I heard a tuba.

At 12:30 AM this morning.

I thought I could just yell out the window at whatever neighbor’s kid was doing something really stupid and annoying, but no.

It was several blocks away.

After a few minutes, the rest of the live band joined in, for an extremely loud hour of mexican polka music.

I eventually got to sleep, then came downstairs this morning, and as I started to make coffee, was greeted by the continuous sound of power tools being used in someone’s back yard.

At 8:30 AM on a Saturday.

At least a block away.

I may have to triple my previous “no part of the house within 20 feet of the property line” rule. Fortunately, three of my top five still-not-sold-yet houses easily clear that bar, and the other two are well-buffered with trees and hedges. A lot of the problem here is that all the two-story houses placed with minimum set-backs from the property line create a canyon that channels sound; the neighborhoods I’m looking at around Dayton aren’t as packed, and most are broken up occasionally by densely-packed trees.

I did add a new house to the #3 slot this week, but it’s already gotten an offer, so I’m down to:

• 4 great choices,

• 1 “would be great if I could change the street name”,

• 1 “kind of far and needs a lot of privacy landscaping”,

• 1 “great location, gas range but cramped kitchen with useless island, old-house layout issues, need for privacy landscaping, and several rooms that need repainting, but also $100K cheaper than the others”.

Hopefully my new manager’s manager will be sufficiently recovered from reorg hell in the upcoming short week to give me a thumb’s-up on the move idea. I said “4 great choices”, but #1 has been far out in front since I started looking, and I’m simultaneously cheered and concerned that it’s still on the market after 50+ days while others are being snapped up within 3. The price has dropped slightly twice since I found it, but I’d have paid the original price and considered it a great deal.

Something is scaring people off. Maybe it smells like cat piss or cigarette smoke, or there’s something about the neighborhood, or some maintenance issue that would cost a bundle, but there’s only one thing I can see in the pictures that might turn people off, and I hope that it’s the reason, because it’s something I want.

It’s also possible the Zillow listing is simply wrong about some things; I’ve seen significant discrepancies before, and not just in the claimed square-footage. After all, I remember when my neighbor’s place went on the market at the peak of a previous boom and was advertised as having “off-street RV parking”, with a picture that carefully disguised the fact that it would have required tearing down his fence and paving my front yard.

Update:

...and Saturday night begins with a really loud party in the house behind me. Which, thanks to minimum set-backs, is about twenty feet away from my kitchen table.

Although I'd be able to hear the music from five times that distance.

“Ah-ha!” moment

I think I've figured out why the house I like so much hasn't sold yet, and if true, might stay on the market long enough for me to get my full-time remote approval and buy it: two of the bedrooms have sucky windows.

Until today, there were no pictures that showed all five bedrooms. The three that were shown are large and well laid out, and they just kind of skipped over the two that are smaller, located directly above the garage, and look like this:

But I don't need five good bedrooms, while I do need a nice private office and a crafting room. And a private dojo with enough room to swing a sword, which this place also has room for.

I do not want to buy this house.

You might think I dislike the architectural statement being made (and you’d be correct), but that didn’t stop me from looking further, because it’s a brisk walk from my parents’ place. It’s kind of crammed into the front of the lot, so it’s closer to the neighbors than I’d like, but the landscaping compensates pretty well to provide privacy. The front windows got a raised eyebrow, but the first hint that this one was going to be special came from the water feature in the foyer.

That one got a big eye-roll, but the first thing to really make me cringe was the wall-to-wall carpet in the kitchen. That was so distractingly awful that it took me a while to notice the black microwave oven/range hood in the middle of the all-white appliances.

Then came the wallpaper, followed by the wood-paneled walls, the painted-on walls, and more wallpaper, but I was still recovering from the kitchen, so they didn’t have much impact. Until I reached the basement.

more...

First, I’d like to thank you for responding to my negative review of your JoyJolt borosilicate glass mugs that exploded in my hands, sent shards of glass flying around the kitchen, and cut my palm.

Now, as for your request:

more...

What fresh new hell is this?

One of my neighbors has put up an outdoor Christmas light system that plays music all night long.

Single-channel, 8-bit, square-wave. Apple II games had better sound.

Slice(r) of life

I’ve gotten no love from the folks at Dremel about the layer-shift problem I ran into a few weeks ago. I’ve gotten responses, but they just consisted of “pics or it didn’t happen”. I had already thrown out the bad prints, and I haven’t gotten around to shaking my printer again, so the simple, detailed repeat-by I sent is unlikely to be fixed until they pull a few years of upstream Cura code into their slicer.

So, I finally sat down and started building profiles for PrusaSlicer, which is a supported version of the open source Slic3r package that hasn’t had a release for a few years. I’m getting as-good-or-better results that take slightly longer, and I knocked together a quick gcode post-processor that inserts the timing comments the Dremel firmware uses to update the display and API with “time remaining”. As a bonus, PrusaSlicer seems to be a lot more accurate with its timing estimates. I need to work out the inheritance features so I can bundle all the settings into one file without a lot of duplication, and then do some testing to improve the results.

On the bright side, Dremel did follow up on the promise to send me two free spools of PLA for posting a review of the 3D45. They’re the older half-kilo spools, but don’t look a gift filament in the extruder.

The Boys: dropped

I tried watching again, about two-thirds of an episode at a time. Somewhere in episode 5, I got tired of the subtle-as-an-explosive-brick social commentary, so I switched to just reading the episode summaries on a wiki. Kind of glad I did, because apparently season one is subtle for these people. Now that I know where it’s going, I doubt I’ll give it another chance.

Final take: Karl Urban has a great deal of fun playing Butcher, but Frenchie gets all the best lines.

The word for the day is ‘tolerance’

…as in, “I designed these parts without any tolerance for variations between 3D printers and user settings, assuming that minimal clearance Will Just Work” (inside part: 25.8mm, outside part: 25.804mm). Given how long it takes to print the average object downloaded from Thingy, I recommend testing all allegedly-interlocking STL files in an app that has a measure function (Meshmixer is free, although the UI, documentation, and functionality are all quirky).

(would you call these “mating surfaces”? 😁)

Genshin Boredom

I haven’t actually played Genshin Impact for about two weeks. I was just logging in, claiming daily freebies until I had enough for another 10x gacha pull, which gave me another character to level up. Which I don’t want to do, because I hit a catch-22: I can’t level any of my other party members above 40 without materials that can only be extracted from specific hard-to-kill bosses. Who would have been easier to kill if I’d gone after them before progressing the main story far enough to level all the monsters in the world.

There’s no other way to get those specific mats. The fights are do-it-again-stupid tedious and difficult with a party that’s underleveled. And I can’t even do the next stage of the story without significant grinding to unlock it.

The solution is to play online with random strangers. Or stop playing. I prefer the latter.

When I went to replace my cheap-but-sturdy Okabashi sandals, I was under the impression that they were typical foreign-made discount crap that I just happened to have found two decent pairs of (8-10 years of heavy use, and only one strap out of the four has broken). The fact that I found them heavily marked down at the end of the summer season at a drug store contributed to this impression.

Um, no. The Japanese-derived name was chosen by founder Bahman Irvani when his family fled from Iran to Buford, Georgia in 1981, based on his interest in reflexology and Japanese design. They’re a 100%-made-in-USA footwear company with decades of community involvement and military support.

And they’ll give you a discount if you send back your old ones for recycling.

Their site gives no hint as to which “oka” and “hashi” they used to form their name. It could be “hill bridge” 岡橋, which is a surname pronounced either Okahashi or Okabashi, but all the companies I found in Japan with those kanji use Okahashi. It could be “land + end” 陸端, a kanji compound that seems to be primarily used in China. It’s unlikely to be “hill + top” 岡端, because that compound gets read as Okahata or Okahana instead of the valid “hashi” reading. Pretty sure it isn’t “male-deer + chopsticks” 雄鹿箸. Highly unlikely to be related to okabasho, “unlicensed red-light district” 岡場所.

Given the reflexology connection, I’m guessing it came from a foot chart. Specialized jargon often gets excluded from dictionaries. Although “Land’s End” has a nice ring to it…

“They all look alike” never goes over well

The bar employee who previously insisted that George Floyd had a history with the cop charged with killing him now claims that he mistook Floyd for another black employee. Oopsie.

“You can have the English language…”

“​…when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

I need a style checker that replaces phrases like “subconscious bias” with “accuracy and precision”.

My reflexive reaction

The Economist: Our model says Biden will beat Trump.

J: Really? What does your actress say?

Porch cat has decided that even though it gets him shot in the face with water, jumping up onto the window/door screens and hanging from them by his claws is the most effective way to request a meal. He knows that even if I give him a time-out today, the handouts will arrive on schedule tomorrow.

Artificial Stupidity, getting worse

(J talking to himself, not saying anything similar to Al*xa)

FireTV: “Who did you want to call?”

J: “Nobody. I wasn’t speaking to you.”

FireTV: “I couldn’t find a contact matching ‘nobody i wasn’t speaking to you.’”

J: “I’m not trying to make a call.”

FireTV: “I couldn’t find a contact matching ‘i’m not trying to make a call.’ If you want to check your contacts list, please open the Al*xa app.”

J: “Al*xa, stop.”

I have never made a call using this or any Echo device. I have never allowed the app access to my contacts. Like many unwanted “features” Amazon has added (like looking up randomly overheard things in Wikipedia or auto-detecting “depression keywords”), there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn it off.

Hell, if there were any actual “AI” involved in the product, it would have learned by now that there is no internet-connected waterfall in my house, and started consistently parsing the words “water pump on”.

“You drive 15 miles, what do you get?”

“A haircut!” I gave up waiting for the local Sport Clips to reopen and went to their Marina location. 2-minute wait, minimal nuisance (just had to hold my mask while she trimmed around my ears). I tipped $20.

Speaking of masks, the WHO has finally gathered enough evidence to confess that there never was any real threat of asymptomatic transmission of Corona-chan. In a better world, I’d have been able to write “confess shamefully”, but nobody involved in The Great Lockdown is up to admitting error or taking blame.

Good: the local Sport Clips finally re-opened this morning!

Bad: the wait is already 146 minutes!

Good: the announced “peaceful” “protest” to loot and burn the strip mall it’s in never happened!

Bad: it’s already 84°F at 10:30 am!

Good: the high for Friday is supposed to be only 64°F!

Bad: with rain!

Since I expect to have video interviews next week, it’ll be nice to get a haircut this week. Also, if I start a new job soon, I could take advantage of the 0% financing deal Toyota’s offering until July 6th (or just pay cash, but for 0%, why not?). And my local dealer currently has one on the lot with exactly the options I want. It’s even the right color.

I still wouldn’t have anywhere to go in the short term, since that company will still be 100% remote for a while, but 240,000 miles is good enough for the old Camry Hybrid.

Well, that’s a new one

Just got email from Amazon offering me a $5 discount on Kindle books by John Varley, because I recently bought Irontown Blues (after the price finally dropped from over $10 to $6.99). Unfortunately, when I clicked through, the only book included in the offer was Millenium.

Yes, the basis for the Kris Kristofferson/Cheryl Ladd film that was memorably slammed in one of Scott Thompson’s Buddy Cole routines on The Kids In The Hall:

“You see, one day, some American thought, ‘hey, I want to make a terrible movie in Canada; everybody else has!’”

Costco, today

And yes, that’s $4.59 for 2 pounds, the equivalent of 129 standard yeast packets (7 grams) at 3.6 cents each.

Still looking, Mauser? I could mail you this one (packed in April, good for two years) and go back for another…

Safeway, today

Dear Amazon…

Actually, I prefer Mary Ann…

Unrelated

How do you sell a $329 toaster without revealing how big the interior dimensions are? The Japanese spec page has it; was that too hard to translate? Or would revealing that the largest item you can fit inside (the optional baking dish) is 7.6x9.5 inches make people realize just how overpriced it is?

By the way, the US price is $100 higher than the Japanese price…