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Mrs. Prof with two of our cats, Baker (sleeping) and Pretty Girl (we didn't pick the name, bugging Baker). The phone doesn't have a name.

Oh, since Leonard Nimoy was brought up on the Listening thread, I thought I would mention that Nimoy provides all of the narration for Civilization IV.

You don't need to resort to anything as primitive as a pile of dirt. There is a Swiss company that creates vehicular decoys to order. Ukraine bought dozens of them made to look like a HIMARS. So the Russians ended up expending a lot of very expensive missiles on some quite cheap decoys, which is optimal only in a universe where you can convince Putin that they were actual HIMARS. And might help explain the Russian claim that they had destroyed more HIMARS systems than Ukraine had actually received.

For the first time since Thursday, October 10th, I woke up from a normal sleep today without any noticeable symptoms of Infectious Colitis. No gas, no gurgling, no cramping. Don't know if it's due to the Lomotil I took last night, or if things are truly slowing down. I really hope it's the latter. Either way, I'm calling my PCP's office on Monday at 8am to set up a follow-up post-ER appointment. Should be fun.

While the vertigo drug has kicked in I'm gonna stay in bed anyway. I was done writing for the day and I need to start plotting what elements of what OGL game I'm gonna use in Project X, which involves a lot of reading PDFs

Damn. Glad you made it out ok.

Here we go again. Wednesday morning, I got a panicked phone call from the doctor's office, telling me to get my ass to the ER ASAP. The reason? My blood tests came back showing that my potassium level was 2.6, in the very critical range. The absolute low end of normal is 3.6, so I'm a whole point low, probably thanks to all the electrolyte loss from my diarrhea over the (then) past seven days. So, without further ado, we head on out to the ER of the hospital where I had my knee surgery. I get there and get put in Triage, no waiting, then get moved to a room soon after. They start an IV and pull blood, then give me an oral dose of potassium, just to get me started. They then come back with an IV drip of potassium and saline (did you know there's a national shortage of IV fluids at the moment? One of the hurricanes knocked out the place where almost all of the country's IV fluids are made). By this time, my potassium level is 2.5 - low enough to stop my heart. I almost died. The IV commences. A few minutes in, my right arm where the drip is located starts to burn like Vesuvius is erupting on it. For the first time in my life, I pick up the nurse call button, punch it, and when they answer, I yell but one word: "HELP!!!" They come running in seconds and adjust the potassium-to-saline mixture. It helps. Unfortunately, it happens again, when the saline runs out. This time, the potassium is done, there's just residue dripping through and killing me. They get rid of it. They wanted to do another drip, but I talked them out of it, since my potassium had been raised back into the safe zone with what I'd had (albeit the low end). They agreed as long as I took two 20meq packets dissolved in liquid before bedtime last night, and again tonight. They also gave me something for the diarrhea - Lomotil. I guess the doctor on Wednesday didn't want to give it to me because it's a controlled substance (it's got atropine, according to the ER doctor). They pulled my IV and let us go. After a stop at CVS, we got home at around 5:45 pm. Just over 8 hours in the ER, which saved my life. The Lomotil is working, BTW, so it's saving my ass as well.

THE LAPTOP IS BACK HOME. It didn't arrive until almost 6pm, of course. Mrs. Prof was doing some cat work outside when the UPS driver pulled up. She signed for it and brought it in, then proclaimed she was too sweaty and tired to help me put it together for testing. I unboxed 93% of it (minus the power bricks), sat down, and promptly fell asleep. I woke back up around 8pm and finally got her to help (i.e., do most of the work hooking up the power subsystem). Once everything was connected, I booted the system, crossed my fingers, and waited for my login PIN prompt. SUCCESS!!! The system booted up to my old, familiar desktop upon entry of my PIN. I have yet to try out Dorico Pro, because I first need to apply an upgrade, and I first really need to backup my system in the event this new video card isn't stable. I'm not in the greatest of physical shape at the moment, though, or else I'd get right on that. Give me a few minutes to recover from the stress of opening up and restarting the system first, and *then* I'll get the backup rolling. Sigh. Hurry up and wait. Motto of the Longhorn Band, as well as certain other organizations, or so I'm told.

Not annoying Lindburg delivers for free, plus the price on lamitcal went down by 25 bucks. Getting my drugs this time was painless. One phone call to Lindburg and that was it. The even have my card on file so I didn't have to dig out the card and read off numbers. I'm gruntled by this.

Hope and Sarah are friends, a voluntary relationship. Zeus and Susan are tied due to a vow made by Jerry, Zeus's former life. There is a major difference in those dynamics.

Don't be insulting nuts like that. They are an important part of a squirrel's diet.

"Got The Dot! I got it!" - Explorer the Cat.

Just got the tracking number. It'll be back this coming Wednesday.

"Buffy takes an oboe to the sternum for two points to the opposing band, while the Cougar and the Eagle tussle near the sidelines."

And thank you for that ear worm.

So far today, haven't needed analgesics, I hope this keeps up.

My uncle gave me his Commodore 128 (one of the two "C64s" I was talking about) when he moved on to a Windows 95 computer, including a ton of games (most of them pirated). It was fun playing around with for a while, but I eventually realized that none of the games I tried could hold a candle to the games we had on the NES (let alone SNES). In retrospect I wish I had tried out the Zork series (which for some reason were among the few games I got from my uncle I didn't try, despite them being my uncle's favorites); I suspect that would have kept my interest better. At any rate we lived in a small house and the C128 required a lot of space, so as soon as it became apparent we weren't using it much it went into storage. I just bought a RCA to HDMI converter for my parents this spring, so they could hook up their old VCR and/or Playstation 2 to their new TV.

/me and you get a 4 SDB impacts on your page.

My youngest niece just turned 20. I think the oldest one is 32 now.

I keep misreading it as Tax avoidance thread.

It will drive Tolkien fans around the bend, I can tell you that from posting it on the book of faces.

Getting a bit meta here.

I finally managed to win a game of Terraforming Mars today, against my son and one of his friends, no less. Couldn't believe it when it happened. And by a decent margin, too. There wasn't one particular stat that led to my win, it was just an all-around thrashing. Wow. In other news, Alabama lost. So did Tennessee. Bodes well for Texas's ranking in the next AP poll.

BTW, the laptop got shipped on October 1st. It'll arrive on the 7th. It had to go UPS Ground, since we had to ship it with its lithium ion batteries still inside. Those aren't allowed to travel via air freight at UPS. 'Twas an expensive package to ship - something like $50, mainly due to the insurance on the $3k replacement value of the thing. One thing this event has helped motivate me to do is to get my installations of certain software on the Music Computer up to date. I'm currently updating - and moving - my copy of Native Instruments KOMPLETE 14. That one piece of software took up so much space on the system's C: drive that I nearly ran out of disk space, quite literally. That's one reason why I installed a new 2TB NVMe drive some while back as a D: drive. (Not to be confused with the new 4TB D: drive I just put into the laptop a few months back.) I'm now in the process of moving every single one of KOMPLETE's libraries from the C: drive to the D: drive. All 254,750 files, taking up 605,146.2 Megs of space. This has taken the better part of 24 hours so far (including verification after copy by Total Commander's copy process), and there's still an estimated 1 1/2 hours left to go. I'll still have some manual follow-up work to do after that, but it won't take nearly as long. Suffice it to say that my system should operate a lot more smoothly afterwards. I am wondering if I should find a standalone TRIM utility to release all of the sectors that were used by the moved data when I'm done, though...

I will repeat my last stance; "It's a good idea, I'm sure it is benign, for now, but is is situated on a slippery slope. Eventual fratricide when your tanks overrun their current zone for instance is a thing that is going to happen. Or your scout vehicle. Or a family fleeing the conflict. Even human beans have this issue, how much more so a clueless idiot savant that 'knows where to blow up' but can't discern the subtleties and edge cases? Are they necessary? Uhm, probably, especially if you are the Ukraine, for instance, up against Goliath. Is it safe? In the short run, it's safe enough. It will probably save net lives, at least 'good guy' lives, even if it occasionally screws up. But consider the narrowly avoided WW III scenario. It isn't hypothetical. It's already happened. Multiple times. Fail Safe (or Dr. Strangelove, if you prefer) came close to being our reality. Where do we draw the line? Do we even know there is a line to draw? I deal with software every day. It does way more than it used to. It has not gotten fundamentally any better over time, quite the opposite actually. Being spied upon and (poorly) advertised to is now a thing I have to be concerned about. AI is not good nor evil, it is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misapplied (hence, the crappy mis-targeted ads). Even AI has fundamentally changed over the years. In the 1980s, 'Expert Systems' were the bees knees. They were rule based, readable, could be analyzed, required significant manpower to create, and had fairly good results. The modern trend is trained neural networks, which are much more quickly and easily created, have been demonstrated to have training biases (which can be exploited to defeat them; make your tanks not look like an tank to the munition's AI), and defy analysis. AI isn't going away any time soon, but I'll refrain from waving a flag for it and throwing a party.

Added irony, the bear thought he needed fiber in his diet, and viewed the running shoes as an extra treat.

I'm sure that they aren't gonna name it "Skynet" even if they are designed to be networked and used against targets in the sky. But then again, this is the US Army we are talking about and some one might just think that's funny and name them that anyway.

Dame Maggie Smith died this past Friday. I haven't seen much of her work, but her portrayal of Professor McGonagall was really well done (in fact I suspect I like the character better because of her).

Found out what this was about. Spousal abuse. And his wife is also a high ranking enlisted Marine so they are paying some attention to it.

So you get bonus points for going medieval on your opponents' asses?

And the vertigo is over. Time for breakfast and maybe some social media on Godzilla instead of the 2-in-1 in bed

This comic comment cracked me up: "People think Trump is playing 3-D chess, but actually he is eating the pieces."

Only barely qualifying for this thread, but... I was playing a game of Civilization 2 out of sheer nostalgia. Late in the game I suddenly discover that I still have a trireme from the early game sitting around in a harbour. I was about to disband it when I realized something odd. It had one more movement point than it was supposed to have. I couldn't understand why until I realized that I had developed nuclear power, which as one effect grants all ships an extra movement point. Somehow the Navy had retrofitted this ancient and utterly obsolete oar-propelled vessel with a fusion power plant. I am utterly baffled. And I admit, also impressed.

ROFL, Trump claims that Kamala is lying about having worked at McDonalds. Your stable genius, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be here all week. Try the veal XD

With Diane, so this can be done in real life. https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2016-08-29

Helene is not nice. And I am on the edge. Spare a thought for the Big Bend.

They need to go for Vance, not Trump. Let's see them run a country when both are in jail.

In some of the better news I've seen, a Haitian rights group is going after Trump and Vance for spreading lies about Haitians in Springfield and endangering lives. They are cutting to the chase and asking for arrests, and yes, it is already formally requested. Seriously, nail those S.o.B.s for their callous disregard for others. (Apologies to actual bitches. Who's a good doggy? You are!)

A six year olde child with improvised weapons would not be a threat to an FBI agent. But in defending himself, Arthur could hurt Jill and THAT would hurt Arthur a lot.

And it's been the GOP doing it every time. At this point even if the Democrats eventually do cause a shutdown, people will just blame the Republicans anyway out of sheer habit.

/me Got the stars, Here have a couple on your page.

We get a weird threesome.

This is some what disturbing.

...yeah. I've done both image editing and audio editing on a slow computer with not enough memory. It sucks. When your compressed image file is four times the size of your RAM...

FUCK. Whilst in the midst of using my laptop, I heard a pop and my screen went blank. All further attempts to resurrect it came to naught. I couldn't get Windows to appear. I could apparently get into the BIOS (from the lack of the Win11 boot tune), but no text/graphics would appear. FUCK. I have since filed a tech support / RMA request (whichever) with Sager notebook support from the dusty Music Computer and am awaiting a reply. Something tells me I'm going to be shipping my laptop - along with a large sum of money - to City of Industry, California. Sigh. And FUCK.