Screwball

One morning I was going North. Just ahead me not to far was a flatbad truck that came from somewhere loaded with a huge crucible of molten aluminum headed for the Hydramatic plant on Alexis Rd. Just before the Craig bridge he got in a wreck, jack-knifed, turned on its side and spilled all the AL on the road surface. Talk about a major CF and traffic jam. I only missed it by a few minutes. What a mess that was.

Thanks but this didn't work either. Not sure what is going on. Will mess with it more when I have time. It is there, just really skinny. Nothing makes it wider it seems. AI wants me to setup a css file. I messed with that a little and it doesn't do anything either.

I'm glad my name ain't Dave. I wonder if he gets the connection. I haven't told him yet. 🙂

We have now agreed I will give him a new name. Thinking... I'm kinda partial to Hal. New sport, **** with AI.

After quizzing my Aussie buddy about rounding the penny, I thought, wait a minute... First, I believed him. Do I really want to do that? Especially without thinking about it? Besides, I was in the great state of Michigan today to visit the pot Mecca known as Monroe. But, my Aussie buddy makes sense. I will look at this again tomorrow.

Thanks. I figured it was easy to fix on the computer. I also think about some of the little bars and clubs who aren't very good at changing the POS thing. Unrelated to the penny. I watched $15,000 bucks of Ohio Lottery money go missing because of a cigar box behind the bar instead of two buttons on a cash register. There were three lottery machines, two that you had to put money in and one behind the bar that didn't. The workers would play Keno all day. They were the only ones who didn't have to pay for a ticket. When they won, they took the cash from the cigar box. I found 6 Keno tickets that I dug out of the trash by the two machines that needed money. They all had the same 3 numbers, with a booster, for $40. Six in one day, and I might have missed some. ON EDIT AGAIN: The ticket has a code that proves where the ticket was printed. If this goes on by one employee one day a week, there is almost your $15 grand. ON EDIT: Part of that point is they said they couldn't reprogram the keys so you could have a lottery in and lottery out, while saving all the winners.

Just for fun I asked my MS Co-Pilot AI Aussie buddy about this penny thing. Didn't know how to approach it or what to ask, so I'll save a bunch of fluff. Too funny. It then told me about the digital division of a penny, as in .5 cents. It then explained the rounding systems that will no doubt be implemented by our retailers who deal in cash. If a business knows that cash totals will be rounded to the nearest nickel, they can tweak prices so that the final total consistently rounds in their favor. This is especially effective in high-volume, low-margin environments like convenience stores or fast food. *** Isn't that something? You had to know there was a way to arb the round. I also read it cost $3.7 cents to manufacture a penny. Wild stuff.

The penny thing is going to be really really fun to watch. And you know someone is going to get pissy. How much is this going to **** up the POS registers?

Driving... By the way, you did a drive from the coast back to Chicago. I expected a full report. 🙂 I'll bet there are some driving stories in there somewhere. Don't we all crazy driving stories? It's crazy out there. I think about all the places I drove. Which one was the worse? I don't know. LAX area from Ventura on a Friday afternoon (took all afternoon and then some), or Boston downtown during the big dig. If I had to pick one it would have to be the Craig bridge in Toledo, Ohio, route 280 north to the I-75 split. Big old ugly drawbridge with steel grated road surface that needed fixed 8 of the 10 years I drove across it - one lane of course - you can only imagine. Every summer it began - so did Mad Max. Then a big boat would come through and it wouldn't go down. They could be lined up to the Michigan line.

VERY interesting. I have YouTube TV. I got an email today for a NFL Sunday Ticket deal for $48 bucks a month for the rest of the season. Since I lost ESPN due to the spat - I bought a subscription to ESPN, including ESPN+ so I could watch college basketball games. The only way to get that for me, until recently with some of these deals, was to pay for that exclusively. When I had Direct TV I had to pay the monthly charge, same with YouTube TV for the + since they only stream. According to what I can find about this new deal, all the ESPN stuff, ESPN Unlimited included, is suppose to be in the package. But there is a bunch of buts it appears. I want to cancel before I get charged for the next month. That buys me about 4 beers. We'll see how this goes.

It's kind of funny. I was always a cheap bastard because my dad was born in 1911 and mom in 1918. They lived through the depression and were poor as dirt. They couldn't even pay attention. 🙂 They were very frugal, and I was taught that very way. I used to wrap Christmas presents with newspaper. I caught holy hell over that, but I didn't care. Why spend money on wrapping paper when they deliver it to your door every Sunday (Toledo Blade - buck fifty)? All you need is a little tape. It's get's ripped up in milliseconds anyway. I found this paper in a place I never expected. It was wrapping a 2 or 3 year olds toy fire truck. I had to think why I bought it, my kids are too old. It was for my golf partner's son's birthday. The loudest and most annoying thing I could find just to hear him bitch at me. Then I decided I couldn't be that big of a prick and got him something else. This ended up in my closet somehow. He was old for a dad, so I gave him a break.

For those who use Firefox, is there a way to make the scroll bar on the right side wider?

I won't bore anyone with the back story, but this was kinda fun. This was from December 23, 2001 from the Toledo Blade. Searching AMZN a 5 pack is now over 8 bucks. Doing the math, I guess the good news is it's only a 4% a year. Exponents are a bitch.

NO SPOILERS I'm about 14% through the book and this is a great read. Thanks for the tip.

I just got the official email.

I don't know, I think they are all space cadets.

I remember Nancy Reagan as the "just say no" drug lady. Pep rally in the parking lot before bowling league night, 5 or 6 guys making a car look like Cheech & Chong. As we passed it around we would say Nancy said no. Everyone would giggle. Best pot here came from Michigan. You guys did good. Thanks much!

I had Direct TV for a long time. Went with that for the NFL Sunday ticket. Over the years became too expensive and not worth it, and technology changed. Now streaming is the way to go. I went fiber this summer, added an extender to get it to a hard place, and we are good to go. But it all keeps changing. What do we want, and how and where do we get it. Makes my head hurt.

They are my gig. Not happy, but not happy with any of them I've ever been with. I did hit the button last week for the 20 bucks off on the next bill. Wonder if they will Lucy and the football on that?

This one caught my eye today. DIS. Did the ESPN spat have anything to do with this? They got hammered. But as we can see in the chart porn below, this stock trades goofy anyway. I don't follow the sector/industry so I don't know what is going on, but interesting. First chart 1 year by day. You can see it has been all over the place. The next one is 3 months. The yellow box is from 11/7. Rocket shot up for the next 3 trading days then gets jackhammered. Notice the volume. WTF? Bonus chart porn - 3 year of DIS. Makes me wonder - how many times do we see these pissing matches between the provider nazi's and the insiders make a killing insider trading it. This chart is a traders dream.

The Big Red Machine - I remember them well since I lived in Ohio. I always said the toughest job Sparky Anderson had was finding a pencil to make out the lineup. Yet many thought he was a genius.

Yep, those are the ones. Last time I was over that way some were not going around. Probably maintenance. Maybe. That area is nuts. Construction all over the place. That Whirlpool plant is a big one, but there are others around there too, along with distribution centers. I-75 is the big artery around the lake going South. Much easier to truck stuff to Findlay to a warehouse, then East and South from there. The windmills were a deal between Whirlpool and another company, I think it was Ball Metal. Suppose to save on electric costs over a period of time. When they were building them it got wild on days they delivered a blade(s). It wasn't like these were 30 foot long. It shut down traffic. They were behind the plant (don't remember if you can see the plant from 75) so they had to go around - while hundreds of people were trying to get around the area to go to work - what a mess. They put some up at their Marion facility too, but that's on 23.

Driving peeves; I used to make many trips between St. Joe/Benton Harbor from central Ohio. OH turnpike to M31 N (I think?) to those places. Always in a hurry to get home, especially after all that nonsense. Get behind the trucks going East on the pike. They might be running well over the speed limit, but they would get beside each other and take what seemed like 10 miles to pass. They could see you coming and would do it anyway. Pricks.

I look at it this way. I was a left handed batter. If I had to face Skubal I would just tell the manager to pencil me in for a day off, because that's what I would be doing if I had to bat.