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RTDNTOTO 🐻 Random Thoughts Deserving No Thread Of Their Own 19 (2024)

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The AC is being installed now. It will be a day full of noise, but it's worth it.
 
Gedunker said:
I hope the black cat we dropped off at the pound this morning finds a nice home. I hate taking black cats - especially during kitten season - to the pound. Seems they already have one strike against them, being black, but kittens are so adorable, it's harder for adults to get a chance at adoption. At least he's a sweetheart, so :crossedfingers:
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My favorite kitty ever was a black Siamese named Cinder. She lived to be 17 before her kidneys caught up with her. (She was one of our many housecats when I was growing up . . .)

Jim
 
Big Owl said:
My daughter just figured out that you can get to the town 26 miles away with out getting on the interstate/freeway. She gets her geographical awareness from her mother.

Edit: she's 18 and has been driving for a year or more now.
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Very few places are only accessible by interstate. Grand Island, NY is not one of them, though there must be others.
 
jsk1983 said:
Very few places are only accessible by interstate. Grand Island, NY is not one of them, though there must be others.
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I'm always intrigued by those large communities that aren't accessible by an interstate highway. Fresno always tops the list with more than a half million residents and no interstate. Some other large ones from the last time I looked:

CityPopulation
Fresno, CA
545,564​
Bakersfield, CA
410,654​
Modesto, CA
218,071​
Santa Rosa, CA
177,185​
Lancaster, CA
169,192​
Palmdale, CA
163,455​
Bend, OR
103,263​
San Angelo, TX
99,871​
Merced, CA
91,572​
Turlock, CA
72,307​
 
jsk1983 said:
Very few places are only accessible by interstate. Grand Island, NY is not one of them, though there must be others.
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Lockwood, Nevada (where I live), is only accessible via I-80, unless you are a railroad train.

There are ways to get into town from Virginia City, on very rutted roads and requiring a quad and a picnic lunch, but not practical for most people.

Jim
 
jumbach said:
Lockwood, Nevada (where I live), is only accessible via I-80, unless you are a railroad train.

There are ways to get into town from Virginia City, on very rutted roads and requiring a quad and a picnic lunch, but not practical for most people.

Jim
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Canyon Way is apparently inaccessible by car after a certain point? Unfortunately streetview ends at a certain point...
 
jsk1983 said:
Canyon Way is apparently inaccessible by car after a certain point? Unfortunately streetview ends at a certain point...
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Yes, the paved road dead ends at a mine, then Canyon becomes a very rutted, 1860's-era road. There are actually petroglyphs (long ago vandalized :-( ) and ruins of the old town of Washington (ditto :-( ) back there as well. If you have a quad or ATV, and a picnic lunch and lots of patience, you would eventually come out on Lousetown Road north of Virginia City.

There have been plans for decades to improve Canyon Road and make VC more accessible, but it's been "five years out" for at least fifteen years now. With the opening of Veterans Parkway (future I-711!) a few miles west, it's now well under an hour to get from Lockwood to the county seat of VC (where, by the way, i will be tonight for my Planning Commission meeting.)

Jim
 
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How I'm looking at midmod buildings on stormy humid days when the glass sweats and it's dimly lit inside and everything outside looks so green.

interview GIF
 
Show of hands.....who here wishes they could be one of the random anonymous dancers that appear in the background of every music video ever made.
cant touch this music video GIF
 
I just put a couple very solid Ethan Allen nightstands on the curb if any of you're interested. Unfortunately, they're just a bit too wide and too low for our tastes. Too bad the house from who's curb I salvaged these from wasn't also tossing a matching bed...

441408576_10106009366343856_7258373573679988368_n.jpg


440897314_10106009366353836_4703821565093900758_n.jpg
 
WSU MUP Student said:
I just put a couple very solid Ethan Allen nightstands on the curb if any of you're interested. Unfortunately, they're just a bit too wide and too low for our tastes. Too bad the house from who's curb I salvaged these from wasn't also tossing a matching bed...

441408576_10106009366343856_7258373573679988368_n.jpg


440897314_10106009366353836_4703821565093900758_n.jpg
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Writec"KMS" on a couple of Post-Its and stick them on those. 😉
 
Gedunker said:
I believe I have just earned another Planner's Merit Badge, for using "turgid" in a staff report.

Home Run Win GIF by Looney Tunes
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We have long history of mentioning that word.

oldest searchable mention of that word was by Dan back in 2001
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Humor 😜 - Most embarassing work moments

I'll start with mine...it was a bitterly cold January morning about 4 years ago and I was getting up early to meet with a builder on a construction site before office hours. I got dressed in the dark (didn't want to wake my girlfriend up) and grabbed my winter jacket (w/ velcro hood attachment)...
www.cyburbia.org www.cyburbia.org

first mentioned in the first Random Thought thread was by Chet back in 2005
www.cyburbia.org

RTDNTOTO 🐻 - Random Thoughts Deserving No Thread Of Their Own 1 (2006)

DAN, DAN, DAN ---- ARE YOU THERE !!!! WE NEED A CHAT ROOM. This "thread" proves it. NO --- WE DON'T NEED ---- WE DEMAND A CHAT ROOM. The mods have noticed this thread has spun into a nightly chat....and that's really not the purpose of these message boards. This thread is probably on the...
www.cyburbia.org www.cyburbia.org
 
I talked to a guy about his idea of creating a community of box truck homes. I didn't know that was a thing. He mentioned masonry foundations; I should have asked if that meant that they would be underpinned with brick or block, or if they would just be sitting on cinder blocks.
 
I survived an audit by one of my employer's customers today. (I think. They won't report any findings until later. But I survived the interview.)
 
I've been trying to build a more robust "liked songs" list on Spotify, which is what I generally shuffle when driving. I'm finding that for music of the last 20 years or so, there are a lot of bands where I like one song, and it tends to be the song that sounds not much like the rest of their catalog.

Example, this song by Tame Impala

There are a few other Tame Impala songs I find kind of fun, but none i can find that I'd really put on this playlist. I wonder what's going on.
 
Faust_Motel said:
I've been trying to build a more robust "liked songs" list on Spotify, which is what I generally shuffle when driving. I'm finding that for music of the last 20 years or so, there are a lot of bands where I like one song, and it tends to be the song that sounds not much like the rest of their catalog.

Example, this song by Tame Impala

There are a few other Tame Impala songs I find kind of fun, but none i can find that I'd really put on this playlist. I wonder what's going on.
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Search, find and include Lawrence.

 
Faust_Motel said:
I've been trying to build a more robust "liked songs" list on Spotify, which is what I generally shuffle when driving. I'm finding that for music of the last 20 years or so, there are a lot of bands where I like one song, and it tends to be the song that sounds not much like the rest of their catalog.
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I have a Pandora station that started out based on the band Cake and I've been adding other bands/songs to the station seeds to get a mix. I've added in several personal one-hit wonders like this:

I've heard some other stuff by Portugal. The Man and it's growing on me. I just like the sound of their music, even though it doesn't all sound like Feel It Still.

Recently I remove Flobots and The Heavy from the seeds. I realized that I liked them when I first heard them but the fascination wore off.

Here's another seed though, that opened up a whole wormhole of awesome for me:

I was aware of Jack White with the White Stripes, particularly Seven Nations Army, but I didn't realize he'd recorded with other bands and as a solo act. The dude is a riffmaster; comes up with awesome guitar licks. It's not that he's particularly talented at playing as much as he comes up with new ideas in his guitar playing I haven't heard before, like in Steady As She Goes, the syncopation in the riff- it's a simple variation but just pulls me in.

I'm trying to decide if I like more by Franz Ferdindand than Take Me Out.

But there are others I've used as seeds and they are good for just the one song as far as I'm concerned. Songs like Blister in the Sun and Flagpole Sitta.
 
The challenge is when you like the one song and try to use it to create a playlist, the playlist goes heavily on the bulk of the artist's work and pulls in stuff that isn't much liek the rest of what they do, right?

Example, I like Bleachers when it's a Springsteen collab:
Or sound:

But not so much when it trends toward or collaborates with Taylor Swift:

And trying to seed a playlist with Bleachers tends to pull the more Swift-like stuff in.

Much like Noam Chomsky said AI "hallucinates language" I think the Spotify Playlist generator hallucinates similarities between songs by trying to extrapolate those similarities at the artist level.
 
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