[Doofrat]

In all the cases I’ve seen, UPS is used for one of three things:

1) Provide power for the few seconds between an outage from street power and the backup generator kicking in
2) provide power for a few minutes at most so that the UPS can tell your system to shutdown
3) On instruments that are sensitive to power being removed, allow enough time for a human to properly shut down the equipment.

The amount of time that the battery can power your equipment will probably be less than advertised from the start and will degrade to somewhere near zero over a period of time and unless you periodically test the time, you won’t know.

One option that someone mentioned is using a laptop which is a great idea. If you can get away from using a RAID set, and switch to synching up two USB drives, then a laptop will provide power for the whole setup for several hours and you won’t have this huge, heavy, battery in your place. Also, you’ll have a somewhat accurate indicator of how long the battery will last.

Sorry that I didn’t answer the original question 😉 but I’m just trying to understand the need for full RAID (hopefully this is an enterprise or above consumer class RAID system, and not consumer class crap like Iomega)

[Doofrat]

It’d definitely be more efficient to build the automated system, then just profit share with the rich guy.

China would have the workers dig manually though, just to keep the workers busy.

Nigeria would build the automated system, then that one rich guy would take 70% of the money and 30% would go to a few people in government and everybody would still be poor.

Venezuela would let the rich guy build the automated system, then distribute a lot of the money to the poor through programs. Then they’d kick the rich guy out and realize that you can’t get the oil with just picks and shovels.

In Russia, automated system build you. So you’d base almost 70% of your economy on automated system and give all of profit to glorious workers and hope the price of oil doesn’t decline.

[Doofrat]

We used Neil Muckler for our home inspection and he was really thourough and provides a nicely formatted inspection report with lots of pictures.

Whoever you use, get the inspector lined up ASAP as both you and the seller will want an inspection first thing.

I honestly don’t remember what our earnest money was, but I don’t think a larger amount will make any difference as you would just get it back if the deal fell through.
From what I understand, the way offers are written, you can get out of it as a buyer for pretty much any reason except “I just changed my mind”.

One tip on showing seriousness – Writing a letter to the seller customized to the particular property. Sounds corny, I know, but there are people out there you will be competing with that just throw out a bunch of offers after the weekend and don’t have time to write a customized letter, so it may stand out for the seller.

Good Luck!

[Doofrat]

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[Doofrat]

With a variable speed pump, it costs me less than $25 a month to filter the pool for 8 hours a day. I run it at 1400 RPM (which uses 186 watts) for 6 hours and another 1-2 hours with the pool monster at about 500 watts (using a straight through leaf basket to the pool monster saves about 150 Watts).

In the winter, our electric tends to hit tier 4 earlier, so that offsets the savings a bit on having to run the pump less, but it’s probably just south of $20 a month for power.

With solar, it costs me about 20-30 cents in the summer to heat the spa to 101.

If you use the pool a lot (stirring it up), running the pump at a lower speed actually cleans the pool better than running it at high speed. I didn’t believe it until I tried it, but it’s true, and a lot cheaper.

Also, replace those incandescent bulbs in the pool and spa with LEDs(in ours, they were each 300 watts). I put a cheap Chinese one in the spa and a good one from Home Depot in the pool and they both work well. The Chinese one isn’t as bright as the good one from the Depot, but has changing colors and such. The combined power in now only 45 watts.

[Doofrat]

Great article! I can’t wait to find out why this guy had such “financial hardships” even after making so much money for so many years, and then misappropriating so much more.

[Doofrat]

Rantings of an opinionated gamer:
I think AMD is done in the high end video card market, they’ve gotten too far behind Nvidia to catch up at this point unless Nvidia goofs up for several years in a row, and even then Nvidia has a much stronger financial footing. AMD can cut prices and overclock their cards to make up for their lack of power on the high end for only so long before their completely out of the high end market.
AMD might be able to scale down and refocus on the console market, or on lower end video cards, but unfortunately, I don’t see them offering too much competition to Nvidia on the high end and they have to stop bleeding money and piling up losses if they want to survive at all.

VR over the next 5 years will require multiples in performance increases.
For example, in the VR space, resolution really needs to be doubled from where it’s at now before it looks really good. I know AMD has a $200 card that will just barely run some of the current generation of VR, but to double resolution in VR requires an 8 fold increase in rendering (8x rather than 4x because of having to render twice).

I don’t know anything about 4k.

I don’t see AMD being the one to beat Nvidia to this.
I hope I’m wrong about this because AMD is the only real competition to Nvidia.

[Doofrat]

Definitely don’t get this done at Sears unless you just pick up the battery yourself. Went to the UTC Sears a few months back to get a new battery and was quoted a time of about 90 mins. Figured I’d get lunch and let them do the install. Just a few minutes shy of 4 hours later I finally left with a battery. They weren’t even that busy.

[Doofrat]

Somebody I used to work with was wondering why he always had these huge grocery bills (his wife did the shopping). Turned out she was buying Nordstrom gift cards at the grocery store to cover up her spending habit.

[Doofrat]

[quote=FlyerInHi]Nancy? I’m totally indifferent she died. Don’t care one bit.[/quote]

I think she aged really well. She started with that “dippy old lady” look on her face in her youth and then grew into it as she got older. Probably has that same look on her face at this very moment in the mortuary as she did in her twenties. Gotta admire her for that.

[Doofrat]

I got popped for that once. Had driven for years with tint on the side windows. One night, cop in a car pulled me over and gave me a tint ticket. Told me to go home and remove the tint that night, blah blah blah. Of course I didn’t and there was a 30 day period to comply. About a week later a motorcycle cop is pulling onto the freeway while I’m getting off and does a U-Turn and pulls me over. Ends up being the same cop who proceeds to give me a $500 (in 1990) illegal operation charge.
I went to court (since Illegal operation required a court visit) and the judge threw out the illegal operation charge. Actually the judge seemed perturbed that we were both in court over tint and told the cop to stay as he wanted to speak to him after.
By then I had already removed the tint and found a cop near the courthouse to sign my ticket. Done for $10, but what a PITA for some tint.

[Doofrat]

[quote=Blogstar]The pseudo science myth that addiction is genetic has probably worsened the problem with lack of personal responsibility. It supports a self fulfilling prophesy for something the user is already highly motivated to do for myriad reasons.[/quote]

Except that it’s not psuedo science in that a strong correllation has been shown over and over again using scientific methods. An example from nature:
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v20/n1/full/1395244a.html

[Doofrat]

I don’t know if it’s just me, but dying in my sleep freaks me out. For some strange reason, I’d want to know I was about to die, not going to bed on some random night and not realizing I wasn’t going to exist after that. Maybe it’s just me.

[Doofrat]

I really think addiction is a spectrum everybody’s on. Some people are really susceptible to chasing altered states and some people are not. Some people may be somewhere in the middle, but they turn to drugs to make up for a bad environment. I don’t think it’s so much weak will.
As an example, I’m pretty slim and don’t eat a lot. There’s an allergy medication I’ll sometimes have to take (Zyrtec). When I take it I get what I call the Zyrtec munchies and I can’t stop eating. Food tastes incredible and I can’t get enough of it. I’d guess some obese people’s brain chemistry is always in that state and I don’t think I’d have the will to not eat if I was always like that.
I’d guess that a lot of addicts are just wired similarly, but with a craving for opioids, alcohol, meth, or whatever their chemistry slants them to.

[Doofrat]

[quote=svelte][quote=paramount]There was a great article in the New York times about the growing denial of reality.

For example, there is a mindset that the gender you identify with is what you are. You’re female if somehow you identify with the female gender as an example (ie Caitlyn).
[/quote]

Yeah I totally don’t get it either.

Gay rights, I’m all for. But this ‘T’ stuff that’s trying to tag along for the ride, I’m not buying.

If the person’s DNA says they are a male, they are a male. There’s no debate as to which bathroom or locker room they use, it is clear cut – no matter what clothes or makeup they choose to put on the outside of that DNA.[/quote]

So you’re saying these “Men” in the picture (from Wikipedia article on androgen insensitivity) should use the Mens restroom and wear Men’s clothes because they are genetically men, even though they have the body and genitalia of females. [img_assist|nid=25711|title=AI|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=56]

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