Engineering Dilemma

Step up from the Living Room to the Dining Room

The living room in the new house is a step down from the kitchen. My wife got the idea that we should raise the floor so that everything on the main floor is at the same level, no steps. I'm generally in favor of flat floors. Steps might make it more visually appealing, but do you really want your home to contain traps for the unwary? I mean, does every time you walk into the living room need to be a dramatic entrance? Besides, if we raise the floor, we can get rid of the soffit covering a heating duct in the master bedroom. Maybe.

The living room is kind of large, and it is just over the master bedroom, which is nearly as large. Yes, the house is a little odd. The entrance and the living room are on the top level, all the bedrooms are on lower levels.

Typical Two by Twelve Floor Joist Framing

Anyway, we've got (24) 20-foot-long two by twelve's on twelve inch centers spanning the floor. The floor is going to be raised about seven and half inches, the width of a two by eight.  Can we run the two by eights cross wise and on top of the two by twelves that are already there? And can those existing joists support the additional load? We want the stringers in the built up section to be cross wise so we can move the ducts from the soffit. I don't think two by eights, 24 feet long can be counted on to support much weight, and since the new subfloor is going to weigh at least twice as much as the old subfloor, we might have a weight issue. We might have to run the two-by-eights directly inline and above the old joists and splice them together to make stronger joists. That might be stronger, but it would be put a serious dent in my plan to move the heating duct.

I'm good with math, but figuring out how much all this wood would weigh, how much weight the floor is expected to support, and how much weight these different arrangements of sticks can support is something for someone who's familiar with all those numbers. Shoot, this problem might even be odd enough to make it interesting.

Harbor Fright

Dasco Cat's Paw

The boys & I are ripping up the #$%%^ pseudo-plywood subfloor in the new house and we realize a cat's paw would be a good tool to have. I have one, or at least I think I do, but it's over at John's house in North Portland, which isn't all that far, but it's over a windy, bumpy road, and Home Depot is a little closer and it's just a straight shot down Cornell Road. Time is money and how much can a cat's paw cost anyways?

Not sure why, but I think I should tell you I didn't take Cornell all the way to Murray, which is where you ought to turn if you are going to Home Depot. Instead I turned on Cedar Hills, took it to the freeway (26) and thence to Murray. I suspect I was on autopilot because that's normally the way I head home, but I'm going to claim I went that way because I have aversion to all the traffic lights I would have to deal with if I went down Cornell.

Harbor Freight Cat's Paw

Whatever. I get to Home Depot, find a reasonable place to park, get out of my car and as I start walking toward the entrance I realize there are a couple of dozen people queued up, carefully spaced apart, waiting to get in. It's raining. I'm not going to stand out in the rain, waiting. I turn around and head to Harbor Freight, just a couple of miles away. Quickly locate a cat's paw and pick up a medium small crow bar as well. Funny about that. They had big crow bars, giant crow bars, tiny ones and small ones, but no medium / regular sized ones. We already have a three crow bars of various sizes and this one seemed like it might be a good addition to my set. Of course, we can't find the big one, which is why I was tasked with getting another one. Thought it was at John's as well, but it turns out it was at the new house, just hiding.

The cat's paw worked for a day, or maybe two, but today it gave up the ghost (picture at the top). The broken cross section looks like is made of compressed coal wrapped with thin steel shell. Yeah, Harbor Freight tools, when you only need to use it once.

Spray Sock
This is the one I bought. Found the picture on Ebay.

Went to ACE hardware today to pick up some masks and a replacement cat's paw. They were sold out of masks, no surprise there, but they had a painters sock, which is just stretchy thing you pull over your head so you aren't breathing paint particles when you are spray painting. I don't know how well it would work with dust, which is what we wanted it for, and who knows how well it would work against a virus. I suspect not very well. The cat's paw, along with about half of their hand tools, was in a cage that required a sales person to unlock. The cat's paw cost about $12 at ACE. The one at Harbor Freight cost about $4.

The Jews Brothers

Happy Feet - The Jews Brothers Band
Happy little tune, snappy little video. I got this from a Joseph's Machines video. Bayou Renaissance Man got me started.

Quote of the Day

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on Jun. 28, 2019. Jacques Witt/AFP/Getty Images

It's like two James Bond movie villains in real life. - The Silicon Graybeard

What do you want?

Ozark Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
It's totally insane, just like the first two seasons. I can't believe I haven't posted anything about it before. Maybe this is a new kick I'm on, posting trailers for every show, or nearly ever show, we watch. Season 1 came out in 2017 and season 2 was in 2018, but season 3 just showed up.

Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is an accountant from Chicago who gets entangled in laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel and due to things happening he moves to the Lake of the Ozarks to set up the grand daddy of all laundering schemes. He keeps getting in deeper and deeper, so deep that the head of the cartel is wondering where his head is at, hence the question - "What do you want?" Just to show you that Marty has no idea what he is doing, his answer is - "I don't understand the question."

Marty is not just an accountant, but he is a typical suburban guy with a wife and kids, and they are all along for the ride.

It's a great show. You've got fourteen flavors of gangsters and you can almost guarantee that someone will get whacked in every episode. Well, maybe not every episode, but, on average, way more than one death per episode.

Ozark has a page on Wikipedia
CNN has a review

Idle Speculation

Chinese Communist Party celebrates 70th anniversary

In the MIDDLE of the RIGHT speculates that the Chinese government may have tried manipulate the flow of information about COVID-19. I don't doubt that they would try, however I suspect that their information control and dissemination apparatus is so creaky and hide-bound that any attempt by the leadership to direct the output would be ham-handed and counter productive. Remember:

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." - Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is Revenge

Revenge

Writing is Revengeby JMSmith
Stolen Entire from The Orthosphere

I have been reading Theodore Dalrymple since his first and I think best book, Life at the Bottom. Dalrymple’s style of irony worked best when he wrote as a prison doctor reflecting on his patient’s self-deception, since the gentility of his bourgeois diction contrasted with the degeneracy of his underclass subjects in a way that was both amusing and instructive. When Dalrymple retired, moved to France, and began to write about bourgeois culture and the petty vexations of his bourgeois life, this style of irony worked less well, and has sometimes lapsed, I fear, into a degree of cranky pomposity.

But many of the articles he now publishes at Taki’s Magazine are worth reading, and the article that appeared this morning is one of them. His subject is, as usual, a petty vexation of his bourgeois life, namely a loudly complaining woman with whom he was trapped on a train from the south of France. Dalrymple tells us that the woman was at first a source of irritation, since he was attempting to read, but that he accommodated himself to her loud and ceaseless grousing by resolving to make it the subject of an article.

For as Dalrymple says near the end of the article that he did, in fact, write:
“Writing helps one to endure what might otherwise be unendurable . . . . the knowledge that you are going to write about something unpleasant puts a screen between yourself and your own experience.”
This is exactly right, for I daresay most writing is undertaken as revenge. Apart from a certain facility with words, the writer’s greatest needs are to be constantly rankled by life, and to endure the pain of this rankling by anticipating the pleasure of written revenge.  Written revenge is by no means limited to mockery, satire and vituperation, for genial and generous words will often serve to settle the score.

I known that thinking I will post it on the Orthosphere helps me endure many inanities and indignities that would otherwise drive me to drink.

Dalrymple fails to note his kinship with the obstreperous woman on the train, but the truth is that he is every bit as much of a public complainer as she is. That he does it with greater art cannot disguise this. Nor can the fact that his complaints appear in print and hers are broadcast to all within earshot of her hotly vibrating larynx. She takes her revenge on the world in loud vituperations; he takes his in mordant scribbling.
And I am able to endure the likes of both of them by rubbing my hands, cracking my knuckles, and anticipating my revenge.

---

I don't know if revenge is my motivation. I got started writing by explaining computer system problems, sometimes just to clarify the problem in my own head, and sometimes to explain it to a number of other people so I wouldn't have to sit down and explain it in person to each one individually. Personal, audible explanations might have been more effective, but it would have taken more time. Now I write because I am compelled. Having an audience is encouraging, but I suspect I would still be writing even if no one was reading. My brain is full, much like my house, and I need to be constantly clearing out old stuff to make room for the tsunami of new stuff that is constantly arriving.