New York April Nyc Meet-up

Calzone said:
Today again I beat the clock. Metro North didn't suck and got to Grand Central at 7:05 AM. Gaming the new clocking in and out is fun and somehow works in my favor, shortens my workday, offers flexibility, and allows me to leave early every day, and even more so on Fridays. "I love it."

Pretty much I'm stealing time and its all legit and legal. I'm following all the rules.

Yesterday's commute home though involved a "train-change" due to "equipment problems" at Grand Central, and this meant the train was late in leaving. So yesterday Metro North sucked.

The power walks to make time offer a certain amount of strength training because my legs do get sore and tired. At times my pace is close to jogging.

The frog ghetto is mucho loud, but the noise is not from the Spring Peepers, but from gray tree frogs that have this musical trill. The effect is not like the Spring Peeper's stadium sound/roar, but is more like a bass set at high volume that carries across a vast distance.

In my bedroom last night with an open window it sounded like I was in a Florida at night swamp.

Calvin-August
Click to expand...

I would gladly be walking distance off places, but have been cursed with living on places that are at an hour's commute from the cities.
Glad it works for you, when trains don't it is a pain. Walking is IMO the best but one has to be close as to not need anything else.
I incorporate some walks back to my station instead of taking the subway, good to end the day and it is nice to walk in the city.
Train rides, even if a bit long, can be quite meditative and productive actually.

The amp talk and frogs makes me think of the song "Lover of the Bayou" by the Byrds and covered by Mudcrutch. The latter band put some frog recordings into it. Ha!
Always been a rocker myself, but a HiFi listener and never a player.

Enviado desde mi Redmi Note 9 Pro mediante Tapatalk
 
Range-rover said:
That's really great about the Fender amp Cal, does it have the original blue
coupling caps in it or they been replaced. It seems a lot of guitar amp lovers
hate changing anything in their amps, the original coupling caps for sure.
Electrolytic's they change but not the Blue ones they rarely go bad, to bad
my Tweed had the original Astron caps but they were bad so I had to change
them to replacement Jupiter's red Astron copies, I'm thinking of pulling out
my Strat again maybe it will help with my hands will see.

Enjoy!
Click to expand...

Bob,

When I performed the forensics the electronics in the chassis were untouched since it left the Fender factory in 1965, all original.

I could see one of the electrolydics in the power supply had shorted, so typical in old amps, and that is what took out the fuse.

I can't explain the missing speakers or the hacked baffle, but I'm keeping them as a conversation piece.

The original paper and oil caps are really important to retain the vintage sound/tone.

In the end, because I found this amp in the garbage, it will always have a very high "You-Suck" factor to annoy my friends. LOL. Also I expect it to be a very-very cool amp to play.

Cal
 
Prest_400 said:
I would gladly be walking distance off places, but have been cursed with living on places that are at an hour's commute from the cities.
Glad it works for you, when trains don't it is a pain. Walking is IMO the best but one has to be close as to not need anything else.
I incorporate some walks back to my station instead of taking the subway, good to end the day and it is nice to walk in the city.
Train rides, even if a bit long, can be quite meditative and productive actually.

The amp talk and frogs makes me think of the song "Lover of the Bayou" by the Byrds and covered by Mudcrutch. The latter band put some frog recordings into it. Ha!
Always been a rocker myself, but a HiFi listener and never a player.

Enviado desde mi Redmi Note 9 Pro mediante Tapatalk
Click to expand...

Jorde,

I beat the clock again today, but this third cheating the clock does not lead to an earlier train, so all I did it for was for the exercise and conditioning.

No joke is that I only come to work for rest. The house and yard work is toughening me up. Using a push mower, especially on the hills of my front lawn is hard work, as well as dealing with my Knotweed disaster.

Don't forget the breaking up of concrete to make a flagstone patio. I figure I'll find out how heavy those slabs of Flagstone weigh when I have to move them.

Last night I asked "Maggie" what are we going to do when we finish working on the house? LOL.

Anyways the work surely has toughened me up.

Cal
 
Meeting Igor this morning at a local camera auction. Two more Norma lenses to pick up from him

210mm f6.8 Sinar Angulon and 12" Kodak Commercial Ektar 6.3 both in barrel
 
Nokton48 said:
Meeting Igor this morning at a local camera auction. Two more Norma lenses to pick up from him

210mm f6.8 Sinar Angulon and 12" Kodak Commercial Ektar 6.3 both in barrel
Click to expand...

Dan,

Congrats on your hoarding. Holding rare treasure is a good way to curb the effects of inflation.

If I did not have so many things going on with the Baby-Victorian, I probably would of bought that boxed Imagon from IGOR that you gave the link to.

Interesting that it could cover 5x7. Perhaps Devil Christian could use it because he has a Linhof 5x7. What a monster that camera is. I love it.

IGOR's often has rare stuff. "Don't tell everyone."

BTW all this "Don't tell anyone" came from a 6 year old grand kid who is now 7, who started telling me all her secretes. "Don't tell mommy, or Don't tell anyone," I found to be very cute.

Cal
 
Seems like my Baby-Victorian is home to many invasive plants.

Yesterday used a pick-ax and shovel to excavate Japanese Knotweed roots and RYE-zomes. Some of the roots I dug out were as thick as my ankles.

I also loped down two large invasive sticker bushes. When I have time and strength I'll dig out the root balls.

So if I were not such a city slicker I would of been more aware and informed about the mucho huge problems with invasive plants.

Right now we have our hands full, and sometime in June is when the Knotweed will bloom. I still have to weed out the flank of my neighbor's yard and the dead-end.

Like a nightmare I see Knotweed growing along the parkways and in other people's back and side-yards. At the train station in Peekskill I see where Knotweed penetrated the mortar in an 18 inch thick stone wall.

I'm at a point now where I not only have the visible vein in my left shoulder you see on professional basketball players, most pronounced on Point Guards, but I also have veins you can see on my hips. I'm pretty low on body fat, but I still have a tiny roll on my stomach.

The Gray Tree Frogs are pretty loud. With the heat and open windows they are loud enough to wake you up. Their trills remind me of an alarm clock.

Soon after Memorial Day weekend will be June and the final countdown begins of my last 6 months of work. The summer and fall I imagine will pass fast, and in September I'll be setting up my retirement for the first week in January.

I read in the New York Times that in Germany they raised the retirement age again from 67 to 69. There is a worker shortage. I believe here in the U.S. that eventually, and perhaps within the next 5 years, that similarly the U.S. will also have to raise the retirement age. Its just a matter of time...

The Times article mentioned how a tipping point is approaching where there are more deaths than births all over the world with the exception being certain parts of Africa.

China with a present population of 1.4 billion will cull down to 750 million, and at one point the amount of 18 and 80 year olds in China will be equal.

Aging populations and a negative birthrate will change demographics mucho within my lifetime.

The one child per family law/policy in China I believe will abbreviate their ambition of ever becoming a superpower. They might not have enough time to develop a domestic consumer economy. There is an expression that "China will get old before it gets rich." I think this will be true.

Europe, Japan, and in the U.S. also all have negative population growth and aging populations. Perhaps these changing demographics will re-frame aging, and the government, culture, and health of the older part of the population will have an exaggerated importance on which region of the world thrives or gets taken down a diminishing spiral.

It is a close race: the tipping point in the U.S. is not far away; and China's tipping point is just 5 years more past that of the U.S.

The biggest hurdle though for China is that because of the One-Child policy, most of the young people born were boys. Infanticide was performed to skew the birthrate to make China's problem worse.

All this talk of a New Cold War has made me connect the dots. For China I think the big picture is a house of cards that leads to a collapse. About 2 boys for every girl during the One-Child policy. I'll state the obvious: Boys do not give birth to babies; women do.

Taiwan I think is mighty important to Mainland China, not because of the politics, but because of the advanced electronics forging capabilities that exist there that they need.

I think this is the key to who wins this New Cold War.

I was working at Los Alamos when Ronald Ray-Gun was President, working on a neutral partical beam space based weapon that would shoot down ICBM's in their boost phase.

Ray-Gun was not so crazy as I thought, and because the U.S. economy was three times the size, the USSR economy was destroyed by their own hands trying to keep up.

Now as part of Biden's infrastructure bill is a 50 Billion dollar part that will go into Enhanced UV Lithography. Of course this technology has stratigic importance and has military purposes.

Keep your eye on Taiwon... The big prize are the most advanced chip foundries.

Cal
 
I had one of my girl co-workers shoot a series of head shots because some brand is wondering what my hair looks like. Had to shoot front, back and side views.

"Maggie" sent me a panic E-mail and then called me. She was not pleased that it was lunchtime and the girls were not available to take the shots.

This campaign, if we get it, likely will involve flying to Europe for a shoot.

So for today's photo shoot: I'm not shaved, complete with stuble; my hair is displaying one of my "self-haircuts" that happened only because I got "Great Stuff" spay foam insulation in my hair and had to cut it out.

I wonder what some art director might think of this guy who looks like a surfer. I expect, "He might clean up nicely," they might say. LOL.

Today I'm wearing a navy blue t-shirt that has mustard yellow letters that say "Metier" in big italic font, with a helvetica "Racing & Coffee."

My lack of style is my style.

Anyways I hate these urgent E-mails and emergency phone calls with a paniced woman on the line.

On one of these last minute E-mails I learned I needed a Tux for a black-tie event on a Wednesday and on Saturday we were flying to Mad-Rid. I ended up paying $2.5K for a Paul Smith Tux and shoes to get out of that jam.

I had to use a modern computer on the main campus to take this mandatory training about inclusion and diversity. Pretty much the focus was on BLM and the recent anti-Asian Hate Crimes.

In one section it asked for a personal story/experience that spun off BLM. I mentioned that I had NYPD guns drawn on me and that I could have easily been killed. What I didn't say was that I was 14-15 years old when that happened.

It was a case of racial profiling.

This was an interactive training that displayed the results of my institution and other users, and I noticed a pattern to my responses in that they did not really fit into the mainstream profiles that were displayed by the results. Pretty consistent that I was an outlier.

A lot of the training was a repeat from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" which is about how we make split second decisions on first impressions and how patterns of behavior get developed/reinforced.

BTW in Blink the last chapter covers the killing of Amadu Dialio who was shot 41 times when his cell phone was thought to be a gun. Malcolm Gladwell writes a surprising narrative where I felt some sympathy for the cops who made a tragic mistake.

Interesting to note that Malcolm Gladwell is biracial and half black.

Anyways this training stirred up a lot of painful memories.

Cal
 
Phil_F_NM said:
Gotta watch out for spay foam!

Phil Forrest
Click to expand...

Phil,

I hate crawl spaces. That's how I got spray foam in my hair. At that time my hair reached my waist.

So let's see if we get the gig. If we get the gig the shooting will be in Europe, but I wonder if they are curious enough about my hair to want to see it down, and I wonder if I can wrangle a free haircut out of the deal.

"Maggie" says my hair is uneven, but it looks good to me. LOL.

I think my short-timer attitude is a regression back to the 70's. I remember the songs by the Ramones "I Don't Care" and "I Wanna Be Sedated." Just after Memorial Day the 6 month countdown begins.

In June I will get my pension statement from my hospital, 21 years.

I'm not sure if I will collect my Grumman pension at 64, 65 or 70. A lot depends on what I want to do with my 403B and the taxes I'll have to pay. New York only tax exempts the first $20K on private pensions.

I imagine the Grumman pension would work off the same actuary schedule as Social Security, and that the later I begin collecting the more money I will get considering my expected longevity (111 years).

My understanding also is that installing solar that the tax credits drop the cost 26%. In New York they expect 70% of electric will be renewable/green by 2030. That's really ambitious.

"Moo," said the Pig.

I'm also thinking of the "Back-Backyard" as an investment that somehow I got for free because it is a separate building lot with EZ-PZ sewer and electric hookups. Not that I would want to sell it, but at this point it is a legal and separate building plot on a dead end.

Who knows, but one day I could easily build a second house and have a two house compound.

This housing shortage seems to have legs. Remember in 2007-2008 how they overbuilt. The luxury building I lived in East Harlem was built initially as condos, but became a rent stabilized building because the market had collapsed.

I figure how lucky to become a tenant in a rent stabilized building that was basically just 2 years old that were built out as luxury condo's.

But that all ended when they performed a condo conversion about 4-5 years later. Oh-well, too good to be true.

I believe in "regression to the mean" and the simple math is easy to understand. "Regression to the mean" has made me lots of money, and these extreme swings are really opportunities to figure out how to exploit.

But right now I'm avoiding the hyper inflated pricing on things like lumber, and some services like hiring a mason to avoid the high price swing.

So I reveal yet another identity: a surfer.

Buying the Baby-Victorian when we did was getting on a wave before it crested.

Calvin-August
 
Nokton48 said:
Morning Cal,
Check this out

5x7 and 4x5 Sinar Norma TLR's by Nokton48, on Flickr

"Construction Unit Design" allows me to upsize the camera to 13x18/5x7. Nice to have the larger format, I am just getting going with 5x7
Click to expand...

Devil Dan,

Christian has a Linhof 5x7. It is a Monster camera. Kinda crazy.

To keep up with you guys I might have to make the jump to 8x10.

BTW Snarky Joe gave me a Linhof Color Kardan at one of the NYC Meet-Ups. The base monorail looks to be similar if not the same.

Cal
 
So between New York State and the FED the total tax credit is 26% of the costs.

It also looks like the battery backup too would be subsidized.

"Moo," said the Pig.

I have to see our total annual electric bill. There is some 110% rule that makes it so there is a limit to how badly you can hose the electric company, Con Ed in my situation.

I would have to add on the power required for a Mitsubishi heat pump for HVAC for my detached workspace (garage).

Generally it takes about 8 years to save your money back to pay for the installation costs. Currently our electric and gas bill is about $120.00, but that does not factor in air conditioning costs that are yet to come.

A gross estimate of $200.00, which I think is way high was used to factor in the 8 year payback.

So it seems to "pay" to go solar if you can. The incentives are here. Happy-Happy.

I'm not ready yet. I need to retire, replace the garage roof, and then I'm ready to build out my detached workspace (garage).

Cal
 
Calzone said:
So in lew of a Meet-Up what are you folks doing over the 3-day weekend?

For me it will be a 5-day weekend: you know me, I'm a lazy slacker. I'll be taking off Tuesday and Wednesday also.

Cal
Click to expand...

It's my Mom's Birthday on the 31st so I guess we'll take her out for lunch.
 
I'm a lazy-slacker: for me the three-day weekend was a 5-day weekend.

Went to the Stormville Flea Market held at a small airport on Saturday. How hill-billy is that?

Sunday went to Newburgh and bought a blue birdbath top without a base for $20.00. My thinking is that it would be a great bonsai pot for a small forest of Japanese Red Maples.

"Maggie" bought this framed poster that is an rendering of some famous greenhouse that is at some french villa. Paid $160.00 at an antique emporium, but the same framed print is listed online at some gallery for $1.1K.

The framed print looks great above the "Professor's chair" in our living room. This room is mighty built out now and free of any clutter. It feels 1912 period correct.

The 3 sunny days I dug out Knotweed. I learned a lot and in a way my approach was like a military exercise; do the most damage in hurting your opponent as fast as you can, and then dig out the trouble spots.

Yesterday we covered 1800 square feet of cleared area with 10 mil thick overlapping tarps weighed down with re-purposed shingle with heavy rocks on top to smother and choke Knotweed. This covering

Down by the marsh grass I found all kinds of artifacts, car tires, truck tires, a retro high chair, a rusted out gas can, some keys on a ring, a broken shovel... I think I will photograph and document these items.

Snarkey Joe mentioned me loosing 20 pounds, and that I have 50 years to fight the Knotweed. Snarky Joe is a straight shooter, and pretty much he speaks the truth. Fact is that Knotweed is likely in my future over the next 50 years, because it might not be irradicated.

So things are moving along with the modeling gig, but no signed contract yet. We were told to keep a certain week "open" where we would have to fly to somewhere in Europe, no location was given.

The first day would be fitting and out of the week two days-two days are for just traveling. Of course first class, limo...

Nothing firm yet, but so far things are looking good to get this gig.

"I'm a skinny bitch," I tell you. I'm 5'10" and 135 pounds. My torso is kinda ripped, but my legs are also kinda stick like. A size 28 inch waist Patagonia knickers has a relaxed and casual fit, and I likely could fit into a size 27.

Last week I went on my Concept 2 rower (ERG). Twenty minutes was enough to get what I needed, It showed how I need to do more cardio and that walking, even my power-walking, does little to really strain my heart.

Calvin-August
 
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