Tag Archives: youtube

Winter Prep Ford Explorer Day 2

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Compound, polish, and more polish.

Never have so few worked so hard and had so little to show for the effort. Churchill said it about the Nazis after The Battle Of The Bulge, and it holds true for me as well. I just spent eight hours polishing out the paint on my car, and I ain’t even half done yet. It blows my mind that some people choose car detailing as a full-time career; it’s really hard fucking work and once you hit middle age your body will be broken. I am middle-aged and my body is pre-broken anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Right now I’m totally shot; I’ll have to update the post later. Pictures and even video to follow.

I’m in pain. And I’m hungry.

Short Update: Here are some pics from today to hold you over until I get time to do a proper write-up.

Tools of the day.
All taped up.
Wet-sanded buffer swirls left behind courtesy of the painter.
Magic, all glossy again!
The hood gleams after a three-step compound/polish.
Still gleams…
Dirty buffing pads.
Dirty microfiber towels.
Here’s a ‘roided out swine to make the grid an even 3 x 3.

Short update 2: A quick video clip of me cleaning the gunk out of polishing pads.

Products used today:

  • Harbor Freight dual action polisher. If there’s a sale and you have a coupon, you can pick this up for about $50 dollars. It’s an absolute steal even at full price and quality seems to be more than good enough for the amateur enthusiast/masochist.
  • Flex 3401 dual action polisher. This one is not cheap (but Marianne only wants the best). It’s powerful (due to forced rotation), hard to handle (due to forced rotation) and extremely heavy; I’d estimate about 68 lbs. That’s why my back hurts.
  • Various buffing/polishing pads from Lake Country and CarPro.
  • CarPro Fixer heavy compound. This gets the job done rather well, but is a total bitch to work with; it takes more muscle and time to remove the residue from the paint than the actual compounding, so I switched to…
  • Menzerna FG 400 with a fairly aggressive pad for the first step. I also used a very fast-cutting CarPro Flash Pad that also finishes nicely for spot corrections where I found deeper scratches.
  • CarPro Reflect with a medium fine polishing pad.
  • Menzerna SF 4500 with a very soft foam pad to finish off and bring out the gloss.
  • Of course the job isn’t done until the clean-up is done, so I washed the pads with a Grit Guard Universal Pad Washer. Pretty expensive for a hobbyist with only two cars to take care of, but, again, Marianne is a snob and wants all the fancy toys. Marianne also shot a video of me laboring with the pad washer. I’ll try to get it uploaded so you can see it in action. It’s a time saver for sure.
  • Buncha general purpose short nap microfiber towels from all over the place.
  • CarPro Eraser and isopropyl alcohol to help remove polish residue.

I think I could have done a decent enough job with two steps, or even one given that the paint was nice to begin with, but taking the easy way out is for girlie men. John Wayne said that.

Oh yeah, I tried to take some before-and-after close-ups of the paint to show the difference, but my camera just won’t pick up such small details in the light silver paint with lots of metallic, but trust me, it’s smoooth.

I think this will have to suffice as today’s entry. As always, no links are monetized. This blog had 36 unique visits yesterday, so I might want to rethink that policy. I could be leaving some serious beer money on the table. EDIT: I rethought that policy. Any and all links on OGNDY can now potentially be a source of beer money for me. Happy clicking!

It’s past midnight. Do you know where your children are?

2nd Amendment Rights – How Technology Defines Them

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2nd amendment rights virgin post in a brand spanking new category here on OGNDY.

My SEO plugin (WordPressSEO by Yoast) suggests that I should put my chosen key word/-phrase at the beginning of the article, which is why I just shamelessly and blatantly did it in the 2H heading (also suggested by the plugin) above (still flags it as yellow, though, go figure (OK, I think I got it now)).

Enough about that! I’m trying out a new category tentatively called “Transcribed From The YouTube”, reason being I’m very uninspired in a creative sense these days (didn’t write much about the election, see?), but I still need to keep my blog going with fresh content on a regular basis so as not to die off in the search engines, should I ever figure out a way to monetize the site.

So right off the bat I’m letting you know that I’m transcribing videos, or parts of videos, that I stumble upon on YouTube. I don’t think I violate anyone’s copyright (or 2nd amendment rights for that matter) in doing so, but if you disagree and think I’m unlawfully taking advantage of the fruits of your intellect, take a number, get in line and call my lawyer. What I’m saying is, sue me.

So as this shall not turn into a completely meaningless endeavor, I will only transcribe from videos that for some reason pique my genuine interest, be it because they have something important to say, that it’s said in a particularly artful manner, that it’s something stupid, something I agree with, disagree with, whatever; it is something I for some reason thought was worth sharing. I may or may not overtly express my reasons (figure it out for yourselves) and I will not identify the video. I will, however, offer a one million dollar prize to anyone who recognizes the transcript and can send me a link to the source video. (I don’t actually have a million dollars, so if you win and I don’t pay (I won’t), take a number, get in line and call my fucking lawyer.)

I’ll make this inaugural post without further comment other than to say that the guys in the video are concerned about their 2nd amendment rights.

“(…) Of course, this is one of those things that gets thrown in our faces all the time as gun owners, but, you know, back when the 2nd amendment was actually conceived and drafted and signed and everything like that, and the whole constitution and all this, our founding fathers, you know, we had all, all of the civilians and military had all the same firearms. You know, it wasn’t uncommon for a male to go and serve in the military to grab his rifle off the, off the mantle and go fight, ’cause that’s all he had.”

“Oh yeah.”

“So you know, the peo…, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed…”

“Well, that’s what it says.”

“…and, so I mean, they mean the same technology as the military, because, back then, that was the height of technology.”

“That was the height of technology that time and it should not be any different nowadays, I mean, a lot of folks out there think the 2nd amendment only applies to hunters. OK, no! Not at all! If I want to grab the AR off my mantle and go to battle, then I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna grab it and go!”

“Right.”

In the future I may attach my own views to the transcript and make it into a true opinion piece, making it more legitimate than just shamelessly fishing for SEO brownie points, but for now it’s just a way to get free content easily, while also being a training exercise in search engine optimization (something I’ve been putting off since ca 2002).

Below is an image of the original transcript in yours truly’s hand.

An image of a handwritten document concerned with 2nd amendment rights.

This image of the handwritten transcript that is the subject of this posting is included for no other reason than to provide 2nd amendment click bait for the search engines.

Post script:

Here is the analysis the SEO plugin made of this article:

The keyword density is 0.45%, which is a bit low, the keyword was found 4 times.
The copy scores 67.3 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered OK to read.
The keyword / phrase appears in the URL for this page.
Keyword / keyphrase appears in 1 (out of 2) subheadings in the copy. While not a major ranking factor, this is beneficial.
The images on this page contain alt tags with the target keyword / phrase.
This page has 3 outbound link(s).
The keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy.
You’ve never used this focus keyword before, very good.
The page title contains keyword / phrase, at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings.
In the specified meta description, consider: How does it compare to the competition? Could it be made more appealing?
The meta description contains the primary keyword / phrase.
There are 893 words contained in the body copy, this is more than the 300 word recommended minimum.
The page title is more than 40 characters and less than the recommended 70 character limit.

 

Hi-Res YouTube Video Blues

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Watching YouTube videos in the new, higher resolutions (>1080, all the way up to 4K) crashes my computer. That’s right; bona fide, old school blue screen of death. Which means I’ll have to disable my browser plugin that automatically plays all videos at their highest available resolution. Sucks to be me, I know, with all the extra clicks I’ll have to go through.

Here’s the video that alerted me to the problem. See if it happens to you, too.

“Lying” By Sam Harris – A Quickie Review

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Finally picked up Sam Harris’ “Kindle Single” (a short book/essay approx. 100 pages) “Lying” (not an affiliate link) and finished off the last few pages. I found the book to be unimpressive both in its main premise “Thou Shalt Not Lie”, and the reasoning for it.

A short quote: “Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to. And by lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others – even entire societies.” Translated: “You should always tell the truth, not doing so might lead to dire consequences.”

Sort of like a butterfly effect of lies, almost; I tell a perfectly harmless white fib with the purest of intentions in Sandy Hook, CT, and a week later a textile sweatshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh comes crashing down killing hundreds.

The book is filled with silly examples and assertions that a bright 5th-grader could easily refute. Having watched a lot of Sam Harris on Youtube I had expected more. Considerably more.

Even assuming that people somehow have a reasonable expectation, or even a right, that I tell the the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth at any given time, this statement is nothing but hyperbolic dramaqueenery©. Denying me the right to lie whenever I’m in the mood is a direct assault on my autonomy (and also the 1st Amendment). Talk about a pompous bag of gas.Two thumbs down.

Hypothetical:
A German SS-Obersturmführer leads his entourage of armed soldiers, Schmeissers held tightly against their chests, from house to house in an Amsterdam neighborhood in November 1942. It’s dark, cold, and a steady drizzle of almost-freezing rain makes the cobblestone slippery under foot. The officer halts at a door and raps it with Aryan authority. A middle-aged woman eventually appears. “Entschuldigung for das inconvenience mein Frau, but hast du any illegal Juden hiding in your loft?” the officer demands.The woman, clearly afraid, stutters, but finally manages to reply in the negative: “No sir, no Jews here. No Jews at all.” The Obersturmführer bows stiffly at the waist as only SS officers do, tips his hat to the terrified woman, utters a polite “danke schön”, adjusts his eye patch, twirls around sharply on his heel and continues on to the next house in search for untermenschen to send off to the work camps in the East. Arbeit macht frei, usw., doncha know!

anne_frank

Lying, runaway Jewess. Picture credit: Bergen-Belsen work camp archives, from a production of “Glückliche Tage” (“Happy Days”) performed by the camp drama troupe.

What a fucking cunt that woman was, lying to the officer like that, knowing full well she had an entire family of Jew fugitives hiding upstairs. You just can’t trust anybody these days.

P.S. I find it much more interesting to read a review of a book, however short and incomplete and biased, thereby perhaps gaining some new insight, rather than just a statement that so-and-so has read such-and-such.

EDITED TO ADD: It appears that Anne Frank was posthumously baptized by the Mormons. Presumably this selfless act by the Latter Day Saints has led God to forgive her for lying and being a Jew, retrieved her from hell and put her in the Heavenly Witness Protection Program where she is now playing dodge ball with Jesus in an undisclosed Heavenly location (Heaven is a big place).

Smartphones And Other High Tech Bric-A-Brac

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Lately I’ve been watching a lot of this guy Marques Brownlee‘s tech videos on the YouTube. He’s a very likeable super nerd who apparently knows everything about everything that’s worth knowing about computers, tablets, smartphones, apps, operating systems etc., and he’s only nineteen(!) years old and much wiser than his age would indicate.

Watching his videos gives me an irrational urge to go out and buy a smartphone which is so out of character for me it’s in a different galaxy or even universe, partly Luddite as I am. But there’s so much to choose from out there; Windows phones, iPhones, Android phones, even Ubuntu phones, small ones, big ones, phone/tablet hybrids so I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Add to that my disdain for being hooked up to the cyber world 24/7 and everybody knowing everything about me and my recent rants against Google and Facebook for being douchebags and my cognitive dissonance on the subject becomes even more obvious. Smartphones may be a trick that this dog is too old to learn properly. Or the straw that broke the camel’s back; pick your metaphor.

I actually own a cell phone (non-smart) that was given too me years ago accompanied by a pay-as-you-go plan. You could roll over your minutes one month, but after that you forfeited whatever was left in your account. Which I think is banditry of the third kind (that’s a movie reference from before Marques was even born) at high noon. It’s been sitting quite dead in the glove compartment of my car for years now and I don’t even know how to reactivate it.

I’m also quite unhappy with the planned obsolescence policy all phone/tablet makers seem to employ as their marketing strategy. Add a new hyped up feature, a new wizzbang super-duper trick to the device a couple of times a year or so and all the millennials bite and line up days in advance of the release date outside stores to get the latest magic phone assembled by suicidal slaves in China.

Clearly I’m not a millennial (actually I’m a mid-to-late boomer; I’ve got more than a decade left before I qualify for Medicare if they don’t change the rules and if I should be so lucky to live that long) and not the target demographic of the tech companies. I thought it was a big deal when we got color TV way back in the day. I bought my first computer ca 1990. No mouse, no Windows. Everything had to be opened through DOS and multitasking was an unknown concept. Viruses spread by infected floppy disks (google it if you’re unfamiliar with ancient technology). It had a 25 megabyte hard drive, a quarter meg of RAM and a clock speed of 25 Hz and was considered bleeding edge at the time. Truth is it was more like a glorified typewriter that you also could play Pacman on. I didn’t get on the Internet until 2000 because I was convinced it was a fad that would go away.

I was able to keep up with the breakneck speed of tech development for a while, even taught myself how to build websites, do affiliate marketing by bombarding the Internet with mini sites (literally thousands built by hand without any auto-generating software) and make some pocket change out of it. Then some douchebag came along and invented Web 2.0, social media, wearable tech and my aging CPU (the one inside my head) wasn’t quite able to keep up anymore. I can still see the train in front of me, but it’s pulling away and the image is blurred by the dust it’s throwing up.

I’m still hanging on by the skin of my teeth, but I think it’s gonna be a long while (if ever) before I buy a smartphone, or a smart watch, or Google Glass or whatever the next fancy gadget they come up with. Because what the fuck would I do with it? Play Pacman?

Google Evil Overlords Of The Internet

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Google 1998: “Do no evil.”

Google 2013: “We know what you did last night.”

keep calman hate google

Take back the Internet. Keep calm and hate Google! What used to be a good search engine with additional useful products has become a monster that aims to annex the entire Internet and force itself into every aspect of your life. They are the civilian equivalent of the NSA, and quite possibly co-conspiring with them to spy on you. Fight fire with fire.

Google the search engine, Gmail, YouTube are all good products, but don’t force us to link up everything with your horrible Google+. I would like to send an email without a list of strangers in the sidebar that Google wants to add to my “circles”. I want to be able to comment on a YouTube video without it being added to my Google+ (which I frankly don’t even want in the first place). Don’t make changes every other day and force me to spend valuable time looking for responses, notifications and settings.

Larry and Sergei, you must by now have enough personal wealth to not need to own all there is to own. You came up with a brilliant idea that benefited millions of people. But the times are changing and you’re not so fresh anymore and new and better shit is popping up all over the place. Go back to what you do best and let the user decide how they want to use Google products. Go back to “do no evil” or people will start to leave you. In droves. You can only move the cheese around so many times before the mouse gets tired of it and seeks out a different pantry ®.

God Is Not Great – He Is Boring

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I’m giving up on “God Is Not Great – How religion poisons everything.” by Christopher Hitchens for the second time. On my first attempt I made it to 23% on my Kindle; this time around I stuck it out to 32%.

I’m a great admirer of Hitchens, and if I were the type to cultivate heroes, he would be one of them. I’ve probably watched 20+ hours of him in various debates/lectures/interviews on YouTube and nothing is more entertaining than watching him destroy a Jesus freak with logic and merciless acerbic wit.

I don’t think there’s anything he has said that I disagree with (apart from his support for America’s unprovoked attack on Iraq, and the subsequent decade-long train wreck of a war), and there’s nothing I have said that he couldn’t have said better. I hold the man to be a true intellectual giant.

BUT, watching him demolish some poor creationist dimwit on stage doesn’t necessarily translate well to the written format. Un-reciprocated snark and belittlement has little entertainment value. While the man clearly is a good debater and wordsmith, it quickly gets annoying when he tries to make a point of, and prove, his superiority in this regard in every other sentence. It makes you look like an arrogant prick. Furthermore, this style is most probably a turnoff for the very audience he (presumably) aims to convert, which makes me doubt his motivation in the first place.

While I do not consider myself anywhere near his academic league and intellectual stature, I haven’t read anything of his that I haven’t thought, or reasoned, myself at some level, however murky and dim. He has, nevertheless, helped illuminate and clarify my own nebulous speculations, I’ll give him that.

While I enjoy him “live” and respect him greatly, there is a strong element of snobbery about him and he clearly takes some sadistic joy in figuratively disemboweling his opponents that may be entertaining in a debate, but tiresome in writing. I’m not at all sure I would have liked him in person (and he probably wouldn’t enjoy hanging out with me). I might still give one of his non-atheist themed books a try, e.g “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” or his indictment of Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice“.

In conclusion, lest there should be any doubt; I believe the world is a better place for Christopher Hitchens having graced us with his presence, cut untimely short as it was.

Pig Snout Glock 19 Fix

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I didn’t even know of this condition until I saw a video on YouTube that some Glocks suffer from a cosmetic problem known as “pig snout”, where the polymer dust cover under the barrel turns up due to heat from firing (supposedly) creating a snouty look to the firearm.

I checked out my own Glock 19, and sure enough, it had the upturned nose. I had never noticed it before, it doesn’t affect the functionality of the weapon, but once I became aware of it, I knew I just had to do something about it. I just couldn’t live with my Glock being that way.

I used a common heating gun that you can buy in any hardware store on the lowest setting to heat up the dust cover, and then pressed it against a hard wooden cutting block to straighten out the curve. CAUTION: It does NOT take a lot of heat to make the polymer pliable enough to achieve a good result. It’s also important to apply even pressure so the gap between slide and frame is equal on both sides.

Glock 19 before corrective pig snout treatment.

pre-fix-g19-pig-snout

Glock 19 after corrective pig snout treatment.

post-fix-g19-pig-snout

 

Beretta PX4 Storm .40 Smith & Wesson Full Size

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Just got back from the range where  I shot my Glock 19 and compared the factory barrel to the Storm Lake match grade barrel I had purchased. Why did I buy an aftermarket barrel for my pistol? I can’t give you a rational answer. It was shiny (stainless), supposed to be more accurate and I had $150 I didn’t know what to do with.

The Storm Lake barrel is a noticeably tighter fit in the slide, but looking at the targets I shot, I can’t really tell much of a difference. Maybe the Storm Lake groupings were a little tighter, maybe it was just coincidence. If you like to shoot but are on a tight budget, spend your money on ammo. Not a bad word about Storm Lake, but for the average weekend warrior it’s not gonna kill zombies any deader.

beretta-px4-storm-full-size

After I had used all my ammo I returned to the front counter for a look at the rentals, and spotted a Beretta PX4 Storm full size in .40 S&W. I had previously owned a PX4 compact in 9mm that I got rid of due to idiocy (mine) and bad advice (others), so I was curious to try it out now that I have a bit more mileage as a shooter. I bought a box of Federal American Eagle .40 S&W and returned to my lane gun in hand.

It’s a pretty big piece of hardware, but not excessively heavy; I would guess about 30 oz. I had never shot .40 before and was prepared for some snappiness, but it wasn’t bad at all. The gun was a dream to shoot, in my hands much more accurate than the Glock 19 or my Springfield Armory XDM 3.8 Compact 9mm. I mean seriously. I made ragged holes in the center of the target just like I see YouTube professionals do. The only thing I didn’t like was the safety/decocker tabs (amidextrous) that made racking the slide a bit awkward. It also adds some considerable width to the slide, but this gun wasn’t designed for concealed carry anyway. The trigger was OK, but not super tight and crisp like the custom PRP trigger for my XDM, but adequate enough not to need any kind of tinkering (why don’t all guns have really nice triggers out of the box?). We’ll see what Santa brings me this year. Anyway, it’s on my list of must-have guns.

Marilyn Manson – Born Villain

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So Brian Hugh Warner, AKA Marilyn Manson, is at it again with a new song, Born Villain. I’ve never been a huge fan of Marilyn Manson, but I think he has some good stuff and at some point may have even had a “mission”, so to speak. Maybe I’m getting old, maybe he is, but this one just didn’t do much for me, either musically or visually/artistically. My guess is he’s trying to regain his waning celebrity with shock value for the sake of shocking. It will probably work on some people. I don’t know, I just wasn’t impressed.

On a different note, YouTube certainly has changed policy on what can be posted. Close-ups of shaved vaginas with eyeballs inserted? What’s with that? Parental advisory, lol!