There's a lot of Members we haven't heard from in awhile. Hopefully everyone is Healthy and doing well.

If you're reading this please leave a comment here, let us know you're still around and how you're doing.

If you're new and haven't posted yet, say hello - tell us a little about yourself, what your interests are... whatever

Bill

OK,
I'm still here and healthy.
Working alternate days for my two jobs as required.
We are doing emergency inspections, and whatever jobs that relate to unoccupied structures.
Doing the best we can under the situation.

FYI, it looks like NZ has gone into full lockdown based on a Reuters report from yesterday. The PM felt a full lockdown will slow/stop the spread.

Mike, if you see this be safe.

I'm under partial lockdown and doing boring office jobs at home. It's been two weeks now and I can't stand it! I do have the next two weeks off, which is decidedly an improvement over editing, formatting and translating instruction booklets for basic 3D modelling and 2D vector drawing for laser engraving.

I'm doing fine here in Chicago. I do all of my drawings in General CADD Pro.(Modern version of Generic CADD) Since anyone can download it, I just had to bring the USB dongle home to be able to save drawings on my computers. I've been drawing schematics and laying out PCBs for projects that have been running on the back burner. I consider myself mightily blessed to be able to work from home!

As for ECN, I really miss all of active discussions we used to have in the technical areas!
Joe

Hey John,
Yes, we did get put into a full lock-down the other day over here.
I have been out to do the odd "urgent" job or 3 since then.

It's quite strange, having never experienced something like this before, in that you have to tell your customer that there is to be no-one in the immediate area where you are working, while you're on site.

Pretty much EVERYTHING is closed here apart from supermarkets, service-stations make you pay through the little window when you get fuel, that's all you can really do here.
All fast-food outlets and the like are closed, if you need milk or whatever from the corner shop, they have a policy of only one person in the shop at any one time.

Kiwi's are funny folks, in that they don't like being told what to do and you see the odd car go past and you wonder where they're going, because we were all told to stay at home unless it is to get food from the supermarket or get fuel.

It's only been 4-5 days into the 4 weeks, I can't see some people lasting here.
I'm quite lucky in that, I have a chest freezer full of food, my garden provided a decent yield of veges last summer and I have enough meat to keep me going for a couple of months if need be.

I hope that everyone reading this is coping well with the restrictions imposed on them,
just remember, this disease will only be got on top of, if everyone follows the rules.

In Austria, everyone was hoping for the restrictions to be eased off after Easter but it's not looking good right now, even though the figures look very promising to me - today the increase rate of infections went below 10% for the first time since the outbreak! The progression is essentially linear instead of exponential as they'd initially feared. The government on the other hand keeps talking about implementing even stricter measures, without actually naming them. Everything's closed except for essential production, supermarkets and small grocery stores, drug stores, pharmacies, car and bicycle repair stores and tobacconists. Public transport has been cut down to weekend timetables and people are advised to avoid it. The city of Vienna is sending out 50 Euro taxi vouchers to all senior citizens, little sense as that makes. As of Wednesday, masks will be required in supermarkets, we'll see if they can actually find enough to enforce that.

Oddly enough, construction sites haven't been shut down yet, on the contrary. One of the largest contractors closed all their sites but re-opened them late last week.

OK, an update from the Garden State (NJ, USA)

In a few days, we will be able to have indoor dining again, however at 25% capacity of the business. I still feel sorry for the owners of the businesses, and the employees who have basically been out since mid-March. Yes, we have 'outdoor' dining, with the 6' social distance, but they are still hurting.

Gyms and health club type places were allowed to re-open today, again with limited capacity and distancing, and masks are still mandatory.

For the most part, all businesses are now 'open' with a lot lo restrictions by Executive Orders from our Governor.

State offices are still 'remote' for the most part, and the facilities that are 'open' are packed with people. Unemployment Offices, Motor Vehicle, etc are packed.

Other then that 'Welcome to the new "Semi-Normal"

The surprising one to me is how many people in the health care industry are going broke. One of my old IBM buddies has been selling medical equipment for the last 20 years since IBM laid him off and he says the whole industry is depressed. He also said that "Ventilator" thing was over hyped. Do you want one? He has a warehouse full.

We should have invested in plexiglass, and clear shower curtains!! Also, the builders are complaining about material costs going thru the roof. 2x4 pre-cuts from <$2 to >$6 each. Plus a lot of shortages.

We had a rumor of a warehouse full of ventilators back in mid April, stored with no place to go.

It is what happens when "News" organizations make up the news instead of just reporting it. The other story out there is the craft distillers tricked into making hand sanitizer. Now they have thousands of gallons of it they can't sell. This reminds me a lot of Y2K. There was a real issue then too but nothing even close to the hype.

Yes I remember all the "Y-2-K" compliant labels! One of my clients back then was a group that made a machine that was used to write 'master plates' for computer chips. They dealt in nano-meters, and all were a strange bunch of Engineer types. They spent a lot of $$$$ for Y2K.

I drew the line in the sand when they wanted all our tools to be Y2K 'safe'???

Heck, we put labels on the Makita battery screw guns!!

Totally agree, Greg,
The more hysteria the "news" companies can whip up, the higher the ratings, for them.
This in no way helps the people on the street, in fact it is counter-productive, when the Covid-19 thing first started
the "meeja" caused all the panic buying of stuff that people didn't even need.
I mean toilet paper, people had all this in their trolleys and no food, I'm not sure how that works.
We've seen rioting and so forth in various places in the US, lately, if the media didn't fuel them fires, how bad would it have actually have been?
Sorry, I didn't want to make it a political thing, but every time, the media is there to up the ante, for their own purposes and theirs alone.

Hey Mike, Portland Oregon (for one) is on about the 100th day of unrest. Civil disobedience (Riot).

Yes, media has it on the 'news' everyday

The one thing we didn't have in Y2K that we have now is pervasive "social media", spewing all sorts of rumor and outright fabrication, either coming from stupid people or smartly crafted by someone wanting to manipulate stupid people.

And I am getting tired of Facebook yelling at me to sign up to vote EVERY time I log in...

Yes still there, life is busy and sometimes forget about posting in forums as there is so much else to do.

I admit spending sometimes too much time on Facebook and YouTube.

Heading into spring here in NZ and look forward to that.

Covid-19 is a pain as it had slowed down the economy world wide and I am tired of all the temporary restrictions.

No doubt, without Politics we could all recover and move on a whole lot easier...!

Hello everyone! It has been a while! I'm still in the rat race, working in the SF Bay area for the last 4 years (essentially since the oilfields/oil prices took a nosedive) on everything from GoPro to Facebook to currently a 14 story big pharma cancer treatment research lab/facility in South San Francisco. While I do miss the constant variety that service work provided, I'm in a much more stable position now... (Just 240 miles from home though.)

Still haven't had the 'rona and can't wait for life to get back to normal...

Hope everyone is in good health and making it through!

Starting to get a little scary here in Manitoba Canada. We are at a 14% test rate for Covid-19 where I live in Winnipeg.

One of the smaller cities about 30 minutes east of me is at a 40% test rate and they are having protests from some of the church groups there about limiting the number of people at church services and having to wear face masks.

There was next to no in person Black Friday shopping here due to the health dept shopping shutdown rules.

We suddenly had a mass influx of northerners at the beach this weekend and I think we will see a lot of new infections. I am not much of a beach guy so I won't be part of that mess.

Greg,
Is that like the last gasp of summer people from the north heading down your way?
How far north are you talking?

I was on the understanding that the Government told everyone to stay at home over Thanksgiving, to try and keep the Covid 19 thing under wraps.
Yet there seemed to be people flying everywhere, like nothing at all was a problem, as long as you wore a mask.
And in the queues, there were people that weren't wearing masks.

Over here, the Pakistani cricket team are staying in Christchurch, they breached the Quarantine cordons and went to visit some friends, 6 of them tested positive a day later.
Who know's who they met up with.

Our snowbirds seem to be coming early. Usually we don't see them in force until after Christmas. These are usually from the upper midwest. (Ohio to Wisconsin/Minnesota).
The Canadians are supposed to stay home but they are doing strange things to hop the border like shipping their car and coming over in a helicopter. This last week simply demonstrates that Americans have a bad habit of not doing anything the government tells them to. We set records for the most people on a plane since Covid got going.

Yeah,
All of our recent Covid-19 cases in the last 2 months or so have been from people coming in from overseas.
It's like the government still lets people in and they have the virus even before they came here.
I mean, we live here on a couple of islands in the middle of the sea, this sort of thing should not even be happening.
If I was running the show, you would be tested before you even got on the plane and then tested again before you leave the airport to go to the Quarantine facility.

This new variant of Covid-19 was a bit of a shock, it turned up from a guy from South Africa in the UK.
Personally, if I was running the show, we would SHUT all of our borders to everyone.
Admittedly, we live on a couple of islands here, this helps us to a certain degree, but if this gets ingrained here,
it will be bloody hard to eradicate, as there is no means of escape.
And you have people freaking out that they can't go home for Xmas with their families, my opinion on this is this,
do you want to go home to your family later on or do you want to end up in a coffin.
Your choice and you could infect the rest of your family.

I just started a thread with an update on where I have been and what's coming up. I missed chatting with you guys! I am also going to have some equipment for sale in the classifieds here soon.

I have avoided (so far) the virus despite having to work full time through it (until January that is, I finally decided to hang up the toolbelt.)

Hope you all are doing well.

Cheers!

I am getting pretty good at this retired thing. I think you will like it. Keep moving but move for you. Just find something you like to do and do it. Stay active, be happy and live a long life.

And that is the thing about retirement, Greg.
It used to be in the UK, a guy would work his whole life in one job (this is obviously the 60's or the 70's), pay his house off, the kids have all left the nest.
When it came to his retirement party at his job, the realisation that he'd worked all of his life doing one thing and now what is he going to do?
If you don't have a decent hobby by the time you're retired, you've done it all wrong and that is the wrong time to find that out!
What hobbies do you have, Greg?

I like building things and when my wife was building houses in the happy times speed was more important that materials. They threw away lots of good stuff and my first stop when I went to see her was the dumpster. If you give me enough materials I will be building something. I did a pool and a 2400 square foot screen cage with 2 covered bars and a spa. I remodeled 2 bathrooms and the kitchen and put a 365 sq/ft addition on the house. My last big project was a swinging bridge over a swale in the back yard that goes up to the PoCo right of way where I maintain a trail for walking the dog and it is a Gopher Tortoise preserve. I also like building electronic stuff and playing with PCs. Right now I am also primary care giver for 2 people with mobility problems and that eats a lot of my time.
I stay busy

LOL,

I've been building things myself recently. Especially with the price of Construction materials now, I find myself eyeballing what the neighbors are throwing out. I'm building up quite a pile...

I'd like to see that swinging bridge.

This is the Ed Labrador Memorial Bridge.
It is actually on PoCo property but I let them use it so nobody has ever complained.
The area up there is a Gopher Tortoise preserve and vehicles are discouraged. The bridge saves them a mile walk it they have to look at anything. The poles are 100 feet high so any serious maintenance gets done by helicopter. It is a 230kv line.

Greg,

Your images don't seem to show up in threads anymore, I thing because Browsers are blocking links from http addresses now.

How about this

NICE!

Looks like a theme park!

What are those lines going across?

They are electric fireflies. They actually look pretty realistic. I have people amazed that I have so many fireflies in my yard and they are virtually non existent here. These run on 12v DC powered from the shed on a wall wart. (class II).

I am a little curious about which browsers won't let you see http sites. Both of mine seem to work. Is it one of your security settings?

Firefox has a security setting that requires https in all windows, but there is an option setting to turn that off which would allow http (there is also an option setting to require https only in private browsing mode). Https is probably the default setting.

My MS Edge and Google Chrome both just say [Linked Image from ...] They're both running the default settings.

My Firefox Browser does show the picture though. (also running default settings)

Took a look - I now believe the Firefox security default setting is not https only, which does explain why http worked for you.

I have Firefox and Slim Jet. Both are OK with HTTP. I am surprised you are not having trouble with other sites. There are plenty of HTTP sites out there although I see this is HTTPS. I will oook at my web host info and see what I have to do to "secure" my site. I also manage one for the HOA. Maybe that is why we don't get as much traffic as I suspect but nobody has said anything yet.

I don't know exact reasons why the pictures aren't showing up, they did in the past, I figured it had something to do with an automatic Browser update (?) , but maybe it's got something to do with something being referenced on this site with the [img] tags, or coming from an https site??

I changed this site to https a couple years back because one of the Browsers was giving me a warning the site was not secure or that it would soon be reported as such in future Browser updates.

FYI, I can go directly to your site and see the pictures in my browsers, It just gives me a Not Secure warning next to the address bar. If you do go to https the [img] links may have to be changed to get the pictures displayed here. If that's the case I can help with that.

I really haven't got serious about it because this seems to be the only place that has that security setting so far, Everywhere else I am going seems OK with it by simply using the IMG tags.

Test

Don't know why, but:

Windows 8.1 PC:

MS Edge: Can't see
Google Chrome: No
Firefox 88.0 64-bit: (same Computer): No

Everyone: what is your experience?

Firefox 88.0 64-bit on a Win 10 computer also did not display the image. I copied the https link embedded in the HTML coding directly into a browser window and Firefox still did not display the image, but came up with a warning about the page not being secure. The reason was that it uses an untrusted self signed certificate. So it looks like it's a certificate issue.

The last one just had an "S" tacked on to the HTTP. I was pretty sure that wasn't going to work. When I get a minute I will talk to my web host and see what it takes to make it a real HTTPS

FYI, I’m here on my iPad and Gregs image is not accessible.

The pic of he walkway in his yard is OK, and interesting. All tha foliage and no real fireflys??

That explains it - a real https connection will require a server side SSL certificate.

I think it is too hot for fireflies here or maybe the Purple Martins eat them. We see one or two now or them but not often.

Is your fire hydrant functional, or purely decorative?

Just for the dogs. Somebody mowed it down up at the end of the street and it laid there on the side of the road for a month or so. One day I saw DOT there putting in the new one and I asked them what they were doing with the old one. The guy said it was damaged too bad to use again and if I wanted it I could have it but they weren't going to help. I had my Prelude and I figure they thought I would try to pick it up and quit. The thing weighed a couple hundred pounds with the pipe that was still attached on the bottom.
I drove down in the swale next to it, got it tilted up and got the top end in the floor of the front seat and flipped it in the car. It barely cleared the door but it fit. They were just shaking their head when I closed the door, thanked them and drove away. It is just stuck in the ground but the 3 feet of pipe anchored it pretty well, If you look close you can see the big outlet is crooked. That was what got broken. It is just wedged in there. The Daffy paint job was for my wife. She is a Daffy fan.

LOL!

I was meaning to ask about that hydrant too.

It just shows that it never hurts to ask. I get lots of cool stuff, just by asking "What are you going to do with that"?

Some years back I helped dismantle some stores and brought home a full checkout counter with Cash Register, Register Open/Closed Light, plastic bags and all. Kids had a ball with it... Wife, not so much...

I did a lot of Point of Sale. I have some cash register stuff around here.

One of our friends got a new fire hydrant from the nearby foundry that makes them. There was a flaw in the casting and failed inspection. It does pay to know people with strange jobs.

G'morning everyone! Long time since I've been here and want to check in again. Hope everyone is doing well after the crazy past year and change. I'm hanging in, was laid off from my job as an amusement park mechanic due to Covid and went back to my prior job at a tourist railroad as their sole electrician. Having fun for the most part and still trying to keep optimistic. Looking forward to coming around some more, I'll have to post up some of my "office" pictures. Take care everyone!!

Welcome back Kid!

Welcome back here kid. Lookin forward to your pictures and comments

<sniff> They grow up so fast

Congrats kid for sticking with it. We need more young people in the trade.

Just wanted to drop by and say hello, I'm still twisting wires together every day. I do mostly service work in residential commercial and industrial for a small shop of 6 guys in the field. Its been busier than normal and we are short manpower. It has been extremely tough the last year or so with the shortage of materials. Our state adopted the 2020 NEC a while back, which means a lot of 2 pole GFCI breakers that need to get installed that are unobtainable. Can't get meter sockets either, and switchgear is a long wait.

Justin

That would have to be pretty frustrating if you had a house just sitting there finished but stuck on the final electric because a breaker is unavailable.

Just ended a 3 year run on a service truck with a good helper for over two of those years. Kept working during the shutdown as an essential employee, but got slow for the last couple of months. Got a call form another contractor for a project manager position. Trying to learn the position and keep up with crews in multiple directions and keep them supplied with materials as well as submitting RFIs and trying to keep track of progress and schedule demands.

Haven't been on here for some time. Been busy with Grand kids. My wife made comment that November is a month of Anniversaries for us.13 years since I took a job as an inspector , 4 years since I had my neck surgery , 3 years since her stroke and subsequent seizures. 1 year since her heart problem which landed her in the Cardiac ICU for a week .
Growing old is NOT for the weak ! But the good news is we are doing fantastic. I'm out every day looking at electrical work . some makes me shake my head and mutter WTF. Some days theres more scheduled work then I can do , other days not enough to fill my day, but thats the life of an inspector

Greg,
That Fire hydrant, is a tripping hazard.........

"Come and get me Copper".

The progression is essentially linear instead of exponential as they'd initially feared. The government on the other hand keeps talking about implementing even stricter measures, without actually naming them. Everything's closed except for essential production, supermarkets and small grocery stores, drug stores, pharmacies, car and bicycle repair stores and tobacconists. Public transport has been cut down to weekend timetables and people are advised to avoid it.