My sleep meds are messing with me

But at least I don’t feel like the second time I got hit with a truck when I get up.

My bedtime sleep meds are a cocktail of gabapentin for nerve pain, melatonin to shut down the monkey brain, and ibuprofen for all the abused joints and muscles from having survived almost 20 years after getting killed with a truck. And there is a more poetic but less accurate way of putting that, evoking the Bard’s slings and arrows and other things. But back to the meds and the disruption to my sleep schedule. The problem is I sleep for 10 to 12 hours but then stay awake the normal 16 to 18 hours and I get further and further out of sync with sunrise and sunset. Basically I get enough sleep to run a 30 hour day. Unfortunately I live on a 24 hour planet. Now if I was living on a space station away from a planet this would not be a problem, but my application to live on an Orion Habitat has so far not been approved.

I have been watching videos on how to make more low RPM power for less money by retaining the stock cam and adding boost. Basically instead of swapping out heads, cam, and intake, keep everything stock and throw a couple of $300 turbos on it and use their small size and low inertia to put boost at low RPM and also not restrict flow at higher RPM. Until I actually get an engine (and the budget to build it) this is all masturbatory because I can’t actually do anything with it. I don’t actually have the engine to work on, I don’t have the budget to work with, I don’t have any parts to work with. Still hoping for the Power Nation 311 in³ 0.060 over bore Ford 302, so I get as many entries as I can get for the contest. As I posted earlier one of my options would be to sell or trade the prize engine to get a junkyard engine and transmission. Because I can get a nice junkyard engine and (probably) transmission for less than the value of the prize engine.

Anywho, this has gone on long enough. And I still hadn’t figured out what to do about the engine.

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I’m hot and a little short-tempered

And my meds are basically knocking me out most of the day. Seriously I didn’t get out of the bed until almost 1700 yesterday and I slipped between the sheets at 0500 or thereabouts. And I dropped off almost immediately, no time delay between kissing my wife goodnight and brain shutting down.

I wasn’t asleep the whole 11+ hours, because I did hear my phone telling me that the second Cup race at Pocono was starting about 1415 and promptly fell back asleep. I heard the sound my phone makes when I get a text, the sound when I get an Amber Alert, the sound when someone sends me a Facebook message. And I didn’t wake up enough to get out of bed until I had to take a leak at 1645, and even then it took a while to get everything functioning. You don’t know what frustrating means until you stand at the toilet trying to pee and nothing comes out, because your muscles are still not responding to your orders, especially including your urinary sphincter.

And for some reason the usual summer daytime setting on the thermostat feels like the Warm setting on the new oven. BTW that Warm setting is freaking wonderful for having late brunch for us late risers. Anywho I’m not sweating, but I’m definitely not comfy at 78°F anymore, and I’m not sure of why. I just don’t feel comfortable at what used to be a very comfortable setting. Might be related to my meds knocking me out for 11 hours today, might not be. But it is another thing making me unhappy today. I think it has something to do with other things that are making me unhappy that I don’t want to talk about here.

Anywho, I am still getting as many entries as I can for that 0.060 over Ford 302 (real size 311 in³ making that 5.0 a 5.09) from Power Nation and you haven’t been helping as much as you can. You don’t have to do anything besides click the link and enter the contest and agree to give me the engine if you win. Right now I’m 10 friends shy of the maximum of 10 friend entries. I guess I need to do something about that, somehow. Winning this engine would be a major boost to the Sprint-T project. I could sell it and buy a junkyard engine and transmission and all the controllers. Seriously, a 6.2L truck engine makes about the same power as the giveaway engine at high RPM, and a bunch more down low, as it comes from the junkyard with the long-tube headers I already have to fit the engine in the car, and it weighs about 80 pounds less. The difference is a junkyard engine will look like… something pulled from a junkyard, and the giveaway engine looks like… bling. And there is always the pull of bling. Who doesn’t like bling? I admit, I like bling, too, but what I like more is an engine and transmission that both work, and are as light as possible while also having good power and reliability.

Previous paragraph I tried to use some html to make the word bling look like sparkle or rainbow text, and all I got by copying in the code and swapping their “rainbow” and “sparkle” text for my “bling” text was this

bling

. It didn’t matter which code I used they both returned the same result, that you see here. I don’t have to describe it it’s right here. And that doesn’t look like either rainbow or sparkle no matter how you squint at it. And that is a good reason to put this to bed and not get any more angry at it for not doing what I coded it to do.

There is one good thing about the condo collapse in FL

It isn’t another gods-damned mass shooting. That is literally the only good thing about yet another mass casualty event in Miami, there is no smoking gun in the literal sense. The building was undergoing a safety inspection because the subsurface support was subsiding for whatever reason rocks and dirt lose their cohesiveness under a building because someone in Florida made a bad decision in the 1980s that had nothing to do with disco or drugs, or fashion.

I’m not real sure what happened because all I saw was one sentence in a 3 paragraph web page article, saying the building site was sinking about 40 years after the building was built. I have a friend who spent 20 years studying and dealing with exactly this kind of thing and I sent her an e-mail about it to see if she knows anything about what happened.

Anyway, stuff happened. Someone is responsible, but it remains unlikely that anyone will get punished for their malfeasance. But, this is the post-Trump apocalypse, anything can happen.

What happens when Disney copyrights your deity?

Just heard Disney was trying to copyright Loki, in spite of several thousand active and devout worshippers of the ancient Norse deity. Link to the news video

Ignoring the prior art issue of Loki being an article of worship for several thousand to at least a couple of hundred years, where do they get off on copyrighting Loki’s name and variations of it? This would be like me making a superhero movie about a guy named Jesus and then requiring the Catholic church to remove all likenesses and references to the name from all their properties. It would get thrown out before I could get it filed. So why hasn’t this likewise been thrown out?

And this is about as far as my outrage can hold out.

I almost got a meat coma for Father’s Day

Since daughter and son-in-law are preparing to move this month we didn’t have the celebration at their house, but we had dinner here instead with our son. Since it was my celebration, I got to choose the menu, which was barbeque, potato salad, and coleslaw. I ordered the 3 meat plate because I didn’t think I was going to get 4 ounces of meat for each type of meat on the plate (and in case you’re thinking I was being greedy, they have 4 and 5 meat plates on the menu). Mrs. the Poet just got a single meat, but her serving was almost as big as my three meats together. So no I wasn’t being greedy, I just wanted the holy trinity of Texas Barbeque, brisket, sausage, and pulled pork.

We got two full meals out of this including the sides, then had a small piece of store-brand cheesecake a couple of hours later. Overall I had a good time.

Whoops, jumped the gun a bit on that Juneteenth thing

Somehow I got the idea that Juneteenth was 6/16 instead of 6/19 but the recent passage of the bill making the day a Federal Holiday has disabused me of this notion. So apologies for the premature posting.

As you probably read in the tags, I’m still thinking about the Sprint-T drivetrain. I’m still getting as many bonus entries as possible every day to improve my chances of winning the engine. And I have been studying the transmissions that bolt up and possible controllers if the Holley Terminator X controller can’t handle the transmission together with the engine, which looks like the case. I checked the microSquirt transmission controller and it won’t work with Ford transmissions. But there are some other brands that do at a reasonable price.

Anyway, still thinking…

Happy Juneteenth!

Not much to say today, just noticing today is the 156th anniversary of the slaves on Galveston Island being told they are (were) free. Happy Juneteenth! Now go vote and do other things free people do. And I just noticed that I never tagged my previous Juneteenth posts, which I will have to do l8r, dudes!

I got things done while I was away

Took my laptop to a computer tech friend and removed a couple of gigs of pre-installed bloatwares that were slowing the system something fierce. I mentioned how severely in a previous post that took almost 7 minutes just to open the compose page from initial boot. Well it takes about 2 minutes now, not perfect, but greatly improved. Uninstalling the software was just a small part of it, we also had to delete the files so it didn’t reinstall itself back. And there were over 2 gigs of files that needed to be uninstalled from the hard drive. Now I have 391GB free on the hard drive and over 101 GB free on the USB drive that I put most of my files on. I have all the books I don’t have on Kindle on that drive, all my p0rn, all my pictures, and a few files that are less easily classified but still important.

I’m still thinking about the frame for the Sprint-T, trying to climb over various things to see how nimble I remain. The answer is surprisingly nimble considering my age and injuries. I couldn’t crawl out of the first iteration that used the cage as a major structural component and braced the inside of the halo structure (across the top of the cage) to make the middle box of the frame rigid, but as long as I can put something to push against to stand up next to the driver’s seat I can get out of the car. Getting in is easy now, sit on the top edge of the body where the frame runs by it and swing my legs over it to stand on the floor then use the grab bars and push handles to lower myself gently to the seat.

On other aspects of the build, I’m still getting as many entries as I can for the Power Nation/ARP 302 Ford build giveaway engine because not-perfect free engine is miles/tons better than the perfect engine I don’t have. You can help by clicking this link to let them know you support me in getting the engine. I can earn up to 10 additional entries if enough people click that link. Apparently I will need to find a built AOD/4R70W/4R75W transmission to fit the bolt pattern on the block and also be strong enough to pass the power from the engine to the rear axle. Theoretically the R70 can hold the power, but there is no question with the R75 version. According to the Internet there is less than 5 pounds of difference between the two, so I should probably go with the 75W and a stand-alone controller unless the EFI controller for the giveaway engine can also control the transmission. I checked and probably not, also checked the peak torque and it’s way under the 75W limit of 533 pound-ft, also way under the 70W limit of 515 pound-ft. So whichever is cheapest gets the nod.

Click that link and get me another entry for that engine. Thank you.

Time for word barf

y that I mean I am compelled to write something, but I have no clue as to subject. So basically I’m just throwing up words from my mind through my fingers. It isn’t helping that I’m listening to my trance channel on my music app, shortest piece just over 3 minutes, longest piece just under 2 hours. This music is ideal for writing when I have a topic, because I can just turn my mind loose and words will fall out of my fingers practically by themselves. But when I don’t have a topic, subject, or prompt I can’t even hit the right keys for the words I don’t know. It’s like my mind is running around screaming and can’t find anything to say. That is a very disconcerting feeling.

Part of the problem is I’m solving a non-verbal problems with the Sprint-T re-do to make it so I can get in and out without resorting to a hoist. I’m working with 2 scenarios on this one. The first is to reduce the height of the front hoop so that I can get in and out by climbing over the side but still have SCCA legal rollover protection. Basically that one calls for everything between the rear hoop and the front bulkhead inclusive to get tweaked if not completely redone.

The other scenario is to raise the tops of both hoops enough that I can get out the side, which looks bad and raises the center of gravity, but only changes the rest of the car slightly and retains all the torsional rigidity from the first concept. A third possibility is to just ignore the loss of rigidity caused by the unbraced hole in the top of the cage and add grab bars to the halo structure so I can get in and out, while leaving the hole basically big enough to drop the body through and the roll hoops just high enough to pass SCCA tech. This is one of the better-looking alternatives that leaves the car with a low profile and decent rigidity. I could brace the hole in the top around the outside in this one, but it would be rehllyy yuhgly (misspelled on purpose, pronounce it like it’s spelled) to have tubes hanging off the top of the cage, and after reviewing it doesn’t help the ingress/egress problem.

Another problem is there has to be another bay that is unbraced across the to because the bracing obstructs forward vision. The top of the front bay behind the front bulkhead is basically the forward vision path, so to remain street-legal no bracing is allowed. So I have two out of three bays with no bracing across the top, even though they are completely braced sides and bottom and partially braced between them on the front hoop up as far as the base of the windshield. The open tops are something that can be dealt with somehow, I’ll figure it out.

Honest, I’m not really dead it just looks like it

I’m having some negative reactions to the gabapentin this week, including a fall into the dresser that gave me lots of bruises and scrapes. I already knew it was partially the fact I hadn’t eaten since noon Saturday and I had low blood sugar, but I probably also had an issue with the gabapentin, because I fell over backwards which is the opposite direction I usually fall. Usually I fall on my face, or at least my hands and knees.

This started with missing grocery shopping Saturday because my balance was wonky because I had been trying to time shift to be awake to play Shadowrun Sunday, and I ended up going to bed before dinner because sleepy and tired, then getting up basically 0500 Sunday and deciding I needed a shower because I normally take one when I go out and I didn’t go out Saturday so I was getting pretty whiffy. I started having issues standing up straight during the shower, and then I was having serious issues standing trying to get dry after the shower and then when I went to put my slippers on I fell over backwards and hit the dresser and the stereo and knocked bits off of both of them. And I had scrapes and bruises all over my back and the backs of my arms.

The reason why I think that most of the problem was low blood sugar was when I managed to get up off the floor and lean-walk against the wall to the kitchen and get food my balance got back to what passes for normal within an hour. I was pretty sure it wasn’t because I was tired, at least this time, because I had been sleeping for almost 10 hours before I got into the shower.

Anywho, we managed to get everybody online at the same time to do the stuff we normally do after completing a run, but that we had to do twice because the GM was sick or had to work before we took our break so we had a guest GM help us with a short run for those 2 weeks, but we couldn’t do the usual post-run until we finished the run we had already started. So we had Nuyen and Karma points to distribute from both runs and then we had to spend same on upgrades and equipment and living expenses (one of my expenses is ¥6K a month food and employees for the animal rescue in the 2nd sub-basement of my compound) and we decided that between the two runs about 3 months had expired so right off the top I had to drop ¥18000 on expenses. Then everybody found out I had over 90 unspent Karma that I should have been spending on skills upgrades but didn’t have to because my stats and skills were so high from chargen that I was pretty much reaching limits on all my rolls I didn’t glitch. I was hitting accuracy limits or other weapons limits on combat rolls or physical limits on the other rolls, so a group has been formed to “do something” with all my excess Karma points that makes sense given my character’s backstory (published here as Character Backstory: The Old Man) without making me so OP that I break the game.

And the reason I didn’t mention the fall last post was I didn’t hurt much and I had to rush the post to be ready for the game.

Then Monday I just watched the races I had recorded Saturday and Sunday, then Tuesday I went and deposited paper checks and got another massage to try to work out the kinks from the fall and found a bunch of bruises I missed because they didn’t show on the surface, and other injuries like I made my right buttcheek hurt somehow when I was trying to not-fall Sunday morning (don’t ask, I have no idea). Then Wednesday I had to access the messages from unemployment for the former tenant who can’t seem to find computer-literate friends at church anymore.

And that feels like enough words on the screen today.