The information below was posted last night (08/23/2020) on the Facebook Page “Kenosha County Scanner”. It’s a sad day for Kenosha…and the rest of the country. Our society is crumbling. I really don’t see how so much violence helps the situation or the state of our country. It only breaks it down more and weakens it. One person takes action in the spur of the moment–whether right or wrong–and everyone else pays for it. We don’t even have all of the facts yet. As a society we have built a system of justice we must follow, but too many people refuse to allow it to work.

***Unrest in Kenosha starting. KPD vehicles vandalized and people throwing bottles at officers***

***any updates will be on subscribers page but will be limited on BOTH pages for officers safety. Posts will be delayed and some left out. Check this post for any information***

***delayed – OFFICER DOWN – 28th ave/40th st – officer being extracted to safe spot. Rioters now throwing fire at officers
***delayed – groups now moving towards downtown vandalizing buildings. Groups have been very aggressive known to ambush officers
***delayed – vehicles are now smashing into storefronts downtown. NG deployed
***delayed – groups are now surrounding the safety building and throwing rocks, projectiles at the building. Boost Mobile has been looted
***there is now a Dump Truck on fire at 56th st/10th ave KFD is not responding due to unsafe scene
***there is a second dump truck in fire at 56th st/11th ave now. KFD not responding as scene is unsafe
***KPD has 2 in custody for looting the liquor store at 7944 Sheridan
***BLACK P/U Truck lifted w/blacked out plates is suspect vehicle for the liquor store and the Boost Mobile
***rioters are now looting multiple stores downtown. One business owner is barricaded in his store as rioters loot his store
***SW corner of the courthouse poss on fire. KFD cannot get near the scene
***reports of Molotov cocktail thrown into dinosaur museum
***everything being looted uptown per KPD
***rioters walking SB Sheridan and looting/vandalizing
***rioters looted the car dealership at 58th st/Sheridan and lit vehicles on fire
***rioters are now lighting several businesses on fire in the city

There was a horrible shooting in Kenosha today. Someone captured it and posted it on Facebook, and now everyone’s in an uproar again. Here’s the video if it hasn’t been taken down yet. It’s pretty shocking, so be warned.

The thing that bugs me much more than the actual shooting is that we don’t know the whole story yet. Maybe the officer was completely justified. What was the officer saying to the guy who was completely ignoring him and walking away? What was the guy reaching for in his car, or what did he already grab when the officer fired?

Wait for the whole story people. Please. We’re a civil society. Let the legal system work. Please.

Well, we were able to auction off 12 of the DVD bags, with no bids at all for the other 9 bags. No bids for ANY of the BluRay bags either, which I find interesting. I thought at LEAST the BluRays would go, since those are much better quality HD movies than regular DVDs, but I guess more people have already gone fully digital than I thought. I posted on my Facebook page, at least one person shared my post, and I posted in 5 different “Kenosha Garage Sale” groups, so I figured that would be good enough to find someone interested in each bag, but I guess not.

I also had one person that was interested in only a few specific movies or TV shows, so I told them I’d consider individual sales after these 21 auctions ended, if there was any left that weren’t bid on, so I reached out and provided a link to “The Leftovers“, a little album contain just the contents of the leftover bags no one bid on, but as it turned out, everything that person was interested in was in the bags that were bid on, so that was a wash.

Feel free to click on The Leftovers link and if you see anything that interests you, just let me know. I’m sure we can make a deal.

Well, we got a few bids so far, 13 to be exact. There are some more coming after these too — We’re still cleaning out the garage and finding more and more music CDs, so the next bags will be stuffed with those. We will be pretty much done with the garage some time tomorrow, so then we can start assembling the rest of the bags.

Someone also asked if I would allow them to pick and choose which movies or box sets they wanted, and I said we might be able to do that with any bags that aren’t bid on at all. If anything’s left after tomorrow, sure, that’s a possibility.

I’ve been testing my smartwatch for the past month in “Essentials Mode”. This is a low-power mode that only uses the LCD screen, which contains the date & time, my daily step count, battery level, and pulse rate (pulse check available with a button push, not constant). With this mode enabled, I’m supposed to get about a month of battery life out of my watch before I need to charge it again.

I started the test on 07/06/2020 and it just died at some point overnight last night. I attempted this test a couple other times before this one, and the first time my wife found my watch with a low battery so she threw it on my charger (nice favor, but it blew my test) and the second time I tried it I was working on something at home in a tight spot, and accidentally long-pressed the top button, which turns the watch on and takes it out of Essentials Mode. So it lasted for exactly 36 days on a single charge. Ironically, the same number of days I’m into my 365-day blog post challenge. I think that’s great for a smartwatch! And there’s even a newer version of the TicWatch available that has a faster processor and provides even better battery life. When this one breaks or dies, I might just stick with this brand. I haven’t seen any other smartwatch with a two-layered screen that provides the regular smartwatch WearOS features as well as the awesome Essentials Mode that also looks great in sunlight, and it’s very reasonably-priced compared to other WearOS-based smartwatches.

I’ll let this test keep going and I’ll post again when it finally completely dies on me.

Ok, so either no one we know is interested in any of the DVD or BluRay bags we have up for auction, or everyone’s going to wait until the last day or even the last few minutes of the auction to make any bids at all. I guess that makes sense when I think about it. The earlier you start bidding, the better chance of higher bids being made during the week, or again, just before the auction ends. So if you wait until a minute before the auction ends, then place your $5.00 bid and no one else is around to bid more, it’s yours for $5.00.

I guess I should worry about a DOS attack… Someone could technically make a first bid on each bag a few minutes before end of auction, then hit my site with a DOS attack so no one else can get in and outbid them, then remove the attack after the auction ends. Well, if it’s that important to them, I guess that’s one way to do it, and that’ll work. We’d still be glad to get rid of the bags, and we’d get to meet the hacker in person… or at least have their full mailing address for any legal follow-up we might need to do.

Or maybe there is really no interest. Maybe DVDs and BluRays are history and everyone has already gone 100% digital. We’ll find out for sure this Sunday. All 21 auctions end at the exact same time, so lunchtime will be pretty interesting. Or not. Maybe there’s a different issue with my site and no one can actually create and account or login…I’m probably overthinking it.

I just published an ad containing all DVD photos on 4 different “Kenosha Garage Sale” Facebook pages. We’ll see if that helps. Next time though, we’ll definitely set a much shorter time period for each auction–like 1 or 2 days.

Looks like Wil Wheaton will be reading Ready Player Two, just as I had hoped! This is gonna be great! Not that I’m obsessed with Wil Wheaton or anything…

Wil Wheaton recently posted about a new horror movie called “Host”. It sounds awesome and I’m going to watch it this week. It’s one of the first new movies that take place in present time, during the pandemic. Here’s Wil’s synopsis:

“Six friends get together during lockdown for their weekly zoom call. It’s Haley’s turn to organise an activity and instead of a quiz, she’s arranged for a Medium to conduct a séance. Bored and feeling mischievous, [I removed something here that’s kind of a spoiler. It’s better to discover this in the narrative]. The friends begin noticing strange occurrences in their homes as the evil presence begins to make itself known, and they soon realise that they might not survive the night. A SHUDDER ORIGINAL.“

Sounds awesome to me! It’s only an hour long, but that’s ok. If it’s as good as he says, I’m all in!

Ok, if you’re here for the Auctions, just click “Auctions” in the top menu. I added 21 auctions yesterday, each containing a selection of DVDs or BluRays. Take a look, and feel free to bid on one if there’s something you like. We would be perfectly happy even if we get only one bidder for each bag, as long as we get someone interested in every bag. That would still be great, and would help us out a lot. All 21 auctions end at noon next Sunday, 08/23/2020.

Online auctions are perfectly legal and don’t require a license. A simple raffle for the whole pile would have been so much easier all around, but for some silly reason it’s considered gambling and auctions aren’t. Now I have to ship back the huge roll of 2,000 raffle tickets I just got from Amazon. Good thing Amazon returns are so simple and only a couple blocks from our house. Ok, enough said about that, I already went through all of this in my last non-auction post.

Well, the raffle is off. Please disregard my previous post. Fortunately for me, my cousin Wayne is a frequent visitor of my site, so he was one of the first to read my last post and promptly informed me that it might just be illegal to hold a raffle without a permit. I quickly googled the question and there it was. Click on the thumbnail if you want to read the official document.

Apparently, in Wisconsin, only Religious, Veteran, Fraternal, Service, or Charitable organizations can hold a raffle, if they obtain a Raffle License. You can’t just decide to have one and have one. It says, specifically, “Is it not legal for an individual, business, or national/out-of-state organization to conduct raffles in Wisconsin.” Wow. I had no clue. Apparently this is a form of gambling.

It also states, however, that “a silent auction is not a raffle and does not require a raffle license”, so that’s something to consider I guess. Back to square one. At least we learned something today.

Thank you, Wayne. You probably saved us a bunch of legal trouble, not to mention the trouble we might have had trying to figure out how to return everyone’s money to them once the raffle had started.

Over many years our family has accumulated a HUGE mass of movies and TV shows on physical media – DVDs & BluRays mostly. Over the past month or so we’ve been doing a slow, much-needed clean-up of everything, and wound up with boxes and boxes of these movies and TV shows. Since everything went digital, we have pretty much re-purchased everything we really want to keep in digital format and we’ve found that we no longer have a use for the original DVDs and BluRays we purchased over the years.

We know there are plenty of people out there that still prefer their media on physical discs, so we’ve decided to hold a simple raffle and just give whole whole lot away to one lucky winner. We could probably make a lot more money selling everything off one-by-one, with everyone looking through everything and picking and choosing what they want and just paying for those items, but then we’d be stuck with all the “bottom of the barrell” leftovers we still need to get rid of, and we’d have a lot of visitors and strangers coming and going just to take a look. A rummage sale was a thought, but again, that’s about the same situation.

So we settled on a simple solution of a raffle – $1.00 per ticket, $5 for 6 tickets. Simple as that. A raffle seems like the simplest and cleanest way to just get rid of the whole lot, unconditionally, with the least hassle. Maybe we get back a little of our investment, maybe not, but at least we’ll get some space back. So far I’ve taken a photo of each box, from the top, 7 boxes so far, to give you an idea of what you’re bidding on. You can see a few top items, but each box is packed full to the top with original DVDs and Blu-Rays. NO RIPPED COPIES. These are all original, purchased DVDs, BluRays, and box sets.

The raffle tickets arrive tomorrow, so I hope to be able to publish the raffle officially on Facebook some time tomorrow, maybe even in a local garage-sale site or two, just to drum up some interest. I think we’ll even be able to take digital payments using Paypal, which accepts credit cards, so people can fully purchase tickets online and I’ll e-mail them their ticket numbers and drop them in the raffle bucket for them and keep their contact portion on-hand until the drawing.

I’m thinking a Halloween drawing would be perfect. Easy to remember all around, and this year Halloween is on a Saturday, so it’s perfect. Maybe do the drawing live on Facebook…

I’ll get the photos up on my website today, and get some more stuff prepped, including a flyer. Stay tuned for more info.

Here’s an exclusive video from Kevin… I had to assemble and edit the video, and it needed several hours to render and upload to YouTube overnight, so I thought I’d post it here as an exclusive way before Kevin gets his lazy ass out of bed on his day off… Enjoy!

In the making of movies based on books, a lot of details almost always get left out. There’s simply not enough time in two or three hours to tell a story that often takes 15 or more hours to read. Such is the case with Stephen King’s book “IT”. You know the one–the group of kids that are haunted by a curse plaguing their little New England town of Derry, Maine by a demonic “circus clown” they refer to as “IT”? Well, “IT” also refers to “The act”, as in “Did ya do IT?” or “We did IT in the bedroom.”. Seems like Stephen King kinda went off on a tangent with that one in the book, and in Chapter 22, all the kids have a bit of an orgy.

I couldn’t believe it when I read about this on the Internet, how it was omitted from the movies and the miniseries for obvious reasons. Well shit, I must have missed or completely forgotten about it when I read this, so I went back and read chapter 22 again. Sure as shit, there it was. How the heck can this group of kids, while hunting down a demonic circus clown that terrifies them by making them confront their worst fears, just stop in the middle and say “Hey, we need to bond here so we’re more powerful to beat this thing–get naked and stick it in me!”?

One by one Beverly called them over and talked them into taking off their clothes and having sex with her. Turns out Ben is actually in love with her, and also has a large “unit”. Yup, it’s very clear, Ben is hung. . And Bev didn’t think she was going to be able to take it all, especially since she had just lost her virginity right then, but she did.

That’s really basically what happened in the book. I can’t believe I somehow missed this when I read the book! I’ve had the audiobook for quite some time as well, so I played chapter 22 again and listened as Steven Weber acted out his reading of IT. Again, just Wow. They “bonded” alright. This scene was replaced by the blood-bonding scene in the movie, and I can’t remember exactly what they did in the miniseries to bond, but it sure wasn’t the sex party from the book.

Not really a party though–it was Beverly’s first time, she was a virgin, and I’m pretty sure most of the boys were as well, if not all of them, so it was quite the awakening and an eye-opener all around that supposedly made them stronger as a group.

King even referred to it as “IT” as I mentioned at the start of this post, emphasizing it several times so the reader definitely gets the reference and connection. It sure seemed out of place in this horror novel though.

I was about to post this question on here: “Why do selfies always appear backwards on smartphones?” This issue drives me nuts, especially when there’s text in the photo anywhere–like Wayne’s selfie of his colorful “Admit One” mask printed in the Kenosha News (and republished here, but with the photo corrected, because like I said, it drives me nuts). But then, as pretty much always, these days, I realized I can ask Google and get my question answered within 0.76 seconds and in 2,240,000 different ways.

Google says (via Michael Airhart from Quora):

“The front-facing selfie camera on many phones does in fact create reversed images: It is not an illusion. This horizontal flipping is evident in the backward lettering on shirts and signs in images that are uploaded from a front-facing camera to social media. Why does the camera initially flip the image? People are accustomed to seeing themselves backward when they look in a mirror. If they see themselves unmirrored while looking at a camera, they become distracted and disoriented, especially if they move the camera, since what they see on the phone is the opposite of what they would see in a mirror. So selfie cameras flip what they see, horizontally, in order to create a reassuring mirror effect. What happens when the picture is taken? When the picture is taken, some camera apps unflip the photo by default, and some don’t. If your chosen camera app does not automatically unmirror the image, then you may be able to change the app’s default settings for saved images, or you may need to use a third-party image app to horizontally unflip the image.”

So there you have it. I find it amusing that one gets easily distracted and disoriented by looking at their reflection the right way instead of mirrored. I gotta try that to myself sometime just to see how it affects me. Maybe just before I upgrade to my new phone… I don’t want to blow chunks on my active phone…

UPDATE: I already tried it. I played with “Webcam Toy” in Google Chrome on my PC and there are plenty of variations on mirroring your live image there. The mirroring that made words look right wasn’t disorienting. It was a little confusing, especially if you’re moving in one direction and your image “seems” to be moving in the opposite direction, but this makes sense to me. It would make it difficult to do anything practical, probably, but I think that’s just because we’re not used to seeing it that way–we’ve always seen our reflection a certain way, so that’s what our brain expects.

Webcam Toy does have some really neat effects though, if you haven’t tried it out before. I particularly like the live split-screen effects. I can move to certain spots to turn myself into an alien, a pinhead, etc., and just crack myself up. Of course TikTok now offers hundreds more live effects than Webcam Toy will even be able to, so I’m probably still way out of touch by today’s tech, but I’m aware, and always trying to catch up to the kids.

My switch to Standard Notes has been a success. There’s been a few bumps, but I’ve changed my habits and I can see the benefits of doing things using the Standard method (pun intended). First of all, it’s nice having a choice of editors to use “per note”. With Keep there was no editor–no way to even bold or underline anything–everything was just flat text. With Standard Notes “Extended” you have your choice of several different editor types per-note, so I can still have simple basic notes if I don’t want anything fancy in them–no formatting, no images, or I can opt for an editor specific to a note’s content. For example if I want full HTML formatting and included images I can switch a note to use the “Bold” editor, which includes full editing capabilities and encrypted image embedding. Or, if I have a to-do list I can switch to the “task editor” for that note and I get checkboxes and lists and I can check off and track what’s completely and not, very easily. There’s even a “Secure Spreashsheets” editor for a nice compact spreadsheet format, complete with cell calculation features.

I think the only other issue I’ve had switching over to Standard Notes is getting all of my 1000+ old notes out of Keep and into Standard Notes easily. I just finished up the last of those. I found that it was easiest to take each tag, select all of the notes in that tag in keep, then Export them to a Google Docs document and copy and paste that into one large Standard Notes note, then cut and paste them out of there individually as time permitted. This way, everything was still searchable in Standard Notes as I worked through splitting the notes one-by-one. I had to be able to easily find things in my notes, especially when I was working, so this made it very easy to find everything in the same application and I broke them out into separate notes to match what I had in Keep. That’s all done now, and I’m very happy with Standard Notes’ performance and options. I think this is going to be a great long-term solution. At least long enough to cover the 5 years of “Extended” I just paid for, which was extremely cheap if you consider it as a monthly plan. It’s $149 for 5 years, which is $2.48/month. Definitely cheaper than all of the other paid-plan note applications, including Evernote. If you just need basic notes though–identical to those offered with Keep, the plain Standard Notes is completely free. This gives you only the Basic editor, which offers no formatting options, just like Keep.

STORM – We had a really nasty storm blow through here yesterday afternoon. Very high winds and tornado conditions. Just around the time I usually leave work to go home they called a “Code Black Level 2” at work, which apparently means Shelter in place, so I decided to stay at work. Our department is in the basement, so it’s pretty safe from storms. I watched the weather map on my phone until the conditions improved quite a bit, when we were only getting torrential rain and a little lightning, then I left work.

My card was blowing around on the road a bit, but nothing too bad. The rain was pretty constant and pounding for the entire drive home though, and we now have a few small 3’x3′ “swimming pools” in front of out house… The street or sewer crews have been working in front of our house for the past week tearing up parts of the street and several crosswalk squares right out front, so there are huge open holes that completely filled and oversflowed with rain water yesterday. It looked a little amusing.

When I got home I backed Kevin’s car and my car into our driveway just so neither of us forgets the huge hole right in our driveway where there’s a missing 3’x3′ sidewalk square. There is a large red traffic cone in front of it, but we might have missed that on our backup cameras if we didn’t remember, so I backed our cars in to make it obvious. We have to drive on the grass and up and down our curb right now just to get in and out of our driveway.

RIOT – There was apparently a riot on the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago the other day–apparently fueled by the shooting of a black man in Chicago on Sunday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/10/chicago-looters-riot-magnificent-mile

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-downtown-looting-20200810-3zwa3b7zzrc5vdyb4qjqywrjvu-story.html

It’s really sad that our society appears to be collapsing. Everything’s going to shit. Everyone’s taking everything to the extreme, everything is very sensitive, partisan politics is causing everyone to take a side for everything, including ridiculous things like “the right to not wear a mask” in public. They can’t just set a country-wide law requiring absolutely everyone to where a mask in public? Because we have the right to spread COVID-19 all we want and kill hundreds of thousands of people? That’s our right because we’re free? Come on, it’s temporary. Only until there’s a vaccine, THEN we can start to return society to normal. But no, people can’t handle the isolation, businesses will die. So now we keep the businesses alive but hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE die instead. Seriously. This shit is seriously depressing. Here’s the dashboard in case you haven’t looked lately: https://ncov2019.live/. I added it to my links list on this site too–under Health & Fitness. Our totals just keep rising and rising while every other country’s numbers go up by very little or nothing.

But have a great day anyway! Sorry if I brought you down.

We watched a few good movies recently.

Made in Italy (2020) – A decent drama about a man and his son and their personal and family problems. The mother of the family died in a car accident when their son was very young, and the father took everything and anything that would remind his son of his mother and locked it away to try to protect his son from the pain of losing his mother. He even sent his son away to boarding school and abandoned their beautiful family home in Italy and moved away. As a result, the son grew up almost completely forgetting his entire childhood before his mother died.

Eventually, when the son is 22 and trying to make a living, he ends up having his own personal issues and is in need of a large sum of money to buy the gallery he runs or lose his job altogether. He tries to convince his father that they should sell the big abandoned house in Italy (they both own half of it) so he can buy the gallery. So they go back to the abandoned house where it is now just a run-down mess of an estate, so they try to fix it up. I’ll stop there.

Sandy and I both enjoyed the movie. It had its moments, both good and bad for the characters and in for the story itself, and we had a good time watching how everything turned out. It stars Liam Neeson as the father. The other actors in the movie I didn’t know.

An American Pickle (2020) – This was a pretty amusing movie starring Seth Rogen and Seth Rogen. Yep, he plays two characters in this movie– Herschel Greenbaum and Ben Greenbaum, Herschel’s great-grandson. Herschel gets a job in a pickle plant and a freak accident involving a swarm of rats ends in him accidentally falling into a pickle vat right at the instant the pickle plant is shut down and closed permanently, and the vat he fell into is immediately sealed shut. He is discovered 100 years later, in present-day, perfectly preserved and “pickled”. He finds all of his family long gone except one living relative–his great grandson Ben, who just happens to be exactly the same age as he is/was.

Seth Rogen pulls off a really good accent with Herschel and does an impressive job acting with himself through this story. It was pretty fun to watch and the story, albeit pretty far-fetched and very obviously just a silly comedy, turned out pretty good. Overall I enjoyed it a lot. Sandy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to get a lot of it and did a a lot of eye-rolling.

The Boys in Company C (1978) – I heard about this movie recently while watching a behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube about Full Metal Jacket, my favorite war movie. They talked a lot about R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and how he was an actual drill sergeant in the Marines when he was younger, and played a very similar drill sergeant in The Boys in Company C, another movie about Vietnam, that came out almost 10 years before Full Metal Jacket. That piqued my curiosity, so I had to find this movie and give it a watch. I’ve watched only half of it so far (this evening), so I can only say that I can tell it’s no Stanley Kubrick classic, but it’s pretty good and was probably highly rated back in 1978 when it came out. Things just aren’t as “polished” as Full Metal Jacket was, and even the drill instructors (R. Lee Ermey) didn’t have things as perfected as much, but it’s interesting to see the fates of each of it’s stars as the movie progresses and the story unfolds. Very good so far. I’ll finish it up tomorrow evening, probably.

We also found the awesome drawing below while cleaning the garage yesterday. This was drawn by Jeff Hoffmann, and is a drawing of Roger Behnke. He passed away and he drew this after he died. Roger’s nickname was “Lobo”.

I must have scanned this drawing years ago, printed a copy, and then stored it away, or I printed it for my dad and it wound up in his his things after he passed away and I ended up getting it back. I had printed it with an ink jet printer back then, so I’m pretty surprised it was completed faded away. Some inkjet inks will do that. It was pretty faded, but I was able to bump the saturation back up and I think I got it fairly close to what it was originally except for the pinkish shading down the left side. Great sketch though, I like it a lot.

Found a few old photo sheets from Matt‘s Cub Scout days when we cleaned out some of the garage today… I don’t think I have these as digital photos, they’re pretty old, so I scanned in each page.

Wow, just under the wire, but I made it! Day 21 in the bank! We’re cleaning out the garage in the morning, so time to hit the sack… I’ll probably find a few interesting relics I can scan and post here. Maybe tomorrow.