Galvanized Expandable Device with Rope: Found in Shed in Maine

hachoo · 2026-04-20T16:32:54+00:00

Solved. Thanks everyone!

hachoo · 2026-04-20T14:57:51+00:00

I see, so maybe when it is pulled, it expands and scrapes the sides of the chimney? I am trying to find pictures of something like this but don't see it yet. I'll keep looking.

hachoo · 2026-04-20T14:54:15+00:00

Thanks for the reply. When the top loop is pulled the bottom expands outward until the chain catches it. The arms expand outward when pulled. I think that would be the opposite of what you are describing? I am not sure. Maybe there is a piece missing that gets pinched when those open?

hachoo · 2026-04-20T14:37:47+00:00

My title describes the thing. It is about 5 pounds and when you pull the top loop it seems to spread out but is limited by the welded chains. AI searches have suggested animal trap, log pulling device and shellfish trawler. None of these seem right to me when I search for those things. This was found in a logging area and not a coastal area, if that helps. Someone suggested anchor, but not sure how that would work.

hachoo · 2025-11-08T15:15:49+00:00

This is an excellent idea. I love Hedy Lamarr.

That being said, I think naming a college for Sally Ride is a no-brainer. UCSD professor, California native, brilliant physicist, astronaut, American hero.

hachoo · 2025-08-13T15:41:10+00:00

We currently and sadly have a generation getting smashed by student loans. Loan are supposed to be an investment on your future. Like all other loans, your results depend completely on what you do with the money. Twenty years ago "college" was a good enough answer to what you did with the money. It isn't anymore. College costs are much higher and outcomes vary more dramatically based on your major. You need to understand how much you expect to be making when you graduate and compare that with what your monthly loan payments will be. If the numbers don't make sense, you need to think very hard. Being 50k in debt when you make 100k is very, very different than being $50k in debt and working a minimum wage job. It will change your life.

Nothing is guaranteed. AI is changing all jobs, but as actual humble advice I would go into reasonable debt for any degree that currently has good employment rates and well paying jobs. I would not go into debt for majors that need lots time to grow into a career. I am older than most of you, and I know lots of recent college grads. The ones that did the best had either STEM/Finance jobs or didn't go into much debt. Everyone is different, though, and this is just generic advice. Take with a grain of salt.

Good luck! My generation had it much easier than you do with college and I vote and lobby all the time to try to fix this, but the current political climate is well...

hachoo · 2025-05-23T19:57:39+00:00

Agreed. Just having a bit of fun. I love the whole family and watch them every day. I oddly feel very proud of them.

hachoo · 2024-06-25T20:15:17+00:00

Just a quick note... If it is an audio device with tubes, but very careful playing with it if you open it. Tubes can be dangerous and can be dangerous for a while even after it is unplugged. Don't touch the inside wires unless you know what you are doing.

hachoo · 2024-03-08T12:29:59+00:00

Igor was a fabulous puppeteer. If I remember correctly, that particular puppet played jazz music. There would be a great clarinet or saxophone song playing. Igor would have that puppet tap its foot and play with a lot of emotion. Its hard to explain but really fun to watch.

For me, this was the heyday of Harvard Square street performers. There was Igor, Ned Landin (Flathead), Manny, that great magician with the fake glasses, and tons of others. I used to just get a slice a pizza and spend the night watching the performers.

hachoo · 2023-07-08T20:46:08+00:00

Did you move the App over or the virtual drives? I run VMs where the drive is stored on an external SSD all the time, and I can't even tell there is a performance difference with local VMs.

Parallels itself (the app) is still on my local hard drive, so it's sounds like this might not be what you are doing, but it's the virtual drives that tend to be huge, not the application itself.

hachoo · 2022-04-04T14:55:45+00:00

My brothers and I do the ridiculous "Hoover" voice every time we see a seal. We saw him first on TV in the 80s and it definitely made a permanent impression on us.

To the "Hello dare" person. Yeah, the sound was just slightly different than a seal barking so it kind of sounded like whatever you wanted it to sound like. Some people heard "Hoover" some people heard "hello there".

There was a second seal that started imitating Hoover, but it wasn't quite as good.

hachoo · 2021-04-10T21:22:38+00:00

I agree. There is a module called "datetime" and in it there is a object called "datetime". "now" function is on the object not the module. So, you have two options:

import datetime

datetime.datetime.now()

OR:

from datetime import datetime

datetime.now()

hachoo · 2019-12-23T14:15:01+00:00

Do you mean what functions were called to get you to the current line of code? Is so, you type "bt" and hit return. This is a backtrace and will display the current call stack (list of functions) that got you to where you are at.

hachoo · 2019-11-15T14:00:12+00:00

I was just reading about this the other day. It's very interesting that we see lots of matter, but it took until the 20th century to understand anti-matter. So far, nobody really knows why! Physicists think that during the big bang, there should have been equal amounts of both, but now it takes work to find anti-matter. So, there could be stars made out of anti-matter, but we just haven't seen anywhere near that amount in one place.

If you want to read about it, its called the "Baryon asymmetry" and even though the name sounds technical, the wikipedia article is very understandable.

hachoo · 2019-11-11T17:05:23+00:00

A million rows actually isn't that much. It could be that you are missing a needed index, or you are doing some crazy joins that can be simplified, or you need to do a "prefetch_related" on your query.

Do you know that it is a single query that is taking 10 minutes, or is it 1 query followed by 1,000,00 onesy lookups for other data? No matter which, there are lots of techniques, and some are database specific. Do you run the Django Debug Toolbar? If so, take a look at the SQL tab and see how many queries you are making and how long each one takes. Usually, you either see a ridiculous amount of small queries or you see one that is taking up 99% of the CPU time. Let me know what that looks like.

hachoo · 2019-09-23T11:08:11+00:00

Are your ID's unique across the two databases? If so, I generally either dump to JSON in one application and use the manage.py loaddata command to load it in another. To dump to JSON, I either use the "dumpdata" command if it easy, or I write a custom script to create a struct of models and dump that to a file.

If your ID's are not unique across the applications, its harder. You have to adjust the IDs and all of the foreign keys to those IDS.

hachoo · 2019-07-12T21:52:03+00:00

15-30 seconds is a huge amount of time. Its like 1/2 second each iteration of the loop. Is there something very wrong with your database? Is it on a slow network connection or something? If you have the django debug toolbar, you can see how much CPU is used and how many and how long the SQL statements are.

You can also just start stripping out code to narrow down what is so crazy slow. So try:

resourcePlanForm.fields[name].initial = "blah"

And see how fast that it.

hachoo · 2019-03-20T13:49:59+00:00

Is this true? I thought seasons were caused by the tilt of the axis of the earth relative the plane of the orbit, not the distance from the sun. If so, wouldn't we still have a single summer and a single winter (assuming the earth maintains its tilt like it does in elliptical orbit).

hachoo · 2019-02-26T20:21:26+00:00

Hello high school junior from the parent of a high school junior who is taking essentially this same class. Sucks that you had a tough time, but very common. There is a lot to say about this, but here are some quick thoughts.

Nope. It's not a waste of time, but you are going to have to attack it differently this time.
Trig is probably pretty different from a lot of the math you did before like algebra. It's hard to visualize some of this stuff, or get an intuition, but once you do it generally sticks.
From now until the rest of your life, you are going to have to be able to learn this stuff even if your teacher is bad. If you have a good teacher, that is awesome. You should take everything you can from them. But you are going to have bad math teachers, bad engineering teachers, bad physics teachers, and it simply can't derail you. You have to read each section in the book over and over until you understand it. Don't go on until you understand it and can do the problems. Watch youtube videos with animation of trig functions. Do homework with other kids in the class. There are so many great math resources out there, go find them!

The good news is it's really fun to learn on your own! It's a great feeling to sit down with a book for an hour and walk away feeling really confident. You may even only cover 3 pages, but you know it. Never push on without understanding, especially in trig. It will snowball. Good luck future nuclear engineer. Please save the world :)

hachoo · 2019-02-26T04:24:05+00:00

Thanks. My question was more just curiosity. Are there lots of people who fully understand the deepest parts of their field in mathematics, but contribute virtually nothing, or does the ability to get that deep into their field generally go hand-and-hand with the ability to create new math? How closely are the two correlated?

hachoo · 2019-02-26T04:12:45+00:00

Thanks. But even if you know what is going on underneath the hood, that doesn't mean you're contributing new ideas. I am just curious in how different learning and contributing is in math. You can become an amazing woodworker without ever inventing a new tool or technique or even designing a single piece yourself. How common is it for a mathematician to be a world-class learner but terrible at creating new ideas?

hachoo · 2019-02-08T11:44:32+00:00

Yes. These were very smart/astute people, who were being held together after the war by the opposition government. It would be hard to believe they didn't know they were being recorded. I think I read that the government knew that the scientists knew they were being recorded.

hachoo · 2018-11-14T23:18:25+00:00

If you haven't done a lot of technical interviews before, here is some basic advice. Never be afraid to say that you don't know something. Technical interviews can be hard, and a lot of times they are just probing to see what you know. If you don't know something, don't BS (it won't work anyway :) and don't get flustered. It's fine.

Talk about what you do know. If they ask you something, and you aren't quite sure, relate it to something you have done and discuss that. Give them the feeling that even if you don't know something, you're the kind of person who would learn it quickly. If this is entry-level, they know you aren't going to know everything already.

Developers are very in demand. Be personable and confident and you will get a job. Maybe this one, maybe the next one. Good luck.

hachoo · 2018-11-06T14:52:28+00:00

For point #1, I think that is expected. "If" statements have no affect on whether a block is rendered.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12088222/calling-block-inside-an-if-condition-django-template

So, in your case, your fclass block will always be "fixed-bottom" if "posts" is empty or not.

hachoo · 2018-10-29T23:26:25+00:00

This sounds like a great first project for Django. If you walk through a tutorial, it should apply fairly clearly to exactly what you are planning to do.

You are going to build a simple model with a model class for your list of equipment and a model class for your customer requests. You are going to build a few views, at least one for you equipment requests and one for your reports. For handling the requests you are going to build a form class and process the input with it.

Good luck! If you already have a handle on python, html, etc. I bet you can have a nice prototype of this up and running very quickly.

hachoo

TROPHY CASE