The Vent and Rant Thread

[RyanP]

Peanut butter and proper trap placement is key. Regardless, the old style traps are better. Even if the animal is only on a glue trap for a couple of hours, it can still injure itself severely. So unless you're monitoring them every hour, the animal is still going to suffer horribly. Some pest control companies and techies don't even use them because they can be that cruel. Sounds like the exterminators you have are lazy and cheap.

I've once a seen a mouse on one with its jaw dislocated, eye hanging out from its socket... it had half its face stuck on the glue. There are people who just throw away the animal in that state into the garbage. It's sick.

It's nice that you end their misery, but a glue trap is cruel and unusual punishment even if your intentions aren't malicious.

[Nate the great]

What a bunch of tools.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

What a bunch of tools.

Do you want to elaborate, or was it enough to just vent?

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by cromag

I found a small snake (I think it was a De Kay's brown snake -- definitely not a garter snake) in the garage a few days ago. Since I could not state with absolute certainty that the snake had left the premises it appears that I am the only person who will be using the garage ... forever.

I use glue boards in the basement to control camelback crickets -- there's really no other alternative but poison, and that's not something I intend to do. Over the years I have gotten an occasional mouse (white footed mice or deer mice, not the little gray house mice). I check the traps frequently and when I have a mouse I drown it in a bucket of water.

I once killed a hog nosed bull snake. Husband and another neighbor got upset with me.
Hey snake or 72 year old woman having a heart attack 40 minutes from the nearest ambulance. The choice you would have made?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

True, that. And yes--I had a friend that lives on the island one over from Guadeloupe--can never remember the damn name--and she has a gecko for this very purpose, wild-ass bug control. While most of her neighbors hear that horrid "cockroach slither" at night--she doesn't. She feels that the barking is a small price to pay. We have to have professional pest control here, for termites. Constantly. And ladies and gents, lemme tell you--ain't cheap. Thousands per year. {sigh}

Termites are not an issue here.

A friend in NYC was living down south for a while, and talked about Palmetto bugs. She was dismayed when she first encountered them. A local friend she called for help said "We don't let 'em get that big!" (How they were prevented from getting that big wasn't stated.)

Another old friend was stationed down south in the Air Force at one point, and told her then husband they were getting lots of Tupperware containers. The reason was the Palmetto bugs, which get into everything that isn't a properly sealed container.

Yes. When we were building the house in Wyoming, those small field mice (unlike NY mice by a factor of 50% and then some) would try to smuggle their relatives across the border nightly. Major hassle. As nobody was living there full-time, a cat was not an option. Traps were the only option while someone was there, and it's true that they are remarkable at figuring out how to get the bait, and NOT get caught.

The ones I caught with standard traps tended to be young ones. The older more experienced mice avoided them.

An old friend who once lived in my building smoked pot. He'd leave the seeds for the mouse that appeared to be a permanent resident in his place. I'm sure it appreciated the food, but don't know if the active ingredient affected it.

I don't actually believe that there is any type of prophylactic snake-exterminating that can be done, and when you live where we do, getting a pro to come out and dispose of a snake you've caught...well, it's beyond "pricey." You can, if you have time, etc., free a snake from a glueboard with oil, which is what I'd do. Otherwise, she'd throw the poor creature into her TRASH bin (the outdoor one that the trash contractor picks up), and let him SIT there, stuck to the glue board, for, what, weeks? While the snake--which can live remarkably long sans sustenance--would suffer? No, no...horrid.

Agreed. I'd do my best to make sure the critter couldn't get into the house in the first place.

And I don't, in general, mind snakes, so I wouldn't get all that upset if a non-venomous species did get in. I'd simply try to catch it and deposit it back outside.

Oh, dear. I had a King snake that escaped from his terrarium, when I was a teen. My dad had a THING about snakes, and I'm not sure he spoke to me for months. We never did find him, mind you...although, this was another very rural home, that had garter snakes a plenty (they'd get into the house all the time. I was the designated garter snake catcher and releaser), mice everywhere (cats thought that they were in Kitty Heaven), etc. It's true that we did see a remarkable decrease in the mouse population for a year or so while he must have grown into his more-adult size and shape, and then he seemed to move on. Eventually, my Dad started speaking to me again.

<chuckle> I don't have a thing about snakes.

There was a hilarious story from the 80s on that line. Rock star Alice Cooper did publicity shots adorned with a large python. At one shoot in a hotel, the snake escaped and couldn't be located. The next person to stay in that hotel room was country musician Charlie Pride. He discovered why his bed felt unaccountably lumpy. The snake had managed to find a hole, and crawled into and wrapped itself around the springs in the mattress.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

I vented here previously about issues caused by the upgrade from Win7 Pro to Win10 Pro on my desktop. The problems I encountered were relatively easy to fix, once I understood them, but I was cursing a blue streak for a day or so till I discovered and applied the fixes.

Now I have yet another. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux on the desktop machine. I awoke yesterday to see the desktop at the Ubuntu login screen. This means a reboot occurred, as Ubuntu is the default choice the machine boots into if I don't intervene. Ask expected, Windows Updates got delivered and applied, and required a reboot.

Fine. Reboot into Windows. Something in the latest updates gave the machine heartburn, as I had a new and different BSOD, this one announcing REGISTRY_ERROR as the problem. I had two more before I gave up and rebooted into Linux, and two of them occurred when I wasn't actually using the machine. If I boot into Win10 and leave it at the Windows desktop, it will BSOD with a registry error.

Now I get to try to figure out what causes the problem, and remove the Update that triggers it.

I think I also vented about having problems connecting to my Android tablet after upgrading to Win10.

When I plug in the tablet via USB cable, what should happen is that Android sees it's plugged in, and presents a screen where I can turn on USB Storage. Do that, and the internal SD card in device flash and the external microSD card in a slot get dismounted by Android and attached by Windows. Icons representing them appear on my Windows desktop, and I can use Windows Explorer to open them as drive and explore the contents and do file transfers. (The usual reason I do it is adding eBooks to the microSD card from Calibre.) When I finished, I turn off USB Storage in Android, it remounts the drives, and they disappear from Windows.

After upgrading to Win10, that started to fail. I could connect the tablet via USB and turn on USB Storage. The drives would appear in Windows, and I could do file operations. But when I turned off USB Storage, things went to hell in a handbasket. The drive icons did not disappear from the Windows desktop, and Windows would get into a state where I'd have to reboot to return to sanity.

It appears the problem was actually on the tablet end.

Android has a Developer Options setting where you can turn on USB Debugging, intended for developers who want to connect to the tablet and do remote debugging from a host. On my older tablet running Android 4.2 Jellybean, USB Debugging was off, and had to be enabled to root the tablet. But I had to turn it back off again once I had, because having USB Debugging on interfered with using USB Storage. On the newer tablet running Android 4.4 KitKAt, USB Debugging was on by default, and if I plugged it in via cable I got a choice of enabling USB Debugging or USB Storage.

I'd already rooted the device, so I decided to turn off USB Debugging. That seems to have been the cause of the behaviour I was seeing. Since USB Debugging didn't interfere with USB Storage, I turned it back on. On impulse, I tried connecting via USB cable. Everything worked as it should. I could mount the drives from Windows, and transfer eBooks with Calibre. When I was done, I could turn off USB Storage and Android would remount the drives and they would disappear from Windows, and Windows would not go to Neverland.

Yes, I'm glad to have found a fix, but no, I have no idea what was going on.
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Dennis

[Nate the great]

Good news: putting out poison in bait stations is having an effect on the rodent population.

Bad news: I have to pick up the corpses.

Strange news: Something is trying to carry off the bait stations.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Good news: putting out poison in bait stations is having an effect on the rodent population.

Bad news: I have to pick up the corpses.

Strange news: Something is trying to carry off the bait stations.

Just what kind of rodents are you trying to kill off?

I mentioned this to my SO, and she said about the Strange News "Probably rats. Smells good to mice..."

If you live in a suburban area, other things are possible. My SO grew up in an area where raccoons had moved in, and used the storm drains as their private highways. People where she grew up quickly learned to put out garbage in lockable metal trash cans. Raccoons were adept at opening and getting into anything else to find tasty snacks.

An old friend lived in DC for some time, in an older building with mice and roaches. He recounted going to bed one night, and waking up with the bed on the other side of the room from where it had been when he got in. He had no memory of moving it, and speculated the roaches all got together to pick it up and move it while he was sleeping, just to mess with his head.

I suspected he had done it while intoxicated enough to not recall doing so, but I couldn't rule out his speculation...
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Dennis

[Blossom]

I chased a field mouse around my living room for hours once. I got him cornered a few times. The poor thing was so exhausted after that he collapsed on the kitchen floor trying to eat a kernel of kitty food. Hubby had finally gotten home. He just scooped the poor critter up and took him to the park and released him there.

The cats thought this was great fun watching me screech and running around trying to capture it.

We brought humane traps and added some peanut butter after that it was much easier to catch them.

Sent from my XT1528 using Tapatalk

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Just what kind of rodents are you trying to kill off?

I mentioned this to my SO, and she said about the Strange News "Probably rats. Smells good to mice..."
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Dennis

Now that I've started killing them off, I can admit to hearing a rat in the walls (already dealt with) and seeing mice trapped in my trash can outside.

Something tried to run off with both size bait stations.

P.S. And yes, I know how the rat got in. There's this one spot on the house where a determined rat can get in around the chimney. It's a known problem. This time I solved it by leaving a bait block in the wall where the rat would find it (and resealing the hole).

[Nate the great]

Well, shit.

I think my backup laptop is dead.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Well, shit.

I think my backup laptop is dead.

No, wait, it's alive.

it's just that the battery was so dead that the laptop couldn't start.

[Blossom]

I am so mad now I want to scream. This isn't about Maisy despite everything that happened with her today.

My sister called. Mom collapsed and was rushed to the ER. She was there a couple weeks ago for a UTI but some one their refused to give her prescription of antibiotics because mom's general practitioner just moved to another state and she has yet to find a new one. WTH!?!? Now Mom is fighting an infection in her blood. The same hospital is now giving through IVs four different antibiotics to flush the infection out which could have been treated ealier with a simple prescription.

First why didn't my sister fight for mom's antibiotics? Why didn't anyone tell me? Don't get me wrong I know my mother is very difficult to deal with but this was very possibly unnecessary. My sister needs to learn to speak up.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[pdurrant]

How awful. That sounds like terrible incompetence by the hospital, to not give treatment when needed.

[Rumpelteazer]

I wanted to try out VLC mediaplayer on my tablet. I have various media on the external SD card and in VLC you have to enter the path to external cards manually. After Googling I found the path and that most cards are called a variation of SD Card or External Storage. I couldn't get it right, so I downloaded an app to find out the path and found out my Galaxy Tab calls the external SD card "0123-4567". That just isn't logical.