fizgig

Maybe 15 years ago I bought an old Mazda Protege, having downsized from a Dodge Dakota. I still needed to haul stuff occasionally, so I outfitted the Protege with a trailer hitch and bought a cheap 4x8 trailer. Best of both worlds.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a hitch installed on my Prius.

Heh. Another great performance by the late Fred Gwynne.

Not as small, but my car is a Prius C. I feel dwarfed by most cars on the roads these days. I'm always needing to inch out juuuust a little further for a turn just so I can see if the road is clear for me to proceed.

I rant every time this comes up. I've cancelled solely because of this annoying feature. The Amazon Video app on my Roku may not be as slick, but at least it doesn't force me to mute my TV when I'm browsing through the selections.

This has happened in every state I've ever lived. I had always assumed it was the Post Office that was responsible.

Different strokes for different folks, and all that.

My sole car is a Prius C, which I think is in the neighborhood of combined gas/electric 100HP. A co-worker of mine has a Charger with a ridiculous amount of HP and a large SUV. He likes to tease me about my the hamster under my car's hood, and I like to remind him I've spent less than $500 in gas in the past 24 months.

I don't need a fun car to get to work, and I can rent trucks for hauling. To each their own.

I have a dev license and I can register 16 systems. Your mileage may vary, but it never hurts to try.

Yeah, I know. I'll probably roll over my 401k into an IRA at Merrill Edge for the free trades and 75% perk on their cash back cards.

I was just highlighting the horrible rates that banks currently provide in the customer's favor even if you are a loyal patron holding a substantial (for the vast majority of people) sum of money.

I know, right? I'm soooo tempted to hoard $100k with BoA for that 20% extra bonus to their crappy interest rate.

I'm gonna guess Lehi?

I lived 17 years in Utah, and spent about 10 of that working remotely for a handful of very small clients (remote unix sysadmin). Spent some time in Delta, then moved to Vernon, then found my way back to SLC.

Unfortunately divorce threw a wrench into the works, so I moved out of state to an urban area and ended up back in the 9-to-5 grind. I've been desperate to get my freedom and quiet life back ever since.

Maybe some day...

Wouldn't strategic reserves be a solution to this? Hoard enough to cover ramp-up time for domestic production.

I went the opposite route and started wearing blue blocking glasses 1-hr before I go to sleep. Seemed way easier than trying to address each device and rouge blue LEDs around the house.

Along with melatonin and magnesium (also 1 hour before bed), this has helped my sleep quality greatly.

It wasn't stated that the blades were necessarily better, but the fact these "science grade" blades were chosen over name brands implies there may be some benefit. This was totally new to me, and it sparked my curiosity.

Got a link, brand, or model number for these "science" grade blades? I've been an on-and-off DE shaver for some years, and I've never heard of this option. I settled on Feather blades myself.

Yeah, if I had that much I'd be much less conservative for sure. You work for a European company or do you just have clout to ask for that much?

Compounding this is the fact that I can only carry over 5 days per year, so at most I can only use 20 days in a calendar year). In a few years my PTO gets a bump to 20 days a year.

The place (federal government) is great, but my current contract employer has some puzzling policies. I've never had a better work/life balance than this place.

In a few years, the contract will be rebid and I'll roll the dice with my next employer. I rarely get sick, so it's not that big of a deal, but I was highlighting how poor policy can induce sub-optimal choices by the employee.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely).

So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PTO policy results in me hoarding it.

I joined up about a year ago at $30/month. For 3 months, I averaged about 5 flicks per month, which was a net gain over the cost of the individual tickets.

Then I got a notice that they were increasing my fee to $40/month and I promptly cancelled. Sure, I could have upped my movie frequency a bit to recoup the extra cost, but that was a little too often to be worth it.

Check out Postum and Pero, the former being primarily wheat/barley, the latter mostly chicory.

Yes.

I love the minimal and efficient app mindset.

Back in the 90s I used this DOS text editor that fit on a single floppy sector (512B). I forget the name, but it was a part of my standard toolkit for many years.

These days, I run "evilwm" for my home desktop. That's about as small and efficient as a DE/WM gets anymore, and I love it.

Someone from Purdue (I think) did research on being able to identify printers that used stepping motors due to unique characteristics in various models as well as individual printers.

I'm not sure if dot matrix was in the study (I want to say it was inkjet?) but the principle remains the same.

Not as precise as embedded serial numbers with watermarking, but it could get a whistle blower identified.

We're just gonna have to respectfully agree to disagree on some of this.

I don't go out of my way to be insensitive, but I'm not going to flush my DVD of The Matrix down the Memory Hole because it has "Wachowski Brothers" stamped on it. If the Wachowskis put out a new movie today, I'll reference them appropriately as the Wachowski sisters who produced it, but they simply weren't sisters when they created The Matrix, and I'll continue to reference the creators of that movie as brothers.

I saw a similar rewriting of history upstream in this thread, and I just can't let that slide. In fact, this is an edge case where nobody is right or wrong, so there can really be no "correction" to call out. Someone (Manning) changed the rules mid-game, so it must be expected and tolerated that not everyone will parse the output of the remainder of the game to their liking.

I think he meant exactly what he meant. Wasn't Manning still identifying as "he" when the leaks were done? Or was she already transitioned at that point?

I hate this whole walking on eggshells around gender/identity politics. It detracts from the discussion for no valid reason.

Milk is a funny thing, being a rich medium for bacteria.

Take a pint of fresh-from-the-cow milk and a pint of your typical store-bought pasteurized milk and leave them open on the counter for 2 or 3 days at room temperature. The former will turn into a tart, pleasant smelling mix of curds and whey I'd be willing to taste and possibly consume while the latter will be a smelly, gag-inducing spoiled mess that will almost certainly make you ill.

I've witnessed this first-hand.

Raw milk is loaded with beneficial bacteria that can be naturally culture itself to various ends, more often then not out-competing environmental bad bacterial. Pasteurized milk, devoid of most bacteria to start, will (most often) be overrun by bacteria that will make people ill. I does not surprise me that our "normal" milk is a non-trivial vector of food-borne illness.

I think the risks are greatly overstated by the dairy lobby. My family drank raw milk from our own cows and goats for the better part of 10 years, and none of us ever got sick as a result.

Of course our animal accommodations and milking practices were much cleaner than what one might find at commercial scale. But that's not a problem inherent in raw milk, but rather the same unsanitary conditions that plague the industry at large.

But Samsung has now become a joke for trying to take down the original jokes. I don't see how anyone at, or working for, Samsung felt this was in the company's best interest.

Not having active cooling in the arid southwest US does not necessarily mean dangerously hot during the day. When night-time temps can hit the 50s and 40s in higher elevations, a house with decent mass can remain comfortably cool throughout the day if you ventilate properly at night.

There are stimulating (green, I think) and sedating (red, I think) varieties, so both experiences are likely. I bought a sampler pack from one of the better sellers recommended from /r/kratom a year or so ago. Was enjoyable enough to mellow out with, but I couldn't stomach the bitterness no matter what I mixed it with so I tossed most of it.

e-ink Kindles do have (limited) apps. I have a weather app and can play chess, mahjong, and soduku on my 3rd gen e-ink Kindle at home.