peckrob

About 6 years ago, the company [0] that owns most of the local newspapers in my state did a "mobile first" redesign of their website ... which actually was a "mobile ONLY" redesign.

It was so, so bad it was almost totally unusable on anything larger than a tablet. It made it virtually impossible to read articles on a desktop because everything was so spread out, the font sizes were all messed up, navigation was hidden in a tiny little hamburger at the far upper right of the screen, and a bunch of other problems. But what was wild was how easy it was to fix them. I ended up writing a small (maybe 100 line) CSS user style that fixed almost all of the problems.

They did eventually "fix" the site so that it wasn't as bad on desktop.

[0] https://www.al.com/

I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.

For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.

I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.

So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?

I’m in my early 40s. I know a guy from my college years who is now making a TON of money because he got into COBOL development early in his career and most of his peers are now in their 60s and 70s and retiring. I think he was among the people who helped New Jersey fix some of their COBOL problems a couple years ago [0].

I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen in about 40 years when some then Fortune 50 company who built their entire operation on Node suddenly can’t find Javascript programmers because they’re all retiring. :P

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/06/new-jersey-seeks-cobol-progr...

Similar story for me. I went to college at Auburn, which is located in eastern Alabama about 20 miles from the Eastern/Central timezone border. Half of our broadcast TV stations came from both Columbus, Georgia (Eastern) and the other half from Montgomery, Alabama (Central). You had to remember which station you were watching and where it was from whenever a time was listed.

Disclaimer: not in the EU, but have lived through some natural disasters that involved power loss for extended periods of time. So this is some kind of general advice.

If you own your home and you haven't already, do an energy audit [0]. Pay especially close attention to window and door seals. These wear out over time. You can lose a surprising amount of heat through these, and they are very inexpensive to fix. If you have ducted HVAC, check the ducts for leaks as well. Adding additional insulation if possible will also help.

Figure out what your biggest energy sinks are. In most homes the HVAC is the biggest power draw. After that you're looking at major appliances like stoves, washers and dryers, refrigerators, water heater and the like. If you can replace these with more energy efficient versions, it may be worth considering. For ones you can't, figure out ways to use them less.

Close off areas you aren't using. If you have rooms in your home/apartment that are largely unoccupied or only occasionally occupied (like a home office), close them off and consolidate into fewer rooms. If it gets especially cold, close the vents if you have ducted HVAC, seal the doors with tape and put a blanket at the bottom of the door. This will help further seal the heat into the occupied areas. But be careful that you don't cause pipes to freeze by doing this.

Stock up on foods you don't need power to cook. Shelf-stable canned goods are a good bet. It won't be gourmet, but it will keep you alive. If you are in an area that stays suitably cold throughout the winter you could use a cooler outside for food storage instead of a refrigerator.

If you have alternative means of heating (like a fireplace) go ahead and prepare to start using that a lot more. Get supplies like firewood or pellets now and, if possible, be sure you have enough to last you through the winter with increased usage. Find the lowest temperature you can tolerate at home, even if that means you may have to wear a light coat inside.

Monitor your usage regularly. If your utility provides realtime or near realtime usage information, find that now and get in the habit of checking it often. If not, figure out how to read your meter and check it at least daily.

And finally, just try to find ways to not be at home. If you can go work in an office or even a coffee shop, that's a few hours you won't have to keep your home as warm. Try to make your home just for sleeping and adjust the temperature in the home when you are away accordingly. Having a programmable/remote thermostat helps here.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/do-it-yourself-home-energ...

This is an excellent comment that really does distill down what an EM is supposed to be.

As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.

Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.

It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

I just sold my 11 year old Hitachi plasma TV a few months ago. Honestly, despite its age it had the best picture quality of all my TVs until I bought an OLED to replace it.

The biggest downside to it? It put out a tremendous amount of heat. It got to where I didn't like using it during the summer because it would heat up the room. It was basically like running a space heater.

This whole comment section is pretty frustrating.

I agree. The amount of misinformation and/or active disinformation in this comment section is horrifying and disheartening.

My trans brothers and sisters have it way, way worse - especially when surgery and/or hormones are not nearly as easy to come by as these people on the internet would like to think.

It really is wild to me how many people think, like, school nurses are handing out hormone medication like candy or something, or you can just go get them OTC at the corner drug store. My kid's school nurse won't even give her Tylenol without calling me, these people really think they're secretly sending kids home with hormone medication?

It is not and easy or fast process. Often, in the case of gender questioning youth, puberty blockers are used to buy time for them while they assess their feelings and the process plays out, because they are entirely reversible - just stop taking them. The whole initial transition process can often take a year or more from first appointment to hormone therapy starting and there are lots of gatekeepers along the way to safeguard you.

In most places if you are under 18 you have to be under the care of an LGBT-affirming physician (which can be very hard to find, even in cities, and often have months of wait time), have had at least some therapy under your belt, and an official gender dysphoria diagnosis to get hormone treatment started.

Surgical approaches are very rarely considered for young people. Like I am sure there have been some, I can't fully rule it out, but I run in LGBT+ circles a lot and have for decades, and I personally have not met a single person who had any kind of gender-affirming surgery done before 18. Most have them done in their 20s or 30s if they can afford it. The wait times can stretch into years, and the surgeries themselves are often considered cosmetic procedures and are often not covered the same as a medically-required surgery. Even among adult trans people, surgeries are often considered a far off goal that many never be reached, and quite a few will find that they don't want or need it once other transitioning processes have happened and they no longer feel crippling levels of dysphoria.

And all of that assumes you have a supportive parent or guarding and, as one stroll through various transgender hangouts on the web will tell you, that is not as common as one would hope. All it takes is one parent to say "no" and you're not doing anything until you're an adult. Once you are 18 things are a bit more open and you have more options to speed the process up, but it is hard being a transgender youth.

There are a lot of misconceptions in these comments about what being transgender is, what the process for getting HRT is, and all of the various steps needed to reach each person's individual goals. And all of this is easily researchable using Google in 10 minutes, it just takes an open mind and a willingness to see others' viewpoints. It's extremely frustrating.

But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.

You know, this is a very enlightening point. I never really thought about it from this angle, but there is a lot of truth to this.

I struggled a lot as a teen with anxiety, depression and bullying. I had a few IRL friends, but the very vast majority of my social interaction during that time came via MUDs and chatting. Many of the people I played and chatted with were fellow social outcasts, and we created our own parallel virtual communities to support and lift each other up. It didn't matter where we were, what we looked like, or how we did or didn't fit in. Many days in the 90s it felt like going to school was the thing I had to put up with, and logging in and seeing my friends when I got home was my real life.

Without them, there's a very real chance I might not be here today. Even all these years later, the people I met virtually during that time are still some of my best and closest friends, and it's a real treat when my travels take me close enough that we can meet for coffee or lunch. Many were at my wedding even, and in one case that was the first time I had ever met them IRL. And yet we knew each other deeply. It felt like we all grew up together because, kinda, we did.

When you look at it like that, those of us who grew up in that environment would look at a screenshot from that era the same way others might look at random photos from high school. Because this was our world.

A few years back I was going through some old floppy disks I found in a box and, on one of them, I found a screenshot I took of my desktop circa winter of 2000. In it was a window open with a MUD I was logged into at the time. Another window had Winamp open with a playlist of songs and another window had ICQ open. The only reason I took it was because there was an unofficial competition between our pub and another pub elsewhere on the MUD about which was more popular, and we had finally surpassed them.

It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again.

Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/

20 years ago or so I wrote a LiveJournal client that used the XML-RPC interface. At the time the choices were that or an older custom text interface. The XML-RPC interface was more understandable to a very beginning developer and even then there were libraries I could use in Visual Basic that took care of all the hard parts. The worst part was that not everything was available via the XML interface so you still had to drop back to the old text interface for some things.

While yeah it’s pretty dated by modern standards at the time it was a revelation that you could build standard-based APIs that anyone could use with a simple library and without having to write a TON of custom code.

And regardless, it was far easier to implement than SOAP, which was just a mistake unless you are fully immersed in the Java ecosystem.

That makes sense. I remember hearing a story while I was out there of a race car driver that got ticketed doing like 130mph. His argument was that, for him, that was a reasonable and prudent speed. The State Trooper disagreed. :P

Around that same, the US implemented the National Maximum Speed Law [0], more commonly known at the "55mph speed limit" for the same reason.

It is widely regarded as one of the least popular pieces of legislation ever enacted by Congress, so hated that it even became the subject of a hard rock song [1]. It was widely ignored by motorists and police alike, with non-compliance rates as high as 85%. Some states made violations of the law basically meaningless, with the "fine" being a few dollars and no points or any other ramifications. It's also why cars over a certain age will have a big circle around the 55 on the speedometer.

What's crazy is that this wildly unpopular law soldiered on, in watered down form, until 1995, at which point speed limits fully reverted to state control. And, in retrospect, because of the widespread non-compliance it is believed that it did relatively little to impact overall fuel usage.

Interestingly, in Montana, there were some places that, prior to the 55 speed limit, had no speed limit. They were signed as "Reasonable and Prudent", and when the 55 speed limit was repealed, the "Reasonable and Prudent" signs went back up [2]. I have a picture of myself in front of one around that time because I was working as a park ranger in Yellowstone. This changed in 1999, and Montana now has a maximum speed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvV3nn_de2k

[2] https://images.roadtrafficsigns.com/img/art/Montana-speed-li...

I don't know why it isn't being mentioned.

I am not in the Bay Area myself, but about half of my friends there have relocated in the last couple years. A bunch to Washington or Oregon, some to Texas, one to Nashville, and a few others to places mostly in the northeast. All of them cited cost of living as the primary reason ... but all also mentioned full time remote work is what finally made it possible to move.

When you aren't chained to a physical location by your job, lots of things become possible.

Very similar experience here. Like you, I'd heard my fair share of HOA horror stories, so my first home was in a non-HOA neighborhood.

* One house near the entrance was bordering on being uninhabitable; rotting roof with tarps covering the holes, rotting siding, gutters hanging half on. Always shocked the city didn't declare it a public hazard.

* The people behind me would drag their TV and sofa out in the front yard every time the state's football team was playing, be noisy and would leave discarded beer cans all over the lawn.

* The people in front of me left a disabled car in the road for more than a year. Suspension shot, tires flat, windows busted out and left in the rain. After a year I finally called the city, who sent a code enforcement officer out. The person's response was to push the car out of the road ... into the front yard.

* My next door neighbor mowed his yard about 4 times a year. I even offered on several occasions to mow it for him, just because I didn't want to look at it.

My current neighborhood has none of the above problems. We have a low-BS HOA that basically exists just to be sure the common areas are maintained and that the homes are maintained to a minimum standard as specified in the rules. Otherwise, they stay out of your life. I was even on the board for a few years; we issued a grand total of about 8 warnings and zero fines in that entire time - and IIRC all of the warnings related to parking. Often, just having rules and an enforcement mechanism is enough to ensure minimum standards are maintained by the vast majority of people.

Also, an underrated HOA benefit we discovered is that they are great for collectively getting the city's attention when we need something fixed. We've had problems with potholes forming in some of the roads and, for a long time, the issue was ignored by the city despite numerous homeowners complaining. Until we got our HOA's legal representative to draft a letter to the city. The next week all the potholes were fixed.

I have never had a problem with the HOA preventing me from doing something, even if it was technically against the rules. Last year our HVAC went out and it was going to be a week before we could get it replaced. The HVAC contractor loaned us some window units to keep the house cool until everything could be ordered. Technically window units are against the bylaws. I didn't even run it by the HOA, just put a sign in the window above it saying it was temporary until next week. No issues at all.

The key with HOAs is to be involved! Think of them as mini-municipalities, like a town within a town. And, as an owner, you are entitled to attend the meetings, introduce measurs to change the bylaws, vote on business and hold office in them. This is why "Karens" tend to get and retain power - because no one opposes them. In our HOA, about 60% of the houses never voted and most rarely attended meetings. Sometimes it was hard to even get quorum, and elections were often uncontested. The way I ended up as secretary was because literally no one ran for it. Don't like the way your HOA is being run? Change it. There's a pretty fair chance you'll succeed.

I know the Internet largely hates HOAs, and it is true that there are a fair number of really bad overbearing HOAs out there. A friend of mine once got cited for having grass a half-inch too high. But I think people focus too much on the extreme; there are actually a lot of fairly nice, low BS HOAs out there as well.

Jira is just infuriating. It is super configurable, but that configurability comes the cost of making it so ridiculously complicated almost to the point of unusability.

See: "how do I add a status for tickets?" [0]

[0] https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/creat...

What I usually recommend at that point is that users do one of two things:

1. Switch to a hosted solution like Shopify for actual order processing, inventory, etc and keep Wordpress around for the read-only business type pages or blogs. Let each component do what it is best at.

2. Switch entirely to a hosted platform like Wix or Squarespace, which let you do both.

I have yet to encounter a Wordpress eCommerce plugin that wasn't, at some level, a disaster. Every one I have seen is janky and the code quality is usually quite poor.

There is also the security implications of doing this. Especially for small businesses, if you can't or don't want to pay someone to constantly patch Wordpress up against the most recent security issues [0] (again, in fairness, this is largely plugins and themes these days), you're taking a very real risk at having your installation hacked and possibly data exposed depending on the severity. I've seen Wordpress installs hacked within hours of a zero-day being dropped. Every plugin you bring in increases your attack surface, and the more complex the plugin, the larger the attack surface.

People really need to just let Wordpress be Wordpress. Wordpress was designed to be a blogging platform and basic CMS. Just because you can extend it beyond that doesn't mean it's a good idea. You can use a screwdriver as a hammer if you try hard enough, but that doesn't make it actually a hammer or the right tool to use.

[0] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=wordpress

Not a bad question at all.

It's all about what the client needs. The advice I give on this subject these days is that Wordpress is fine to use for a blog or a very basic, low traffic read-only company websites. Think like a small restaurant or something. The two things to be aware of:

1. Somebody has to support it, whether that be you or someone who comes after you. While Wordpress doesn't have as many security issues in and of itself as it used to, it still does have some occasionally and will still need to be patched up to more recent versions. Security vulnerabilities in Wordpress are almost immediately exploited, so the sooner you patch, the better.

2. The minute you start trying to push Wordpress beyond the bounds of being a basic CMS or blogging platform (like adding online ordering, inventory management, etc.) you are better off finding other, better suited options.

I've done some Wordpress consulting work in the past. I wouldn't say I hate Wordpress. I advocate for it's use in some cases! I think it is a fantastic piece of software for what it natively does.

You want a blogging platform? Wordpress is one of the best, hands down. You want a basic CMS that is so dead simple that anyone that can use a word processor can update the website? Wordpress excels at this, because that is what it was designed to do.

But I do think it is a poor solution in a lot of cases where it has been shoehorned into. People keep grafting so much extra, unnecessary crap onto what is still, at it's core, a blogging platform. Often this is done by low-skill, low-paid "consultants" with very little experience in writing maintainable, secure code. Literally all they know how to do is write Wordpress code. I would often end up having to clean up the mess from these folks, who often still write PHP like it's 2007 and they haven't learned better [0].

Wordpress's architecture has, until relatively recently, encouraged this behavior. Their stubborn refusal to move beyond PHP 5 for many years (and continuing to support absolutely ancient versions of PHP 5 at that!) held their entire ecosystem back from writing better, more secure code for a long, long time. And, more broadly, held PHP as a whole back, as they were among its largest players. It was really hard to make the case for hosts to upgrade PHP when Wordpress still supported whatever ancient version of PHP the host was providing. Their internal architecture can be very messy in places and documentation often contradictory about what the "correct" or even preferred way to do something is because there are multiple ways implemented at different times.

I will give them credit: Wordpress itself doesn't have too many gaping security holes anymore. Most of those has been patched. It's the plugins and themes that provide the attack surface now.

The public plugins themselves (and to a lesser extent the themes) are of such widely variable quality that it is difficult to know what to use and trust. You're probably okay with the "official" plugins and most of the widely-installed third party plugins, but you get too far off the beaten path, you find a lot of garbage (and, to be fair, a few gems as well). And any custom plugin I find is immediately suspect for the reasons above. Building a theme? Which of these multiple ways of user customization do you support? All of them? None of them? Or do you just write your own customization further messing up the UX for writers and editors who have little idea how to manage Wordpress beyond the very basics of writing a post.

Oftentimes when I would come into a Wordpress case, there's 30 or so plugins installed, half of which are disabled and you have no idea what is causing the client's problem. It takes a few hours just to untangle the mess, and you can't ask the last "consultant" because they wrote garbage code, threw it over the wall and disappeared. It's the reason I usually don't take Wordpress cases anymore unless it's someone I know or an installation I did, myself, from scratch that hasn't been messed with by anyone else.

Wordpress is a great blogging platform and basic CMS. It's when people start trying to make it do things beyond this that problems start to accrue. I don't hate Wordpress. I hate what people try to do with it.

When Wordpress is your hammer, everything looks like a custom post type.

[0] https://phptherightway.com/

To me it's analogous to buying a house. If you buy a house over a certain age, especially one that's changed hands several times, there's a pretty fair chance someone died in it. You can either stress yourself out over that and walk away, or accept that that's just part of life and move on with things.

Last year I helped my best friend clean out his mom's condo after she passed away unexpectedly. Aside from a few sentimental items he kept and some things that were valuable either as gifts to the remaining family, for donations, or for or resale, the very very vast majority of the accumulated stuff went straight into the dumpster. A lifetime worth of things were cleaned out in two days and the condo was sold within a week.

Nothing in our lives is truly permanent and the only constant is change. Accepting that change is part of being human.

I've lived in four of the top 10 "most rainy" cities on the list. They way it normally happens in all of them is that you'll have a bunch of sunny days, then a day where you might get anywhere from 0.5-inch to 8+ inches of rain. Especially in the spring and summer. Four days ago it rained 2.5 inches in one day. This week it's all sunny.

One of the reasons rail trails are fairly popular is because it preserves the railroad right-of-way for potential future use. Even if the rails are removed and pavement put down, it's far cheaper to pull the pavement up and re-lay rails if you need the line in future (like for light-rail or commuter service) rather than to have to re-acquire the right of way again or build an entirely new line. The term is "railbanking." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbanking

I remember seeing an SGI Octane [0] at Comdex. I think it was 1997 or 98? I was still in high school, but I remember thinking that it was just the absolute coolest thing ever. When my home computer could barely play DOOM, this thing was just blowing up over here with beautiful video animations that didn't stutter at all. Things my PC wouldn't be capable of until a few years after that. Not to mention it just looked cool. In an era of beige boxes, you had this striking blue cube.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane

I'm kinda with you, though I am more willing to use wifi as an alternative when wiring is impossible or impractical.

The line I use in the house is, "if it's staying in one place and can be wired, it should be." My iMac is wired, all the AppleTVs are (now) wired, Linux servers are wired, etc.

Weirdly, until the 4K launched, on the AppleTV 4's was actually faster to use wifi (they only had a 10/100 Ethernet port, but support 802.11ac.)

To be fair, Wifi has gotten a lot better than the bad ol' 802.11b and WEP days. My Unifi access points are fairly solid (even if the company behind them is acting less so recently) and I very rarely have any wifi problems that aren't specific to a device. Like printers. I constantly fight with printers falling off the wifi. But I just prefer to be wired if possible.

A few months ago I was banned from Twitter for sharing a meme that literally said "I fucking love outer space." [0] That was it. Just an image with some text on it. For some reason this angered some algorithm and 10+ years of tweets and interactions were gone. It was heartbreaking. For a lot of people I followed that was my only real way of engaging with them.

The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from Twitter. I tried opening a support ticket and got no response. DAYS later, I got an automated email about what I needed to do, but the instructions didn't even work. Eventually I was able to get my account back about a week after that by going through some cumbersome verification process.

All for sharing a dumb space meme.

In that moment, if I could pay $10 to talk to an actual human being who could resolve my problem or at least tell me what I needed to do, even if it was via web-chat, I would gladly have done so.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/746515-space

In my case it is predicated on a disaster being localized. Basically it assumes that I will have 48 hours to get a message out.

Where I live is six hours from the coast so hurricanes and tsunamis are not a threat. An earthquake on the New Madrid fault [0] is a possibility although a fairly remote one in any given year. The disaster I optimize for is tornado outbreaks, because it's the most likely to happen. Those occur fairly regularly every few years and are contained enough that I could get a message out probably within 48 hours just by going down the highway an hour or so to get cell coverage.

But to more directly answer your question, pretty much everything depends on power. When the power goes out you have a limited amount of time before backup generators run out of fuel. Even landline telecom systems need power at the switching end. A widespread outage that lasts more than a couple days basically means nothing works and you're reduced to using (like you mentioned) amateur radio or other point-to-point methods that don't rely on ground-based power.

During the Super Outbreak, the cell network stayed "up" for a couple days before going offline completely. But it was impossible to get a message out, most likely because of either demand or damage to the interconnects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

The thing is, you don't have to be a Doomsday Prepper to just be prepared. It's about mitigating the risk of the disasters you are likely to face in your locality.

I lived through the 2011 Super Outbreak [0]. Following the tornadoes, we had no actual damage (and most places didn't, tornadoes are pretty localized disasters, even in big outbreaks), but we had no power for about eight days because the tornadoes tore up all the transmission lines that feed the town.

The biggest lessons I took from that were:

1. Have enough supplies on hand for the duration of the event. I now keep 10 days of food and water for everyone in the family. It's not a lot and it won't win awards - mostly shelf-stable canned goods and bottled water that gets rotated out regularly - but it will keep us fed and watered. Things like toilet paper, a hatchet, matches, a first aid kit, etc. All in my "tornado box."

2. Keep enough cash on hand to last you 10 days with minimal spending. At one point during the outages that followed the Super Outbreak, we went to a pharmacy to pick up some supplies. Obviously with no power it was cash only. They were "ringing" up by writing things down on paper and manually tallying up with a pocket calculator. We were able to get some essentials using the cash my wife and I had in our wallets, but we were fortunate because we usually don't carry cash. I now keep $500 in cash in a safe in the house.

3. Keep at least a half tank of gas in both our vehicles. Basically enough to get us a few hours away from town. These days if I know we're going to have a big storm I top off. That's enough to get us to our family that lives a couple hours away, should we need to bail.

4. Have a crisis communications plan. When the power went out, initially the cell network stayed up in a degraded form on backup generators. But when those ran out, we lost cell coverage. On the third day I drove about 45 minutes down the highway to where I could get a cell signal and let everyone know we were fine. My Mom was so freaked out that she couldn't reach us after the tornadoes happened that she almost drove over to look for us. Now, they know to wait 48 hours before worrying.

Now, it's easy to say "that was a unique event." And you would be right. The 2011 Super Outbreak was a "once in a generation" event. But I have lived through so many rare events in my life so far that it makes sense to be prepared for another one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak

In my undergrad years every major seemed to have what students referred to a "weed-out course." These courses were intentionally made difficult and often has inane non-standard grading policies (for example, in one, anything under 85 was considered an F). They were often taught on odd schedules (like one semester a year or something) and at unusual times. And they were often taught by difficult professors who did little, if anything, to help students succeed. If you were lucky, there might be a TA that might be able to help you, but students were often expected to form independent study groups and assist one another.

Basically if you couldn't pass this course - and in some cases department policy limited you to a single try - your chances of success in that major were slim to nonexistent, and you were encouraged by your advisor to find a different major. If you could pass the weed-out course, you could be reasonably assured you were ready to face the rest of your coursework, because nothing ahead would be as difficult as that course was. And, that you were reasonably certain this was what you wanted to do.

They weren't necessarily directly related to the major. For some of the engineering and science programs, a math course was often the weed-out course.

I can't say for sure that this was the author's experience, but her description of it sounds very much like a weed-out course.

Aging is optional; it will improve the wine, but there's nothing stopping you from drinking it immediately and it will probably taste pretty decent. Many wines are perfectly drinkable after secondary fermentation has finished (and you've added the metabisulfite to fully stop it unless you're making champagne and you want additional carbonation). The longer you age it and the more work you put into it, the better the end product, but that's true for most things. Many store-bought wines are less than a year old.

To me wines are actually less work to homebrew than beer. Especially if you're working from a kit, there's no need to cook anything - just dump everything in the fermenter and go. Beyond that the process is largely similar. Primary fermentation -> secondary fermentation -> bottling -> drinking. They're pretty forgiving too.

In general, whites take a bit more work to get a really good looking product than reds. For a white, I'll usually rack at least three times over about a week, and then filter it so I get a nice, amber-clear end product with no sediment. Note that this doesn't really impact the taste much, just the appearance. Reds I usually don't bother to rack more than once or maybe twice.

When I am done I usually sit my bottles upright in a cool, dark area for a few days before putting them in the wine rack on their sides.

This one [0] specifically is a family favorite. Has a nice light, somewhat fruit taste that's great for a warm summer evening. This one is best kept cool (I keep a few of my bottles that we're about to drink in a wine refrigerator.)

[0] https://www.midwestsupplies.com/collections/riesling-recipe-...

DIY winemaking kits can actually make some pretty decent wines if you spend a bit of time and money getting proper equipment. Not a lot - $100 will get you a really, really good setup with two glass carboys for fermenting, siphons, thief and test jar, hydrometer, corker, etc.

I've been making my own wines for years now. Occasionally I'll do a full from-scratch wine, but more often I buy a $40 kit from Midwest Supplies [0] that has all the components - grape juice concentrate, fruit essence, yeasts, kieselsol and chitosan, potassium metabisulfite as well as full detailed instructions. All you need is four gallons of distilled water. 28 days later, ~30 bottles pretty good wine! It won't win awards or anything, but it'll make a fantastic table wine and great for everyday meals.

The only downside is that you'll spend a bit of time cleaning and sterilizing things and you'll remember all the stuff you forgot from high school chemistry class. :)

[0] https://www.midwestsupplies.com/