arcing in the walls

Yeah, when I rebuilt the kitchen/living room wall, I found the stud that had held one of the original outlets and it was scorched black where the box had been. Kind of amazing the house was still standing.

I did reuse the scorched stud. 2x4s are fucking expensive and these ones from the 1940s were perfectly straight and completely knot-free.

remote controlled blimp

I always wanted to get one of these and program it to follow me around the disc golf course with my bag slung underneath it.

Like, I actually had emails from the bosses talking about this shit. I really should have saved them for blackmail - no worse ethically than what I did do.

I bought a fridge from Lowe’s and one of the delivery guys asked to use my bathroom. When I went in there later, he had basically managed to pee on the floor instead of in the toilet. I’m a bit of a “tinkler sprinkler” myself but this was next level.

I bought a house last year and one of the switch boxes was filled with caulk to hold the switches in place. I’ve seen a lot of caulk abuse over the years but never anything like that.

Speaking as a 57yo, I sure wish there was some sport where age wasn’t a disadvantage. Is getting your knees to make weird noises when you stand up a “sport”?

I bought a house last year and I was somewhat mystified by why the two light switches next to the door were horizontal instead of the normal vertical arrangement. Turns out they had tried to turn a single box into a double by basically just gouging a bigger hole in the cinderblock wall and filling it with a softball-sized lump of caulk into which they stuffed the two switches; somehow they could only get this whole mess to stay in place by putting the switches horizontally. For bonus points, one of the switches did nothing except producing a distant humming noise and then tripping one of the breakers after a few seconds.

I worked on one project that was essentially one main app and then a plugin architecture where other companies could write modules that would be run inside the main app. My explicit instructions were to make it very difficult to actually write one of these modules (so that our competitors could not actually be competitive) and boy did I deliver! If my company had really wanted to deliver something like this that actually worked (in the sense of other companies being able to make real contributions) it would have been trivial to make everything HTML-based web apps.

I had to endure a roasting session where some junior developers laid into “grampa” for his absurdly bad design decisions. I suppose I deserved it, though, for my poor ethical choices.

I mean, the whole problem with airships is that they’re just big inflatable sails, and to be barely economical they have just enough propulsive power to move about in normal weather conditions. Once they hit bad weather they’re fucked, which is why nearly every airship built before WWII ended up crashing in a storm. They’re only marginally viable today because of weather prediction that grounds them before they hit the shit. Adding sails isn’t going to help anything.

I would want “lump of star shit” in my obit.

It’s a lot harder to murder somebody when you actually have to stab them or beat their head in with something.

Life expectancy from birth is easily the most misleading statistic in the history of the social sciences because it is a measure of central tendency (aka an average, specifically, a median) of a property (age at death) that not only has no central tendency but actually has the opposite of a central tendency, with values concentrated at the low end (infant and child mortality) and the high end (old age deaths). In almost all societies ever measured, the life expectancy from birth age is usually the age at which a person is least likely to die.

To add to its misleading nature: demographers usually use the value to express the life chances of the just-born cohort (up to age 5). Since they obviously can’t wait 70 or 80 years until half of that cohort has actually died, they instead use curve-fitting to estimate life expectancy based on infant and child mortality actually experienced by the cohort. People often say that life expectancy from birth is misleading because it’s heavily impacted by infant and child mortality, but this is not quite correct - it’s actually entirely determined by infant and child mortality.

Imagine being proudly offed by Pluto and then they make it not a planet any more.

I once tore my hamstring playing Ultimate on a wet field. I thought I heard a sound like a giant rubber band snapping when it happened but I figured I was just imagining it. But then everybody came running over to me saying “what was that sound?”

Cleveland-Akron-Canton metropolitan statistical area is 3.7 million, Columbus metro stat area is 2.1 million. Cleveland proper is only 362K while Columbus proper is 913K. Direct size comparisons of “cities” almost always are dependent upon arbitrary border definitions.

Aloe.

My Florida (of course) cousins are half-Thai and rabidly anti-immigrant (their father, who was white and also rabidly anti-immigrant married their mother in Thailand in the service and brought her back to the US). It just doesn’t make any earthly sense. For bonus points, they both happen to look vaguely Central American and have been harassed for that all their lives.

I know Qt is cross-platform, but cars? Wow! I only ever used it for shitty Skype clones for Canadian ISPs.

Well, I am a Prodigy at that sort of thing!

Y’all need Qt Creator: C++ for under the hood and Javascript for the UI. Virtually nonexistent base of coders who can do both competently and if you’re not careful you end up moving to Finland because of it.