Canopyflyer @ Canopyflyer @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Just about everything I've saved up to buy, that had a reputation for longevity or built for commercial use:

Appliances: Speed Queen washer/dryer: Washer is 10 years old this year and is working just like the day I bought it. Unlike the GE frontloader it replaced, which died at 6 year of age. Speed Queen actually rates their equipment's duty cycles. I'm about halfway through the washer's rated life. The dryer is about 4 years younger.

Wolf DF304 range: Cooking is a hobby for me, so it gets used... A LOT. Far more than the average range gets used. Otherwise, this is an extravagant purchase for most households. I clapped out a Dacor range in 6 years, but suffered with it for an additional 2 to save up for the Wolf. Have had the Wolf for 8 and it still works like new with no issues, unlike its antecedent.

Electronics: McIntosh: MC7100 it's 30 years old and I've owned it for 20 of those. I also have an MC7108 that had issues that I corrected. My grand kids will be fighting over those two pieces. Before, I had to dig into box store branded stuff at about 8 to 10 years to replace capacitors, or other things that happened to them or they were just junk. The MC7108 had a bad capacitor in the on/off circuit. It still worked, with that bypassed. It's fixed now as it was worth fixing.

Cars: Toyota: 85 Corolla GT-S (raced it in Autocross for many years and it never had a problem). I currently own a 14 Camry LE that has been reasonable over its 147,000 miles, but not as good as I was hoping. I detest fancy cars and anything that guzzles gas. Simplicity is where it is at, if you want a car to last a long time and not be a garage queen. People that buy the fancy German cars are just bewildering to me. Sure, they are nice, drive great, and might even get you laid... But that's a LOT of money to put into something that will uneconomical to fix by 150,000miles (241401km for my more civilized friends).

On my list of things I want to buy that I'm fiarly certain will be worth it:

Dash Cam

The past several years I have been working more as a process engineer than a technical one. I've worked in Problem Management, Change Management, and currently in Incident for a major defense contractor (yes, you've heard of it). So I've been on both sides. Documenting an incident is a PITA. File a Change record to restart a server that is in an otherwise healthy cluster? You're kidding, right? What the hell is a "Problem" record and why do I need to mess with it?

All things I've heard and even thought over the years. What it comes down to, the difference between a Mom and Pop operation, that has limited scalability and a full Enterprise Environment that can support a multi-billion dollar business... Is documentation. That's what those numb nuts in that Insurance Company were too stupid to understand.

Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.

Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I've worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I've ever seen up until that time and since.

They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They'd bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered "nothing" every god damn time.

They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a "B") a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.

We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.

Fuck IT Security. It's a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.

My family watches several Youtube channels on the main HTPC. It had Chrome for them to use, as that is what the kids and my wife are familiar with from school/ work. Then this BS started. I use Firefox on my personal PC and have yet to have a problem.

So I dumped Chrome off of the HTPC.

It would be amusing if Chrome lost a ton of market share to Firefox and other browsers.

I've always wanted to pick up the guitar.

I have played, in the distant past, at various levels of ability: trumpet, baritone, French Horn, trombone, piano

Amateur...

In Back to the Future, Marty traveled from 1985 to 1955.

If that movie was made today, Marty would travel back to 1993.

Gen X here and an older one at that.

I don't think I'll get SS and I will be of retirement age in the next 12 years.

My funeral will also be my retirement party.

It's not so fun when the Kraken is looking at you.... Is it Sydney?

Seriously though, this woman just screams sociopath, given her behavior and actions over the last several years. The fact that she managed to not get disbarred is a grave injustice.

Can someone tell me, if convicted, will she lose her ability to practice law? Or is that too much to ask?

Around the kids, when they were young, we used French for those things we didn't want them to know about. She's fluent and I don't really speak it at all, but took it back in High School and remembered enough vocabulary to make it work.

Today, both our boys have taken years of Spanish and they speak in Spanish for those things that they don't want us to know. LOL

Around other adults, my wife and I have a system of looks that we give each other. We can have an entire conversation just by giving each other looks.

My 10th grade French teacher.

The very first day of class, she stood up and stated clearly that everyone already has their grade for the year. No matter what we did, if she had already put an "A" that was the grade we were going to get. If she wrote down an "F", the same. Me being an ugly awkward boy that had the temerity to take her class, of course, received an "F". I did all the work, studied hard for the tests, but she always found a way to fail my work. I forgot to put an accent aigu, or grave somewhere on the work.. Fail and she would defend to her last breath to the administration, who ALWAYS caved to her. (EDIT: If I missed just ONE accent mark on the entire work, she would fail then entire thing. )

Of course who got the "A" grades in her class? The cheerleaders and pretty popular people.

Toward the end of the year, I inadvertently got massive revenge on her though. All throughout the school year she would talk about her dog. It was like her child. We got every detail of how that dog ate, pooped, and did any little stupid thing. She was OBSESSED with the thing.

What I didn't know what that she lived near one of my friends. I had visited my friend and was driving out of the neighborhood. I was not speeding. I was driving my car in a very safe manner. When a small dog darted out in front of me and I slammed on the brakes and saw the dog run back into the yard. I never felt an impact, as I was driving a 1970 Impala that probably weighed in at 4500 pounds (2050kg for my more civilized friends). So I didn't stop, didn't feel an impact and the dog went yipping back up into the yard, so I thought it was OK.

Well, I was wrong.

The French teacher was out for the next two weeks. No one knew why, until she returned looking like a shadow of herself. Apparently a huge green car came screaming through the neighborhood at a very high rate of speed and veered up onto her lawn to hit her precious dog...

And killed it.

At first I didn't connect the dog I thought I had almost hit to her dog, until I spoke to my friend. He said that she came out to find her dog dead in the middle of the yard, obviously hit by something very large. He said her screams could be heard all over the neighborhood. Which occurred about two minutes after I left his house and the only description of the car was a very large and old green car.

Yeah, my car was green and this was 1986, so my car was 16 years old at the time.

I feel terrible for the dog. Its death was a complete accident. I didn't even know she lived in that neighborhood until she came back to school and told everyone what happened. It is not in my nature to hurt animals, so even if I had known it was her dog, I would have still done my best to avoid hitting it.

Definitely not the method of revenge I would ever use of my own volition. It happened and there is nothing I can do about it.

No, I never owned up to it and do not feel I need to. What I did do, was focus on my driving skills, awareness and make sure my car stayed in its absolute best mechanical shape to avoid a repeat. A habit that I continue to today and one I am teaching my oldest child who has just started driving instruction.

I do the same as averyfalken, just run everything in the browser.

No you won't get 4k, but it does work for 1080P. You can run the Plex client on PC for 4k media.

If you need 4k, then I can see your point. My TV is 1080P, so the browser works just fine.

Personally, I like having a full fledged PC connected to my TV. Currently I'm using a Beelink T4 running Ubuntu. The PC is under my direct administrative control, so no surprises with ads or other things.

Power consumption may be slightly higher than an NVIDIA Shield or Roku, but at 24w at full tilt for the Beelink it cannot be that much more.

The same Beelink machine comes with Windows 10 as well, if you'd rather have Windows.

Cut completely.

Deleted all the data on my account, then deleted my account. Haven't been back since.

Buy an oil popper.

Then go buy butter flavored coconut oil

Then pick up Flavocol

Enjoy your movie theater level popcorn at a fraction of the cost.

That's why Dr McCoy absolutely hated the things. He viewed them as death machines.

Cumberland Falls is one that has a moon bow every full moon. It's actually well worth seeing.

He has a couple of very specific jobs for the Republicans.

1. He's the token minority so that the GOP can point and say; "SEE WE'RE NOT RACIST, WE HAVE THIS GUY IN THE PRIMARY."
2. He's moving the crazy line further out. He's saying more and more outlandish things, so that the other insane assholes that are running, seem positively nice in comparison. Even though, compared to actual sentiment of the public at large, they are beyond deranged.

I am sure this asshole is well paid by the GOP.

My wife and I are both devoted readers and read dozens of books every year. However, about 7 years ago I took a job that made me commute 50 miles a day.

I also love to listen to music, but the 30 minute to 1 plus hour drive each way was boring as hell. So I decided to look into audio books and the first one I listened to was "Leviathan Wakes" book 1 of "The Expanse." I went from hating my commute every day, to actually slowing down and taking more time to consume more books.

I love audio books now and have listened to hundreds over the last several years. I still read books of course and my wife has not listened to audio books with any consistency, unless we are traveling. Audio books are excellent at keeping the kids entertained on those long trips to see family.

My wife and I often read the same books and series and we discuss them at length. I have not found any difference in my ability to understand and debate the material, whether I've read or listened to it. I do find it a bit easier to remember smaller details if I've read it, other than that there is little difference. At least for me.

53m

Learned how to drive synchro'd transmissions on a 86 Ford Escort.

Learned how to double clutch and rev match on a non-synchro'd transmission in a 49 Willys.