Greetings programs!
I prefer to think of them fighting evil in another dimension.
This means something.
Your ass looks like 150 pounds of chewed bubble gum!
There’s no fighting in the war room!
Sire! The Great Leslie escaped with a friar!.. He escaped with a chicken!!!
Of course I denied installing CCTV in the nursery! What the hell would they watch?!!!
I think what we have here… Is a failure to communicate!
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
My life became infinitely better once I understood that saying.
My favorite band that I’ve actually seen live:
Duran Duran. Was a closet fan of theirs back in the late 80’s and got to see them when my girlfriend at the time got tickets.
Actual favorite band and unfortunately have never seen live:
RUSH
And it’s not because I think that Neil Peart is the greatest drummer of all time (that would be Buddy Rich). It’s because their music actually talks to my neurodivergent brain. It is also due to that the 3 of them were a confluence of exceptional talent that just happened to come together to make something special.
It’s “Revved up like a deuce.”
Not “Wrapped like a dou…” well you know.
First heard that song in 1981… Learned the correct lyrics in 2020. 39 years of being wrong, but I think I’m in good company.
Also learned that the version that most people know is actually a cover done by Manfred Mann in 1976. The original artist is Bruce Springsteen and he recorded it in 1973.
Onions
Raw: arrgg can’t stand them. Maybe if it is a sweet onion and very thinly sliced, but otherwise keep it away from me.
Sauteed: Mmmmm… spread them over EVERYTHING!!!
Caramelized: Extremely inappropriate moaning noises…
Hobby: Skydiving
Free fall is at most 65 seconds on a normal jump. My personal record is jumping from 28,000 feet and I was in free fall for around 85 seconds. That’s it, there is no such thing as a 5 minute free fall, unless you are looking to break an altitude record.
If you run up to a skydiver and pull their Pilot Chute (PC) out and throw it into the wind, nothing will happen. The gear is designed to work at free fall speeds. A 10mph wind will not pull the main out. If you pull on the PC bridle hard enough to actually pull the main out of its compartment… You will just have a main parachute in its deployment bag closed by rubber bands, or other method and it will just be laying on the ground. You will also get a well deserved punch in the mouth by more than one jumper. If you pull the reserve handle you will probably get murdered and there will be no witnesses, especially if the hanger was full of jumpers. They will just hide your body and you will have deserved your fate.
BASE jumping and Skydiving are as related as Hockey and Figure Skating. Sure there is some overlap, but one cannot do the other without training. Also BASE is an acronym. Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. Bridges fall under Span BTW. No, I am not a BASE jumper, although I have jumped the Bridge in WV. So yeah, I guess I have my S.
Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.
You cannot talk in free fall. The old movie trope of talking back and forth is simply not possible. How difficult is it to talk in a car with the windows open going down the road at 70mph? Now, remove the windshield and drive the car 120mph…
The “parachute not opening” is not even in the top 10 concerns when jumping. The gear works and we jump with two chutes. There is a whole lot of bullshit that can happen before we get to deployment altitude. Not the least of which is just getting to the DZ in the morning. I always considered my drive to the DZ my most dangerous part of the day. Second most dangerous is being in the airplane. I’m actually relieved to exit the aircraft as at that point I have a better chance of making it to the ground safely than the pilot.
One of my brothers adopted a baby from Guatemala. He was a beautiful baby that grew up into a good man. He is 20 this year.
I knew that my mother and by extension my father were bigoted. She had made numerous comments while I was growing up that revealed that aspect of her. With that said, I had never seen her act upon it though. During a phone conversation with her we were talking about my new nephew and she stated: “He’ll never be a real grandchild.” When I asked why, she flatly stated because he was Latino. To me that was the point that I lost all respect for her. My Dad was a massive enabler as well.
She also showed a strong preference for those children/ grandchildren that looked like her. Brown hair with brown eyes.
She died in 2011 the week that the tsunami hit Japan. My life became a lot better after that. Dad died last year and I did not even go to his funeral.
My girlfriend and I had been dating for about 5 months and were serious. We went for a day hike at a local park. Our conversation during the hike went to talking about the future and similar topics. Out of curiosity, I asked; “Do you want to get married?” Not meaning it as an actual proposal, but rather just to get her thoughts. I didn’t have a ring, nor was I on one knee. Yet she responded with an enthusiastic “YES”! We started planning the wedding the next day.
Here we are 20 years later, married happy as ever and our oldest is graduating high school and going on to University, our youngest is finishing up 9th grade.
I guess I found out what she was thinking!
Truth be told though, we were both 34 years old and neither of us had been married before. So it’s not like we were teenagers making a rash decision. We were thirty somethings making a rash decision. That’s different… Right?
You always were an asshole Gormon.
Raspberry, Dark Chocolate, Chambord. The Chocolate Passion Cookbook has my absolute favorite cake ever on its cover. My wife makes it for me every birthday. If she doesn’t make it for me, she makes it for our oldest’s birthday, which is only 2 weeks after mine.
Schindler’s List
It is a cinematic triumph and a film that everyone should see. With that said, I am unable to ever view it again. The scene where Schindler is breaking down realizing that if he didn’t have expensive items he could have saved more people just absolutely killed me.
8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.
The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.
The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.
The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you’re supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.
Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.
We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.
But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.
I have two Wireless Access Points (WAP) and a separate router/ firewall. The WAPs are meshed, meaning as a WiFi connected device moves through my house, it will be automatically handed off to the WAP with the best quality.
Power and channel of the two WAPs use are automatic. I live in a fairly dense neighborhood. Meaning my neighbors are so dense they barely have done any configuration of their WiFi. There are also a lot of them. The main thing I worry about is having just enough transmit power to give a good quality connection within the house, without being so strong it interferes with my neighbors’ networks.
I would never leave the management of my home network to an ISP. With that said, I’ve been an IT professional for 30 years and got my start in networking.
My upstairs WAP often works at higher power, but I don’t remember seeing it at 100%. It is fighting all the other WiFi routers that are nearby. There are so many that there are no clear channels on 2.4GHz and very few at 5GHz. The WAP in the basement is better shielded, so I almost never see it at high transmit powers.
My router is a separate unit that provides routing, firewall, IPS/IDS, DNS, and management for itself and the WAPs.
No, you almost never require 100% transmit power out of a WAP. The best thing is to have a good quality WiFi router or WAP and set it to “automatic” for channel and power settings. That way the unit can determine what is best for network quality on the fly. It will be better at it than you logging in multiple times a day doing the same thing manually.
This is exactly why an automobile should be treated as a depreciating asset, rather than an investment.
You fix a car if it will cost less than half of its value at the time of the repair. If it cost more than half, get rid of it at the first opportunity. There are caveats to that rule of course. So don’t fault yourself for buying another car.
You had some bad luck and that is just a part of owning a car. In commiseration, I invested $2500 into an Acura TL that I dearly loved for timing belt and some other 100K maintenance items. Only to have its transmission blow up less than 4 months later. The $2500, plus the transmission replacement would have been well over half the value of the car. I traded it. For a car that I still own and absolutely loathe, but it’s been reliable and I’ve put over 160,000 miles on it. My oldest kid now drives it.
The short answer is:
Keep your current car. It’s basically new. From a manufacturer that is notable for the reliability of its products. You also know its maintenance history, which is incredibly important.
Have your payments kept ahead of depreciation? Meaning, can you sell your car for enough to pay off your loan? Just so you know, that’s almost always “no”, but your results may vary. You would also be forced to buy another car. 7.59% APR sucks, but are you able to get a better rate now on another car? Do you have the down payment for another car? Again, you may not have any money left over from selling your current car and paying off the lien.
If you can refinance it at a lower the rate, then absolutely that is the path you should take. If not, then taking a more global look at your finances are in order to make the payment more palatable.
My wife is a Rheumatologist. She actually had a patient attempt to use an article SHE WROTE to argue against her diagnosis. The article the patient was “citing” was not even applicable to the symptoms the patient presented.
Chili (I modified the “Joy of Cooking’s” McCleod chili recipe with fresh chilis and roasted red peppers)
Julia Child La Beouf Bourguignon (This actually gets better the longer it sits in the fridge).
Baked Ziti (Cooks Illustrated)
Chicken Tinga (Bon Appetite recipe)
Playing a high level (19th) home brewed adventure. I’m playing a Dragonborn Twilight Domain Cleric, my wife is playing a Sea Elf Paladin Oath of Vengence. There are two other players in the party a Tortle Warlock/Bard and Triton Ranger.
The party runs across a large chamber absolutely filled with various monstrous insects and other nasties, with the latest BBEG at the other end of the chamber. In between are chasms, and other obstacles. Basically, the entire room was designed to wear us down before we get to the BBEG.
My wife’s Paladin has Gauntlets of Storm Giant Strength, so her strength is 29 AND she’s hasted. So my nearly 300 pound armored Dragonborn Cleric climbs onto her back and casts Spirit Guardians… at 9th level.
Then my wife runs as fast as she can. Her movement was 120 and she was able to leap over all the chasms in the way. I rolled for Spirit Guardians and damn near maxed out the damage and the DC was 22… There were THREE monsters left, besides the BBEG, and they were severely bloodied and easily dispatched by the other two characters, at range obviously. Also, the BBEG had to use one of its Legendary Resistances to save against Spirit Guardians, and with smart work from the Warlock/Bard and Ranger its next two LR’s got used up and we killed it in 3 turns.
Our DM was too impressed to be pissed.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya 'bout the raising of the wrist Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart “I drink, therefore I am.”
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed
I have several direct antecedents that lived over 100. The last was my paternal grandmother, who died in 2004 at the age of 103. She was born in 1901 and outlived 3 of her 6 children (one child was stillborn). Her last child, my Dad, died just this past February at the age of 88. He was the youngest.
I wanted to be a pilot.
By age 16 I had several hours towards my private license.
My junior year in High School I started looking universities with aviation degrees, or engineering. I had settled on Rose Hulman and one other (been 40 years so don’t remember the place, but it was one of the top aviation colleges in the US at the time.) I actually was accepted at “the other place”.
It all came crashing down in the last conversation I had with my enrollment counselor and he asked a question that hadn’t been asked of me in the prior many conversations I had with him.
“How is your eyesight?”
You see, I’m legally blind in my right eye and in the US, pilots are required to have 20/20 corrected eyesight. In order for my right eye to be 20/20 I would basically have to have a telescope hanging off my face.
I never did get my private pilots license, which I can get even with my eyesight, but I would never pass medical for a commercial ticket.
Yes, I did look at training in other countries and yes there are a few that only require perfect color vision, which I do have. The problem was my parents absolutely forbade me to travel to another country.
So that was that.