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The kittens have been hanging themselves from trees and fences all day, so I brought them in and am attempting to get them to nap.
I am not hopeful in this endeavor.
Rig up something similar to a washing line across your living room, and allow them to roost there like bats.
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NB: Appearances may be deceptive. That is not a washing line
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So darned close. Mail arrived at 1:58 pm. Bank closes at 2. Since I cannot teleport, can't deal with the check 'til Monday.
But I *did* place the kittens in the catio and they promptly passed out.
NB: Appearances may be deceptive. That is not a washing line
Its a dirtying line?
Whoops...
Target the cleric first, indeed...
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His Freehold moment.
There is 100% less jumping into GothBard's chest after a shower than I expected for a Freehold moment.
This is not me being Freehold-y actually, it is what my beloved, lost, cat used to do EVERY TIME I GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER. Just sat on my chest leaving a wet, shedding mess behind. Made me late for work multiple times.
Miss her.
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And now I imagine Freehold meowing in response and pretending to be Mephisto.Wait, how did Freehold managed to squish himself into Nobodys's mail box?!
Now there is no place for my kobolds! How are they supposed to get their paws on the...
Oh...
Dammit Freehold!
Since we don't have a mailbox, I now imagine finding Freehold squatting in my foyer, gazing eagerly at my mail slot.
NobodysHome: Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?
Freehold: Oh, Dearest Father, it is I, Freehold! And I patiently await the coming of your mail that I may sort it for you, saving you the tedious effort and the danger of marring your dove-soft hands!
NH: Get out.
Only if Mephisto has to wear human clothes and go to work for me.
I KNOW everyone will love him more than they love me.
Only if Mephisto has to wear human clothes and go to work for me.And now I imagine Freehold meowing in response and pretending to be Mephisto.Wait, how did Freehold managed to squish himself into Nobodys's mail box?!
Now there is no place for my kobolds! How are they supposed to get their paws on the...
Oh...
Dammit Freehold!
Since we don't have a mailbox, I now imagine finding Freehold squatting in my foyer, gazing eagerly at my mail slot.
NobodysHome: Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?
Freehold: Oh, Dearest Father, it is I, Freehold! And I patiently await the coming of your mail that I may sort it for you, saving you the tedious effort and the danger of marring your dove-soft hands!
NH: Get out.
I KNOW everyone will love him more than they love me.
Oh, there was a lot of love for Blacksad, but definitely not from everyone...
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Huh... There is a Blacksad RPG now?
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Took the bike out today. It’s kind of warm for a leather jacket. Got some pork for the grill, some coleslaw mix and a twelver of Sierra Nevada pale ale. Took the dirt road back home so my beers are foamy when I crack them. It’s gonna be a pleasant evening.
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Yes, I complain endlessly about the costs of being poor in our society.
Yes, I have a lot of nerve, being in the top 10% in terms of wealth.
Yes, I'm going to do it anyway.
As mentioned, the check arrived yesterday but my credit union's mobile deposit limit is $10,000, so I was going to have to drive to Oakland to deposit it. Since it arrived at 1:58 pm, I was going to have to do it on Monday.
If I were a normal 9-to-5 worker, this would mean taking time off of work, possibly unpaid, and adding 40 miles to my car (not free) just to deposit a check.
Instead, I thought, "Hey, wait a minute! What about my investment accounts?"
I Googled my investment bank's limits and it said, "Thanks to the Tik Tok fraud scheme most customers are limited to $1,000/day. However, some customers are still allowed to deposit up to $100,000." With that much headroom, I figured it couldn't hurt to try. Installed my investment firm's app. Signed in. Said, "Deposit a check."
And there at the bottom. Your limit for checks is $500,000/day.
What. The. Actual. F.
If I had that kind of money I'd send chauffeur Freehold to deposit all my checks on a gold platter.
But yet again, because I have money, they basically threw out any limitations on my remote deposits, so *I* don't have to take time off work or leave the house. And they're not even subtle about it.
How hard is it to treat everyone fairly and equally if you're a bank? Is that so fundamentally difficult a concept to grasp?
Oh, and now I'm just in a lather.
Shiro's coming to visit in April because a number of our favorite European or Japanese metal bands are descending on the Bay Area for a week.
Since we see him so rarely, we figured we'd treat him to the French Laundry, which is one of those incredibly-rare restaurants that lives up to its reputation.
GothBard and Shiro set up this morning for the 10:00 am online reservation window for April... only to have the site go down at 10:00 am sharp and within 2 minutes all of the reservations for April were gone. GothBard did some immediate digging, and they were already all being sold online at an extreme premium ($150+ or more per reservation).
In short, even famous restaurants are going the way of concerts and you have bots snap up all the tickets and either you're willing to say, "Wow, capitalism!" and pay the price, or you're not and you forego the event.
And the frustrating part is that it would be SO easy to stop. "When you make a reservation you must provide a full name and address. When you arrive to dine that person needs to show their photo ID with that name and address. No exceptions."
Poof. Bot ticketing is gone. But the restaurant would actually have to care enough to do that. And that's not going to happen, because they get a richer, more selective clientele by ensuring that everyone who wants to dine there can spend an extra $150/seat for the experience, without them having to be the bad guys...
lol... welcome to banks, savings and loans, credit unions, brokerages, and transaction centers(most forget about these). Banks treat different accounts differently, like business, escrow, and estate versus personal accounts. If you want more of a shock deal with British or European banks. That all happened to me 20+ years ago. Texas wasn't part of the US Interstate Banking years ago and so banks sat on your activity for the full amount of time allowed by law to collect interest on your transactions. Whenever I have to deal with British(old Hong Kong) Banks the scenes from Mary Poppins spring to mind and "Banking is a privilege" .
You need a lawyer and banker in your bridge/pinochle/hearts group.
My friend moved to Sacramento and ended up with his fax machine (yes, this was a while ago) being one digit off from a car finance company's fax machine. So he got a lot of car loan proposals. And routinely, if the person had a female name the loan would be 5-10% higher. If it was "Black-sounding" the loan would be 15-20% more. He saw far too many loans in the 30% interest range. And those were NEVER for guys named, "Robert Smith". And yeah, yeah, that's illegal, but it isn't illegal to jack up interest rates based on ZIP Code, so that's always their fallback excuse.
EDIT: And yes, this is a classic, "A friend said this..." anecdote, but his wife was a fairly right-wing Republican (for the time), plus a corporate attorney, and she corroborated his story and said the finance company was playing with fire if anyone ever filed a formal complaint against them.
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Because books.
Actually, it was supposed to be a letter-stealing gremlin. Because reasons. But it kept evolving...
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Wait, how did Freehold managed to squish himself into Nobodys's mail box?!
Now there is no place for my kobolds! How are they supposed to get their paws on the...
Oh...
Dammit Freehold!
Since we don't have a mailbox, I now imagine finding Freehold squatting in my foyer, gazing eagerly at my mail slot.
NobodysHome: Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?
Freehold: Oh, Dearest Father, it is I, Freehold! And I patiently await the coming of your mail that I may sort it for you, saving you the tedious effort and the danger of marring your dove-soft hands!
NH: Get out.
FIFY
There is a note here at work that the owner wants the entry mats taken out and pressure washed. But they spelled it "preasure", and all I can think of is someone going into a Japanese soapland, and one of the workers saying "You want preasure wash?"
I blame Freehold.
Yes. That's on me.
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of (lack of) work ethic that enrages me:
VP Where's the link to our file share?
Working Group Lead: It's at the top of this channel.
Consider this response: She took the time to respond, but couldn't be bothered to actually copy the link. It was lazy. It was also dismissive. "Well, if YOU can't be bothered to just check the top of the channel, it's obviously YOUR problem."
It was also wrong. There was no link at the top of the channel. In fact, the link was about two-thirds of the way down through a pages-long conversation.
So, unhelpful, dismissive, and wrong.
And I fundamentally don't understand why someone would be so lazy as to reply in such a manner. If you don't want to do any checks at all, then why did you take the time to respond at all? You could've remained silent and I would have provided a more helpful, accurate answer.
Such events frustrate me.
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Yeah, this is exactly the kind of (lack of) work ethic that enrages me:
VP Where's the link to our file share?
Working Group Lead: It's at the top of this channel.Consider this response: She took the time to respond, but couldn't be bothered to actually copy the link. It was lazy. It was also dismissive. "Well, if YOU can't be bothered to just check the top of the channel, it's obviously YOUR problem."
It was also wrong. There was no link at the top of the channel. In fact, the link was about two-thirds of the way down through a pages-long conversation.
So, unhelpful, dismissive, and wrong.
And I fundamentally don't understand why someone would be so lazy as to reply in such a manner. If you don't want to do any checks at all, then why did you take the time to respond at all? You could've remained silent and I would have provided a more helpful, accurate answer.
Such events frustrate me.
Im beginning to think Slack is not particularly good for communication at work.
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Two empty baked bean tins connected by a length of string is all you really need.
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And yep... my life is entirely predictable. The BofA check arrived on Saturday just as banks were closing, and today my IRS refund came. So now that I've had to pay some interest, all the checks I needed have come pouring in. If the universe truly has a sense of humor, GothBard's bonus will show up on Friday as well, making us well-prepared for my potential layoff.
...however, about that...
...I've been working under the same Executive Vice President for 20 years. He certainly plays the political games and dodges direct questions with the best of them, *but* he doesn't out-and-out lie, which puts him a cut above most execs. And last week his statement to our division lead was, "I haven't heard anything about layoffs, so I'm comfortable saying that's just a rumor."
So, I'll believe that he hasn't been told about layoffs, because as I said he's never out-and-out lied to us. With the deadline less than two weeks away, not telling him about losing 30% of his workforce would be catastrophically bad.
I won't be surprised if we *do* have massive layoffs next week, including cutting entire divisions. But it looks like our division was deemed "mission-critical" enough that we'll survive this particular round.
I'll post more once I know more and it's public.
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Either that or the Executive Vice President is on the chopping block too...
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The taming of the free range boulder field is going splendidly! We're ahead of schedule even, with just the pile of "garbage" that Jose and Pako deemed unworthy but they don't know s$&@ about boulders, so I've actually saved about 90%.
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I witnessed one mass firing, in 2009, I was there because a load of trees came in and they called me in to unload them. When my boss saw me that morning, he asked in a panic "Are you here for the meeting?!!" "No, I'm unloading trees, I didn't even know about a meeting" "trust me, you don't want to, we're letting a bunch of people go"
But yeah, I watched from across the yard in my skid loader as everyone walked all cheerful and joking into the office and then stomped out pissed off or melancholy about a half hour later.
It was pretty surreal.
I witnessed one mass firing, in 2009, I was there because a load of trees came in and they called me in to unload them. When my boss saw me that morning, he asked in a panic "Are you here for the meeting?!!" "No, I'm unloading trees, I didn't even know about a meeting" "trust me, you don't want to, we're letting a bunch of people go"
But yeah, I watched from across the yard in my skid loader as everyone walked all cheerful and joking into the office and then stomped out pissed off or melancholy about a half hour later.
It was pretty surreal.
Ironically, my best job ever had the worst layoffs. Round 1 we were invited to two different meeting rooms. Being a close-knit team, we communicated with each other and there was a lot of room-switching. Then came the, "The people in this room are being laid off. The people in that room are staying," then realizing that a lot of people were in the wrong room so they had to meet everyone one-on-one to clear things up anyway. It was all kinds of stupid. The next round was, "OK, we're shutting down the entire department in 60 days so you're all laid off, but we're also getting rid of all the equipment so take whatever you want."
I'm honestly surprised the wallpaper remained. (I ended up with a full-size server rack in my garage, which is far more of a PITA in a private residence than you'd imagine.)
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"I despise recipes that say things like '2 cups of onions'. Onions don't come in cups. They come in onions."
I feel that.
I pretty much despise all U.S. recipes because they go by volume instead of weight. "1 cup of shredded cheese" can be an incredibly varying amount depending on how fine you grate it, how hard you pack it, etc. European recipes go by mass, so there's no room for error. "200g of shredded cheese" is 200g, no matter how you shred it.
The worst is sweet potatoes. They vary in weight from around 5-40 ounces. Yet a recipe will say, "Use 3 sweet potatoes." Not useful.
There are measuring cups that split the difference, marked with several scales for various staple ingredients by weight, which I figure will probably be close enough for a barbarian like me. I keep thinking one of these days I should get one, but I haven't been moved to get to the kitchen supply store for ages.
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I'm honestly surprised the wallpaper remained. (I ended up with a full-size server rack in my garage, which is far more of a PITA in a private residence than you'd imagine.)
Having a data center tech living with you may have helped, but I am definitely going to take my time to make it a feasible option when we can remodel. But dang, I would have loved to take a lot of things off my former employers hands.
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I'm honestly surprised the wallpaper remained. (I ended up with a full-size server rack in my garage, which is far more of a PITA in a private residence than you'd imagine.)Having a data center tech living with you may have helped, but I am definitely going to take my time to make it a feasible option when we can remodel. But dang, I would have loved to take a lot of things off my former employers hands.
They sell MUCH smaller wall-mounted ones; instead of a 6'6" rack I have a one-rack mount and a two-rack mount in my wall (OK, homeowner so I can pull that s***), so my 32-port switch for hardwiring the entire house and my wiring panel are now comfortable and accessible... without a 200-pound rolling steel cage taking up a huge portion of the garage.
Going in for my second eye surgery tomorrow so it'll probably be a few days before any lengthy posts on the experience, but overall:
(1) I want to reiterate how much it wasn't, "Oh, I went in, got surgery, it was painless, and now I see perfectly out of that eye!" It's been a month and the eye still starts feeling dry by around 7:30 pm in the evening, so moisturizing drops are a must. I still get blurry episodes and halos in my peripheral vision, especially at night. GothBard says it takes about 2 months for all these symptoms to fully resolve. However, the surgery was indeed absolutely easy and painless, and I am at or near 20/20 vision in that eye.
(2) People with low myopia (nearsightedness) can get both eyes done at once. Those of us with high myopia (10+ diopters) need to get our eyes done one at a time. And it's kind of terrifying; it's MUCH easier to adapt to having only one eye than it is to adapt to two eyes with vastly differing focal lengths. It's really really hard to focus on anything with both eyes open, so even when I had a contact lens in my untreated eye it was a constant game of, "Close one eye, see whether that one can focus. No? OK, close the other eye and focus that way." It is going to be SUCH a relief to have both eyes with nearly the same prescription again. I've spent years with the optometrist-recommended "one diopter off" technique where one eye is a little undercorrected for close-up work, and the other is fully-corrected for distance vision, and it works well. But once the difference between the two eyes is more than a couple of diopters, it's a nightmare to deal with. So it's been an unpleasant month.
(3) The focal variation of the artificial lenses really, as my surgeon put it, "sucks". I feel like a pigeon having to constantly move my head to get things into focus. GothBard went ahead and got several pairs of prescription reading glasses to deal with her various hobbies. It's obvious I'll need to do the same.
So yes, overall, my vision from the treated eye is better than my vision has been in 38 years. If I close one eye and then the other my color perception and light perception are significantly better. (It's kind of cool having the room go from bright to well-lit or dim to dark by just changing eyes). My vision will eventually be vastly improved, and the only inconvenience is needing to constantly carry reading glasses with me...
...but I've already been carrying glasses with me my entire life so it's not like it's any worse.
After all that, I recommend the surgery to anyone who's eligible. But it's not at all the, "This one surgery will fix your vision in an hour!" that it's cracked up to be. There's recovery time of around two months, and drawbacks in terms of no longer being able to focus on things.
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I'm honestly surprised the wallpaper remained. (I ended up with a full-size server rack in my garage, which is far more of a PITA in a private residence than you'd imagine.)Having a data center tech living with you may have helped, but I am definitely going to take my time to make it a feasible option when we can remodel. But dang, I would have loved to take a lot of things off my former employers hands.
I have a lifetime supply of A4 notebooks from a part time work and my GM has a lifetime supply of cups from the same job...
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Now I understand why some people call email a "useless" tool.
Watching a demo from a developer on his work machine. He has 10,633 unread emails. That's not a typo. That's, "This man gets so much email he'd have a full-time career reading it all."
And I wonder. I get *maybe* 2-3 direct emails a week, and another 5-10 for my department/division. This guy must be in the hundreds a day. Did he subscribe to a stupid number of lists, or is it really that bad for devs?
Oh! I found a pretty good simulator for myopia. The only issue I have is that it uses lens blur instead of actual blur so the colors get all mixed and blended. For real myopia the colors are what let you recognize things because they don't blur together. But for reference I'm at -12.
Now I understand why some people call email a "useless" tool.
Watching a demo from a developer on his work machine. He has 10,633 unread emails. That's not a typo. That's, "This man gets so much email he'd have a full-time career reading it all."
And I wonder. I get *maybe* 2-3 direct emails a week, and another 5-10 for my department/division. This guy must be in the hundreds a day. Did he subscribe to a stupid number of lists, or is it really that bad for devs?
I get several hundred per day.
For devs, it depends on how things are set up and how many cooks are in the kitchen. used to only get like 10 emails a day indicating whether projects built successfully overnight that everyone received regardless of whether they were on the project. Most people routed these to a folder that no one cared about. Sometimes people would try to send announcements on that mailing list because everyone was on it, then be surprised that no one read it.
since we got new project management software we get emails when ever someone touches something that has our name on it. For example before any code gets merged in it needs to be reviewed by other coders. One coder puts in a request for review and marks a bunch of people as potential reviewers. Everyone marked as a potential reviewer gets an email for every comment posted by anyone on that review request regardless of whether they actually end up reviewing anything. There can be a 100 post back and forth on the management software that is a reasonable back and forth to have, but it will send an email for each post.
Miz Daisy, my mother-in-law, is going in for hand surgery tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon she was walking over to a neighbor's house to go visiting, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and took a bad fall. Someone called my husband on her cellphone as the paramedics were attending to her to come over. She *only* broke a cheekbone and three fingers, not a hip or anything (at 87, it could have been SOOOOO much worse), but she's black and blue all over and looks like she lost an Oklahoma bar fight.
Miz Daisy, my mother-in-law, is going in for hand surgery tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon she was walking over to a neighbor's house to go visiting, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and took a bad fall. Someone called my husband on her cellphone as the paramedics were attending to her to come over. She *only* broke a cheekbone and three fingers, not a hip or anything (at 87, it could have been SOOOOO much worse), but she's black and blue all over and looks like she lost an Oklahoma bar fight.
Ouch.
For devs, it depends on how things are set up and how many cooks are in the kitchen. used to only get like 10 emails a day indicating whether projects built successfully overnight that everyone received regardless of whether they were on the project. Most people routed these to a folder that no one cared about. Sometimes people would try to send announcements on that mailing list because everyone was on it, then be surprised that no one read it.
since we got new project management software we get emails when ever someone touches something that has our name on it. For example before any code gets merged in it needs to be reviewed by other coders. One coder puts in a request for review and marks a bunch of people as potential reviewers. Everyone marked as a potential reviewer gets an email for every comment posted by anyone on that review request regardless of whether they actually end up reviewing anything. There can be a 100 post back and forth on the management software that is a reasonable back and forth to have, but it will send an email for each post.
When they set up a system like that for us, I just funneled all such emails into a special folder so it didn't show up as "unread mail" in my inbox. And it made it easy to scan and purge that mailbox every day. But yeah, with automated notifications I remember it being in the 30-50 per day range.
I have so many emails I just never get around to reading. I could probably just mass-delete them all and lose nothing of value.
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Miz Daisy, my mother-in-law, is going in for hand surgery tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon she was walking over to a neighbor's house to go visiting, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and took a bad fall. Someone called my husband on her cellphone as the paramedics were attending to her to come over. She *only* broke a cheekbone and three fingers, not a hip or anything (at 87, it could have been SOOOOO much worse), but she's black and blue all over and looks like she lost an Oklahoma bar fight.
Jesus. I hope she heals swiftly.
Jesus. I hope she heals swiftly.Miz Daisy, my mother-in-law, is going in for hand surgery tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon she was walking over to a neighbor's house to go visiting, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and took a bad fall. Someone called my husband on her cellphone as the paramedics were attending to her to come over. She *only* broke a cheekbone and three fingers, not a hip or anything (at 87, it could have been SOOOOO much worse), but she's black and blue all over and looks like she lost an Oklahoma bar fight.
We have absolutely no frame of reference. In 87 years, she has never once been hospitalized or received general anesthesia, so there is no telling how she will react to it. Like me, she had all her children at home, and so she has never had anything stronger than the occasional shot of novacaine for a minor dental procedure. Dollars to donuts, it's gonna give her the mother of all migraines, because she's pretty much decided it's going to. I can't wait to see which vitamins and homeopathics she tries to substitute for whatever medications the doctor tries to give her post-op. She is a firm believer in such quackery.
I am minding my own business and just made her a big crockpot full of soup for when she gets home.
The only 4 types of work emails I get are: 1) when someone helps me on my snow route and misses a section of sidewalk at this one place. 2) when a customer compliments me on a job well done. 3) when there's changes to a project I'm working on or will be working on. 4) if we have a meeting, training, or work event.
Jesus. I hope she heals swiftly.Miz Daisy, my mother-in-law, is going in for hand surgery tomorrow.
Sunday afternoon she was walking over to a neighbor's house to go visiting, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and took a bad fall. Someone called my husband on her cellphone as the paramedics were attending to her to come over. She *only* broke a cheekbone and three fingers, not a hip or anything (at 87, it could have been SOOOOO much worse), but she's black and blue all over and looks like she lost an Oklahoma bar fight.We have absolutely no frame of reference. In 87 years, she has never once been hospitalized or received general anesthesia, so there is no telling how she will react to it. Like me, she had all her children at home, and so she has never had anything stronger than the occasional shot of novacaine for a minor dental procedure. Dollars to donuts, it's gonna give her the mother of all migraines, because she's pretty much decided it's going to. I can't wait to see which vitamins and homeopathics she tries to substitute for whatever medications the doctor tries to give her post-op. She is a firm believer in such quackery.
I am minding my own business and just made her a big crockpot full of soup for when she gets home.
...wow.
Its rate for ones mother in law to be just as tough as oneself.
I hope your births were more like Fry's mom than anything else.
I think my ribs are going back together so I'm approaching my previous level of decrepitude after tying with that car last week.