Canopyflyer

Cumin

I buy cumin seeds in bulk and grind them as needed.

I also use turmeric and ground mustard a lot too.

Recently?

Lucifer

Grimm

Leverage

Timeless

Lost in Space (2018)

Series that my family rewatch about every 3 years or so:

Stargate SG-1

Farscape

ageing vs aging

The former is the way I learned it in school way back in the 70’s… Apparently that is the way the British spell it and it sends US citizens into an aneurysm.

One that bothers me the most when people do it is brake vs break. Your car will break if you do not apply the brake in a timely fashion.

When it comes to electronics, reliability is determined by the quality of the electrolytic capacitors used as they are typically the first to fail in an electronic circuit. There are other considerations of course, but in general the better the capacitor used in construction the longer the item will last.

Electronics that have cheap capacitors will have about a 10 year life. Those that use higher end capacitors will last 30 years or more. I have two McIntosh amplifiers that were built in 1992 and are still working great on the original caps. They have McIntosh branded capacitors and are top tier, although I don’t now who specifically makes them for McIntosh. I also have 2 Carver amps from about the same era and I’ve had to recap them already. Carver has great sound, but lousy build quality. Also have a Marantz receiver that was built in 2000 with Marantz branded caps that came to me with a dead amplifier, which just turned out to be a dry solder joint on a PC board. Two hours of resoldering several PCBs in it and it’s working very well.

HERE is a good list of top tier capacitor manufacturers, just scroll down a bit to find it of top tier capacitor manufacturers. You’ll have to do some research to find out what TV manufacturer is using what capacitor in their designs.

With that said, there is one listed there that also makes televisions and they, fortunately, have come back to the US market. That is Panasonic. I have a Panasonic Plasma that I bought in 2010 and it is still going strong. It is still my family’s main television. It got hit by lightning in 2012 and I had to replace the power supply and main board in it, which was not the TV’s fault. It has all Panasonic capacitors in it.

I also have a Panasonic Microwave, and cordless phone. Both of which have far far outlived their predecessors. The cordless phone will be 20 years old next April and the microwave is coming up on 13 years.

I will not say that Panasonic has the best picture, best sound, or uses unicorn farts to make the best what ever… Honestly, I don’t give a damn about any of that. What I will say that in my experience if you want an electronic device that lasts a long time, buy a Panasonic.

Reminds me of a major incident I got involved in. I was the Problem Manager and not MIM (Major Incident Management), but I’ve had years of MIM experience so was asked to help out on this one. The customer manufactured blood plasma and each of the lots on the production floor was worth a cool $1 million. The application that was down and had brought production down was not the app that actually handled production, but an application (service) that supplied data to it.

Of course the customer thought that app was not Mission Critical so it didn’t have redundancy. I joined the call and first thing I asked was when did the last change go through on this app… Spoiler: I had the change in front of me and it went in the previous night. The admin of the app speaks up that he did a change the previous night… And NO the MIM team had NOT looked at that change yet… Did I mention this was FOUR FUCKING HOURS into the outage? That is MIM 101. Something goes down, look to see who last fucked with it.

This is why you need experienced MIM people in enterprise environments.

So I took control of the MIM, instructed the App Admin to share his screen and walk us through the change he did the previous night… Two screens in and OH… Look at that… There’s a check box that put the app into read only (or something like that, this happened back in 2009 and I don’t remember all the details). I’d never seen the application before in my life, but knew that check box being checked, just based on the verbiage, could not be right… So I asked… The Admin, sounding embarrassed, said yeah he forgot to uncheck that box last night…

Fuck me.

He unchecked the box, bounced the app and what do you know… It started to work.

A single damn check box brought down the production line of a multi-billion dollar company.

My investigation for that Problem was a bit scathing to multiple levels of the customer. If a service supports a Tier 1 production app and that Tier 1 app would stop working if that service goes down… GUESS WHAT! That service is MISSION FUCKING CRITICAL and it should be supported as such. My employer was not on the hook for this one, as both applications involved were customer supported.

I would love to say that the above is an uncommon occurrence, but honestly it is the main reason for outages in my experience. Something small and stupid that is easily missed.

55m here.

I’m farsighted and started to need glasses for close up around the age of 36. Never really had to get use to them per se as I always had non-prescription sunglasses anyway.

I became a full time glasses wearer around the age of 40. At the age of 45 I became a progressive lens wearer and those took me about 2 full weeks to get use to. So it’s been about 10 years that I’ve worn progressives and my script has changed 4 times. It takes me a couple of days to get used to a new script.

I’m also legally blind in my right eye. It sees just well enough that it tracks with my left eye. One optometrist insisted on giving me 1/2 strength script for my right eye and I went along with it. It took me weeks to get used to it as I’m not used to having binocular vision of any kind, not to mention the near Coke bottle look to the lens. 3D movies are almost and absolute no go for me, because they make me ill. My current glasses have a script on the right lens, but it’s not nearly as strong.

My wife and have extensive flower beds on our property. My very first job as a teenager was in a nursery/garden center and did a lot of landscaping and landscaping design back then. So we have something flowering through out the entire growing season for the pollinators.

Here is one of the more interesting pollinators we have:

“Never pass up the opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

There is a lot of great advice in this thread.

Humble_boatsman (plywood panel) and EmpireofLove2 (screw bottle jack) in particular.

I would add two more things that I don’t see on here and that is a set of chocks and a piece of iron pipe.

The chocks are optional and can take up a lot of room in a small trunk, but they do add an additional level of safety.
The iron pipe, that can go over the handle of the tire iron, provides leverage to LOOSEN the lug nuts. Just don’t use it to tighten them as you could easily twist off the studs.

Granted you do not really need additional leverage to get lug nuts off, but I’ve had to change a tire with an injured arm and it made my life a lot easier.

I’m in my middle 50’s. There are alcoholic drinks I do like, but Miller and Budweiser and not among them. The wife and I will have wine, typically a Malbac or Chianti, with dinner a few times a month, then I’ll use the rest of the bottle to cook with. My local liquor store has a great selection of beers that you can mix and match. I usually pick up a 6 pack, especially when Dopplebocks are in season. A local brewery here has a “Dark Dopplebock” that is really good. Those 6 will sit in my fridge over the next several months until I slowly get to them.

Budweiser in the middle of the night at a party on the shore of Lake Cumberland in Kentucky.

The party was great, but the “beer” was so thoroughly disgusting that I have not drunk it since and that was 35 years ago.

Life is too short to drink bad beer.

“Nor Crystal Tears”: by Alan Dean Foster

One of the first novel length books I ever sat down to read when I was young.

The first series that I fell in love with was: “The Belgariad” by David Eddings

Say what you want about Eddings, the guy was not a nice guy, but “The Belgariad” was a great series and I leaped from it to LOTR.

Scorpius in Farscape.

He was introduced long after the main antagonist, Captain Bilar Crais, was firmly established. Suddenly the Captain was shoved aside for this new monstrous weirdo who’s motivation seems a bit contrived.

Scorpius is absolutely fantastic. Wayne Pygram absolutely knocked it out of the park and then some with portraying both Scorpius and Harvey throughout the rest of the series. Probably one of the best written and acted villains in television history.

Personally, I think Heinlein said it best: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

Love is also a choice that you need to make every day.

Next week my wife and I will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. I love her more now than I did back then.

Because it is a LOT more complicated than that.

Not all rheumatological diseases are due to the immune system’s memory. As a case in point, Ankylosing Spondylitis is theorized as being caused by a mis-folded HLA-B27 protein response. The mis-folded protein response is caused by cellular stress, at least that is the theory. The lead singer of Imagine Dragon Dan Reynolds suffers from this disease. So there are people out there suffering from it, it’s not just some disease out in left field no one has heard of before.

Are there diseases that could be treated by clearing the immune system’s memory? Possibly, but there would also be consequences for that as well. Mainly, because the actual method by which the memory works is not completely understood.

Disclaimer: My wife is a Rheumatologist that does both basic research and clinical work. What I wrote above is based on what I have gleaned from her over the years. Any mistakes or misconceptions are strictly mine. I’m just an old IT guy and have never studied medicine.

Princess Bride

Strictly Ballroom

Paul

LOTR

I’ve been an IT Professional for almost 30 years and have had to keep up with the computer industry that entire time. These days, I’m more in management and processes, so no more sitting in front of a console with a pager on my hip.

During the technical portion of my career, I was a full +10, at least for computers and associated technologies used in very large enterprise environments.

In my personal life, I’m ore of a +2 or +3. I usually have the previous year’s flagship phone (my current phone is a Pixel 8 Pro) and keep it till it dies. My audio electronics are mostly from the 90’s, because they are high end components (McIntosh) that I have taken decades to procure. Some of which I actually had to fix in order for them to be usable.

All the computers in my house I bought used and refurbed myself. I think the newest one is my computer and it’s a Dell Precision 7550 and it’s at least 4 years old. The network in my house is more current. My router/firewall one of Ubiquiti’s latest and greatest, although both WAPs in my house are about 7 years old. My previous firewall was PFSense that I ran on a VM on Proxmox. It became too much of a pain if there was an issue with Proxmox, then there was an issue with the internet, although I did have a backup, so I decided to just separate the two.

1970 Chevrolet Impala: Liberty (I bought it from a guy in Liberty, KY).

1997 Nissan 200SX SE-R: Dot (It was Pacific Blue)

2003 Acura TL: Sally (Generic name for a generic car)

2014 Camry LE: Pearl (It was Cosmic Mica Gray which gave the car a pearlescent sheen).

I currently have a 2019 Camry Hybrid XLE, but have yet to name it. I’m leaning toward “Betty”, because the car has so many warnings, alarms, and notifications that I feel like I’m being bitched at when I drive it.

I have owned several cars over the years that I never named. My absolute favorite car I’ve ever owned was a 1985 Corolla GT-S that I raced in Pro Solo for a few years and it never received a name. The next car I owned was a 1992 Sentra SE-R and it never got a name either. Also had a 1969 Chevelle that I drag raced in my teen years, but no name there.

Yes.

Let me tell you when, why, and how I learned that you need to pay attention to taxes.

I was in third grade and my class had a field trip. This was 47 years ago, so the exact details of the trip are lost to time and rusty memory. The lesson remained.

There was something that the class could purchase at the end of the day on the trip and the place only took cash and the school was not doing anything to help, except tell the kids about it and the price. Which was something like $5. I told my Mom and she handed me a $5 bill, plus a quarter, which confused my 3rd grade brain. She said to due to some strange words "sales tax, which was 5% in my state at the time. Got to school that morning and all my classmates were proud that they had their $5 bill, but none seemed to have a quarter. So I kept the presence of my quarter a secret and was a little embarrassed about it. Yes, I was young and stupid. Now I am old and stupid.

When it came time to purchase the whatsit at the end of the day, me and one other of my classmates produced a quarter to buy it. The teachers and chaperones had to cover the sales tax for the other 20 kids and they were pissed.

I went to school and learned a lesson that has stuck with me for nearly 50 years.

House on the Rock

When I moved to Wisconsin back in 2006, House on the Rock was one of the first things I heard about from my neighbors to go see. My wife and I looked at the website and said “we’ll go see it someday.” Well, that day was about a month ago as back then we started having kids and getting used to living in a new place. However, over the past 19 years I’ve had people tell me that “you’ve got to go see it.”

Now… I understand.

Is that place a monument to a man’s ascent to brilliance?

Or his decent into madness.

There was stuff in that museum that I took DAYS to process and I still really am unable to understand what it was I was looking at. It took my family and I FOUR hours to walk through it. It could have been a LOT longer if we actually stopped to study more than what we did.

I’m 55 years old and I’ve seen and done a lot things in my life… None of it prepared me for the sheer onslaught that is House on the Rock. Walking out of it I told my wife that I rather chaffed at the entrance fee when I paid it… Now, I’m not sure if they charged enough.

If you’re ever anywhere close to South Central Wisconsin… Take a day and go see it.

It doesn’t just live up to the hype… It so far exceeds it that trying to explain the place will never do it justice.