Spent 2 weeks hiking in around the Red River Gorge, Kentucky and Sheltowee Trace back in the late 80’s. Only time I got wet was when it rained, or found a creek to take a dip in.
When I got home, even my own Mother would not hug me. She sent me off to the bath where I stayed for over an hour.
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.
30 year IT Professional here, who has run laptop depots.
Absolutely mandatory in an enterprise environment.
The number of dead batteries I have seen throughout the years is too many to count. Having to dispatch a replacement laptop, instead of just a battery is really irritating. Sure the affected laptop comes back and my techs can take care of it and put it back into inventory. That comes with the cost of needing to keep extra full laptops in the rotation. Not to mention having to cross ship two laptops. Instead of just having much cheaper batteries that I can send off to the user, then they pop it in and drop off the old battery at a local store that accepts used batteries.
As far as a “thing”, which I would define as an object and not a person or animal, I would have to say my two McIntosh amplifiers. I have an MC7100 and MC7108.
Both were built in 1992. I am listening to the MC7108 in my office as I write this.
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.
Landscaping
My very first job at the age of 15 was working at a Nursery/ Garden Center. I also would work on the landscaping crews and even did some design work.
When my wife and I bought our house she said she always dreamed of having a big flower garden, but said she didn’t know how to do it properly.
Well… I do. Even my Mother-In-Law, who is an experienced gardener, learned a few things from me. Although, I have to admit, she really does know a lot and I learned a lot from her as well.
Our flower beds are beautiful throughout the growing season with a huge variety of plants.
My family had “The Best of Bill Cosby” album when I was a kid and we listened to it a lot. Some of the funniest bits on that album and I always had warm memories sitting and listening to them.
Then it comes out that he’s a complete monster. All those family memories tied to that now, it really sucks.
Audiobooks.
Music is fine, but I actually find I will make more time to exercise if I’m listening to a good book.
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.
Yes, I have several of various types and use them extensively.
They are not necessary to cook, they are necessary to cook consistently.
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.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Used this against my controlling mother, who liked to lay BS at my feet and make me think it was my responsibility to fix. When it was HER that caused the whole thing. The look on her face when I hit her with that phrase and just turned around and left was priceless.
There a LOT of things that are just flat not your problem, even if someone else tries to make it yours.
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.
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.