Thank you. It’s a new construction and the builder seems to generally pick really good subs, and I’m pretty sure whoever installed it did the entire house, so they should be familiar with it. I’ll give them a call.

Can I pester you with a question? Feel free to tell me to get bent because I know your time is worth money and this is just the internet. We have a new Trane system that was flawless when it was first put in, but over the past five months the blower has started making louder and louder vibration noises. Almost like it’s slightly off balance. If it was an older system I wouldn’t think twice, but it was dead quiet at first, just the sound of moving air pretty much.

Part of me wants to open up the cabinet and just see if there’s some sort of vibration pad that’s gotten loose, but I also don’t want to to void a warranty, or something. It seems so trivial a thing. We live in the boonies and a service call is pretty onerous for a tech. I thought maybe there could be balancing weights, like a car wheel or a lawnmower blade, but your comment about motors being sealed is making me think twice.

I paint. I sold through a gallery for awhile but it just wasn’t worth it when I could make ten times more for far less work doing my original job, so now it’s back to just for fun. Also I hate painting portraits of rich people but if you don’t do that it’s really hard to make money. I also hated the mandatory social media removed. Engaging in that ecosystem disgusts me.

Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn’t turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.

Same thing happened with “VitaminWater”, a product in the category of “enhanced water” (a term reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation technique”). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it’s actually healthy. They settled.

In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.

Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

I think some people want to find morels so bad they get a sort of “buck fever” and convince themselves they’ve found one. That’s all I can imagine because to my eyes they would be hard to mix up. Same with chanterelle and false chanterelle. Like… sure, I guess if you are profoundly incautious.

Condolences for your dad. 42 here, my dad is showing his age majorly now.

Looking back I know I lived every single hour but huge leaps of time are just gone. Like, entire jobs I worked for years I have maybe a half dozen memories. On top of that our work product is gone, the company is gone, the building is gone, the entire industry is changed… it’s like it was all a dream. I definitely understand the old man looking at a city and saying, “this was all orchards”. I used to think it was a wistful phrase, but it’s also an expression of disbelief. When we were embedded it all seemed so important. But it all shuffled off with zero fanfare. It really changes how you experience life, and that’s how I “feel old”.

You’re right. I used to be “no mow” when I lived in the city and the burbs, but now that I have a rural acreage, I’ve realized that you have to use every trick in the book to even have a chance against invasives.

Tomorrow I’m renting a brush mower to take out an acre of 8 foot tall Himalayan blackberry that’s completely choked out a meadow. It’s flowered, but hasn’t set fruit, so I need to get it now. I’ll have to follow that up with herbicide application in late summer because it has vigorous root energy storage. That’ll be year one of at least three years of restoration. This is on top of wineberry, tree of heaven, stilt grass, japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive. It physically blocks animals, consumes all the sunlight, and none of this shit supports native lepidoptera so it totally fucks up the food chain.

I wish I could just let it be and it would be fine, but that ship sailed a hundred years ago. The upside is in areas where there’s been active remediation the forest looks fucking fantastic.

It’s from the days when records were a lot harder to track down and someone could just die or disappear. After a certain amount of time the state just has to just call it or else the land’s ownership is locked up forever. That’s why the term of adverse possession is generally lower in the Western “frontier” states than the Eastern states, it was a lot more perilous to stake a claim there and there was a lot of turnover, with poor records. People have successfully adversely possessed abandoned houses in places like Vegas though, and more power to them.

It should be noted that trashing a house, setting fires, shitting in the corner, and inviting 30 of your friends to join you isn’t the way this is done. You have to “openly and notoriously” occupy the property, which basically means presenting yourself as the owner. So you live there, keep the place up, and most importantly pay the property taxes. Basically present yourself in such a way that everyone thinks you are the owner.

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she’s had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won’t run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven’t seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

I have a similar experience but I was driving a cargo van around delivering boxes of office paper. Didn’t even have a cellphone in those days, just a big list of deliveries and a map. I delivered to all kinds of cool places and learned a ton about the city.

I imagine that job is totally fucked up now. Twice as many deliveries on half the time, eye tracking cameras, and the driver is responsible for paying for gas and maintenance. But man, for that one summer in 2001 it was glorious.

I really like misr wat. If you can find the berbere spice mix and red lentils I highly recommend it.

Between deer pressure and Lymantria dispar I’m worried my woods will never see a mature oak again after the current over story dies out.

A couple friends of mine worked on the PS3 launch title “Lair” back in the day. Sony brass demanded, at the 11th hour, that they completely change the control scheme to use the braindead PS3 motion controller nonsense. The game wasn’t perfect but, before that decision, it was at least playable. Game launch was a disaster. San Diego studio closed. Execs who made that decision probably got promoted. They’ve always been like this.

Trucks can only be 80,000 pounds max and certain weight ratios per axle (varies by state and conditions). If you’re too heavy it could mean shifting the axles, obtaining a special permit, needing an escort, paying a fine, or even being stopped until you can sort it out. It has to do mostly with safety and damage to the roads AFAIK. Also it’s where they check all your paperwork and licenses.

Ohio and North Carolina have a license plate beef over the Wright Brothers. They lived and worked in Ohio (“Birthplace of Aviation”), but the first flight was in Kitty Hawk because of the steady winds (“First in Flight”).

Was it this thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

I paid $5 USD as a kid to play this thing at the mall, which was a fortune to me, but I loved stuff like this so much I thought it was worth it. The game was so shitty I couldn’t even tell wtf was going on or what I was supposed to do. Just randomly floating through a sea of polygons until the guy said time was up.

I’ve been fighting tree of heaven for years, and I’ve had the most success with triclopyr ester mixed with oil. The product I use is called Pathfinder. Can’t use it close to water though. But I’ve been able to take a couple totally infested acres down to just the occasional seedling. No hacking required, which is nice, just soak the trunk around the base in late summer.