If I was a Boeing shareholder, I would be mad as a wet hen right about now. Amid a string of phenomenally bad business decisions that culminated in the flying [sorta] tin can that is the 737 MAX, Boeing is handed an aerospace companies PR wet dream: transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. They then proceeded to drop that softball so hard that the thud could probably be heard from Mars.

Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?

They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.

And the persistent tiredness.

Presbyterians don’t have canonized saints, the way Catholics do. But if they did, Fred Rogers would probably be at the top of the list.

If you had a 1974 Dodge Monaco, preferably the police cruiser version, you could jump that drawbridge with no problem.

What kind of bullshit numbers are these? I live Arkansas. If you make $40,928 and live here, you are poor. Not even close to “middle class.”

Yesterday, I asked it to help me create a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table. The answers it gave were completely wrong. Each time, I would tell it the error that Excel was displaying and it would respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t use that function there for [x] reasons.”

So it knows the reason why a combination of DAX functions won’t work but recommends them anyways. That’s real fucking useful.

I had a client years ago who was in his late 80’s. He grew up on a farm in Indiana and I remember him telling me a story about threshing grain. He was just a kid in the 1920’s, shoveling coal into the firebox on a big Case steam engine that they took from farm to farm. He said they would try to stay near a creek whenever they could so they had a water source for the engine. It was hard, hot work. He said there was a “big German fella” who worked on their crew who never drank anything but hot black coffee, something which fascinated him as kid.

It was an interesting story to listen to. Such a mundane activity but the fact that it’s no longer a thing and only existed in the memory of someone who remembered doing it made it kind of fascinating

I have a recording of interviews I did with all my living grandparents for a school project when I was a kid. One thing that stood out was the level of abject poverty they experienced. They were teenagers during the great depression and it definitely had a major impact on all of them.

I don’t know.

This is generally known as “land contract/contract for deed”. People do it all the time. As suggested in another comment, you should consult an attorney. If either you or your mom is hesitant to do that, you should ask yourself what happens to your house and mortgage if (God forbid) your mom were to die? Don’t wait to find out. Get an attorney and make sure that it’s all ironed out in advance.

Just an expensive timer.

There’s a reason Allstate is the most frequently sued auto insurance provider. They will give you the run around all day long until you lawyer up and then it’s, “Oh! Ha ha! Sowwy! We bunch of dum dums who no can read and no use kumputers good. We no know what happened! Here big check for you go away now.”

But for every person who lawyers up, there are probably 20 more who don’t. Fuck Allstate.

No, the real one is standing up.

Door opener fluid. It’s a canister of fluid that you have to pump into the door to open it in an emergency. Then you get a replacement canister from the dealer for $150. I recently found out that that’s what passes for a “spare tire” anymore.

During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.

Linqpad is awesome! Sadly, I don’t get to code in C# for my day job anymore but I still use Linqpad all the time. It’s main purpose originally was for building and testing Entity Framework SQL queries but it will run basically any C# code you plug into it on the fly.

Now, I primarily use it for testing out design concepts that end up getting translated to TypeScript. I also use it for validating the hot garbage that Elastic Search is serving up on a given day so I can send a nifty little report (Linqpad easily generates and exports tabular data) to the data team to show them that it is in fact their Elastic Search template that is an error laden dumpster fire rather than my code.

If you’re familiar with C#, F#, or Visual Basic, Linqpad is an incredibly valuable tool.

I read an interview in the Democrat-Gazette with the daughter of Ms. Taylor, one of the victims. There are no words to describe how awful it must be to have one of your friends or family members just minding their own business only to be shot to death while checking out at the grocery store.

Ms. Taylor’s daughter expressed frustrations that she wasn’t there because she thought she could have done something, implying that she would have shot the assailant. In her defense, the woman’s grieving and people who are in that state tend to think and say all kinds of stuff.

But here’s the thing, the “good guy with a gun” mantra is idealistic at best. Even if you are a “good guy” with a gun, odds are that by the time you can even respond, the “bad guy” has already killed someone. Not to mention that in that very panic filled moment, there’s a much higher chance that you might accidentally shoot another bystander.

“Good guy with a gun” is not a solution to “bad guy with a gun” because no amount of bullets fired by “good guys” will bring back the people who are already dead.

At a former job, there was one – and only one – lady in customer service who would actually reboot and do all the basic troubleshooting steps before calling IT. If we heard from her, we knew something was legitimately broken. Oddly enough, I’m married to her now. Best decision I ever made.