"It's so great! It automatically writes the [wrong] answers to everything for you!"
Yesterday my toddler comes up to me and says, "daddy, build block tower?" So I tell her to go get her blocks, which she does. We built a block tower, knocked it down (which makes her giggle), built it again, etc.
A decade ago I was in a horribly toxic marriage and honestly didn't think I would ever have kids. Today, I have an awesome wife and three kids. I love all of them and I enjoy getting to spend time with them. I never would have imagined myself being where I am today and I am reminded often that I am a very lucky man.
"Why is Jesus always preaching liberal talking points!? And those prophets in the old testament are getting all pissed about people not taking care of the poor. That sounds like SoCiAlIsM!"
Here's my experience. I make $180,000/yr. Family of five. Wife stays home and has a consulting gig she does when she wants to. We live in Northwest Arkansas. Far from the most expensive place in the country but experiencing massive growth and becoming increasingly expensive. Our only debt is our mortgage and a loan on our minivan. We own our other vehicle outright.
We live reasonably comfortably. Definitely not extravagant. We're also tightwads and I stay in top of our finances. We paid $345k for a fixer-upper home. Average home price in our area for similar homes is probably closer to $450k. It's liveable but ultimately needs a full remodel. I figure it will take about 5 years doing most of it myself. If I had to pay contractors to do all of it, it would not be feasible. Most of them are so busy they don't even give you the time of day anyways.
Material costs are insane. I mean absolutely bonkers. I would guess I'm spending double what I did for the same materials I used for my last remodel project on our previous house, four years ago. The five year plan is partly because we can't afford to go any faster.
If I made $100k/yr, we would never have bought a house. Wouldn't have even been able to save enough for the down payment. I also seriously doubt we would have had our last two kids.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm pretty fortunate. I have things I worry about but money isn't one of them. I know where my next paycheck is coming from and if it doesn't come, we have enough money in the bank to get by for a while.
The same cannot be said for the vast majority of Americans, even ones making $100k/yr, which is not nearly as good a salary as it used to be.
When every restaurant and bar you went into reeked of stale cigarette smoke. Yuck.
Reviewing large PR's is hard. Breaking apart large PR's that are all related changes into smaller PR's is also hard.
If I submit a big one, I usually leave notes in the description explaining where the "core" changes are and what they are trying to accomplish. The goal being to give the reviewers a good starting point.
I also like to unit test the shit out of my code which helps a lot. The main issue there is getting management to embrace unit tests. Unit tests often double the effort up front but save tons of time in the long run. We're going to spend the time one way or the other. Better to do it up front when it's "cheaper" because charging it to the tech debt credit card racks up lots of expensive interest.
A Mose is a Mose.
A rose is a rose.
A toes is a toes.
Whoop-dee-doo-dee-doo-doo!
Fancy title for the developer that gets yelled at when the CI pipeline is broken. Also a good chance they are the one that broke it.
It's like Wyle E Coyote finally gets an ACME rocket that's fast enough to catch the road runner, only to go zooming by the roadrunner on an upward trajectory headed for the moon.
"Can we get a show show of hands just to confirm we're ready to move forward?"
Me Everyone, who wasn't listening and doesn't have a clue what they were just talking about: ✋
I used to have a semi-outdoor cat. She could come and go from the basement through a cat door. That little shit knew where my bedroom was and every morning she would climb up on the shelf as high as possible and meow loudly as if to say, "Hey! Hey Dumbass! Are you gonna feed me or what!? Heeeeyyyy!"
You gotta remember that some of these people are the same ones who complained that their Southern Baptist pastors were preaching "liberal talking points" (aka, things Jesus said). If teachers actually started reading the Bible in class, these same people would probably start calling it "liberal propaganda" and trying to ban it.
I'm just saying, the irony is so thick that you'd need a rock drill and some dynamite to cut it in half.
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.
"Daily Pay" Is Just Another Way to Keep You Living Paycheck to Paycheck
I've seen several big chains, mostly gas stations and fast food, advertising "daily pay". If you are worried about how you're going to make it until your next paycheck, whether it's tomorrow or next month, or you have no savings to cover any sort of emergency, then you live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Don't be fooled. "Daily Pay" is just a shitty attempt at avoiding paying better wages by giving you your shitty wages faster. It's designed to benefit the company, not you.
Edit: If you don't get to hold on to your pay check long enough to earn interest on any of it, then getting paid daily is not benefiting you.
Sewer Vent Through Middle of Standing Seam
Recently had a new standing seam metal roof installed. Roofers could talk the talk but I was not impressed with the quality of work overall. My main complaint is that they installed the roof so that most of the sewer vents go right through the middle of a seam. The boots are clearly not designed to accommodate this and they've succeeded in creating more work for me in the future; which is what I was trying to to avoid by spending the extra money to upgrade to metal. The boots are going to leak. In fact, they already have.
I was pretty pissed about this initially and told the owner of the roofing company that if they had bothered to tell me this was going to happen, I would have moved the damned vent pipes myself if they weren't going to. The right fix would be to replace the panels and move the vent pipes but I have a feeling getting them to do that is going to be difficult if not impossible.
Is there a boot that's designed for this kind of install or a better way of sealing these? Or, am I going to be stuck checking and resealing them every couple of years?
Chimney Gaps
Edit: Resolved. Decorative brick is actually a chase and doesn't need to be completely filled in. Thanks to @[email protected] for advice on rebuilding the crown.
I have a double sided wood burning brick fireplace which is honestly just a big collection of code violations. It was converted to propane shortly after -- I'm assuming -- the people who built the house 50 years ago discovered that it smoked badly in the house. I fixed all the major issues with the firebox and smoke chamber and converted it back to wood burning this past winter.
I had a new steel cap fabricated to replace the old brick and concrete cap, which I removed. During this process, I discovered that the brick is basically just a facade. There are huge gaps on either side of the flues which are encased in 4" cinder blocks. My understanding of fire code (at least in the US) for masonry fireplaces is that the material surrounding the flue is not permitted to have any gaps in it. NFPA says all gaps in the brick should be filled with mortar. However, I'm not sure what to do with a gap this large. I'm not sure if filling it with mortar or concrete is an option. I've considered installing a steel flue liner but those are expensive and there are two flues. I'm also concerned about steel liners changing the draft characteristics since the chimney is on the short side.
If money were no object, I would tear this thing out and put a more efficient steel insert in but that is cost prohibitive.
Anyone have any experience fixing something like this?
Extra Thick Bread Slice
Found a piece of bread in a store bought loaf that didn't get sliced properly.
Home Ownership is Just One Persons Fight Against Water
Had a nice little foundation leak during the last rain storm. Installed a drain line last fall to divert two downspouts and front walkway run off away from the house which helped a lot. Front walkway and a big retaining wall next to it ultimately need to be removed and reinstalled with proper grading and drainage. That's going to be a huge and expensive project so for now I'm just replacing all the worn out concrete sealant and hoping for the best.
Self Host Pen Testing
Anyone have any good external pen testing tools that you've used on your self hosted setup? Mine is pretty secure overall but I would like to be able to scan the WAN for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations just to make sure I haven't missed anything.
NFC Championship
Well shit. I was really hoping Detroit would go all the way. And that's something I never would have expected to say.
Variable Position Damper Control
I have to preface by saying that this isn't really related to Home Assistant. I can't find a more generic home automation community on Lemmy and I figured someone here might have some experience with this so I hope is post is allowed.
I have a large masonry fireplace that I'm fixing some issues with. It has a fresh air intake that I'm venting outside the house. Code says the air intake also has to have a damper which can be closed to prevent the fire from burning out of control.
I'm planning to use a 24 volt power open/power close damper. I want to be able to modulate it with a wall control where it can be set in increments somewhere between 0% and 100% open. I'm sure I could engineer a creative solution but I wanted to see if anyone else had a simpler way of accomplishing this first.
Neurodiversity In The Workplace
I appreciate the fact that some employers recognize that some of their employees struggle with cognitive disorders. But, asking someone with ADHD to click through a very boring presentation about neurodiversity is almost peak irony. Not to mention, trying to distill such complex disorders down to one sentence is practically guaranteed to fail.
Props for trying I guess.
No More Medication Breaks for Me
I've been taking 70 mg Vyvanse for years. It generally works well. Although there are occasional days where I feel like maybe it's not quite as effective as it should be. That probably has more to do with outside stressors and diet than anything. By this point I've built up some tolerance to it. I know a lot of other people try to take breaks from their stimulus occasionally to try to help with the tolerance.
Well, I've learned that that is not for me. I tried taking breaks two Saturdays in a row and holy shit, the anvil-on-chest anxiety is more than I can take. Feelings of dread that I have not felt in years come bubbling right back to the surface.
This is something that I have, in the past, tried to explain to parents who are apprehensive about putting their kids on stimulants. For me, the worst part about ADHD isn't the poor short-term memory, it isn't the inattentiveness, It isn't even the "inner restlessness". It's the emotional dysregulation. The fact that it makes me feel anxious and depressed all the time and I can't just shrug it off. It's like a dark cloud hanging over you and no matter how much you wish it would go away, it never does. And, if you don't want your kid to kill themselves or develop substance abuse issues, then you need to try to help them get a handle on it while you can.
It took me 28 years and becoming a borderline alcoholic to get the help that I needed. I guess if I didn't get anything else out of my experiment, I got a reminder to not take what I have for granted. Getting my meds dialed in dramatically improved my quality of life.
Milling Cedar Log
Ripping a board that I milled from a cedar I recently cut down. Made the initial cuts with a chainsaw and used the Craftsman to straighten it out. There are honestly better tools for this but it's a one time project I'm working with what I've got.
Personal Accounting Software
I'm a long time PocketSmith user currently switching to Quicken. PocketSmith is a decent product but has some glaring issues that don't seem to be on their radar and I feel like my finances have honestly become too complex for PocketSmith's simplistic philosophy.
Quicken is the 800 lb. gorilla of personal finance and has been for decades. It's fairly complex but also way more feature rich than most personal finance software. My main complaints about it are that it's a (mostly) Windows Desktop only platform and that handling attachments is more time consuming than PocketSmith. In reality, PocketSmith doesn't handle attachments that well. I just built an app to help streamline the process which is not an option with Quicken.
We run a couple small businesses along with our personal finances, which Quicken accommodates just fine.
What personal Accounting software are you using and what do you like about it?