Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting you take a hose to your indoor units. How on Earth you would contain the splashback is anyone’s guess.
Use your hose on the outdoor unit. I use compressed air on the indoor ones, like OP. You can buy the cleaning foam stuff, too. Probably from whoever made your split system, in fact. I’ve never found it to be necessary, though.
You’ve never paid for WinRAR because you’re cheap. I’ve never paid for WinRAR because I know 7-Zip exists.
We are not the same.
I sure am. (Also, that is a fuckton of fake Swiss Army Knives. I kind of approve, especially including the loose busted off scale on the platter, there.)
Story time. In fact, I have told this story before. It’s got two acts.
Act 1: Our local farmer’s market/flea market had a stall that sold, among other sundry low grade imported Chinese crap, a wide variety of low grade Chinese knives. I bought a few from them over the years for the sheer novelty value – you know how it is – but one day I noticed their stall was completely barren of knives. I asked the owner what was up.
He told me he (or rather, his son) got busted via some kind of sting operation by the local cops selling a knife to a minor, so they’d been banned from selling knives and weapons altogether. What was he to do, he told me, with all of the crap he had left over he couldn’t sell.
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” I said. And I did.
I wound up with a Samsonite suitcase half filled with bargain basement knives. It took me years to get rid of them via giving them all away, and then breaking the rest. Me and my friends would go camping with bandoliers of 20 identical knives each. We’d use cheap folders for throwing knives, baton firewood with fake Swiss Armies, and lashed brass-and-plastic bejeweled Arabian daggers to the ends of sticks to use as fishing spears. The whole lot. It was a riot.
Act 2: At that time I was working in IT at this engineering firm. This is relevant because one day we had a prolonged power outage, and I can tell you there’s very little in this world that’s as useless as a bunch of engineers who can’t use their computers. While we were waiting around in the semi-darkness waiting for the lights to come back on, I was hanging out in our accountant’s office chatting (because we got along, and also not least of which because her office had a big window in it whereas my IT dungeon had none), and idly flipping my balisong/butterfly knife around. As you do.
Well, as I do, anyway. It’s not like I’m not a known quantity in that regard. Both here and there.
Some background on this, we had a new accountant in training who nobody liked because she was a little proto-Karen and also not very competent at anything. We suspect her CV was rather embellished. Even the boss didn’t like her and he was the one who made the decision to hire her in the first place. She came in to ask our head accountant some question or other, damned if I was paying attention to what it was, and left. No incident, didn’t speak to me, didn’t even look at me.
Well, here comes the next day and I get a calling on the carpet from the boss because this nutty woman complained that I was “brandishing a knife in a threatening manner and she felt unsafe,” or some shit.
I told my boss two things in no uncertain terms, the first of which was I was standing behind our head accountant’s desk while this chick came no nearer than the doorframe, so I’m like 20 feet away with a significant quantity of office furniture between us. And more to the point, we’re all adults here. All you gotta do is say, “Hey. Why don’t you put that fuckin’ blade away, man?” No problem. But she didn’t say anything about it to me.
Nothing really came of this and she got fired a couple of weeks later for gross incompetence and, I suspect, getting on the boss’ nerves.
The punch line: This announcement came at our weekly meeting where every single individual in our little office was crammed in the conference room. “Awesome,” says I, “To celebrate I have some party favors for everyone.”
Among my suitcase of shitty knives I had a ridiculous bevy of crappy balisongs, which I’d dutifully sorted out and completely filled an empty box from an Allen Bradley contactor assembly with them. I must have had fifty of the damn things. I plonked it on the conference room table and told everyone in the company to take one. Hell, our outgoing employee can have two, for good luck.
Now we had a level playing field – everyone has a butterfly knife. (Glassdoor did not exist at the time, and in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t.)
Anyway, I can now tell you there are in fact two contenders for the most useless thing in the world. The second one is a building full of engineers, all armed with balisong knives, none of whom really know how to use them.
For instance, just wait until you get a load of what astronomers consider to be metals.
You’re in the same boat as me, except swap 70’s for 1920’s. I have to tear down all the plaster – not drywall, actual literal plaster, on lath – to get at the ground floor wiring. I decided it’s fine where it is for now.
You used the magic word, “modern.”
Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn’t exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920’s or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn’t have all of our current appliances, TV’s, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.
So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn’t accomplish anything, especially in OP’s case.
My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.
I would not buy a Razer if they paid me $120. Do yourself a favor and don’t. I’ve owned a fair few Razer products in my life and they’ve all been overpriced flimsy pieces of shit, and when they break Razer will do anything and everything to weasel out of doing anything about it. As a matter of fact, the last Razer product I had break on me was a Blackwidow Chroma, and not coincidentally it was the last Razer product I will ever buy. I think it made it a whole nine months.
Anyway, I was in this very boat not too long ago and settled on the Glorious GMMK 3 100% for my wife, which is indeed available in white. It’s $140 USD list price, so I don’t know how that fits your budget. She got some nice cat themed keycaps for it and she’s having a ball. You can get it with various keyswitch options prepopulated, or even swap the switches around as you see fit. She got the “Fox” linear keyswitches which are not short throw but are definitely quiet.
I use a Logitech G512 Carbon at the moment, myself. It’s not white but it has otherwise been bomber for over a year.
This is a sterling endorsement for me. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but I type a lot. Not just bickering in the comments, but for work as well. I am not rough on keyboards and mine never moves from this spot, but I will tickle the keyswitches on any 'board a couple of million times in short order and I probably find the service limit on all the keys that are not W, A, S, or D more quickly than the average penguin.
What part of what I wrote expressed that I was “proud” of it?
I’m just telling you how people behave. I don’t have any control over anybody but myself. For what it’s worth, I’m probably one of the six people in this damn country who doesn’t drive like a nut.
For what it’s worth, the I-95 corridor from about Richmond to Boston, particularly the DC-Balitmore-Philly-NYC part, is probably one of the worst stretches of highway in the country for generalized insanity and phenomenally poor driving skills on display from everyone involved. It is easily my most hated patch of asphalt in the universe.
A small but measurable improvement would be made to the world instantly if every person in DC and Baltimore had their licenses revoked. Although if experience is any judge, that still wouldn’t prevent any of them from still all being on 95, three inches from the car in front and raging over “only” being able to do 80 in a 55.
Practically no one actually drives at or below the speed limit in the US, especially on freeways. Whether or not you personally like this doesn’t matter – it’s just how it is.
You’re welcome to try it, but speeding is so pervasive in our culture that this will single you out and Ruggedly Individualistic Americans will get frothingly butthurt at you over it. Prepare to get tailgated, cut off, bullied out of your lane, stuff thrown at your car, etc.
Because it can be enforced selectively, and if everyone is guilty of something, anyone in particular can be harassed under the cover of a legal justification.
Well, there is such a thing as “Fashwave” for some damn fool reason.
I had to explain the concept of Vaporwave to my father, a musician who was active throughout the '80’s. I told him it’s zeitgeist for an era that never actually happened. So I think this hits the nail on the head.
There are similar, albeit less ᴀ ᴇ s ᴛ ʜ ᴇ ᴛ ɪ ᴄ, notions for other decades as well.
Everyone thinks the 1950’s were a nonstop sock hop and an episode of Leave it to Beaver.
Everything thinks the entirety of the 1960’s was Woodstock.
Everything in the 1970’s was brown and orange, or wood grain, and had a ridiculous mustache on it.
…But then, everything that everyone knows happened didn’t actually happen in the decade everyone thinks it did anyway.
Your same source also includes charts of reports versus clearance rates (i.e. arrests and prosecution) of all types of crime categories.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
Compare how high the grey line (prosecutions) is compared to the reports (blue line) for:
Versus, say,
The clearance rate for shoplifting is higher than rape.
More shoplifters. Get prosecuted. Than rapists. What does that tell you about priorities? Think about it.
It is always Friday.
basing this on not much more than your particular set of prejudice.
Wow, just like the police! What a coincidence.
Because this was many, many years ago and back then I was naive and thought contributing might have actually made the world a safer and better place. I know better now thanks to experience.
The issue is that it’s a case of the boy who cried wolf. Yes, there likely are “actual” crimes out there that need to be solved. But they are in the tiny minority of what the police pursue and prosecute overall compared to petty drug bullshit, harassing people for existing while black, writing speeding tickets, busting homeless people, and jailing people who need to steal to eat on behalf of megacorporations – crimes for which the police will show up for near instantly when called, whereas if someone victimizes you, Mr. private citizen, they generally can’t be bothered.
That’s how the cops operate here. I know how the cops work here because I live here. I don’t know what to tell you about where you might happen to live, but I’ll bet you if you look at it hard it isn’t that much different.
…And even if you are not the perpetrator, that doesn’t matter. The police are pressured to arrest somebody. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter to them who it is, and the perp got a way while in the meantime you’re standing right here. It’s much easier to harass you.
Do you have warrants? Are you sure? Do you have parking tickets? Is your name similar to someone else they want for something else? Do they smell weed? Are you black? Etc., etc., etc.
It’s not worth it. Don’t interact.
I did not testify because the accused took a plea deal, which the state kindly did not inform me of (although they wasted in total about $4 in postage threatening to arrest me for no reason) until the day of the trial after it had been rescheduled for the fourth time. The charges were indeed dumb shit. Nobody got murdered.
It has nothing to do with my busy life, it has to do with not enabling bad behavior from the police and state. The police demand respect but give none in return. You do you, but that doesn’t fly on my doorstep.
I will not be bullied. By anyone.
Yeah. Just prepare for dust. Wear a mask, open a window…