francis_t_catte

ah yes, I guess because the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster happened in Canada, the US shouldn't bother learning anything from it.

Good. Housing should not be treated as an investment.

hahah, yeah, like we're gonna find out there's a piece of alien technology buried inside charon or something.

doesn't matter if there's no LTE (or even 4G) out there.

I was paying in excess of $112 US a month for the priviledge of DSL that had about a 60% uptime on fair weather days, and 0% uptime on rainy days.

I also forgot to mentiom how my DSL speeds got that low; one section of telephone wire on my rural street had literally no usable pairs left (they had all corroded into nothing). the linesman had to reroute our phone line about 1.5miles out of the way in the opposite direction of the CO to get us reconnected. after that, if you picked up the phone, all you'd hear was a ghostly whistling instead of a dial-tone. the only reason I still had a 'working' DSL connection was from modifying the firmware on my D-Link DSL modem to do horrifying things. :|

LOL, try Verizon-level of rural infrastructure neglect. I paid for a guaranteed 3,300Kb/s down, 768Kb/s up. I usually got 900Kb/s down, and 150Kb/s up. to quote the linesman who had the shit job of patching together the literal 1930's(!) phone lines," I was told by corporate to absolutely not replace any lines unless they're taken out by a drunk or a tree. the cable on that spool I pull behind my truck is going to go white from sunfade long before I ever get to use it."

I non-jokingly asked him which tree I should cut to 'accidentally' nail the worst sections of wire. his response was essentially 'they're all so bad you'd need to cut down a lot of trees'. Verizon DSL was my only choice beside Hughesnet or dial-up. I ended up moving instead.

Two things about Lead-Acid or AGM based UPS's (regardless of UPS topology or design):

1.) check your battery health annually and replace bi-annually. I don't care about the battery quality, an always-online UPS is very hard on lead-based batteries. they're float charged basically all the time, and deep discharged during outages. if you're in a power failure prone area (i.e. more than one per year), invest in a generator too in order to avoid stressing the batteries with full discharges.

2.) check the battery float voltage with an actual volt meter to make sure the UPS is calibrated correctly. APC UPS's in particular, prior to and post the Schneider Electric buyout, had a lot of really poor cost-savings decisions applied to their enginnering. this included using a carbon film resistor-based voltage divider to measure the battery voltage on much (or all) of their Back-UPS and Smart-UPS range. if you don't know anything about resistor technology, carbon film resistors (especially cheap ones!) change in value due to temperature, humidity, and age, usually drifting up in resistance. this is a bad thing when you need a stable voltage reading...

oh and on APC's cost cutting measures; there's the fun time they stopped using nickel plating on the bus bars in their Symmetra UPS line. they switched to tin plating instead. apparently none of them had heard of tin whiskers. :)

I use OpenCore, on my 2010 27" iMac of all things. Needed to enable target display mode and native brightness control on the new K610m GPU. So in essence, my actual Macintosh is now a Hackintosh in Apple's eyes.

If you have a 2010 or 2011 iMac with a dead GPU btw, check out this thread on the MacRumors forum: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-imac-graphics-card...

Hahahah, oh man, one of Drach's best. Highly recommend his episode on what to do if your ship is sinking/exploding/disagreeable too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbX8rJMI9GM

btw, did anyone else see Japanese torpedo boats???

Firefox had blocked the HTML5 canvas data request for me, which broke the page as you outlined. Once I allowed the canvas data request, and refreshed, the page eventually loaded correctly.

It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was:

  $945,000 in salary
  $276,474 in bonuses
  $31,874 in nontaxable benefits
  $5.8 million in deferred compensation

plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :|

p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)