rcurry

I went and cried in a corner.

I used to love REI because of their return policy. But I guess they had to stop doing it because you’d get these jerks that would buy a pair of climbing shoes, use them for a season and then come back and demand a new pair. It kind of pissed me off.

There’s a really fun movie out there called Special. It’s about an everyday Joe who participates in a clinical drug trial and starts to think he has super powers. He crafts a super hero outfit but he puts the drug company’s logo on his back and so the big drug company sends hitmen out to assassinate the poor guy because he’s bringing them all sorts of bad publicity. I guess I’d characterize it as Limitless meets Kickass. I love movies like that where the whole genre is turned completely upside down.

What was so impressive about all that was the level of technical ingenuity that went into it. I thought this one was pretty cool as well:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

If my memory is still holding up I think they also pulled off another passive bug in a State Department conference room one time but I can’t remember enough about it to find a reference online. It was the same deal though - short piece of wire attenuated to a certain frequency and they’d illuminate it with a microwave truck parked on the street.

There’s some weird stuff out there with beans and nuts. One time my wife and I were moving from WI to NY and we stopped in a Denny’s to get some food. We order a couple of breakfast skillets and when she takes a bite of one she instantly spits the food onto her plate. I was freaked out because I’d never seen her do something like that in public. I’m like “What’s wrong?” and she says “This is poisoned. It’s contaminated.” I didn’t believe her so I took a bite of her food and it was fine. Then she drinks some water and spits that up as well. I try it and there’s nothing wrong.

Long story short I freak out and call her doctor, worrying she might be having a stroke or some other weird issue. The doctor can’t help, just says “Schedule an appointment.” So I call my old man who is an immunologist and he’s like “Oh wow, she can’t eat food? Says the water tastes like metal? That’s weird, let me think about this.” Then a minute later he’s like goddamned House MD, he says “you guys are moving right? Did you clean out your fridge?” I’m like “Well, yeah, of course.” So he says “Your wife is into baking right? You’ve got all kinds of shit in your fridge. When you were cleaning it out you didn’t happen to eat any pine nuts, did you?” I thought about it and then I was like “Yeah, we had a bag of frozen pine nuts and we both ate a handful of them.” He laughs and says “She’s got Pine Mouth, it’s a weird olfactory reaction to certain types of pine nuts. She’ll be okay in a day or so.”

I’d never heard of Pine Mouth before. And I guess neither had our doctor. Thankfully we had a drunk seventy five year old immunologist on tap.

Your comment reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie The Fly, when the reporter asks him how he could have built the teleportation system by himself and he says:

“I don’t work alone. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I don’t even understand. I’m really a systems management guy, I farm bits and pieces out to people who are much more brilliant than I am. But none of them really knows what the project is. I say build me a laser this, or a molecular analyzer that - and they do, I just stick them all together.”

I recently had to build an e-commerce portal for our customers to be able to order 3D printed parts on-demand. Did I write my own algorithms for rendering 3MF files and calculating the volume of a mesh? Nope, I just used three.js and a mesh volume algorithm I found on Stack Overflow and problem solved.

I was one of those whiny kids, lol. Always the high point of our cross country trips in the old ‘72 Impala when my dad would get tired of driving and say “What do you kids think about hitting a HoJo’s?”

I came up with a fun game that’s along the line of your snarky movie game. I call it Mixed Up Movies, where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one. You write the description and provide the real actors and the other folks have to guess the name of the movie.

For instance:

Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.

Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?

Dirty Harry and The Hendersons

Or:

A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.

Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?

The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.

Or:

The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.

Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?

Casino Royale With Cheese

Exactly. The firm I work for does a lot of 3D printing using the HP Multijet Fusion systems and we do not require custom support structures for anything. As you point out, the powder bed is the support.

The only thing I really miss about the Navy was the night sky when you’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You don’t see stars, you see galaxies, it’s truly breathtaking when there is no light pollution from anywhere.

I just got tired of them putting the same movies in every damned category:

Horror? How about The Truman Show!

Sci-Fi? How about The Truman Show!

Action? How about The Truman Show!

Adventure? How about The Truman Show!

Finally I just unsubscribed.

I got exposed to TCL/TK while working for a National Lab a long time ago. At the time I was a hardcore C++ developer and after a week or two with TCL/Tk I was almost dying laughing about how easy it was to build really cool applications. I truly miss working with that platform.

Yeah, it was JC.

Wisconsin.

I was just being glib, but we all figured it was from exposure to one or more pesticides:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480006/

But who knows, could just be coincidence.

There are so many terrifying stories about stuff like this. I don’t remember the site, but there’s a website where you can research superfund allocations and it’s really frightening to learn that the parking lot two hundred meters from where you work in NJ was the site of a massive insecticide dump that used to spontaneously ignite.

This hits home for me. For years a few buddies of mine and I would go out coyote hunting in farm fields. In the mornings, there would be a lot of dew and our pant legs would be soaked through from walking through freshly treated corn fields. All five of us came down with various thyroid disorders - nothing as scary as brain cancer, but I was telling my buddy that I had thyroid cancer and he was like “Weird, me too, and my son and a couple of other guys have it too.” Monsanto for the win I guess.

Reminds me of the time a group I worked for at a National Lab decided to call the root folder for their project “core”. I bet you can’t guess what filename the backup scripts were configured to ignore…

I used to be an avid skydiver, this article reminds me of the time my buddy Todd and his friend Jason jumped out of a jet, naked, at the World Freefall Convention in Illinois. They underestimated how bad the spot was going to be and ended up having to walk back like four miles wrapped in nothing but their parachutes. Ha ha. RIP Todd Jacobsen, he died after a bad landing back in 2008.

They were actually quite nice about it, unblocked my card and down the road I went. Good for them, but they should have terminated that guy because he really did get so obnoxious that I actually thought I was taking to a scammer.

It gets even weirder when your bank acts like a scammer. A few weeks ago I was trying to help my wife add her USBank credit card to Apple Pay and Apple Pay said I needed to call this number to finish setting up the card. So I call the number and the guy is very friendly and asks me for a bunch of identity verification details, which I provide to him, but then he asks us to send a code back that will be coming over text messaging - yes, I initiated the phone call, but I suddenly realize that the number Apple directed me to was not the same number on my USBank card. Being a bit paranoid I tell the guy “Look, nothing personal but I get nervous when people ask for a verification code to be read back to them, I’m just going to call the regular number and go from there, okay?” Instead of being friendly, this guy suddenly gets in my face and is like “Oh, you’ll give me all this other info but won’t read that code back to me? I’m Fraud Prevention dude, good luck getting this done calling the main number. Oh, and just for this I’m putting a block on your card.” I hung up immediately and called US Bank’s main number and asked to talk to a supervisor - sure as hell, it turns out the guy I had talked to did work in their fraud prevention department and actually had retaliated against me by locking my credit card. It was the most incredibly ugly thing I’ve ever seen from a customer service department.

Honestly, the answer is no here. Putin can make as many threats as he likes, but he is surrounded by fabulously wealthy insiders who have absolutely no interest in being fried to a crisp. They’re more worried about losing their reservations at Dorsia right now, and push comes to shove they’ll take the old man out back and pop him.

They probably can’t even find the keys to their missiles in the first place.

“Damn it, they’re supposed to be on the hook next to the fridge - I told you never to move those!”

“Did you check the junk drawer honey? What about in the garage with your fishing stuff?”

And I’m right there with you.

What I mean is that it will be a thousand times worse.

I’m sure the US and allies will make that happen. This isn’t Afghanistan - even if the Russians occupy the Ukraine we will be supplying the insurgent forces with technology that will make the Russians feel like they’re fighting the Martians.

A rifle behind every blade of grass, as the saying goes.

It’s tough to claw your way up when your dreams have been scuttled and you’re just a shell of your former self. If trading barbs with an urchin wasn’t beneath my morays, I’d gladly sink to your level. But it takes more than reading the Dredge Report to beat my mastery of current affairs.

A new life awaits you, in the off-world colonies - the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!

This reminds me of the first year I lived in New Mexico, I had moved there from Wisconsin and one night the TV warns us of an “Emergency Weather Alert”, so I look to my wife and, fearing the worst, I say “maybe we should go stock up on some groceries.” A few minutes later we learn that they are expecting up to an inch of snowfall in the next five hours. We almost died laughing about it.