“Nobody is completely useless… they can always serve as a bad example.”

-tipicaldiks father

“trusted bank”

lol

you wanna make more christians? Then feed all those poor kids and tell them it’s literally by the grace of jesus that they’re being fed. The prayer they want in schools will naturally follow. It isn’t just men who’s hearts can be reached via their stomachs…

am I the only one who likes to fantasize about doing something like this? I was 60 years old before I discovered stealth camping was so popular on youtube…

yeah it’s a holdover from the early days of movies and vaudeville… think Abbot & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Spanky and Alfalfa, the list goes on and on…

I had a love-hate relationship with Sears for a long, long time. We’d always shop around for larger purchases, and quite often Sears would end up getting the sale, and then I’d have to put up with the salesperson bugging me about opening a Sears card and buying an extended warranty, and then being obstinate about taking NO for an answer. Of course, this was back when Craftsman Tools and Kenmore Appliances tended to be better than average. Hell, about 6 months ago we finally replaced a Kenmore refrigerator that we bought in '99. It’s currently cooling beer in my bro-in-laws garage. I’m still using Craftsman tools I bought 30+ years ago.

… and saying “a plethora of” something is just saying “a a whole bunch of of” something…

Nah… he ain’t special. His audience now… they are some kind of special. I live deep in the bible belt and have to listen to them talk and hear their opinions way more than I care to. Sometimes I just want to scream insults and call them all a bunch of suckers. What gets me the most is it’s not just 10% of their incomes, it’s also full access to their children.

“Ask my Dad what time it is and he’ll tell you how to build a clock”

sitting under Schrödingers window…

Fuck homeowners insurance. I live in Florida. I’ve had State Farm for several years now, and it always felt like I was paying them extortion payments. Last year, we got a letter from them informing us that they had sent an inspector by our property, and listed off several things that we needed to do, and show them proof that we did them, within the next year or they were dropping our coverage. Some of these things were understandable, but others just seemed ridiculous. Like re-roofing or tearing down my shop in the back, when there is absolutely nothing wrong with it (I just built it seven years ago). It’s already pretty well-known that SF is no longer writing new policies in Florida, so I could see the writing on the wall. Even if we complied and got all that done, their premiums were going to go way up, and switching to another company would certainly cost us even more. The wife and I discussed it and said fuck it and fuck them and took the money out of my 401k and paid the place off. State Farm will not renew us here in about a month and a half when it expires, and we’ll carry on without. This house has been through every hurricane that’s hit the NW corner of Florida since 1958 and has so-far only lost some shingles. We’re on high enough ground that flooding isn’t a worry either, so fuck it… off we go, fingers crossed! I feel really fortunate that we were able to do that, because this place is so much more than just a house, and I’ll be DAMNED if we’re losing it because some bureaucratic requirement that I can no longer afford allows it to be repossessed.

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

I had a good friend who worked LP for wal-mart back in the '90’s. He loved that shit. He’d burn CD copies of the surveillance videos of his latest escapades fighting with and tackling shoplifters and bring them home for us to see. He was a master of “redirecting” someone running away from him into whatever nearby solid object he had available. I know those big red bollards that keep cars from driving thru the front doors claimed more than a couple of victims at his, um… urging. Entertaining stuff for sure.

yeah… I’d love to say that I’m an atheist because I was a child genius who saw right through the bullshit, but this is definitely a more likely explanation. The actual “hard thinking” came a fair bit later…

I knew some folks that used to own a “dented can” grocery store named Dirt Cheap Grocery. They would find all sorts of deals on entire lots of nearly expired canned and frozen goods and what ever various other things they could find through their various connections. There would always be something different, and they would have some pretty incredible deals sometimes. I remember buying an entire case of frozen hash brown patties for $5. There were six 5 lb bags in there. we split it up with my wife’s sisters families. Another time they had those Michelina’s frozen pasta dishes that had just expired for 10 for $1. My favorite deodorant scent had been recently discontinued and they just so happened to get a hold of a big display bin full of hundreds of them and sold them for $1 a piece. It took me several years before I finally ran out…

He’s a trustee and that car is probably a county jail vehicle and not a deputy’s cruiser. He probably just washed it too…

Seeing this has caused The Beatles “Nowhere Man” to start playing in my head…

Learned that lesson… I work developing e-learning, and all of our stuff was built in Flash. Our development and delivery systems also relied heavily on Flash components cooperating with HTML and Javascript. It was a monumental undertaking when we had to convert everything to HTML5. When our system was first developed and implemented, we couldn’t foresee the death of Flash, and as mobile devices became more ubiquitous, we never imagined anyone would want to take our training on those little bitty phone screens. Boy were we wrong. There was a time when I really wanted to tell Steve Jobs he could take his IOS and cram it up his cram-hole…