Doomsday preppers

There are two kinds of people who own a pressure canner - people who enjoy making preserves and fucking crazy people.

Tame compared to some of the other stories here but the Motel 6 across from Disney World in Florida when I was visiting for a high school trip. I noticed that the soles of my feet were all black and assumed it was because I’d been walking around in the parking lot in bare feet. Turns out it was actually the carpet in the room. I wore my shoes in the room for the rest of my stay.

Fires the entire R&D department

Changes the company slogan to “Innovate”

When I’m thawing meat, I usually put a sheet pan under it to catch any leaks or drips.

It’s an image of a scene from the Clue movie:

Col. Mustard: Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?

Wadsworth: You don’t need any help from me, Sir.

Under the Influence is Terry O’Reilly’s show and he’s usually really good about sourcing things. Pretty disappointing, honestly.

Yep. Exactly right.

In North America, Christmas lights usually have a plug end and a socket end so you can connect multiple strings together in series.

If you accidentally put the plug end at the top of the tree, it might be tempting to try to buy or make one of these cords so you don’t have to take the lights down and redo them.

It is as dumb and lazy as it sounds.

I’m not sure if this is universally true but I’ve never seen a fully electric vehicle that uses motor oil. Hybrid vehicles with an internal combustion engine and an electric drive train would still need it, of course.

Not having to take my car for oil changes is bliss.

Kia and Hyundai are both Korean and sell EVs in Canada.

The OG Nazis were actually bozos too, they just had very good propaganda. So good that you’re still seeing the effects today.

I’ve worked in bash. I’ve written tools in bash that ended up having a significant lifetime.

Personally, you lost me at

reading from the database

Database drivers exist for a reason. Shelling out to a database cli interface is full of potential pitfalls that don’t exist in any language with a programmatic interface to the database. Dealing with query parameterization in bash sounds un-fun and that’s table stakes, security-wise.

Same with making web API calls. Error handling in particular is going to require a lot of boilerplate code that you would get mostly for free in languages like Python or Ruby or Go, especially if there’s an existing library that wraps the API you want to use in native language constructs.

I worked with dedupe products at a previous job. Media files generally deduplicate poorly.

At my last job, one of the presales guys was terminated instantly when he tried to expense a client meeting at a strip club.

Postgres has JSON operators you can put into expressions, including WHERE clauses. You can write queries like:

SELECT item_details->‘manufacturer’->‘location’ FROM inventory WHERE item_details->‘material’ = “concrete”;

Storing data in JSON columns has other trade-offs, though.

I visited a former coal mine that’s now a museum. If you take a tour, you get a small piece of coal to keep at the end.

I loved Transformers when I was a kid. My parents never worried about putting food on the table but we didn’t have a lot of disposable income, so I never had the Power Wheels or the Action Figures, or whatever when I was growing up.

One day in my late 30s I realized I could just buy Optimus Prime. So I did. He’s hanging out on a shelf in my office.