• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle




  • I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.


  • Ideally you notice it from the shore and avoid it as others have mentioned. If you’re swimming in one you’ll realize soon enough you’re getting taken out from the shore.

    I got caught in one when I was a teenager off Mission Beach in San Diego. I’d already been out swimming in water deeper than I could stand in for a while and, getting tired, started heading to shore. After some time I realized I wasn’t making any progress at all. It took me a little while more to realize what was up: I was in a rip current. Thankfully I’d had an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, AZ of all places that taught us kids how to escape one and I remembered - swim parallel to the shore a good distance and then try swimming back in again and check your progress. Repeat as needed if you’re unable to make progress. I followed those instructions and eventually was able to get back to shore, utterly exhausted. I can’t help but think how lucky I was not to have missed that day of school.







  • I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

    The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.



  • It’s truer than most realize.

    Decided to start lifting at age 47 because I was depressed with work, expecting to be laid off, and needed something positive in my life. A few months in I realize my back no longer hurts while sleeping. I’m not waking up in the morning aching. Here I thought I was hurting just because I was getting old when the reality was I was hurting because I was weak. I was dealing with back pain for several years unnecessarily.

    I can do nothing and suffer, or I can suffer a little under the bar and feel great. Either way I suffer but the latter suffering is so much better.






  • It all depends. I don’t have a will of steel, that’s for sure. I started it to lose weight but have continued after my chronic heartburn stopped immediately, my eczema went away, my blood sugar came down and my triglycerides dropped to a normal range. I take 0 prescription meds now.

    I feel so much better, no longer have heartburn wake me up in the middle of the night, and no longer have my fingers crack and bleed from eczema. 7 years in and it’s really no trouble staying on the diet. The 45 lbs I lost turned out to be a minor benefit of the diet, not the major benefit.


  • I disagree.

    It’s rare to hear of someone killing or injuring themselves working on home electrical fixes. I’m pretty old and can’t even recall an incident. Most people won’t do it because they do have enough fear not to play around with it. But if you do know enough, you know how incredibly simple it is to replace an outlet or light switch and how to do it safely. Even a overhead light or fan is pretty trivial. Also the US 120v standard is less likely to cause harm with a stupid mistake than some other countries that have higher voltages. I’m thankful the states allow homeowners to do this themselves.

    There are definitely things people shouldn’t do with a license, but swapping switches and outlets is more trivial than changing the oil on your car.