jeramey

Sounds like there are more stories there!

Cheers to your mum for that! One of the trickiest parts of changing the rules in any bureaucracy or medium-to-large organization is if the org are lucky enough to still have people willing to stick their necks out to try to make things better for someone else. I admire the courage it takes to do something like she did.

Got it. Your previous statement didn't really seem like you were speaking in broad generalities and instead seemed more absolute, like math is something that could always be learned by any human brain. Clearly that's not the case, which was the point of gpp, I think.

Is the brain not a physical thing? Do you believe that all human brains are physically and functionally equivalent such that one brain should be able to learn to do anything that another can?

What about those people in this world with genetic abnormalities that affect brain function? Would you expect someone with Prader-Willi syndrome to be able to become competent at mathematics if they only worked hard enough at it? At what point does “hard enough” become “virtually impossible” or even “definitely impossible”?

But us pop kids still stuck to 101.5, annoying everyone with our bad taste.

As cool as this is, I'm very curious where the data is from, and am suspicious about the validity of this map. The Pacific Northwest, where I am at, has a lot of variability in sunshine in a fairly small geographical area, so the big block of samey-colors for Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana doesn't seem quite right.

Compare this against the Direct Normal Irradiation map from Solargis[1] for example. DNI is approximately what most people would think of as "clear day sunshine". There's a lot more variability in most regions compared to this map, and the color bands tend to follow geographical features a bit better.

[1] https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world

Seems true! The longest amount time I ever engaged with anyone on public transit was when I was sitting near a couple of fellows who had decided that polishing off a full case of long drink on the train ride north was a good idea. Thankfully, both were the I-love-you-man type versus the angry drunk type, especially since they wanted to talk about Trump-era politics once they figured out one of my companions and I were Americans.

My Belgian companion wisely kept his damn mouth shut the whole time.

I'm am American who works for a Finland-based employer which has given me a few opportunities to travel there. My experience suggests this is changing a bit generationally as I've generally found it pretty easy to have brief, friendly conversations with younger (say, under 35 or so) people at least in the Helsinki-Espoo areas.

The quiet public places and public transport do make my introverted heart gleeful, though. I also reckon that a group of German tourists can give Americans a run for their money in the boisterousness department. :)

I’d never heard of this, so thank you! I’m not very excited by the prospect of surgery, and all of the other “treatments” I’ve been recommended are steeped deeply in woo, or pretty obviously a bad idea, or both. (E.g. colloidal silver.)

A little web searching even turns up an NIH study. The abstract indicates promising results with the only likely downside being a possible case of minor irritation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18284857/

Using a dutch oven is indeed a fantastic way to get a lovely crust and good oven spring in your bread! I often will mist the loaf before putting it in which I find helps a little with a good rise.

I do occasionally like to make longer loaves such as baguettes which aren’t really easy to fit inside of a dutch oven, especially if I am using a forming pan. One method I have used to get good oven spring and a nice crust at home in those cases is to place a large cast iron griddle on the bottom rack of the oven, and a few minutes before baking, placing a pan of water—a square bread pan works great for this—on it and wait for it to come to a visible simmer. The cast iron does a good job of retaining and re-radiating heat quickly after opening the oven, and the pan of water adds enough steam into the baking chamber to help get a good rise during the bake. Bake on a middle rack of the oven and remove the pan of water after 10-12 minutes of baking to finish the bake with a dry oven, and you’ll still end up with good color and a nice, crunchy crust.

This method has worked pretty well in a variety of standard electric home ovens new and old that I’ve used over the years.

And 100% agreed on simple recipes being best! The loaves I’ve made with just flour, water, salt, and yeast have tended to be the crowd-pleasers. Thousands of years of bread and beer being diet staples have definitely made their mark, I suppose.

Marmite and Vegemite are also really good for adding some umami-saltiness to tomato sauces and stews without being very noticeable for what they are. (Assuming I can stop myself from spreading it all on toast first...)

It feels like it almost did. There was a pretty frustrating couple of years there where it wasn't clear if 2.x or 3.x was going to be the winning version and the Python community seemed to have a lot of disagreement on that subject. My team invested heavily in alternatives like Node.js at the time to hedge against Python dying.

However, Python 3 did at least eventually have a reasonable backwards compatibility story which Perl 6 never really seemed to have. It's a bit harder to do now since Python 3 has marched on while Python 2 is formally unsupported now, but for a while in the 2.7/3.3 days, it was relatively straightforward--if a bit icky at times--to have a single code base that would support either version of Python, and many library and app developers took advantage of that to allow as-seamless-as-possible transitions, rather than the whole community having to immediately spend a ton of effort porting their entire code bases to an incompatible language. Mechanical code rewriting tools which were introduced during that period like 2to3 also helped ease the transition for many use cases and code bases, too.

The downside of all that is related: Since source compatibility was possible, the package distribution method remained the same, and at the same time for all the usual reasons, some useful packages never got updated with Python 3 compatibility changes. Today, there are still libraries in PyPI which can be pip installed with Python 3, but you can't actually use them because they never got the attention needed to be compatible with it. If the package is a pure Python code base, you might not even find out until you try to import the library or call a function, class, or method. Then you get to spend time in your favorite search engine trying to hunt down an alternative. Very annoying.

It certainly used to! That machine introduced me to a weird variety of things when I lived near it almost 20 years ago. Cheap thrills as a broke young 'un.

Thanks to it, I still have to try strange sodas when I am traveling--especially abroad. It's not always good, but it's always fun.

Depends a bit on your shell. That works great in bash. Other shells have different semantics. For example, zsh will wait for input until you type ^D or ^C and tcsh will complain about an invalid null command.

The variant I know that works identically in pretty much every shell I've ever tried is:

    :>myfile.txt

And if you don't want to overwrite the file if it exists:

    :>>myfile.txt

I always wonder if these kinds of stories are real, and this one does seem to be. It was reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=117... (PDF link)

You are correct. At the time, AOL had released TiK and documented the TOC protocol but TiK was a bit slow and clunky, so Mark Spencer, the original author of GAIM, implemented faster client in C using GTK for the UI. OSCAR support came later because OSCAR supported some additional presence features (I think?? It's been a while...) and because ICQ also used OSCAR.

Pidgin and libpurple also have roots in another project called Everybuddy which was one of the first multi-protocol integrated free software chat clients. As I recall, Torrey Searle started Everybuddy because he was having a hard time getting traction on adding multiple protocols to GAIM at the time for a variety of reasons my hazy memory doesn't really remember.

For a couple of years after GAIM started to get plugin and multiple protocol support, much code was shared between GAIM and Everybuddy, and then eventually effort centered around just one of the code bases which eventually became Pidgin and libpurple.

Source: I was involved in GAIM early on and Torrey is a friend from those days.

Also look at fpm: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki

This sysadmin uses it frequently and it's a big time-saver for many software packages.

At my day job, we run CentOS 5 on EC2 instead of Amazon Linux because we actually run a hybrid local-node/EC2-cluster and it is easier to verify software builds on a single platform rather than two of them. The distribution we use actually doesn't matter a whole lot, though, as long as it is consistent between what we can install locally and what we can install on EC2. Our choice is actually constrained by what Amazon offers for the node types we primarily use (cc1.4xlarge).

Since Speakeasy was bought by Best Buy and then shuffled off into MegaPath's maw, their customer service has gotten progressively worse. Qwest's customer service is OK as long as you're willing to learn the right magic phrases that they use. That's the hard part. On the flip side, their field techs have always been uniformly competent when I've dealt with them in spite of having to cope with the massive wad of bureaucracy that goes along with working for a huge telecom company.

DSL in general is slow in Seattle because the city hasn't spent much effort in upgrading its (or encouraging telecoms to upgrade their) old copper telecom infrastructure. When line lengths aren't just really long, they're often running over corroding 40 and 50 year-old copper. In about half the buildings I've lived in, the NID was still the very old nut-and-bolt screw down terminal style interfaces. 66 and 110 blocks? What are those?

e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful.

Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)