Climbing on columnar basalt is interesting. Vantage / Frenchmans Coulee (2 hours or so east of Seattle) has a bit of a bad reputation but some of the routes are decent.
Yes, that was one thing we luckily avoided. The previous owners of our place had the older 25 year old well crap out. It also didn't have good GPM in that location so in addition to fixing the old well they added a new well and cistern about 200 meters away in a location with better flow. The old well was enough to run irrigation (we only irrigated a few acres of lawn around the house) so they set it up so the old well ran irrigation and outside frost frees and the new well ran the house, with cutoff so that I could swap as needed.
I sometimes thought about retiring from software and starting a handyman business that would shoot for a 24 hour response time and fast turnaround for small things like outlet repairs, light fixtures, small plumbing fixes, etc. The main trades in the valley were backlogged with 6 figure new builds so I don't really blame them for ignoring calls for a 2-4 hour job that would take 2 hours of driving to access.
Washington is already extremely expensive and our area was even more so. Water was free (well) but electric was very expensive and often went out. I put in a 48kw generac with a thousand gallon propane tank for backup which was a big project but very nice to have. Food, plowing, driveway maintenance, property stuff were all also high. (wife wouldn't let me get a beater 80's f-250 plow truck) Getting trades to even return a call was hard and could be months out for any jobs so I learned to do a lot on my own. I lived in WA for 25 years so just got used to the costs but moving to Boise last year made me realize it was insane.
I owned a house on 60 acres in Washington State that was bordered on 2 sides by state land (WA DNR). It was generally great and the only time I closed my gate was actually these two weeks of every year for regular rifle deer season. I never had issues with hunters coming on my property (I did give some friends permission to bow hunt). My driveway was about a mile long and had to cross DNR land to reach my property, but I had an easement. The easements typically have a 35 year expiration and it would take extreme circumstances for the state not to renew an existing easement. Complete and total privacy is really nice, but it's certainly a lot of effort and money to maintain a remote property of that size with a large house. I had to travel to SF a lot for work and that was certainly not ideal: 2.5 hour drive minimum to a tiny airport that only served Seattle, then on to SF.
My mom insisted I got a job the summer after my freshman year in high school and I didn't want to. We lived in a small town and there was a small new French restaurant about to open just down the street so she walked me down there and talked the owner-chef, Franc into giving me a job. I ended up working there all throughout high school (washing dishes and eventually cooking) and the education was arguably as valuable as what I learned in college. I was studying French so Franc and I only spoke in French. It was incredibly helpful but I also learned a lot of words and phrases that weren't useful on the AP French test. Working in the kitchen I got exposure to people and lifestyles that I didn't know existed and it was eye opening in the best possible way. One time when I was home from college I got a frantic call from Franc to see if I could fill in because his sous chef had been busted with a kilo of coke.
Yes, Idaho and Boise in particular are absolute hellscapes. Who wants an incredibly clean, safe city with kind people who value the rule of law, a low cost of living and great access to trails, mountains and rivers. People should definitely not move there.
Given how often the "experts" on CNBC and Bloomberg TV use the term hyperscalers, my approach is to completely disregard anything written or spoken by any person who uses the term.
For those interested in the topic, this book is an amazing and extremely scientific read. Scott was a world cup nordic skier and mountaineer. I am a nobody but got to train with him before my first ultra and it was eye opening. I would upload every workout and if my HR zone was too high he would text me and say "Slow down! I don't care if you're walking at a snails pace."
The question is very important. What if you ask/tell an AI "I need a 2 bedroom vacation rental in Park City for a trip this fall". If you only get Airbnb results you are missing a lot of the true answer.
I don't know the AUM of this pension fund but if the managers were doing their jobs they should have had at least a tiny bit of exposure to SpaceX years ago.
I only have 2 data points, but my mom in the southeastern US (in her 70's) and all of her friends have started playing and are fully addicted and the same seems to be true at my golf club in Inland Northwest. Maybe it's getting a toehold? (in a very non-HN demographic)
I had disk issues in my lumbar spine that caused nearly unbearable pain and terrible quality of life. Tried everything: PT, OTC painkillers, epidurals, massage, nothing worked. Was prescribed pragabalin and duloxotine. Duloxotine is an SNRI that also treats nerve pain. That combination helped some but I was sleeping 11+ hours per day and generally felt like my head was in a complete fog, was pretty much useless with work. I had been trying to avoid surgery but finally had 2 procedures in 2024 that helped immensely. Weaning off those 2 drugs was no fun: sweating constantly, anxious, headaches for about 2 weeks. Extremely happy I went the surgery route and stopped those meds. I can't imagine living day to day feeling like that.
My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.
There are basically zero players on the PGA tour right now who were self taught. For the next generation of pros, if you are not a plus index player by the time you are around 13 you have no chance whatsoever.
The combination of Charles + Postman is great for reverse engineering mobile API's. Inspect traffic w/ Charles, export request to cUrl, import cUrl into Postman, play around with request headers / params / etc, export to py, use Cursor to create reusable library.
I was on a train from Miyajima to Hiroshima on a random weekday morning and an older gentleman sat next to me. I am a white American and I could tell he wanted to talk with me but was hesitant so I said good morning in my terrible Japanese. He wanted to practice English so we chatted and he ended up insisting on taking me to his local okonomiyaki spot in Hiroshima where he was clearly a regular. We had a 2.5 hour lunch and he hazed me with food beer and shochu and introduced me to the other octogenarian regulars. It was a really cool experience.
Big Mountain ski area in Montana has tons, as do mountains all over the world. When I saw this headline my first thought was "clickbait headline to push climate doomerism". The BBC did not disappoint.