leviramsey

On 5/29/2016 at 07:01, Dr_Pangloss said:

Buzzfeed, everyone who contributes to it is a word removed, I hope it goes out of business.

I much prefer Clickhole.

On 6/9/2016 at 05:19, BOF said:

Simple rule of thumb for driving.  If your wipers are on, then your headlights should probably be on too.

A number of US states (per http://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/headlight-use/ ) require headlights to be on whenever wipers are operating (a few extend it to whenever conditions warrant using wipers).

They have a seasonal mix pack out.  Their normal Amber (don't care to count up how many gallons I've had of it over the years), a summer one with blueberry, the Gumption (a mix of dry cider apples and sweet eating apples), and their Day Chaser, a semi-dry.

The Day Chaser is my pick of the bunch.

Of late, I've been preferring Angry Orchard's line to Woodchuck, but it's nice to see them firing back (especially with marketing that focuses on cider being their only game).

A variety of Woodchuck ciders tonight.  I don't normally like the sweet ciders much, but the Gumption cider is surprisingly good:

I inherited one of these:

A mid-century modern Zenith stereo AM/FM/turntable stereo console (pic is of a similar system with an 8-track tape player and which had had an iPod conversion; the seller wants $750 for it) .  One of my to-do projects is to update the inputs to this (satellite radio, PC, television, etc.) and move it into my home office/den.

It's also Prosecutor 101 level practice: load up on the charges early to play Let's Make A [Plea] Deal from a position of strength.

On 3/2/2015 at 12:25, The_Rev said:

What did one tectonic plate say when it bumped into another tectonic plate? 

 

 

 

Hidden Content

 

 

 

I work crazy shifts.  I've never heard them referred to as "continental" shifts before, but basically I will do a week of very early AM shifts where I am waking up at 4am to start work at 5 (ish) and work until early afternoon and then go to a week where I am starting in the early/mid afternoon and working until somewhere near midnight.  Long weekend every third week. 

 

How is it? Well, I've survived for nearly fifteen years.  I'm in my mid thirties now and I can't get by on as little sleep as I could when I was in my mid twenties when four or five hours was enough but I've never found it too difficult to pinch an hour or two here and there when I really need it even as a father of two young children.  It's more difficult going from lates to earlies (the jet lag equivalent of flying west) than vice versa so take extra care to get adequate rest when doing that.  Try not to skip breakfast. Enjoy the fact you can do the weekly big shop at 10am or 2pm when nobody else is in the supermarket.  I can't really offer any more advice other than it's not killed me yet and it probably won't kill you.  There will be times when you miss social engagements if you work weekends, but I guess that's why they pay extra cash. 

Better to try it and give it up in six months if it doesn't suit than pass now and spend the rest of the year wondering whether you could have hacked it or not. 

Interesting contrast with normal labor practice for on-board staff (engineers and conductors) at North American railroads.  There it's typically 12 hour shifts, but the same shifts all the time: the engineers are ordered by seniority at a given crew base and the most senior pick which trains they want to work.  Sucks when you're just starting out as you start on the extra board: have to be up at 3 am every morning in case you're called in to cover for a sick day etc. (if you're not called in, you get 8 hours of pay, unless you don't answer a call).  The pay, though, is decent: on the NY area commuter railroads, an experienced engineer is good for $150k a year including benefits.

On 5/29/2016 at 07:01, Dr_Pangloss said:

Buzzfeed, everyone who contributes to it is a word removed, I hope it goes out of business.

I much prefer Clickhole.

On 5/29/2016 at 15:21, MakemineVanilla said:

I wasn't thinking of rugby, I was thinking of the Eton Field Game and such.

But yes, you are right.

For reasons to do with class loyalty/prejudice I had completely blanked from my mind all those early Wanderers' FA Cup victories.

I always think of Blackburn as the first winners.

Professionalism, it seems, was the big turning point for working-class players.

  

On the other hand, to the extent that mid-19th century football could be called a codified thing, there weren't major differences between the various strains throughout the Anglophone world.  Within the space of a lifetime (somewhere between 50 and 75 years), primordial football speciated into the diversity we see today (association, the rugbys, the gridirons, aussie, gaelic).  Part of this speciation was geographic (largely accounting for gridiron's evolution), some was political, no small amount was driven by other social trends.

Association football's working class associations are, more than anything else, traceable to a peculiar willingness of middle class Midlanders (for the most part) being far more OK with playing alongside/against the working class.

Too lazy to see if I posted this, but:

I have sold Anthony Bourdain one of these:

5 hours ago, maqroll said:

The automobile industry was probably shrewd enough to demand post war concessions from FDR in return for retrofitting their plants to make planes and tanks etc. 

 

No, it goes back to the beginnings of the New Deal.  Among other things:

* Federal funds to pave roads were only available where there were no streetcar lines operating on the street, causing many cities to revoke streetcar franchises and rip up the rails

* The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 required the electric companies to stop operating streetcar lines; lines would have to pay normal rates for their power and, as they were legally barred from raising fares, many lines ended up not being able to find a buyer and shut down.

21 hours ago, The_Rev said:

The Luftwaffe contributed to a lot of the demand for "improvements" to a lot of the major cities in the UK.  They dropped a couple of thousand tons of bombs on Brum and practically wiped Coventry and Hull off the map. East London got royally flattened too. Then it all needed rebuilding quickly by a government who didn't have any money.  Concrete cubes flew up.  Quite why the same happened on that side of the pond where there was zero bomb damage and a booming economy is beyond me, but a lot of that is just the fact that I really dislike brutalism. 

The general consensus in a lot of the world was that cities as they existed pre-war (and pre-pre-war) were damaging to the human spirit or some such.  Look at Le Corbusier, etc.  In the US at least, as the largely WASP and rural/suburban Progressive ideology took hold from the 30s onwards, cities were fairly systematically dismantled (witness the war on public transit that started with FDR).

On 5/16/2016 at 09:27, mjmooney said:

No, because England.

EDIT: misquote... meant to quote the becuz Germany...  I'm rusty at this whole forum-posting lark.

Many American beer snobs would dispute that

I’M BARELY THROUGH BAGGAGE CLAIM before I enjoy my first taste of German craft beer. Munich Airport is, fittingly, the only airport in Europe with a microbrewery inside the terminal, serving freshly brewed beer in an enormous glassed-in biergarten. At the entrance, I meet braumeister Rene Jacobsen, who walks me back into the brewing operation, past a large, silver mash tun emanating the sweet smell of fermenting barley malt.
He serves all of his beer unfiltered, says Jacobsen, who prides himself on the quality of his ingredients, including the noble aroma hops grown nearby in the Hallertau region. Due to the heavy traffic in the terminal, as well as a healthy complement of locals, none of it stays around more than three or four days. Jacobsen pours out a mugful of the popular Jetstream Pilsener, pale gold and cloudy in the glass. I lift it to my lips with anticipation and taste: Budweiser. But the freshest, cleanest Budweiser I’ve ever had. It might be fine to drink after lawn mowing or during an all-day music festival, but it’s nothing close to an American craft beer.
Confession time: I have never loved German beer. I know, I know, it’s supposed to be the best in the world and all that, attested to by the 5 million-some pilgrims who descend upon Munich every autumn to celebrate the beverage in a riot of brimming steins and lederhosen. But to me, it’s always seemed a bit, well, boring. Beer snob? Guilty as charged. Give me a West Coast IPA with a piney nose and a solid malty backbone, and I’m in heaven. But I’m left cold by the dull triumvirate of Pilsener, Weiss, and Dunkel that dominates every bar in Germany.
But something has been stirring in Deutschland of late. As beer consumption has actually gone down a third in the past 25 years, drinkers across the country, especially in the more progressive northern cities of Berlin and Hamburg, have increasingly turned to American-style craft beers as a more flavorful alternative. Now here I was in the World Capital of Beer, Munich — where the history of beer goes back a millennium and tradition dies hard — to find out just how far craft beer has come. And to see if I can find a decent IPA.

The NBA, yes.  But basketball is at least somewhat redeemed by the NCAA tournament.

To elaborate:

Basketball has its problem that, in general, the first half/three-quarters/seven-eighths of a game has a distressing tendency to not really matter, compounded by being, like baseball and gridiron, fundamentally a large number of Bernoulli trials, so the better team generally wins the game.  The NBA makes it worse by having 82 games to eliminate just under half the teams and then playing long playoff series which limit the ability of underdogs to pull upsets.  It's really the only sport that has all three problems.

Baseball is the epitome of a large number of Bernoulli trials, but the combination of pitching rotations, the batting order, and being low-scoring allows for some measure of randomness.  The limited schedule for gridiron (despite being Bernoulli) allows for randomness.  Ice hockey (like football) isn't really Bernoulli.  NCAA basketball at least takes from gridiron the limited number of games and a single-elimination postseason.

This has me feeling like it's a traditional Red Sox team.  All hitting and will be in great position in July until the August-September swoon to something like 88 wins.  I've seen this movie many times before.

You can just about see me through the seventh window on the first of the private cars (Babbling Brook).

Thursday's day trip was a ride on a trio of private railcars from New York to Boston (the long way around: on the direct route, the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak only hauls private varnish overnight). The going rate for chartering private railcars approaches $5,000 per car per day, but because these three cars were needed in Boston for a party this weekend, the owners of the cars decided to make a little money on the side by selling seats for the equipment move. $349 including lunch, dinner, and unlimited drinks.

Truly the way to travel.

Southeastern Connecticut (protip: if traveling on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor north/east of New Haven, try to sit on the left-hand side heading Westbound* or right-hand side heading Eastbound, for the better view of the shore. You do miss out on the view from the Hell Gate Bridge of the Manhattan skyline, though, if also traveling north/east of New York.

*: for historical reasons (going back to the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad), the NEC between Boston and Philadelphia is named East (towards Boston)/West (towards Philadelphia), though most popular usage would use North/South.

Keep watch on this space for a bit of a day trip (thanks to VPN and a boss who doesn't particularly care if I come into the office as long as shit gets done, I'm not even taking a day off) today.  Those of you who are fans of Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and/or Eva Marie Saint may recognize some photos to come:

I do like the feeling of noticeably slowing down and looking down at the GPS speedometer and seeing that you're down to 135 mph...

Was feeling a little flush a while back, so purchased a new ThinkPad.

• T560 model
• 15" 3K screen
• 3 cell front battery & 6 cell removable rear battery (which also puts the keyboard at a nice typing angle)
• Core i7-6600U (4 cores, 8 threads)
• 256GB NVMe SSD (the SSD is basically directly attached to PCIe; I'm getting sustained 900 Mbyte/sec reads)
• 32GB RAM

Installing Linux (Mageia for me) was surprisingly easy. The only real issue was the installer not recognizing /dev/nvme0 as a device which Linux could be installed to, which necessitated an install to USB stick, boot to USB stick, go to single-user mode, partition and mount SSD, copy files from stick to SSD, chroot, and install grub to the UEFI partition (this is my first UEFI system, and it's nowhere near as bad as I feared) dance. Beyond that, everything just worked. I run X at 1920x1080 because for now the 24" monitor at work that I hook up to this maxes out at that resolution and I don't see the point in having a laptop screen display more than the external monitor. The keyboard is fantastic (and the pointing stick is, as expected, superb; it's also amazingly nice to have middle click on a laptop again). Battery life has been amazing (despite Linux apparently not doing power management properly for this chipset). Everyone else on the team is a MacBook user, but I've caught some envious looks (I passed up an offer of a company-paid $2500 MacBook (not long after we separated from the laptop and printer guys, we were suddenly able to buy nicer laptops...) to buy this on my own... I can deduct it on my taxes and avoid having IT enforcing policy on me).  It came to $2,000 or so.

Heartily endorsed.  The Intel GPU isn't spectacular (but Intel GPUs are the best-supported in Linux), but anyone like me who needs something between something ultraportable and a mobile workstation can't do much better than this.

On 1/28/2016 at 08:42, useless said:

I did wonder about technology, Maybe that's taking up so much of the creativity these days, that it's to the detriment of other areas. But that doesn't really make sense, lol.

It's more like the era of mass culture is over, replaced by lots and lots of subcultures.

On 1/26/2016 at 08:43, StefanAVFC said:

How do people that stupid get into management?

The Peter Principle: people get promoted to their level of incompetence.