just the fact that my data is accessible to anyone is upsetting enough. I take a little comfort in believing my data is like water molecules in the ocean of everyone else’s data…

The repair company we use told us it wasn’t worth fixing, and I believed them. To repair the microwave would have cost more than the new GE we replaced it with for <$220 on sale, which I installed myself. We also had an Electrolux double wall oven that kept burning out computer boards at about the 10 year mark. We had them fixed twice in 6 months, and when it went out the third time we wrote it off and replaced it with a Kitchenaid. One of the burners on the stove top is slow to heat up, but still usable. The dishwasher doesn’t seem to have a drying cycle anymore, but still cleans, tho we rarely use it. We did a big remodel back in 2011, and bought all Electrolux appliances and were quite proud of them, but alas… The first thing my wife did when the new kitchen was open was bake 6 trays of cookies at once :)

We recently had to replace a $500 Electrolux microwave that was only 11 years old. We mistakenly thought that brand was supposed to be higher quality :(

My mom had a microwave that lasted for decades. I left home in '81, so it was bought prior to that. She was still using it when she passed in '16. That thing was huge. I remember that before my dad would sit down to the table to eat, he would open the door on it to just the right angle so he could continue watching the TV in it’s reflection. The only thing wrong with it was the top and bottom rows of red LED lights had quit shining which made it a little tricky to tell how much time was left on it, but that never bothered my mom. Also, they didn’t have turntables in them back then, so you had to frequently turn the food. Mom bought a wind-up platform that you’d sit the food on and you could hear it in there ticking away while it slowly turned your food. She had to give up about 2.5 inches of height for it, but that oven was so big it didn’t matter…

just looking at this gave me a blister.

Removed by mod

We have LED street lights and our driveway is lined with crepe myrtles. Every evening after dark, I can see the grid pattern of the individual LEDs in the shadows on our driveway. It’s trippy when there’s a slight breeze, and all these little “grid shadows” are moving around overlapping each other

haha this reminds me of a pair of flip-flops my wife had. They were left in the car, and one of them somehow ended up in the back window where it got super-heated by the sun. It was curled up and half the size of its mate when I found it. Couldn’t tell you what they were made of…

I literally just learned this in a Ted talk that youtube fed me yesterday or the day before. Here’s a fantastic example of that smirk.

I had an earth science teacher that would let us bring in one 3X5 card of notes for our tests, and I would spend an hour or so transcribing all my notes into small print front and back, then go in and ace the test without ever needing them. Just recopying it all was enough.

This guy is smug as fuck… is he really equating heavy traffic in NYC to all of America?

My son had this incredibly bright flashlight, and one evening he shined it out into the yard and claimed that all the little sparkles we were seeing in the grass were spiders looking back at us. I disagreed and told him they were reflections from dew drops. To prove his point, we agreed on a particularly bright sparkle, and approached it keeping the light on it. Sure enough, there was a spider sitting there looking back up at us. We then proceeded to find about a dozen more. I was totally surprised that every one we honed in on turned out to be another spider.

the over and under-inflation wear isn’t as much of an issue these days as it used to be. In the old days of bias-ply tires, that was definitely the case. You could have a low tire and hardly be able to tell, because the stiff sidewalls would hardly sag. Their flex point was down the middle of the tread. Radial tire construction puts the flex point in the sidewalls, which doesn’t distort the tread as much, plus gives a much smoother ride…

it has to do with the angle between the point the tire pivots (steers) on and the point the wheel spins on. The steering point needs to be forward of the spinning point to help the car go straight down the road. Think of a shopping carts front wheels (they’re called casters), and how they’ll pivot around with the direction you’re pushing the cart. That angle can be adjusted so the car tracks properly…

got lung cancer… only found it because it had eroded into rib #5 and felt like I had a flaming hatchet stuck in my back. This explains why pacing my den while streaming profanities seemed to help, at least a little anyway…

I do elearning multimedia and run in to AI schlock all the time and hate it. With the background and soft-focus I can see why you thought what you did. While AI would have done good with the dog’s face etc, details like the leash clasp would have probably been just poorly defined shapes or complete nonsense. That’s the stuff I key in on…

I drink entirely too much coffee, and if I don’t be sure to drink plenty of water on top of it I’ll get constipated. It’s almost like the coffee dries me out or something. I had a chemo nurse tell me how important it was to stay hydrated during my treatments and when I told her I drink several cups of coffee a day, she scolded me and said In that case, I need the water even more. I followed her advice and since then I’ve gotten more regular. I used to think it was just normal for me to crap once every three days, but now I go every day and feel better too…

I played “The folly of mankind” on that one once. I didn’t win the hand…

I went through the US Navy’s damage control and fire-fighting training back in '81 and we trained with their oxygen breathing apparatus (OBA). I remember we’d have to pull a pin like in a grenade to light them off, and when we were done we’d have to release the canister into a barrel of water because they were like super-hazardous…

“Nobody is completely useless… they can always serve as a bad example.”

-tipicaldiks father

you wanna make more christians? Then feed all those poor kids and tell them it’s literally by the grace of jesus that they’re being fed. The prayer they want in schools will naturally follow. It isn’t just men who’s hearts can be reached via their stomachs…