Random Raves 54: You will succeed. It is inevitable.

[Birdjaguar]

Please, how did you break your bed?

 

[EgonSpengler]

Please, how did you break your bed?

I lifted the four corner feet up on risers, but I forgot about the centerline piece underneath, which was then a couple of inches off the floor. After about a year of that, the strain on the side pieces caused one of them to snap suddenly.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I once purchased a recliner with a lifetime warranty.

Part of the internal metal construction that does the reclining (elaborate accordion-like device) broke.

Like these cup-holders you may have seen:

I contacted the company thinking they would send me the part that broke (little four-inch segment of that total structure), but I couldn't see how I was going to remove it from the entire expanding structure and put the new piece in. Everything seemed factory riveted, in a way I couldn't undo.

They sent me the whole structure. Not only that. The reclining mechanism is two such frames, one on each side of the chair. They sent me both. The trick was to completely remove the structure from the interior of the chair. There it was just mounted with regular style screws. There were dozens of such screws, but I removed the old structure and installed the new one. I kept the part for the other side of chair in case it should break too. That side never did. The fix kept the chair in service until I was ready to throw it away for other reasons.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

I lifted the four corner feet up on risers, but I forgot about the centerline piece underneath, which was then a couple of inches off the floor. After about a year of that, the strain on the side pieces caused one of them to snap suddenly.

We don't want to hear about your boring old civil engineering disasters.
What about the bed?

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

I apologize for that ^ uncharacteristic, unmedicated rudeness.
I confess that I worked with a civil engineer friend for many years designing and optimizing vertical axis wind turbines.
Here's a photo of a 5m diameter version. I hope that it will make you feel better because it was situated at a sewage treatment plant, something close to every civil engineer's heart.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I apologize for that ^ uncharacteristic, unmedicated rudeness.
I confess that I worked with a civil engineer friend for many years designing and optimizing vertical axis wind turbines.
Here's a photo of a 5m diameter version. I hope that it will make you feel better because it was situated at a sewage treatment plant, something close to every civil engineer's heart.

How could you stoop so low to work with a civil engineer, let alone be friends with one? I have heard that they are people who have given up on life and have no creativity. Clods really.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Like these cup-holders you may have seen:

View attachment 688181

I've only ever seen those used for coats, hats, and keys.

 

[warpus]

Over the pandemic (and beyond) I relied on a food service to deliver me food boxes with ingredients and assembly instructions. I ended up collecting almost 300 distinct recipe sheets, each one formatted in a very similar way - dish description and ingredients on one side of a sheet of paper and instructions on the back. I was going to throw them out, but my roommate suggested that I organize them into a cookbook.. That got me thinking..

I created a web accessible database of all the recipes, which made it possible to quickly figure out how to best organize the recipes. I bought 3 binders and looked at the data and it didn't take long to figure out that it probably makes most sense to break down the recipes into 3 distinct binders, each one representing a different set of continents. Each binder would then be organized by country and noodle or dish type.

I am happy to report that this project has reached an important milestone - all the recipes are now organized and inserted into the 3 binders.

Spoiler :

The next phase of the project is to re-organize the dividers so that the label starts at the top and moves down. Right now they're a bit all over the place. After that I will have to write in each category name for each of the 48 dividers.

The first binder contains all 108 European recipes. The biggest subcategory here by far is Italian, with 77 recipes. It is divided into 14 noodle/dish-type categories such as Gemelli, Cavatappi, Risotto, etc. French comes in second with 14 recipes, subdivided into 3 categories. On top of that there are 6 Greek recipes, 2 English, 2 Russian, 2 Spanish, 1 Swedish, 1 Dutch, 1 German, 1 Hungarian, and 1 Pan European.

The second binder contains all 93 Asian recipes, including all countries that are geographically in Asia minus Russia. There are 31 Chinese + Taiwanese + generic/fusion east Asian recipes, subdivided into 3 categories (rice, and 2 types of noodle), 14 Japanese recipes subdivided the same way, 14 Korean recipes in one category, 8 Vietnamese, 8 Thai, and an "other SEA" category incl. 3 Indonesian, 1 Malaysian, and 1 Singaporean. On top of that there are 6 Indian recipes, as well as 5 Middle Eastern, 1 Lebanese, and 1 Turkish recipe.

The third binder contains all 78 recipes from North & South America + Africa. There are 51 American & Canadian recipes, which includes the types of dishes you might find at North American diners as well as some cajun recipes and other regional stuff. It's subdivided into 9 categories, such as pork chops (15 recipes), meatballs, meatloaf, steak, chicken, seafood, etc. Next up is Mexican with 19 recipes in 3 subcategories, and an "other recipes from the Americas" category with 1 Argentinian, 1 Brazilian, and 1 Cuban recipe. The African category contains 2 West-African recipes, 1 North-African, and 1 Ethiopian recipe.

Now that I have finally created all these categories and organized the recipes in the binders, it seems that I should probably buy more dividers. I want to divide up the Chinese & Japanese dishes further, and probably the Korean ones as well. Maybe Vietnamese and/or Thai? Mexican recipes could probably be broken up further too.

I rarely order these food boxes anymore.. I like their system in that I can skip my orders ahead of time, so for months at a time I don't get charged.. but every once in a while I'll log in to their website and look at the recipes on offer and maybe order 1 or two. If I don't order in a while they like to send me $30 discounts, so that factors in my decision as well. Overall I've found this whole thing sort of opened me up to more culinary opportunities.. in that without these food boxes I would have never cooked 90% of these types of dishes. It's a lot easier to stick to what you know. I also found the cooking sessions therapeutic, and there was no "I now i have to get to the grocery store to find all the ingredients" related stress. The cost is reasonable too. And now I have 3 cookbooks that I can use as inspiration for dishes for when I do have energy to go out to the grocery store. And I have a web interface I can use to quickly search through them. So if I want to make tacos, I type in TACO and it shows me all the taco recipes. Then I can pick pork, beef, or chicken or whatever. Then it's a matter of leafing to the right section in the right binder. I am pretty sure it is going to lead to me cooking more and buying the ingredients manually more often VS relying on a delivery service.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I was surprised to see this morning that the price for a 5oz/150g cup of yogurt at Whole Foods has come down 10¢ for the first time in years. It was steady for a long time, then after the pandemic, it rose every 4-6 months. I don't know if this indicates anything about the larger economy or if it's just an anomaly.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

How could you stoop so low to work with a civil engineer, let alone be friends with one? I have heard that they are people who have given up on life and have no creativity. Clods really.

Nah, the good ones are my favourite kind of scientists because they know about concrete, steel and things that
applied mathematicians ignore.
Hemmingway once said (something like): the best thing a writer can have is a good editor, one who is an
infallible bs filter. Engineers are applied mathematicians' editors.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Hemmingway once said (something like): the best thing a writer can have is a good editor, one who is an
infallible bs filter.

and also one who would catch any misspelling of his name!

 

[PhroX]

Nah, the good ones are my favourite kind of scientists because they know about concrete, steel and things that
applied mathematicians ignore.
Hemmingway once said (something like): the best thing a writer can have is a good editor, one who is an
infallible bs filter. Engineers are applied mathematicians' editors.

As a civil engineer, I can safely say our knowledge of, well, everything, boils down to "NEEDS MORE CONCRETE"

Oh, and we're not mathematicians editors. We're architects editors. They come up with aesthetically pleasing but impractical ideas, we have to bodge them into something that can actually stand up. Usually by adding more concrete.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The other day I cleaned the inside of my PC, and I must've [screwed] up the case fan when I tried to wipe the blades, 'cause it sounded like a lawn-mower afterwards. It was old, prolly should'a replaced it anyways. Just installed the new one. I decided to splash for a Noctua blabbity-blabbity-blah Premium 4-pin. It's brown. Why the [fork] would you make a PC component brown? Who cares. At least it doesn't have any of those blasted LEDs.

More importantly, a blind person wouldn't even know that my PC is on, now. My PC has gone from chainsaw to ninja blade.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It appears that I won two books in this month's LibraryThing giveaway and LT forgot to tell me about the second one.

The first is about a guy who takes a job as a chef in Antarctica. The second... I'm not sure. I must have dropped a request on it and forgot about it. But they've shown up now, are downloaded, and now I have some reading and reviewing to do.

 

[warpus]

I am spending the weekend with family in the greater Toronto area, we just got back to my aunt's from a first communion family celebration.. I never really thought about it, but it's pretty cool I think that this part of the family is a Polish, Vietnamese, Kazakh, and Chinese mix, and all the little kids running around were various mixes of those ethnicities. So yeah, there was a lot of great food on offer, and it was great to see some family members I haven't seen in a while. Oh yeah, there was some Scottish represented there too, can't forget that. No haggis though.

Family is important, and a weekend like this really drove that home for me. I'm grateful to be here, staying at my aunt's right now, who along with her husband make great & welcoming hosts.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I went to the mall today to stock up on some stuff (Maddy was down to 1.5 cans of cat food! ).

While I was in Walmart, I noticed a lone Cadbury Easter Creme Egg sitting on a shelf and it looked like someone had just abandoned it there. The package was unopened, so I figured why not? It should still be on sale.

After I checked out, I asked the clerk what the egg had been rung through as. She checked and was flabbergasted.

I literally got that chocolate egg for TWO CENTS!

I told her, "I won't complain about that!" The egg is now sitting in the freezer, waiting for whenever I won't be able to resist it. (I always keep the chocolate in the freezer so it won't be in danger of melting or getting messy when I eat it).

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

As a civil engineer, I can safely say our knowledge of, well, everything, boils down to "NEEDS MORE CONCRETE"

Oh, and we're not mathematicians editors. We're architects editors. They come up with aesthetically pleasing but impractical ideas, we have to bodge them into something that can actually stand up. Usually by adding more concrete.

Hmmm. One of the possible applications for the wind turbine I mentioned before was to mix reservoirs to prevent "over-turning". I guess filling the reservoir with concrete, or putting a concrete lid on it would work too.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I went to the mall today to stock up on some stuff (Maddy was down to 1.5 cans of cat food! ).

While I was in Walmart, I noticed a lone Cadbury Easter Creme Egg sitting on a shelf and it looked like someone had just abandoned it there. The package was unopened, so I figured why not? It should still be on sale.

After I checked out, I asked the clerk what the egg had been rung through as. She checked and was flabbergasted.

I literally got that chocolate egg for TWO CENTS!

I told her, "I won't complain about that!" The egg is now sitting in the freezer, waiting for whenever I won't be able to resist it. (I always keep the chocolate in the freezer so it won't be in danger of melting or getting messy when I eat it).

I love Cadbury Eggs. I remember when they cost a quarter. Now they're something like a buck-fifty, which strikes me as outrageous (because I can remember when they only cost a quarter). So, at two cents, you really scored: one twelfth the lowest price I ever remember. Enjoy it when the time comes!

 

[warpus]

My flight to/from Portugal and 2 weeks of accommodations in central Lisbon are booked! I am really excited, this trip didn't feel start feeling real until I booked the flight. I haven't been out of the country on a multi-week trip since 2019, so I'm feeling emotions about this I don't think I've felt about a trip since my early days of world travel. After the 2 weeks in Lisbon I will be probably heading to Porto for a week, before my flight home.. but one thing I'm enjoying about this trip is that there's nothing in my plans that requires me to set much in stone. The accommodations in Lisbon I'm sharing with a friend, it's basically what pushed me over the line and got me to agree to going. A part of me is still a hermit, due to the pandemic.. Not really in a day to day sort of way, but a part of me just didn't want to go anywhere.. a part of me did. When my friend said he'll be in Portugal, I mentioned I was actually looking at that as a potential travel destination earlier in the year.. He said we could share accommodations.. and.. yeah, I'm going!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I love Cadbury Eggs. I remember when they cost a quarter. Now they're something like a buck-fifty, which strikes me as outrageous (because I can remember when they only cost a quarter). So, at two cents, you really scored: one twelfth the lowest price I ever remember. Enjoy it when the time comes!

It was delicious.