Random Rants Q': I protest against subtitles

[Valka D'Ur]

It's possible that my Gussy was part of an abandoned litter, but we never found any other kittens in the vicinity, nor did we find any adult females who didn't already have a home. I asked around the neighborhood and at the corner store (everyone went there at some point, so if anyone was looking for a lost cat there'd have been a mention).

The answers were all negative, so I felt absolutely certain that keeping Gussy was the right thing.

He was with me from October 1993 to November 2007.

Maddy was born in June 2007 and I adopted her in August. So for 3 months, Gussy tolerated her crawling around, sometimes cuddling up to him... he was elderly by then and suffering from arthritis.

It's a bit scary these days... Maddy is now almost as old as Gussy was when he died... and he was the longest-lived of my male cats.

 

[Birdjaguar]

That's the way we got Poseidon and Boots. Although, till this day, I wonder if they might have brothers and sisters which we did not find.

Our youngest cat, Caboose, was found at a dumpster by one of my employees 5 years ago. Fabulous cat.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The science articles talk about early Perseid showers. So look up...

In all the haze here, I'm lucky to see the Moon, never mind stars.

And this post is taking minutes to compose because I'm quite looped on sleep meds at the moment...

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Our phone and internet stopped working around 3pm on Friday.

Resetting the router did nothing. Neither did unplugging it and plugging it back in again after waiting a few minutes.

I tried seeing what I could do to trouble shoot it using my cell phone's mobile data, but it was really slow and I kept having to reload pages before it could do much. Eventually I go to a page which said that there is a service issue in our area that they know about and are working on, plus another issue which will likely require a technician to visit out house. I tried setting up the technician appointment for the soonest time available, which was Monday morning, but the page just froze on me.

I tried again later and found that it said the service area issue ought to be solved by 7:40pm, so I decided to hold off until after that.

When I checked again at 8pm, the only change was that they no longer gave us an ETA for that fix.

Around midnight the phone service started to work again, but the internet would not. Our wifi network did now show up anywhere.

I went back on my phone and this time managed to get through the process of setting up a technician visit, but by then Tuesday was the soonest they could come.

I tried an ATT app on my phone which was not working earlier. It let me log in this time. It showed the appointment scheduled for Tuesday, and when I scrolled over to the next section it claimed everything with our internet was working properly. I still could not find our network, but it claimed we had a connection. I ran a speed test and found it was almost twice as fast than ever before, but there were no devices on the network except for the Roku that is plugged into the gateway directly instead of using wifi.

Eventually in that app I found a reference to out wifi network using an strange new name, which I had recently seen appear in the list of available networks. More importantly the app also showed the password for that network, a completely random series of letters, numbers, and symbols that I never would have been able to guess or remember. It didn't work when I tried to change the network name from my phone, but I was able to change its password to what we had been using and then use that to log in to that wifi network on my computer. From my laptop I managed to change the name back to what it was before, and then found that all of out devices connected automatically.

I also saw that our internet plan had been automatically upgraded from 300 mbps with a 1 TB data cap per month (although that cap had been waived for about a year) to 500mbps with unlimited data, and at a cost of about $5 less per month.

I just cancelled the appointment for Tuesday, as everything seems to be fine now.

I guess this is a rave in the long run, but it was a stressful waste of time to spend about 10 hours trying to troubleshoot.

 

[Traitorfish]

I've come to realise that the exodus of conservative users from CFC OT has been a bad thing.

The old environment tended towards a left/right tribalism that produced a lot of petty spitefulness, but it at least guaranteed there was a broadly accepted notion that people genuinely disagreed with each other in substantive ways. We may not have attributed each other charitable motivations or characteristics, we may have regarded each other as noxious or stupid, but we understood that the disagreement was, on some basic level, sincere.

We seem to have lost that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've come to realise that the exodus of conservative users from CFC OT has been a bad thing.

The old environment tended towards a left/right tribalism that produced a lot of petty spitefulness, but it at least guaranteed there was a broadly accepted notion that people genuinely disagreed with each other in substantive ways. We may not have attributed each other charitable motivations or characteristics, we may have regarded each other as noxious or stupid, but we understood that the disagreement was, on some basic level, sincere.

We seem to have lost that.

I don't actually miss it. There are plenty of other reasons to argue.

 

[Ajidica]

Was working on a model kit (WW2 PT boat) and royally screwed it up because I got frustrated with it.
Trying to mark out a waterline to separate upper hull from lower hull. Because the actual boat was so small, the waterline essentially curves under the bow, and I couldn't get the marking to stay level under the bow. When I got the kit the deck piece was slightly warped, so I had to do some finagling to get it to mount onto the hull right. I noticed that in the back of the boat, there was still a bit of a gap between the hull and the deck. Then I got the totally brilliant idea to pry the deck off the hull so I could flip the hull upside down and have a flat surface from which to mark the waterline. This has two major problems if I had paused for a second to stop and think.
1. the top of the hull is not a constant distance from the waterline. To reduce spray/improve high speed seakeeping, there is greater freeboard in the front than in the rear.
2. when working with plastic kits, the plastic glue used literally melts the styrene plastic to make a secure bond. By prying it off, I made getting it back together vastly more difficult as I will need to sand down both parts quite a bit so I can have a clean surface for the cement to weld together.

Then when I finally had a decent looking waterline marked down, in my rush to see if it looked right, I crudely slapped down some tape and painted over it to see how well the waterline turned out - virtually guaranteeing I will need to measure and mast again.

That kit is going in the box for a very long time. And I got distracted/frustrated by it I didn't go food shopping when I intended to, so now I get to decide if I quick go shopping now and only eat at like 8pm, or what.

 

[Takhisis]

How do you mark the waterline? Do you chuck gently ease the model onto water?

 

[Ajidica]

How do you mark the waterline? Do you chuck gently ease the model onto water?

That is not necessarily the craziest way to do it.....
In a battleship I made, it was pretty straightforward as the hull had a fairly square stance with no complex curves in the bow and the deck was a near constant height above waterline. With the PT boat, that doesn't hold true. So I ended up having to make a really crude jig (tape holding a marker in place on some leftover sprues I taped together log-cabin style to build up a proper height and then ran the marker along the hull. The complex curves in the bow were still a pain as I had to mark underneath the hull as it curved toward a vertical and a horizontal point.

Biggest problem now will be re-cementing the deck to the hull. Will have to sand down the rough parts where the weld was pulled apart, and for the the smooth parts where the cement never properly welded in the first place because there wasn't enough contact between the two parts in the first place. (Evidently there was insufficient contact for the plastic weld as I shouldn't have been able to pry the deck from the hull like that.

 

[amadeus]

Prepare for "art!"

Da Vinci, if he had worked exclusively in the medium of YouTube thumbnail.

edit: was certain I posted this in random thoughts but it works here too.

 

[Zkribbler]

The science articles talk about early Perseid showers. So look up...
In all the haze here, I'm lucky to see the Moon, never mind stars.

I built an observation platform at the top of my house for stargazing. But the sea mist hides everything. Since I've been here, I've never seen a meteor shower, comet, or lunar eclipse.

 

[Kyriakos]

Was working on a model kit (WW2 PT boat) and royally screwed it up because I got frustrated with it.
Trying to mark out a waterline to separate upper hull from lower hull. Because the actual boat was so small, the waterline essentially curves under the bow, and I couldn't get the marking to stay level under the bow. When I got the kit the deck piece was slightly warped, so I had to do some finagling to get it to mount onto the hull right. I noticed that in the back of the boat, there was still a bit of a gap between the hull and the deck. Then I got the totally brilliant idea to pry the deck off the hull so I could flip the hull upside down and have a flat surface from which to mark the waterline. This has two major problems if I had paused for a second to stop and think.
1. the top of the hull is not a constant distance from the waterline. To reduce spray/improve high speed seakeeping, there is greater freeboard in the front than in the rear.
2. when working with plastic kits, the plastic glue used literally melts the styrene plastic to make a secure bond. By prying it off, I made getting it back together vastly more difficult as I will need to sand down both parts quite a bit so I can have a clean surface for the cement to weld together.

Then when I finally had a decent looking waterline marked down, in my rush to see if it looked right, I crudely slapped down some tape and painted over it to see how well the waterline turned out - virtually guaranteeing I will need to measure and mast again.

That kit is going in the box for a very long time. And I got distracted/frustrated by it I didn't go food shopping when I intended to, so now I get to decide if I quick go shopping now and only eat at like 8pm, or what.

Pretty shameful, more so if one considers that people (though non-barbaric) created a virtually level 1036 meter passageway under a mountain, 2600 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos

Although dioramas/models were never my strong point either; I ruined more than enough and then gave up.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I built an observation platform at the top of my house for stargazing. But the sea mist hides everything. Since I've been here, I've never seen a meteor shower, comet, or lunar eclipse.

It's 3 days (nights) until the peak of the Perseids. I am not even slightly optimistic of being able to see anything. It's just the last couple of days that we've had a normal-colored sunrise and blue sky during the day (but I expect that will change when the smoke from the latest BC fires reaches us).

 

[really]

Yeah I'm on holiday in a relatively remote part of Ireland but unfortunately it is cloudy/overcast and I won't see much.

I did see them here a few years ago and it was cool.

 

[The_J]

I try to draw a simple arrow in GIMP, and it's driving me mad .
How can it be 2021, and it's hard to figure this out in one of the best open source tools out there, how ?

 

[shadowplay]

xbox game pass for pc seems to have an issue with purchased and installed DLC not appearing in the game, and it is driving me up the wall.

 

[Samson]

I try to draw a simple arrow in GIMP, and it's driving me mad .
How can it be 2021, and it's hard to figure this out in one of the best open source tools out there, how ?

The gimp is one of the best tools out there, but noone ever said it is the easiest tool to use.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I like Gimp!

 

[The_J]

I actually dislike it . I never manage to do with it what I want.
Right now I actually just need to combine a few pictures and draw some arrows. Pretty simple. But has been driving me nuts .

 

[amadeus]

Paint Shop Pro 7 here!

Why mess with success? Been using it for 20 years!

edit: rant: my phone battery didn’t plug in right last night. I’m posting on my balcony on a wing and a prayer (9%)