They're indestructable. Get a clump of chives and plant them in a sheltered spot that gets a decent amount of sun (I live in a cold climate, so I have my chives in a nook by the back porch, right near the foundation... seems to protect them somewhat from the -10F winters). Snip some off when you need it. Snip any flower buds--I hear you can eat chive flowers, tho I haven't tried it. Generally, herbs taste different if you let them flower, so don't.
I've had the same $1.59 clump of chives growing in my yard for four years now. Great for scrambled eggs and baked potatoes. They're the first thing to sprout in the spring and the last to die back when frost hits (I've grabbed usable chives from under six inches of snow).
IIRC, determinate tomato plants bear all their fruit in a short period of time--great if you have a big home canning operation set up, not so great if you want a tomato a day for a few months. If you plant indeterminate tomatoes, you can harvest them until frost kills the plants.
The other great thing about tomatoes is that you can buy actual plants of various sizes and varieties instead of starting seeds on your own. (They say, though, that you might as well buy smallish plants, because they'll catch up to the $6.99 behemoths pretty quickly.)
There are a lot of movies floating around out there in SVCD format, and with very few exceptions, the movie fits on 2 or 3 CDs. Off the top of my head I can recall a 148-minute movie that fit comfortably on 3 CDs.
Oh brother. Why does the "TV is a waste of time" crowd even bother reading TV-related threads?
Oh, right. To preach their gospel to us poor, misguided TV-watching dimwits.
Relative difficulty and duration of favors...
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
I will fix it once. I may even fix it twice. I MAY even do it a third time. After that BITE ME!
This makes it sound like the stuff your family does for you is interchangeable with your tech support on a per-incident basis. I'm not sure that's fair.
My boyfriend's sister needed help with their family's computer a while back. I drove an hour to get there, grumbling all the way; did an hour's worth of light, easy work fiddling with their settings and giving her pointers; then drove back. Not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, but her husband spent a whole day fixing our roof once in the blazing sun. As far as I'm concerned, we still owe them a few hours of whatever help they need, and then some.
I just wish nutrasweet was more shelf-stable and high temperature stable so I could substitute it for sugar in recipes and not have the diet coke in the back of the fridge go south.
Dunno about shelf-stable, but Splenda (sucralose) is heat-stable. Makes great cheesecakes. Diet Rite cola is sweetened with sucralose and acesulfame potassium, and has neither aspartame nor caffeine.
More like 32 days right now, at least in the groups that I know of. Nothing to sneeze at, anyhow.
And some ISPs have decent news servers. Mine has good completion but lousy retention. If I want to grab anything there, I have to check the newsgroups just about every day. Still beats trying to download SVCD video on my $10-per-6-GB Easynews account.
1. Be extra nice to your mother, she won't be around forever. (I don't think I'd really want to tell my 12-year-old self that she had only four years left, though.)
2. Don't just work around the agoraphobia, get help.
3. When you get to college and start having outright panic attacks, don't go whinging about your childhood to a bunch of counselors for nine years. See a doctor. Maybe by 1987 they'll have some idea how to treat psychiatric problems like anxiety and depression. By the time you graduate they DEFINITELY will have some idea.
4. Hey, on the "I'm not gonna drink 'cause it's easier not to start than it is to stop" thing--good thinking, kid. Still sticking to that plan at 33.
6. Less sugar and junk food, more protein and veggies.
Playing chess during lunch isn't streetsmart, it's like walking down a dark alley alone. . . . If you lack streetsmarts, I don't care how much booksmarts you have, you're still an idiot.
If there's a difference between that first sentence and "hide the chess set," it's a little too subtle for me. And we're not supposed to talk about Tupperware at football games. All right then: how 'bout we talk about Matisse? Star Trek? No? Then perhaps you meant "pretend to be interested in football" after all?
And for the record, if I want to meet a woman I can look in the mirror. If you meant "form a relationship," I've been in one for eight years. As for work, my performance reviews are just peachy, thanks for your concern. What a concept--I can find love and build a successful career without turning into a social chameleon.
I can't believe I'm getting lectured on my "lack of social skills" by a belligerent idiot.
As a nerd kid, I did not whine about being unpopular. I didn't want to be popular; I wanted to be left the hell alone by the jackasses who made a hobby out of tormenting me.
Common sense says: Don't be yourself. Pretend to be interested in sports. Hide your chess set. Deliberately give wrong answers in class so you don't look too smart.
Oh brother. If that's streetsmarts, I'm glad I had booksmarts instead. I may have gotten relentlessly tormented by the non-nerd kids, but at least I had some integrity.
Agreed. There's so much pressure to provide positive feedback that there's a kind of grade inflation going on. Any seller who doesn't completely botch the transaction expects praise.
My own experience with feedback has been mostly at half.com, which eBay now owns. Two recent incidents:
(1) I ordered a book, and the seller promptly entered glowing feedback about what a good buyer I was. Not that I didn't appreciate the gesture, sorta, but on Half, all a buyer does is click the buy button and enter a credit card number, which Half processes. The whole "good communication, prompt payment" thing that happens at eBay is moot at Half. I can only assume the seller was hoping I'd reciprocate with similarly glowing feedback.
(2) I ordered a CD in "very good" condition from some bozo who sent it in a broken case with mismatched pieces (front cover from slimline case). Got stonewalled when I sent a complaint through Half. Before entering public feedback, I did a little digging and found that he had apparently retaliated against another buyer who gave him negative feedback. My feedback number is low enough (all positive, but only about 10 comments) that one retaliatory negative rating would really mess things up--how many people will do the research to determine if the bad rating is legit? So I held my nose and entered "neutral" feedback. Seller claimed the damage must've happened in the mail. Riiiiiight.
So I take positive feedback with a grain of salt, but even a "neutral" comment is a big red flag.
coupled folk have to spend a lot of money so that their SO will still think they love them...
Actual phone conversation this morning at work: SO: Hey, I forgot to get you something for Valentine's Day. Hope you still love me. Me: Of course I do. And I forgot too.
Yet another artificial holiday perpetuated by Hallmark and florists to keep the profits rolling in. We haven't even bothered getting Valentine's Day cards since maybe the first year we were together.
Sounds analogous to "I want to collect 600 pounds of books." Man, wish MY tastes were that unspecific...
with a sprig of irony on the side
on
Advergames
·
· Score: 1
That wasn't too bad. The game and its instruction manual, IIRC, poked fun at the product placement... and Sobe was enough of an offbeat brand to fit in with the personality of the game. Besides, the stuff in the machines within the game didn't match actual Sobe products (unless they really make something called eXpresso that makes you run really really fast...).
On the other hand, if they had littered the landscape with Pepsi machines and skipped the nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to product placement... Ugh.
So am I. I kinda liked learning Graffiti. Then eventually I got tired of my Palm and let it gather dust for a couple of years.
A friend showed me her spiffy new Palm last week. She handed it to me and said, "Here, put in your phone number and email address for me." I was rusty at Graffiti, but managed to fill in the info, stumbling over a couple of forgotten characters. Those happy finishing-a-puzzle neurons were firing; ahhh. Fun.
When I handed it back to her, she said, "You know, you're the only person so far who did this with Graffiti. Everybody else had to pull up the onscreen keyboard."
My local Best Buy has a hand-written sign up near the music CD-Rs claiming that they sound better and are more(!) flexible.
I haven't figured out yet whether they're deliberately lying or just ignorant. (These are the same guys who had no idea what I meant when I told them they shouldn't leave their monitors in the PC section at the default 60hz.)
it is almost impossible to distinguish sound peer reviewed medical services from Dr. Nick Riviera's "I'll do any operation $199.99"...
Nonsense. You just stick to the big medical sites like WebMD and Medscape, or keep an eye out for titles like "New England Journal of Medicine." If, on the other hand, you're on a site that sells quack cures or links to conspiracy-theorist or UFO sites, get outta there. If you find something interesting and you're not sure it's reliable, hit Google and look for corroboration from a trustworthy site.
I'm one of those patients who shows up armed with internet printouts, 'cept I show up with GOOD ones. I often go in with a diagnosis in mind, and you know something--I'm usually right. I'm fortunate to have doctors who are open-minded enough to hear me out. Without my internet research, I would still be undertreated or untreated for a couple of chronic but manageable disorders (hypothyroidism, acid reflux).
I'm a salaried "exempt" employee of a contract house that bills the client hourly. The company says that I am "hourly exempt," which is a contradiction in terms and most likely illegal. I can't work over 40 hours without prior authorization (cool by me); I can't work under 40 hours without using paid time off or taking unpaid leave.
As far as I can tell, the only real difference between me and an hourly employee is that I can only take unpaid time in full-day increments--which sucks, since I only get 2 weeks paid vacation and no sick pay. Unpaid leave is a certainty, and I wish I had more flexibility with it.
But I like the job and the people, and in this job market, I'm not about to quibble.
And it beats being "really" exempt. I don't work overtime--if I did, the contract specifies that they pay me straight time. I love how they make a lack of protection by labor laws sound like a good thing: hey, I'm exempt!
Slashdot Mirror
They're indestructable. Get a clump of chives and plant them in a sheltered spot that gets a decent amount of sun (I live in a cold climate, so I have my chives in a nook by the back porch, right near the foundation... seems to protect them somewhat from the -10F winters). Snip some off when you need it. Snip any flower buds--I hear you can eat chive flowers, tho I haven't tried it. Generally, herbs taste different if you let them flower, so don't.
I've had the same $1.59 clump of chives growing in my yard for four years now. Great for scrambled eggs and baked potatoes. They're the first thing to sprout in the spring and the last to die back when frost hits (I've grabbed usable chives from under six inches of snow).
IIRC, determinate tomato plants bear all their fruit in a short period of time--great if you have a big home canning operation set up, not so great if you want a tomato a day for a few months. If you plant indeterminate tomatoes, you can harvest them until frost kills the plants.
The other great thing about tomatoes is that you can buy actual plants of various sizes and varieties instead of starting seeds on your own. (They say, though, that you might as well buy smallish plants, because they'll catch up to the $6.99 behemoths pretty quickly.)
Interesting idea. Two questions:
(1) Would it degrade video quality to have cables this long? I'd probably need 50 feet.
(2) Anyone know offhand of an S-video out card that's an add-on, not a replacement for one's main video card?
There are a lot of movies floating around out there in SVCD format, and with very few exceptions, the movie fits on 2 or 3 CDs. Off the top of my head I can recall a 148-minute movie that fit comfortably on 3 CDs.
Oh brother. Why does the "TV is a waste of time" crowd even bother reading TV-related threads?
Oh, right. To preach their gospel to us poor, misguided TV-watching dimwits.
I will fix it once. I may even fix it twice. I MAY even do it a third time. After that BITE ME!
This makes it sound like the stuff your family does for you is interchangeable with your tech support on a per-incident basis. I'm not sure that's fair.
My boyfriend's sister needed help with their family's computer a while back. I drove an hour to get there, grumbling all the way; did an hour's worth of light, easy work fiddling with their settings and giving her pointers; then drove back. Not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, but her husband spent a whole day fixing our roof once in the blazing sun. As far as I'm concerned, we still owe them a few hours of whatever help they need, and then some.
I just wish nutrasweet was more shelf-stable and high temperature stable so I could substitute it for sugar in recipes and not have the diet coke in the back of the fridge go south.
Dunno about shelf-stable, but Splenda (sucralose) is heat-stable. Makes great cheesecakes. Diet Rite cola is sweetened with sucralose and acesulfame potassium, and has neither aspartame nor caffeine.
More like 32 days right now, at least in the groups that I know of. Nothing to sneeze at, anyhow.
And some ISPs have decent news servers. Mine has good completion but lousy retention. If I want to grab anything there, I have to check the newsgroups just about every day. Still beats trying to download SVCD video on my $10-per-6-GB Easynews account.
8. Learn to count... (or is that 5?)
Mine'd be something like:
1. Be extra nice to your mother, she won't be around forever. (I don't think I'd really want to tell my 12-year-old self that she had only four years left, though.)
2. Don't just work around the agoraphobia, get help.
3. When you get to college and start having outright panic attacks, don't go whinging about your childhood to a bunch of counselors for nine years. See a doctor. Maybe by 1987 they'll have some idea how to treat psychiatric problems like anxiety and depression. By the time you graduate they DEFINITELY will have some idea.
4. Hey, on the "I'm not gonna drink 'cause it's easier not to start than it is to stop" thing--good thinking, kid. Still sticking to that plan at 33.
6. Less sugar and junk food, more protein and veggies.
7. You're gonna turn out great. Really.
And I quote:
Playing chess during lunch isn't streetsmart, it's like walking down a dark alley alone. . . . If you lack streetsmarts, I don't care how much booksmarts you have, you're still an idiot.
If there's a difference between that first sentence and "hide the chess set," it's a little too subtle for me. And we're not supposed to talk about Tupperware at football games. All right then: how 'bout we talk about Matisse? Star Trek? No? Then perhaps you meant "pretend to be interested in football" after all?
And for the record, if I want to meet a woman I can look in the mirror. If you meant "form a relationship," I've been in one for eight years. As for work, my performance reviews are just peachy, thanks for your concern. What a concept--I can find love and build a successful career without turning into a social chameleon.
I can't believe I'm getting lectured on my "lack of social skills" by a belligerent idiot.
As a nerd kid, I did not whine about being unpopular. I didn't want to be popular; I wanted to be left the hell alone by the jackasses who made a hobby out of tormenting me.
Whining had nothing to do with it.
Common sense says: Don't be yourself. Pretend to be interested in sports. Hide your chess set. Deliberately give wrong answers in class so you don't look too smart.
Oh brother. If that's streetsmarts, I'm glad I had booksmarts instead. I may have gotten relentlessly tormented by the non-nerd kids, but at least I had some integrity.
Agreed. There's so much pressure to provide positive feedback that there's a kind of grade inflation going on. Any seller who doesn't completely botch the transaction expects praise.
My own experience with feedback has been mostly at half.com, which eBay now owns. Two recent incidents:
(1) I ordered a book, and the seller promptly entered glowing feedback about what a good buyer I was. Not that I didn't appreciate the gesture, sorta, but on Half, all a buyer does is click the buy button and enter a credit card number, which Half processes. The whole "good communication, prompt payment" thing that happens at eBay is moot at Half. I can only assume the seller was hoping I'd reciprocate with similarly glowing feedback.
(2) I ordered a CD in "very good" condition from some bozo who sent it in a broken case with mismatched pieces (front cover from slimline case). Got stonewalled when I sent a complaint through Half. Before entering public feedback, I did a little digging and found that he had apparently retaliated against another buyer who gave him negative feedback. My feedback number is low enough (all positive, but only about 10 comments) that one retaliatory negative rating would really mess things up--how many people will do the research to determine if the bad rating is legit? So I held my nose and entered "neutral" feedback. Seller claimed the damage must've happened in the mail. Riiiiiight.
So I take positive feedback with a grain of salt, but even a "neutral" comment is a big red flag.
coupled folk have to spend a lot of money so that their SO will still think they love them...
Actual phone conversation this morning at work:
SO: Hey, I forgot to get you something for Valentine's Day. Hope you still love me.
Me: Of course I do. And I forgot too.
Yet another artificial holiday perpetuated by Hallmark and florists to keep the profits rolling in. We haven't even bothered getting Valentine's Day cards since maybe the first year we were together.
Oops, someone posted the same thing 12 hours ago.
...who lie awake at night wondering if there's a dog.
At a conservative 50MB/episode, that's 15 gigabytes...
I want to collect 150GB of pure legal stuff.
Sounds analogous to "I want to collect 600 pounds of books." Man, wish MY tastes were that unspecific...
That wasn't too bad. The game and its instruction manual, IIRC, poked fun at the product placement... and Sobe was enough of an offbeat brand to fit in with the personality of the game. Besides, the stuff in the machines within the game didn't match actual Sobe products (unless they really make something called eXpresso that makes you run really really fast...).
On the other hand, if they had littered the landscape with Pepsi machines and skipped the nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to product placement... Ugh.
So am I. I kinda liked learning Graffiti. Then eventually I got tired of my Palm and let it gather dust for a couple of years.
A friend showed me her spiffy new Palm last week. She handed it to me and said, "Here, put in your phone number and email address for me." I was rusty at Graffiti, but managed to fill in the info, stumbling over a couple of forgotten characters. Those happy finishing-a-puzzle neurons were firing; ahhh. Fun.
When I handed it back to her, she said, "You know, you're the only person so far who did this with Graffiti. Everybody else had to pull up the onscreen keyboard."
My local Best Buy has a hand-written sign up near the music CD-Rs claiming that they sound better and are more(!) flexible.
I haven't figured out yet whether they're deliberately lying or just ignorant. (These are the same guys who had no idea what I meant when I told them they shouldn't leave their monitors in the PC section at the default 60hz.)
Listen closely.
You are clinically DEPRESSED. Textbook case. See a doctor NOW. You owe yourself that much.
Trust me, I've been there. Think I'm wrong? Take this depression quiz.
it is almost impossible to distinguish sound peer reviewed medical services from Dr. Nick Riviera's "I'll do any operation $199.99"...
Nonsense. You just stick to the big medical sites like WebMD and Medscape, or keep an eye out for titles like "New England Journal of Medicine." If, on the other hand, you're on a site that sells quack cures or links to conspiracy-theorist or UFO sites, get outta there. If you find something interesting and you're not sure it's reliable, hit Google and look for corroboration from a trustworthy site.
I'm one of those patients who shows up armed with internet printouts, 'cept I show up with GOOD ones. I often go in with a diagnosis in mind, and you know something--I'm usually right. I'm fortunate to have doctors who are open-minded enough to hear me out. Without my internet research, I would still be undertreated or untreated for a couple of chronic but manageable disorders (hypothyroidism, acid reflux).
Weird situation indeed.
I'm a salaried "exempt" employee of a contract house that bills the client hourly. The company says that I am "hourly exempt," which is a contradiction in terms and most likely illegal. I can't work over 40 hours without prior authorization (cool by me); I can't work under 40 hours without using paid time off or taking unpaid leave.
As far as I can tell, the only real difference between me and an hourly employee is that I can only take unpaid time in full-day increments--which sucks, since I only get 2 weeks paid vacation and no sick pay. Unpaid leave is a certainty, and I wish I had more flexibility with it.
But I like the job and the people, and in this job market, I'm not about to quibble.
And it beats being "really" exempt. I don't work overtime--if I did, the contract specifies that they pay me straight time. I love how they make a lack of protection by labor laws sound like a good thing: hey, I'm exempt!