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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • USA, Virginia: My county does not have municipal trash collection, so we either haul our own trash to convenience centers, or pay a private service to pick it up. The landfill and convenience centers are run by a private company and it seems to work pretty well, except for recycling. The county only recycles paper/carboard, metal, and #1 and #2 plastic, and for #2 plastic the opening of the container must be narrower than the container. We don’t recycle glass or any other plastics. Apparently my neanderthal neighbors couldn’t be arsed to rinse out the containers and the people whose job it was to sort it out refused to accept any more recycling from us until we made changes. And most of the county still just tosses everything in the trash compactors. I think our county-wide recycling rate is just under 25%.

    I like the system better than when I lived in a city where we had trash pickup. I can go drop off when I need to instead of missing trash day, having trash pile up waiting for trash day, or having it not picked up because it was “too heavy,” or some other reason. It doesn’t cost me anything other than gas, and we can usually combine the drop off with grocery shopping or other errands. I just wish we were better at recycling. My daughter lives in a city with single-stream recycling - all the trash and recycling goes in the same container and it gets automatically sorted at a processing facility.


  • A 27 1/2" tube is not really the same as 700c. 622/700c is a pretty common size that has a bead seat diameter of 622mm. 27 1/2" is a rare Danish size with a bead seat diameter of 609mm. Tubes fit a range of sizes for a specific diameter tire; the 26" tube might fit the 26" tire, but you need a 700 x whatever width range covers your tire width for the 700c wheel. For example, Conti makes a 700x32-47c that fits a 700x45c tire.

    Further complicating things, fractional tire/tubes are not the same as mathematically equivalent decimal sizes: 26x1.75" is not the same as 26x1 3/4".

    If you want a really good explanation, check out Sheldon Brown.



  • Years ago I was working on a major relocation as a government contractor - like shutting down a base and moving all the civilians to another state kind of major. We were in charge of getting people in the new building set up. Stuff likr making physical connections to the networks (6 different networks in some cases) when the drop is on the other side of the room, setting up specialty stuff like rooftop GPS or cell service antennas to get timing for some of the equipment, and adding or extending drops when some manager decided that the room that has been designated a conference room since before the building was complete should now be his department’s lab, and the lab should be his office.

    Anyway, I get a call from the facilities manager that “Jane Doe” does not have network access, and instead of coming to him or us, she called the Director of the entire fucking command (Senior Executive Service, above a GS-15, so equivalent to an Army General), and the Director is pissed that we screwed this up. Jane is well-known for being a difficult person, to put it mildly. Her whole department was a bunch of entitled prima donnas, and she was the worst of the bunch. So we meet the facilities guy outside the department office, which has about 30 people working in cubicles. I walk in, then turn around and walk back out, and ask him politely how exacty can she be surfing CNN.com on her computer if she has no network access? Turns out she was upset that she didn’t have a pretty blue ethernet cable like a bunch of other folks, and thought they had something that she didn’t. No, she had a fiber connection. The whole ginormous building had SM fiber to all the drops, but this conference room-turned-office only had about 10 or 12 drops, so some people got fiber but most got CAT6 coming from a switch that we installed as a temporary measure to make sure that everyone would be able to have network access until they figured out who was going to pay to install more drops.







  • All of my machine names are related to Elvis Presley. Elvis has been my desktop PC for years, and I have or have had Priscilla, Lisa-Marie, ColonelParker, Blue-Hawaii, Hound Dog, Memphis, Tupelo, and Graceland. I want to rethink this a bit to have to flow better, maybe have Graceland as my network name, or maybe the router. Also thinking about changing to something space-related or Norse Mythology as the theme.


  • I got upgraded from my usual generic Mercedes C-Class rental car to a BMW 5-Series on one of my trips to Germany. I instantly felt 10% more assholish as soon as I got into it. I even managed to get a speeding ticket within the first 10km or so - camera caught me going 8km/h over the limit in a construction zone, I think on the A67. The fine was only something like €20.
    I usually make a conscious effort to not drive like an asshole, especially when I’m traveling, although for some countires driving like an asshole is mandatory.