I mean, it does sound like y’all both saved yourselves some time.

It’s somewhat specific to someone with my type of background; namely growing up in a family of young-Earth creationist, fundamentalist Christians, and learning that things like science and evolution are lies from Satan.

At some point curiosity got the better of me and I realized I didn’t even know what evolution even is, so I read up a bit about it. Then a bit more. You know, this actually kind of makes sense. Eventually the rabbit hole led to the existence of God. I remember watching a bunch of debates and expecting the most learned representatives of our Christian tradition to make some really great arguments. And… they… never… did.

That was super cool.

Honestly, why? We’ve got billions of people driving around in cars they don’t know how to build. Is that a problem too?

I got a bunch of different kinds of boxer briefs a few years ago, and I learned from that experience that there is a WIDE variety of quality and fit in this category. They really shouldn’t chafe or let your balls stick to your thigh, if they do I’d highly recommend trying a different brand or fit or whatever.

One use case is if you’re running a web server that is configured to return a “maintenance” page instead of the live site if a particular file exists. Which is actually pretty cool because then you don’t have to update the config when you need to do something or let your users get a bunch of 502 errors, you just touch maintenance and you’re good.

Being a child with an ear infection, rather than take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, my parents had my grandmother come over to pray for me and she told me that Jesus was my physician. I just remember wondering why my physician wasn’t fucking doing anything about it.

I got myself a Xerox printer because I figured I’d be familiar with the interface since all the offices I worked in had Xerox printers, plus I figured getting a near-corporate printer might keep some of the bullshit away since Xerox would probably not want to motivate their corporate customers to switch brands. AFAICT they probably get most of their business through service, not so much product.

So far it has worked out well. I have yet to buy a Xerox brand toner cartridge, and I’ve had this printer for several years and I keep getting consistent high quality prints. Some of the features are not super intuitive, but I don’t think it’s terrible to have to read the manual once in awhile.

It wasn’t huge in terms of actual numbers, but it still feels like my biggest win. I bought my first car for like $750. It needed some work, but I fixed it up. Before long, I crashed it. It was totalled. But, it was a 1973 Dodge Charger. I started pulling parts off of it and selling them on this new thing called eBay, and by the time I ran out of parts, I had made more than twice what I bought the car for.

I guess one specific, concrete example would be reversing Citizens United. As I understand it, that could be done either by legislative action or through the judicial, though the former would probably be better.

I don’t use it every day, but today I used the pizza cutter that I bought for myself when I was maybe in my early 20s and I thought about how long I’ve had it. I had been pretty fed up with the cheap ones that my parents had around and decided to spend some money on a good one. I was pretty poor so it’s not like made of marble or anything, but it’s still sturdy and cuts pizza well after 20 years, so it was probably worth whatever I spent on it.

I’ve occasionally had success restoring a network connection with troubleshooter. Generally if you switch between Ethernet and WiFi, Windows will get confused, but the troubleshooter will turn the network devices off and on which gets it back. I find it’s easier to turn off the device I’m not using, but if that’s too complicated for someone usually “run the troubleshooter” works.

When I was a kid I had this idea about a protagonist who’s a serial killer but kills bad people. I think I even wrote a chapter or so, but it was probably shit. Then later someone wrote Dexter, so I don’t need to worry about it any more.

Edit: it was Jeff Lindsay, the first book was in 2004. It was probably the mid-90s when I was having those ideas so we might’ve been thinking about it at the same time lol

I’m a CPA and my PC runs Linux, but also has a Windows VM for when I need Excel (unfortunately the open source alternatives just don’t cut it, and I’m guessing it’s similar for someone who relies on Word the way accountants rely on Excel), and my work laptop runs Windows.

If you ever edit PDFs with Acrobat Pro, there’s no good Linux equivalent that I’ve found for that either. It can be done, but you’ll need a couple of different programs depending on what you need to edit in the PDF.

In general I’d say that you can run your business in Linux, but it is probably not the best choice.

I tend to think of it like a garbage disposal. If you can’t dispose of your garbage, you gotta keep it somewhere. Except most things probably don’t check if it exists or have a backup plan, so they’ll just crash.

My parents always told me the “truth” about Christmas: it’s Jesus’ birthday, and Santa Claus is a lie from the devil meant to turn you away from God.

I grappled with this question for awhile as a young parent. A thing that I noticed about kids is that they are great at make-believe, and they will get endless enjoyment from things that they made up themselves.

So I gave them presents “from Santa”, I filled stockings on Christmas Eve, etc., and we all knew we were playing the Christmas game together. I don’t think there was any lack in wonder or enjoyment.

I also made sure that they knew that some folks take it really seriously and believe Santa is real and everything, and that’s really none of your business so just play along and don’t ruin it for them.

Ironically, that’s like the one thing I’ve learned to do in Vim.

Not quite the same thing, but my first name inspires people to quote Dr. Seuss to me. Eventually I dropped it and started using my middle name instead.

I do share a last name with a couple of celebrities, and people will ask “any relation to (celeb whose name is spelled differently)?” Depending on my mood I’ll either point out the spelling or tell them he’s my cousin. Or bring up the celebs whose names are spelled the same.

Apart from the babies thing, that’s still a very interesting question. I bet someone knows the answer, but I wonder if the weight of the earth increases or decreases on average. I’d have to guess it’s a net increase from picking up stuff as we move through space, which probably dwarfs the mass of stuff we’ve sent out (especially if you don’t count satellites since they’re more or less still tied to earth). I don’t think there’s anything like natural ejections of matter from earth either.

I mean, you weren’t exactly 100% wrong.