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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Teams feels a bit like a never ending beta. On one hand, it’s kind of nice to get constant tweaks and it’s generally pretty good. On the other, things do break from time to time. There’s also the whole “new teams” thing, which feels… very similar to “old teams”. All the old sillyness, like not being able to folder dive in a team while chatting (it will forget where you were when you switch back) for not much benefit. It also is a big regression in basics like spell check speed. It takes seconds for a red squiggle to send, so now my spoild self has to wait a bit before hitting enter.

    At least it’s not new outlook. Everything on that is way slower and it’s very clear the UI was not optimized for a computer. Left click to spell check in an email body, right click to spell check in an email title. Want to add formatting in a meeting invite? Ha, that’s rich. Even very basic things like changing fonts take forever.

    Both feel a bit like a new PM being given the reigns and going at it. I struggle to see what was so wrong with the old versions, especially outlook…


  • This isn’t about imperial vs metric, it’s about measuring by mass vs volume. A good example here is flour. Weighing out 30 grams (or about 1 ounce) of flour will always result in the same amount. On the other hand, you can densely pack flour into a 1/4 cup measuring cup, you can gingerly spoon it in little by little, or you can scoop and level. When you do this you’ll get three different amounts of flour, even though they all fill that 1/4 cup. Good luck consistently measuring from scoop to scoop even if you use the same method for each scoop.



  • Even if you don’t go down the programming angle, your style seems ripe to incorporate things like PCB traced/layout. In the olden days, layouts were done by hand and some had a bit of artistic flare and were generally single layer with jumpers to hop over other traces as necessary. Something from the 80s through the early aughts will have a lot more straight lines, but there’s still a lot of interesting geometry. Multi-layer PCBs were becoming more prevalent, but most limited to two. Modern designs are very dense and often span way more than 2 layers, but if you were to find the right thing (PCB antennas maybe?) it could make for something interesting.


  • Man, color in photographs and color on screens can be quite the rabbit hole…

    Many consumer screens, especially phones, display colors very differently. Likewise, most cameras (phones, DSLRs, MLIC, etc) will render straight out of the camera JPEGs with various degrees of tweaks (more contrast, saturation, etc).

    Take a photo of the same thing with two different cameras and then view the results on two different screens. You’ll get a total of four different results.


  • Here are five fast examples from both sides

    • The average new house size went from around 1,000 sq ft in 1910 to 1,500 sq ft in 1970, to 2,000 sq ft in 2000 to aroind 2,400 sq ft today. It’s not easy to buy a new small(er) home and housing prices reflect that
    • When the Corvette was launched in 1953 it cost $3,490. That’s around $39,000 in today’s money. A brand new Corvette will cost you $70,000
    • A 1970 Datsun 240z was $3,500, which is $28,000 today. You can buy a brand new Mazda Miata or Toyota GR86 for that inflation adjusted amount
    • A gallon of milk cost $1.32 in 1970. That’s $10
    • According to the 1970 census, median household income was $8,730. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $71,000 - which is surprisingly close to the 2022 census’s $70,784 number

    So what’s going on and why are people not happy? IMO it’s a mix of

    • Things are getting nicer, but they’re also getting more expensive. This seems to be a mix of consumer taste and seller side shenanigans. For example, small/mid size cars, which are typically cheap, have had decreasing sales volume for the past 20 years. Enter multiple OEMs de-emphasizing small/mid size cars and leaning into crossovers, which just so happen to cost more. To go back to the earlier housing example, house size has been going up while the average household size is going down. There were 4.5 people per household in 1910. This dropped to 3.15 in 1970 and is down to 2.51 today. In other words, today’s new larger homes have fewer people living in them than 50 years ago. New homes today also tend to be built with nicer furnishings (coming from someone with 1960s builder grade cabinets in their house). Housing is a bit of a mess for a bunch of other reasons too… Zoning, smaller parcel sizes for subdivisions, etc etc
    • The wage vs productivity gap
    • The… very big imbalance between worker vs CEO wage growth

    It goes beyond the cost of goods and gets back to some level of fairness (or a complete lack there of).


  • Waiting tables at the tail end of high school and throughout college really boosted my intrapersonal skills. I have no problem interacting with most anyone and can usually pick up on cues that go beyond what the person is saying. I work in engineering at a fortune 500 now it’s really amusing how bad a decent swath of employees are at getting their point across, understanding what someone else is trying to tell them, and reading the room.

    That said, I had a stint in retail. Waiting tables was more stress, but the people were generally quite a bit nicer.



  • I am aware of them, but given my general lack of focused fitness I am fairly ambivalent about a fitness tracker. I do spend a decent amount of time chasing my kida outside and take the stairs/park far away at work, but my smartphone does a good enough job at tracking those activities.

    A smart watch/fitness tracker makes sense if you’re actively engaging in use cases that they will enhance, but that’s not the case for me right now. I just want an easy way of knowing what time it is and I’ve learned to manage notifications on my phone so the important ones still catch my attention.



  • I bought a mechanical watch about five months ago and honestly, it’s been great. I’ve been through… way too many smart watches over nearly ten years and was getting tired of not getting more than two-three years out of them before something failed. It seemed wasteful. Yeah, standalone GPS tracking and what not was neat, but I nearly always have my phone on me these days. I wore watches, granted Iron Man and not mechanical, all through middle and highschool and ditched them when cellphones really started becoming ubiquitous. It’s funny how I’ve come full circle.


  • Haha, I was trying to post a summary vs rehashing one of the million recipes you can find on the Internet. Let me try restating them a bit more explicitly:

    1. Start softening your desire amount of butter in the bottom of the stand mixer. If you don’t have a stand mixer, put the butter in the bottom of a large bowl. Set aside
    2. Optional: add minced rosemary and/or roasted garlic and such to the bowl
    3. Add cold water to the pot you’re going to boil your potatoes in. Large pot = good. Add salt to this water if desired
    4. Get a cutting board, a potato peeler (optional), and a knife. Chef knife = good
    5. Peel potatoes with a knife or a potato peeler. The only exception I make for this is for red potatoes, but even then I peel half
    6. Dice the peeled potatoes using the knife and cutting board. Add to the pot from step #2
    7. Put pot on stove and bring to a boil using high heat
    8. Boil the potatoes until they cleve cleanly with a fork. You’re not going for mush/butter soft, but you also don’t want a crunch as you slice them
    9. Drain the potatoes and dump them in the bowl from step 1. Let rest a few minutes to soften the butter.
    10. Mash some to make sure the butter is melted
    11. Add milk as necessary and mash. Don’t overdo the mashing!

  • It looks like I’m the odd person out: I cut my potatoes before boiling and use a KitchenAid stand mixer for the mashing. My mashed taters are usually soft/fluffy/yummy.

    For mashing, less is more. If you know this going in, there’s no harm to using a stand mixer.

    Put your desire amount of butter in the bottom of the stand mixer. Peel, slice and add to cold water. Salt if desired. Boil until they cleve cleanly with a fork. Drain, dump on butter, let rest a few minutes to soften the butter. Mix and add milk as necessary. A little minced rosemary with the potatoes when they go into the stand mixer is 👌




  • Eh, it really depends how heavy your clutch is. Exonoboxes (Saturn SL2, Sonic) or sporty cars with lower torque numbers (Miata, Celica, Fiero, Prelude, S2000) = no biggie. Higher torque (V8 Camaros and Trans Ams, Corvettes) usually have an assist spring to help you hold the petal to the floor, but engaging/disengaging take more leg effort.

    /late 30s guy who only owned one auto that was converted prior to buying an RV

    On a side note, modern manuals kind of suck. They hold revs when you pop the clutch for emissions reasons, which makes the 1-2 shift especially kind of suck. A lot of them also barely engine brake and dual mass flywheels on higher output engines can clunk if you unload them hard. Although regen braking isn’t super thrilling, it’s way more engaging that engine braking in basically any model year 2010+ vehicle.