richfiles

On Wednesday, the forecast says it will be -29°F (-33.9°C) with 16 MPH (25.7 Km/H) winds... On Saturday, the forecast says it will be 34°F (1.1°C) with 14 MPH (22.5 Km/H) winds... With a 30% chance for showers... RAIN!!! That's snow and rain, in the span of a week, with a 63°F (35°C) temperature swing in a span of three days!?!? Why is Minnesota weather so crazy?!?

I got my first words today of how much of a... well... a "something show" it is at my old employer, since they let me go. If only I were there to see it!

Nice dubs + trip get

My complaint... I no longer work at a testing lab. It was very abrupt, and given how much they've been pushing for labor reduction recently... I barely reacted to the news. I'm not even that surprised. They've been so cheap with labor int he past year. No annual raises for anyone, not replacing employees who leave... Oh well. At least it gives me an incentive to find something better that I won't need to whine here about all the time. Now the big debate... Do I look for something in tech again... Or do I look for something outside of tech... I actually have a few options with technology related jobs, but I definitely recall how much that killed my drive to do my own tech... That and many other reasons were partly why I put up with the lab's shenanigans. Well, it's over now. Time to draw unemployment while I look for a new job. At least I have my second job for some cash flow, but it's not remotely enough without being supplemented by unemployment or another job. Unemployment isn't a longterm solution, so I need to find something good.

Since getting my new phone, I decided to get Pokemon Go to supplement the collection on my Pokemon game on the Switch... Darn, that's an addictive thing... My complaint... I discovered this game that encourages me to get out and enjoy the outdoors... In the middle of sub zero WINTER TEMPERATURES!!! On top of everything else... I JUST found Mew Two in the Switch game, and as all Poke-nerds do... I'm soft reseting till I encounter a Shiny Mew Two... So basically, I have a 1 in 4096 chance of getting it... Right at the point where if I left that point I could start transferring stuff into my Switch game... But I can't, cause I'm right there... Now I understand why I never touched Pokemon for the past 20 years... Good Lord... You have to be a masochist to enjoy this game... And considering it's about capturing and "enslaving" various animals to make them fight each other... Pokemon fans might have a sadist streak in them too! Yikes!

Every time I see this statement, I have to roll my eyes... Yes, we can certainly use interplanetary travel to save ourselves from our planet's ultimate doom, provided some version of ourselves is around to flee when the sun starts expanding... Sure, thats true... Thing is, anyone who thinks Mars will save us from destroying ourselves in the near future is... kinda bein' silly. If we are gonna destroy ourselves socially... What makes anyone think humanity has any future anywhere... Humans carry human nature with them wherever they go. We've done it everywhere we've traveled Earth, and we'll do it again when we travel to Mars, or beyond. Human nature is engrained into us, and "picking up, and leaving home" has never left it behind once. Whatever social doom might befall us here on Earth... It'll follow us to the planets and stars. Now... If it's climate destruction that we are fearing, then fleeing to Mars is downright delusional. I hear the climate on Mars is in even worse shape than the climate here... If we ever reach the point where we can terraform an entire planet to be habitable... Then the only reason to go there is expansion, and not fleeing a world we are destroying... If we develop the tech to modify a word that drastically, then we will have a far EASIER time modifying our own world that isn't trying quite so hard to murder all life on its surface! I love space travel, and I do belive we should try... But the reasons so many people give these days, are nothing more than pure hype and fear mongering, disguising the real reason to go out there... To DISCOVER! To EXPLORE! Sadly, those reasons aren't good enough for certain... "Down to Earth" folks. Many people out there don't "get" the "waste of money", so they don't care, or worse, are even opposed to space travel. As such, we get this personal, media, corporate, and government hype over how "Mars will save Humanity"... I don't buy it... I'm still happy to fund and promote exploration though. I just hate that it's being done through a hype filter... We risk even greater apathy, or worse... resistance... to Mars exploration and beyond once the hype filter cracks. That's just my opinion though. Sorry for stinkin' up the place...

Bought a new phone on Monday. Got an LG V40 ThinQ... Nice phone. My old one, and LG Spectrum (VS920) was from 2012... 6.5 years old. I was gonna order online, cause free 2 day shipping and they waive the $30 activation fee... I decided to see int he morning if the local store has the model I want, just in case. They did, but said the they didn't waive the $30 activation fee cause they handle transferring all your old data to your new phone and activating it and such... Okay, fine, whatever... At least the phone is right there... How bad could it be... "What's your PIN?" Umm... I'll punch that in myself... "What's your Google password?" Are you serious... hand me my phone... "Oh, you don't need to do that. That's just the legal agreement. I usually just do that for you" • Literal jaw hanging open... no words to respond to that • "Your phone is so old it won't let me run the new transfer app... I wonder if that might work...Hmm... Umm... Uhhh..." ~ Proceeds to page through EVERY screen of my phone Lady... I know exactly what's on my phone... If you need something, I can show you exactly where it is. "I can set up cloud sharing to save all your photos" Lady... It's 20 GIGS of photos and videos... On my SD card... I can pop out my SD card and transfer it to the new phone in 10 seconds...That's LITERALLY the one thing you don't need to do... "Everything looks like it should work, but I can't figure out the WiFi on your old phone... I mean, you could try it yourself when you get home... I just can't get it to transfer." Are ya flipping kidding me!?!? I skipped the free activation deal cause you told me this was gonna be the "easy way"... And you're sending me home with only a basic activation, after I did most of it myself, anyway, cause you couldn't grasp the concept of secure information practices and just hold my phone out to me any time it needed a password inputed into it? I just kept the phone once I got it out of her hands and proceeded to go through the entire remainder of the process myself. When I got home, it took me about 30 minutes to figure out how to do the transfer, with nothing more than the software already on both phones... And I've never done a transfer before in my life... This is her JOB!?!? Is she taken by the flippin' KRAKEN! How! Ugh... The absolute lack of not simply respect for information privacy, but her doe in the headlights look any time I didn't just hand over the keys to my digital kingdom at her every request was dumbfounding! Its like she had NEVER heard the concept of privacy before, never heard of keeping your passwords and data secure... Still did most of the work myself, AND get to pay and extra $30... Joy...

@kerbiloid I think some people fear the thought of dying on the "throne"... This... THIS ONLY INCREASES THOSE CHANCES!!! Too hilarious! I will say this though... It looks far more comfortable than mine! So... Moving on... I've been really getting into model trains again... Not a good thing for my KSP Instrument Panel project's progress... But hey, when I'm this busy with work, buying moar™ train stuff is an easy hobby... I discovered this passed summer that there's still a brick and mortar model train shop about half an hour from my location, out int he middle of nowhere. It's literally a store room in the back of a small town's grocery store. You walk into the grocery store, ask for the proprietor, and then you get taken passed the deli & meats department, passed the store's inventory area, and into the little storeroom in back. It's wall to wall, floor to ceiling model trains! I want to support this small hobby shop and it's owner so much... But they seem to get stock based on reorders... and the locomotive I want has a digital controller (DCC) without sound, but I want the sound equipped models. That means I want to either buy ones with the factory installed DCC sound modules, or buy just plain old analog DC models (with no controller at all) so that I can install my own aftermarket DCC sound controller myself. Unfortunately, because he's only got the locomotive with the no-sound controller, I have to pay a $44 premium above the analog only price, to buy it with a controller that I will literally immediately remove. Could I sell it? Sure I could. Problem is, basic name brand DCC controllers can be had for $20-40, and from China, they can be had on the cheap for $12. The demand for no-sound controllers isn't as intense, cause the controllers are readily available. As such, they rarely sell for the $44 retail price... This same controller will sometimes sell, sometimes not sell, even from reputable, specialized ebay sellers for $30-35... I probably won't be able to match that. Basically, cause this little shop has their stuff presumably on auto-order (when it sells, they seem to replace it with the same), I have to waste $44 and HOPE I can maybe make a fraction of that back by selling a decoder I don't want... Even though I've asked about getting that particular model with a sound decoder or with no decoder...

After watching "Bohemian Rhapsody", I popped my iPod in to play some Queen on my ride home... Only to be horrified that Queen wasn't even listed under artists, and the SOLE, SINGULAR Queen song loaded onto the old upgraded iPod Mini was part of the Liberty Rock Radio soundtrack from GTA 4. This... made me sad... When i got home, I sought to remedy that by loading all my Queen music onto the iPod... Only to be FURTHER disappointed that despite a 296 GB music folder, I had FIVE Queen songs, not counting the aforementioned GTA 4 track. Basically... EVERY rock station plays Queen. I can't go a DAY without hearing Queen (this is a good thing), so long as a radio is playing (Radio, I still love you ). Problem is, that radio, for all it's love of Queen, doesn't really hardly play more than about a dozen songs... Always the same handful, repeatedly. As such, I sought to remedy this. Five greatest hits albums acquired, and 5.5 hours of Queen later, I now have resolved my iPod's Queen deficiency, but MORE importantly, discovered that they have SO MUCH MORE that I either have NEVER heard, or that I haven't heard for YEARS. "Driven By You" is one of those forgotten songs... I used to hear this on the radio, back when it was new, and I LOVED IT back then... I know it was used in a Ford advertisement. I think that might have actually pushed the song quickly out of regular play... It became "that Ford song". Thing is, it's been SO LONG since I'd heard it, I'd completely forgotten all about it. I never even realized it was Brian May, of Queen, performing it. More likely, I didn't know the name Brian May as a kid, and thus, since this was released as a single by Brian May, I never knew that, for all intents and purposes, this was more or less Queen, post Freddie. I also didn't know enough about the music world back then to know Freddie Mercury had died the SAME month this got released. I like to think that despite the use in a Ford ad, and despite the relationship described in the lyrics... I imagine some of the inspiration of this song has got to be a tribute to the bandmate they had just lost, who they knew they were loosing as this song was written. Particularly the bridge and final chorus... I just get that vibe... Anyway, when taken in that light, its a rather touching song, at least to me. Even the lyric's up front narrative is interesting. I tell ya... It really is something to discover a great song for the first time, twice! Hehe... I JUST watched Spirited Away and "Howl's Moving Castle" on Friday night! What great movies! Welcome to the aural experience that is the music of Pink Floyd! I hope you find plenty to enjoy! Now come on... Is that really such a terrible way to fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way!

Landlord had a new toilet installed to replace my old cracked one... It works great, but the seat seems to have been intentionally designed to cause the greatest possible amount of pain in my... seat...

Get home from work... Plan to spend the rest of the day finishing up an order or circuit boards for my second job... Notice on the door from the landlord... 24 hour notice for an inspection of all sinks and toilets... Okay, that's fine... Except now I need to clean, cause over Christmas and New Year, my place is an absolute mess. Now I STILL have to do boards, but now get to clean up too! Joy! Update... It's 10 PM and I took a shower. I cleaned up in the kitchen, the living room, and changed out all the cat's stuff. I still haven't eaten yet. On top of everything else, I discovered there actually IS a crack in my toilet tank... It looks like it's been there for a long time (staining from "blue water stuff" that I know I haven't used for at least a year and half, maybe two years. Thing is, the staining doesn't go all the way down the crack on the inside of the tank, so the crack must be growing. There's a disaster waiting to happen! If the tank were to crack open, the water would never shut off! Needless to say, I turned off the valve. About 4.5 hours of circuit board work to do... Joy. **UPDATE 2** I'm done... With both things... It's 4:45 in the morning... I get up at 6:50. I get to go to two jobs tomorrow.

I'M TRYING!!! I CAN'T DO IT!!! But seriously... The standard pronunciation is too burned into my brain, and these words collectively are such a silly string of characters that I literally can't wrap my brain around how to move my mouth and throat muscles to make this happen! It's a most hilariously absurd demonstration of muscle memory, and is so hilariously frustrating!

Two jobs. The one that I tend to rant about is a job at a testing lab. We test food, water, cosmetics, soil, and other goods and materials for all manner of contamination and characteristics... microbes, heavy metals, caloric content, etc I work in the microbiology department. My job includes preparing sterile media and sterilizing and disposing of tested samples. Basically, we prepare the sample containers by lining them, filling them with measured amounts of water, and adding the growth media to the containers. Those get loaded into an autoclave, which is basically a giant pressure cooker with a cart that roll into the chamber on rails. The media is sterilized to a temp of 122°C @ 17 PSI and then we store it. Other sections of the department add samples to the sterile containers and incubate them. after an incubation period, they take samples out of the containers and swab them on petri dishes for further incubation to do visual colony counts and microscopic examination, or they load them into specialized machines that can detect the presence of bacteria by detecting specific DNA markers directly. After testing, samples are returned to my department for sterilization and disposal. They are fed back into the autoclaves, which kills anything growing in them, and then they are disposed of. Food liquids and soft solids go into an in sink disposal, and solids go into the trash. We also clean the reusable glassware in my area. The positives are that the job is very flexible in my hours, and there is a nearly nonexistent level of discipline or consequence over things like arrival time... As long as the work gets done, it's all good. I have NEVER in all my life seen anything like their level of flexibility... People have tried to quit (five times is one dude's personal record), and been retained with near pleading. In my five and half years there, I've only ever witnessed two firings... One over theft, and one over directly getting into an argument with an upper manager. As long as I come in sometime within the first half hour of when I'm expected to be there, all's good. If I somehow sleep through my seven alarms (yes... I'm not a morning person), or something comes up and I don't call in, I'll generally get a call asking if I'm coming in or if I'm feeling well. The department manager has always been flexible with start times, cause as long as things get done by the end of the day, it's all good. If it takes me an extra 5 minutes to scrape the ice off my car, I never sweat it. If I need to run to the bank before work, I just do it. If I wake up groggy and just can't get moving... And I take an extra 10 minutes to get ready... Oh well. They often times have let other people shift their usual start time by 40-50 minutes, just to let them work around taking kids to school, and such. They've always been so flexible! Theres also the issue of overall job security. When there are only ever 2-3 people in your area, and you have the most knowledge and experience, and the job itself is not manufacturing, but service, and much of it testing for government standards... You can be assured that save for a tornado or flood leveling the place... There will be work the next morning. The company is growing, though they are doing so at the expense of things like... Oh, employee raises and edging more work out of the same workforce without adding new people. They rely heavily on the seasonal interns that come out of the college in town, or migrating the soil lab workers into other areas during the frozen season. The issues seem to stem from new people at the top level. I won't discuss the details of internal things like that here (nor will I ever discuss customers or goods tested). The past year has been incredibly trying... I've definitely been burned out, and the work and hours have been crazy lately... but that confidence in knowing my job is secure is very overpowering. That's why I put up with it. If I didn't vent, I'd probably go crazy. My second job is actually much older, and carries over as a direct successor of my original career. After I graduated college, I started working for an electric motor manufacturer called Motion Control Group (MCG, formerly QMC - Quality Motion Controls). I specifically worked for their Tachtronic Instruments division (TACHtronic, not to be confused with TEKtronix), which specialized in DOD/Aerospace motors and synchros. In 2006, the TA division was brought back into the main MGG building. In 2007, a company called AMETEK bought MCG and by 2008, announced they would close our plant and move the products they wanted to keep out to North Carolina and Pennsylvania. My last day there was at the end of September of 2009, right as the worst of the economic recession was happening. I got a job at Gamestop two days later, and worked there for peanuts and video games till that store closed in January of 2015. Seriously though... I was there for the discount! One of my supervisors at MCG had seen the writing on the wall and had built his own machine shop a couple miles out of town, on his country property. The shop was basically a miniature version of MCG. Much of what they did, he could do, just at a smaller scale. He acquired a few products from AMETEK that they didn't care for taking, and he hired me once he started operation in January of 2010. That job is GREAT! Much of the work, I am able to do from home, in my own workshop. I get paid $20 an hour to solder stuff. If it were full time, or even part time with more consistent hours, It'd be a dream job, and the only one I'd need, but while business is booming right now, work isn't always consistent. It's entirely dependent on customers actually ordering product. I've gone as much as 4 MONTHS with no work from there at all. Granted, it's been a long time since that happened, but whether the customer will order more product after an existing order is fulfilled is always a gamble. I can't base my livelihood on it. I CAN make it into a GREAT supplemental income though. The problem, is that when things ARE booming, and I can put 20+ hours into that job in a week, I have to consider that I'm already pushing 35-50 hours a week at the lab, and over the past year, a department that typically had 3-4 employees was being run by me and one newbie. That's it. It was grueling. I'd often put in 9-10 hour days, Monday through Saturday. They screwed up the schedule as well. Microbes don't take Sundays off, and we used to have a rotating schedule where you got alternating weekends and Mondays off, and at least one three day weekend each month. They ditched that because there were no longer enough employees in the department to distribute around that schedule anymore, so they just canned Sundays, and now we do two days of work on Mondays. Cause, you know... Mondays needed to be WORSE than regular Mondays. Rubbing salt in the wound, I'm technically only part time, by my choice. I'm on a good health insurance program right now. Problem is, I only qualify to buy into it because I don't qualify for any employer provided insurance. If I went full-time, I'd qualify for employer provided insurance, and no longer qualify for this decent insurance. It's worth it to me to give up other full time benefits, for good insurance. Problem is, it feels like the company almost goes out of it's way to take advantage of my part time status. They push more and more hours out of me, ask me to come in earlier and leave later... But I don't get PTO or any benefits matching. I don't get holiday pay. None of that. Even my bonus his year... I've put in more hours than i've ever worked before in my life. I've bent over backwards for them... But my bonus was less than 1/3 of what others got, what full timers got. Was all my efforts not good enough!? I put in the same amount of labor. I'm just disgusted by it all. And finally, it snowed, then rained, then snowed again... True to form, I did some off the clock testing. Turns out gravity still accelerates my backside toward the Earth at a rate of 9.8 m/s2, and the coefficient of friction is reduced when interface material is sub 0°C crystaline H2O, and the other material is my shoes. I broke my fall with my right knuckles and a bag of chips crumbs. Aside from trying to keep the centimeter long wound on my knuckles from getting infected, the left front side of my abdomen, and my neck both feel like I pulled something... Ouch...

"The lab will be closing at noon today, so once we finish up our work, we can all head out early..." "That one lady" that is an absolute workaholic ( We're talking daily 10-12 hour shifts, even on weekends, and I'm pretty sure she might actually secretly be a machine in disguise) asked me to turn off the lights when she left. Before me. Literally, the last person out of the building. At 5:17 PM... My SUPERVISOR left sometime just after 3! ====== So, that was my complaint, but I do at least have a few things to be thankful for... Don't worry... I'll mix complaints into it, so it's topical. Last month, one of my uncles appeared to have a stroke... and the MORON he's married to didn't "get" how serious his symptoms were... You know... Inability to move one side, incoherent speech, etc... Decided to see if he improved by the morning and get in touch with his brother to see what he thought... The second I'd found out she WAITED overnight... I'd pretty much given up any and all hope for a recovery... I was in tears, and was shaking I was so furious with her stupidity. I think the best name for what I was feeling would be "impotent rage"... The absolute inability to do a darn thing about an utterly helpless situation that anyone involved BUT me might have had any influence over... Once I composed myself, I actually methodically plotted out on Google maps the exact distance between me and her, JUST so I could say "it's a good thing there's 1134 miles between me and her right now" (1824 km) I suppose, it was a distraction in that moment. Something to do other than worry and utterly DESPAIR at the thought that there was no hope... Well, it was a hellish month. The worry and all... But interestingly enough, despite the severity of symptoms, by some miracle, the long term effects don't seem to be nearly as profound. I don't know how or why, but he's already in physical therapy, is coherent and talking, and was even released to home care! He's not out of the woods yet, but its FAR MORE than anyone in the family ever thought possible! Thank God he's recovering! Modern medicine is an incredible thing, but that level of recovery had to be at the edge of the bell curve! My complaint... Should be self evident... Stupidity is not acceptable in such situations. It's not his first stroke even, so she should have KNOWN BETTER... She was just that stoopid™ I'm also thankful for an unexpected Christmas gift! On an N-scale model railroad forum, someone started a thread titled "What would you like to see manufacturers run for 2019". In this thread, someone posted "A BL-2 with sound". For reference, modern model locomotives can be purchased with DCC controllers, allowing digital commands to be sent through the rails to command individual locomotives, rather than the old way, where you divided your track into electrically isolated "blocks", and just powered different blocks to power whatever locomotives were on that block, in a completely analog fashion. Sound refers to a DCC controller with a speaker and flash memory to store sound samples of the real locomotive the model is based on. The digital controller simulates the sounds of starting and stopping the engine, idling, revving up, applying brakes, blowing the horn or whistle, or ringing the bell, and so on... Some DCC sound controllers are so detailed, that they simulate little things like the air compressors that charge the air supply for the air brake sand such, or simulate radio chatter. It's actually pretty amazing they can pack all that inside a model with a frame as little as 8-12mm wide! Modern technology is an incredible thing, but that level of tech is expensive... Not cause it's actually expensive, but because it's a captive market. My complaint... The flash memory is a <$1 part, and the microcontroller is <$5, even in single quantities... I bet the whole board costs under $15-20 to make, but costs $85 to me. Really hoping the open source community steps up! They've already got the control station and track power, plus accessory decoders figured out... Just need locomotive scale decoders now, both with and without sound functionality. Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. Back to the BL-2. I'd never HEARD of the BL-2 before. It HAD to be notorious, cause people immediately started posting comments like "What would a BL-2 with sound even sound like? "I'm ugly, get it over it. I'm ugly, get over it. I'm ugly, get over it."." Another guy started making jokes about needing to run to the toilet to barf. So... Now I NEEDED to see how bad this stinker must be... I... You know... I kinda like it! It's unique! It's totally retro! Love how the curves and lines on this create that enormous aerofoil shape on the side trim! And that cab looks incredibly roomy! Must have been nice to ride in! Everything about this screams 1940s, and indeed, it was built initially in 1948. For whatever reason, a lot of people don't dig this design though. It's kind of a hybrid transition between the old E and F series streamliners, and the more blunt ended and narrow bodied GP freight series. Honestly, I liked it, and I said so on that thread! So, queue the following day. I was behind on assembling circuit boards for my other job... It SUCKED!!! I was tired, and it was 3 in the morning, and I still had at least an hour of work left, and I NEEDED to deliver them that day! I was SO tired... But then I see a notification that someone on the modeling forum PMed me. I click it and read the message... Some dude from France had read my comment. He tells me that he has a few BL-2s and that he had one he doesn't really run anymore, and since it was Christmas, he decided he was gonna send it to me! He told me not to worry about postage, that he'd cover everything, 'cause Christmas. It was a gift from one modeler to another! I was thrilled! I thanked him at least three times in two paragraphs responding! My complaint, besides the SUPER LATE night of work... The world has left me so cynical about people, that I kept wondering... This isn't some scam is it? Dude never asked me for any money or any bank info, just where to ship it. Legit, just gifted me a model locomotive, all cause I stood up against the flow and said, "I kinda like this thing. It's unique. Now I wish I had one." I almost feel bad for thinking that, especially regarding such a kind gesture. World is a screwy place, I tells ya! Sometimes, you just gotta stop worrying, and just appreciate it.

Just a break or retirement ? A lifetime of work left... How long? I dunno, only my Chief knows that one. I doubt I'll be able to retire by the time I reach that age... I kinda expect my finances to tank, Social Security to tank, or my health to tank... Whichever happens first... Pttht!

We are thinking that it was a rash (for the past month), as appearance and symptoms (itching) were always consistent, till yesterday, when something entirely different was being done, and the area where the rash was suddenly showed much worse symptoms. One ongoing theory is that some of either the pH balancing acid (Hydrochloric Acid) or the base (Sodium Hydroxide) may have been spilled on the removable cart panel. The panel was being washed when the burn occurred, and the sink was not very full of water. There was so little water in the sink that the coworker had decided to add water to the sink to submerge a 1.5 inch thick (3-4 cm) panel. If the acid or base on the panel touched her skin (the underside of the arms) and water splashed on it, it's possible that could have given it the opportunity to burn the already inflamed area more easily. It's also possible that there could have been acid or base transferred to the ledge of the sink, where her arms would have rested while washing (she's kinda short). As for the initial inflammation, it had previously been theorized that the detergent we use was causing it, and it had been healing well since we stopped using it... People unfamiliar with our area worked there last Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday, and DID use that detergent in our area, and her irritation had come back. So, TL;DR version... The current theory is that the unexpected return of the detergent reignited her inflammation, and that possibly spilled pH balancing chemicals (either Hydrochloric acid or Sodium Hydroxide) were previously spilled on the cart panels. The burn happened while the panels were being washed. We suspect the already inflamed skin was the most sensitive, and reacted most readily. The good news, is it's already healing well, and she might only be on restrictions for a week, not a month. Meeting tomorrow... Sooooooo.....

My employer... ugh... Coworker has had a "rash" on her arms for a month that has been getting worse. Company trying to figure out why. Bought her longer gloves. That failed to fix it. Tried changing the soap we use... Nope... All the while "We'll figure this out", and "It's just a little rash. You don't need a doctor for that."... Well, she couldn't take it, and yesterday it escalated to unbearable. She left in the middle of the work day to finally go to the doctor... Coworker: "I've had this rash for about a month now..." Doc interrupts her: "That's no rash... Those are chemical burns." Welp! I'm now down my Coworker for probably over 80% of tasks (she can't get her arms wet), right as I lead up to next week, when I'm supposed to pull a crunch to work extra hours for my second job (good luck with me leaving this job at a reasonable time now...), all while we STILL have no clue how it even happened... I gotta jump in and put in my 130% now... Ugh... I told my coworker "never trust this company's medical advise. I regret, to this day, falling for their... how shall I say... bovine excrement... and "waiting" for their occupational therapist... who simply "cleared me as being fine, and okay to work", when I literally couldn't operate my shoulder with enough force to even button my own pants... I regret not immediately going to the doctor and sending them the bill. I kept asking how to do the billing (I didn't have insurance back then), and they kept dodging an answer... To this day, my shoulder is not at 100%...

Sony even had instructions in the PS3 manual on how to use the Other OS feature. It was an advertised feature, and they disabled it... Not for compatibility or security reasons (their self contradictions in the courts prove that), though they claimed it was for "security". It was because they wanted to limit legal homebrew. They had already put heavy restrictions on what hardware Linux could access... This was being worked on by the homebrew community. They killed an advertised feature (pre-launch advertised even), to snuff out the chances of a free and legal software development community around their then advanced hardware, and push people into their Game OS and the Playstation Store. A Judge ruled Sony had to pay for this action... Sony just simply managed to drag this out long enough to stick it to all of us, AGAIN, and make sure the lawyers got most of the money, and not us. Also, due to Sony's were security and formats and stuff... No, I never recovered anything on the drive. People eventually figured out how to make it work, but I didn't have much on there that wasn't also backed up to the Crapple Mac G5.

Yesterday, I FINALLY got the settlement check from Sony, over them removing the "Other OS" functionality from the Playstation 3, and thus eliminating my very first Linux box. It only took 8 years and 7 months... I really was expecting the claimed $65... I'd provided all my info... Dug up emails and downloaded installer's file creation dates, and all sorts of proofs... Damn it Sony... Well, They guaranteed one thing... I've been screwed over by Sony enough times... Between defective power management chips in multiple generations of TVs, to rootkits on music CDs, locking out third party Epic accounts over Fortnight crossplay... Originally, I bought a PS4, but quite frankly... I almost never touch it anymore. I let my PS+ expire, and I just don't care anymore. I now game on retro consoles, my PC, and the Nintendo Switch. I don't even care about Sony's exclusives... Sony had to drag this out, had to repeatedly appeal, even when the appeals got thrown out... Sony wrote off my troubles with $10.07... I'm writing off Sony. Ten o seven... This isn't a new decision, but that INSULT of a check only bolsters my vitriolic hatred for Sony these days. I will not buy a PS5. I will not buy a PS Classic. I will not buy Sony TVs, or any other consumer good. I've even been lately, paying attention to what movies are Sony, and not paying to see those either. Let me put this another way... I'll still give EA money, if they produce something I'm interested in... Not Sony. Sony is dead to me. Have any of you ever hear of the Grand Theft Auto IV expansion "The Ballad of Gay Tony"... Well, on the PS3, you could enter a short bit of text to display by your username... I changed it to read "GTL-Balad of Gay Sony" (Grand Theft Linux) after they pulled their dirty bait and switch firmware update on April Fools day. NO WARNING that it would disable Other OS, that you'd even lose the partitioned space on your hard drive unless you reformatted the ENTIRE DRIVE... NO warnings at ALL... I read stories where people thought the claims it nuked Linux was itself an April Fools prank... "Sony would have said so if it actually did that"... It was some shady "involuntary launch seat deposits". After Skyrim came out, I changed my PSN user comment to read "Linux took Sony 2 Knee"... I did not like the limited character count, but I never changed it again... When I bought my PS3, I had a hard choice... I had wanted the PS3, but my computer had died and I needed to decide on a new PC or a game console... Except I knew the PS3 could run Linux, so I made the choice. I did get an old Power Mac G5 at the time, but it was slow and cumbersome. This was 2008... I lost my job in 2009. At one point I was working THREE JOBS and making only half my old income. 2010 was a tough year... That old PowerMac G5 was PAINFULLY obsolete, and I had no spare cash... Then Sony took my one powerful computer away from me in the most out of turn, but definitely in season April Fool's prank... I was stuck using that pathetic Mac for another three years before I saved up for an i7! THREE YEARS OF SUFFERING under the glow of an obsolete Steve Jobs machine... $10.07 doesn't even begin to cover my frustration, and it definitely doesn't begin to absolve any of my hate for Sony!

Plumber was out to fix the heat yesterday. Even felt heat in the floorboard radiator pipes over my lunch break yesterday... I thought everything had been fixed... This morning, it's 62°F / 16.6°C in my apartment...

I woke up this morning, and before I even got out of bed, I knew something was wrong... I'll drink some water and get my breakfast going... Four minutes later I'm tossing the breakfast in the fridge and bolting for my throne room. I leave... And return within another 10 minutes... At this point, I'm letting my boss know I won't be in. So, this has been a BAD week at work... I started out SOLO for Monday and Tuesday due to a sick coworker, and because of the infernal bean counters, I've been DOWN my third coworker since October... Last year... My coworker is only a few months in, and she was sick two days in a row. Me, I was out Friday, and now today. There is a nasty bug going around. I've had a head cold since last month, and occasionally have kidney stones. "You seem to be calling in sick a lot" NO KIDDING!!! Just like EVERYONE ELSE!!! So... You know what else is a problem... My heat at my apartment isn't working. I've not had the heat on yet this fall. Temps dropped to a consistent sub 0°C/32°F this past week... Overnight temps are expected to reach as low as -11°C/11°F tomorrow night... Messaged my landlord this morning... Still no response. I baked an apple pie last night, just for the heat. It's so cold, that I keep having to reheat my chicken soup, cause it gets cold before I can finish it.

I think it boils down to having a thing that otherwise is far beyond your personal means to possess... There's no way I could have a real train. There's no way I could have that much land, or all those buildings and businesses. I can't have control over any of those vast and impressive things... Unless I build them in miniature... I DO like to build things, after all! Then I can be the master of it all!!! MWAHAHAHA!!! I kid, I kid... I suppose for some people, they enjoy the operations. I think I'd get bored with logistics. An Arduino can handle that for me all day long. Some people... They love the idea of having a timetable for their imaginary freight and passenger stops... Pickups, deliveries, schedules... They want to manage an entire fleet, and do it by the book! What's a loop? A real train wouldn't just roll loops! It has places to go businesses to service! Stations to provide transit for! I'll bet you there's even those "snooty" hobbyists (not to be confused for the EMD SD40-2 "snoot nose") who like to just buy the most impressively expensive limited run production models, just so they can feel superior! "Why yes, I DID indeed spend $880 on a Santa Fe Warbonnet F7 A-B-B-A quad locomotive set WITH the DCC plus sound decoders, as well as the complete Pullman coach set. That was another $600, plus the extra $120 I spent on the custom replica of the "Turquoise Room" Pleasure dome lounge. And yes, I did spend $500 on that Union pacific "Big Boy" steamer. Oh, of course it has the Tsunami sound DCC decoder installed. What do you take me for, some DC track savage!?"... Yeah... I bet that guy's out there, somewhere... Waiting... Lurking... Ready to pounce and belittle your puny little Atlas Dash 8-40C that you only spent $65 on... egh, used... blech... with NO decoder installed... DC savages... Even with a DCC decoder installed, it doesn't support sound without... *haughty shivers* mods... Ugh... Pathetic... Yeah... That guy is totally out there, and I'm 99% certain I encountered him this passed July, belittling me for being cheap when I laughed on a modelers forum about an incredibly rude ebayer trying to sell a $75 Exactrail DM&E hopper set for $145. This guy's EXACT response to my post about the ridiculously priced auction... "I hate selling stuff because somebody always comes along and want's to explain to me why the price is too high and that I should be grateful for their lowball offer. (I offered the ebay seller higher than the going used prices on ebay... This here is just a guy complaining that I was cheap!) I'd sooner throw some stuff in the trash (Really!?! You'd rather throw, in this example, $75 worth of models away, than to make a deal with another human! Yikes!) than deal with Richard Rawlings or Rick Harrison wannabes sending unsolicited messages about what their opinion is. (Unsolicited?!? This guy is nuts! I clicked on someone's ebay sale. Clicked "Make an Offer". I was declined manually, I replied trying to find what the seller was realistically wanting to get... I wouldn't call that "unsolicited"... Lordy...) You're entitled to your opinion, not to my attention, that this guy replied at all is more than I'd have done. (And yet this randumb guy took the precious time out of his busy day to tell me how cheap I was for not offering DOUBLE retail price for these out of production hopper cars... Must be quite the amazing product, eh? ... Right?) I saw these DME hoppers. I'm watching them to see if the price changes, but I don't really want them. Intermountain cars with their etched roof walks are better, these with their clunky plastic walks were obsolete when they came out. They appear to be sold out on EXR's website, and I doubt they'll ever be rerun." ... Whaaaaa!!! There is a REASON I put this random, unsolicited response to my laughing at an ebay seller's absurd auction in Comic Sans. More money than brains, I guess! (Well, I complained about that bit of silliness, so I guess I'm on topic now!) Honestly, for me, it's the building. When I got into the hobby originally, back in high school, All I had was a $7 train set from a fleamarket. I had no buildings. I had to build everything myself. I got some books from the library and I carefully built a few things, step by step. A log cabin made out of skewers. A coal tower made from balsa sheets and toothpicks. An oil pump made from cut rail scraps... But then I discovered the joy of recreating real buildings. I built my mother's house, and my dad's house, our family's old farm house, the barn, the machine shed... When I went on a church youth group trip, I measured the dorm we stayed in and built it. I'd find a nice vantage point and sight the building, recording my measurements. Sometimes I'd measure the space of one lap of wood, or one brick's dimensions (plus mortar), and count them. Other times I took sighting angles and used trigonometry to calculate the dimensions... I was a real nerd in high school... I only got worse! I have very little of anything I simply bought from back then... What I retained after so many moves, was all those old buildings that I'd created. For me, it's the creative works and the recreations of the real, made miniature. There are things I thought I'd saved, but I can't find. That has been driving me absolutely MAD! (that's also my complaint, so I guess I'm still on topic!) Ebay can replace those old items with identical copies, but it can't return my originals to me, and I have NO IDEA what happened to some of my original rolling stock. I think another aspect of it is the application of useless knowledge... Knowing how the airbrakes work on a machine you will NEVER OPERATE is pretty useless... Knowing they are accurately reproduced, down to every little hose, the brake wheel, and the linkage to actuate the system, and also knowing the transportation hazard markers and all the road numbers and markings are faithfully reproduced on a miniature is a justification for all our useless knowledge! Most of us will never launch a rocket of our design either, but we know the basics behind it, at least on Kerbin! In the end, we all might even be able to apply said useless knowledge towards impressing the fellow nerd herd and gain status within the pack's hierarchy... Okay... That, or it just simply looks cool!

... I'm so sorry, man...

I went to a Model Railroad show on Saturday. I found plenty of amazing deals, met interesting people, heard cool stories, and one model club even Invited me to run my newest locomotive (an Intermountain Iowa, Chicago, & Eastern "ICE" SD40-2) on their layout, since I don't actually have my own layout built yet (I'm not even going to attempt to do so until after I leave this apartment and get moved back into a proper house). Here's some of what I bought (I also got some paints and components, not pictured)... What's the complaint? This almost sounds more like bragging (it is ) Well... Click, if you dare! (Careful... Not for the faint!) Remember folks... These were still GOOD deals... At least four of the above were such good deals, I'd almost go so far as to call them outright steals! Let that sink in... Good thing I am so overworked, so I can afford all this!

For those who know of me here, you know I'm into electronics, though lack of time has put a massive roadblock on getting anything done lately... Anyway, I have a Hakko 936 Soldering Station, and as far as soldering irons go, it's quite nice. Lately though, I had been thinking my Hakko Soldering Iron was failing. The tip looked very new, but it was just having a terrible time melting solder. I was going through excessive amounts of flux, and work has just been wretched with it. I genuinely thought it was failing me after 14 years of reliable use. I tested the tip temperature with my Soldering Iron Calibration tool (it's a thermocouple temperature meter that can handle peak temps up to a several hundred °C... At least from 0-500°C accurately, I know for sure)... It was 80°C below the set temperature! The next day, I disconnected the handle from my base station and took it to the machine shop where I work. I first tested the machine shop's Hakko, and it was perfectly calibrated... Measured to within 9°C of where the knob was set, which is quite impressive for an analog knob. When I attached my handle to the base station there... Same as before. Mine measured about 80°C LOW! Anyway I took the tip off to examine the ceramic heating element. I thought maybe it had cracked... That's when I realized there were no markings on the tip. The tip wasn't a Hakko tip! Turns out, back when I bought my hot air rework station, it came with a knockoff Hakko soldering iron. It was BAD... Like, I thought it had been damaged in shipping, cause it was bent, but no, the ceramic heating element was just molded with a curve. It was shoddy, poorly made, and I immediately removed the handle from the hot air station and left it disconnected since! I have never used it. Ever. Turns out, one of the shoddy "Chinesium" tips that came with it managed to get put into my good pile, and that's what I've been soldering with for months! These tips were SO BAD, that they lost around 80°C of the heat generated by the heating element, just in transferring it to the tip. I can't even imagine what they're really made of, considering that the lack of laser marked logo and part number (what genuine Hakko tips use to ID the tip type) was the only means I could even tell the two tips apart! A genuine Hakko tip made the soldering iron like new again. I can't stress enough how great Hakko soldering stations are! 14 years, and it's still working flawlessly! It feels like it's still new! Just don't cheap out on knock off tips... They REALLY DO make a difference! Those trash tips that came with my hot air station's auxiliary soldring iron... Scrap is all they're good for! Yikes! Still can't believe I let one of those pics of garbage get stashed with my good Hakko tips... I feel dirty! Btw... I find wetting a brand new soldering iron sponge to be quite satisfying to watch, so click below if you've had a bad day (or even just a meh day) and want to see something mildly satisfying.