totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Any unusual traces of teeth on it?

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Maybe Wendie got bored?

"Don't worry, she's just playing!" (c)

 

I was expecting this guy

https://images.app.goo.gl/xakWvXMSYwfBD4QC9

[TheSaint]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Any unusual traces of teeth on it?

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Maybe Wendie got bored?

"Don't worry, she's just playing!" (c)

 

Or...

 

[kerbiloid]

Both of you expect Jaws, so unlikely they sent him, he's compromised.

While some old shamanism is expectable. Better keep watching for traces looking like human ones.

[StrandedonEarth]

"Bad things come in threes" struck the Greater Vancouver area this morning. In New Westminster (former B.C. capital city and a suburb of Vancouver), a thousand feet of "Pier Park" went up in flames, including the ancient creosote-soaked pier pilings to make for a toxic smoke. 100 km to the north there's the aforementioned Sea-to-Sky gondola sabotage. And 100 miles to the east twenty-two train cars derailed beside the Trans-Canada Highway; fortunately no injuries or hazardous cargoes were involved but it is a visual distraction to drivers on the highway. Luckily it's past the main commuter corridor.

Pier Park before and after during:

Spoiler

 

Derailment:

Spoiler

Yeah, that would be a distraction....

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[kerbiloid]

Unlikely Jaws could do it alone.

Either there is Dr. Evil at your place, or your dwarves again woke up the balrog.

[richfiles]

I finally worked out a solution, figured out all the parts, and ordered everything I'll need to build the drive mechanism for the Radar Altimeter Tape Meter for my KSP Instrument Panel.

Delivery date: As late as October 22.. 
This is assuming all the parts even ship... I've had huge supply issues out of China cause of the pandemic. Not all supply chains are at full capacity.

[richfiles]

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I HATE stupid, absolutely incompetent suppliers that can't even keep their inventory straight.

Just got the most aggravatingly cheery "Hi! Sorry we forgot to update our inventory, so no motor for you! Plz cancel and we'll refund you"... Complete with the stupid cheery emojis... I just can't even... I just paid $57 for a whole pile of parts TAILORED to install around THEIR MOTOR!!! ARHGHnjbfbbdabfbKLMbfbgf

Every part I bought had to be ordered to match the bores and shaft diameters of other parts, so all of it would actually fit together... Ugh!!! Now I'm not only BACK to searching for a motor, but now, cause it had a 6mm shaft, I'm now locked out of the more common 5mm shaft motors, unless I WASTE MORE MONEY and just buy extra parts! I'm so frustrated with these absolutely unreliable suppliers, I swear if my hair don't fall out, I'll start pulling it out! This is an untenable level of incompetence, over such simple concepts, like keep track of your freaking inventory! Now I'm back to searching...

Most of this post was copied out of a Discord chat, so I wouldn't need to retype it... I think I got all my "choice words" removed from it... 
Oh, am I angry though... Absolutely livid...

**UPDATE**
Found the exact same motor on ebay... Now let's hope it's not coming from the exact same source... 

Edited September 17, 2020 by richfiles

[Delay]

I'm very good at remembering numbers. I can even say with confidence that I memorize numbers better than anything else, sometimes even without intending to.

It therefore was very frustrating and disappointing today when I misremembered the Planck constant as 3.3*10^-34Js instead of 6.6*10^-34Js... in physics class, during a test. So all results are off by a factor of 0.5 or 2, except for one, which is off by 1.41. I'm sure my grade will be fantastic.

What an embarrassing error.

[cubinator]

19 minutes ago, Delay said:

I'm very good at remembering numbers. I can even say with confidence that I memorize numbers better than anything else, sometimes even without intending to.

It therefore was very frustrating and disappointing today when I misremembered the Planck constant as 3.3*10^-34Js instead of 6.6*10^-34Js... in physics class, during a test. So all results are off by a factor of 0.5 or 2, except for one, which is off by 1.41. I'm sure my grade will be fantastic.

What an embarrassing error.

Usually physics teachers are more focused on the equations rather than their constituents - especially in a class where you're using that particular constant at all...If it's obvious that you had the wrong Planck constant but wrote down your equations, I bet you'll be all right. A factor of exactly 2 is very conspicuous, and it's obvious whatever you were doing was consistent.

[Bill Phil]

4 hours ago, Delay said:

I'm very good at remembering numbers. I can even say with confidence that I memorize numbers better than anything else, sometimes even without intending to.

It therefore was very frustrating and disappointing today when I misremembered the Planck constant as 3.3*10^-34Js instead of 6.6*10^-34Js... in physics class, during a test. So all results are off by a factor of 0.5 or 2, except for one, which is off by 1.41. I'm sure my grade will be fantastic.

What an embarrassing error.

I didn't multiply acceleration by mass on a Dynamics test and still got most of the credit and even got a good chunk back when I talked to the professor about how I worked it out. So long as you get an answer, physics is generally quite lenient and forgiving.

[richfiles]

On 9/16/2020 at 12:56 AM, richfiles said:

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
I HATE stupid, absolutely incompetent suppliers that can't even keep their inventory straight.
....
**UPDATE**
Found the exact same motor on ebay... Now let's hope it's not coming from the exact same source... 

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
I was JOKING!!! For the love of God, I was just joking!!! 
It seems I found the exact same SELLER on ebay...  

I just... I'm so tired...
I wanna just sleep a whole stupid day, and maybe dream of a world where workmates at Shenzhen warehouses actually do their job and track inventory...

Edited September 18, 2020 by richfiles
The listing was up for at least 24 hours after they learned the motor was out of stock...

[qzgy]

On 9/18/2020 at 7:23 AM, richfiles said:

Motor issues that suck and are very annoying

Umm possibly dumb question - would it not be possible to make/get an adapter between the 5 and 6 mm shafts to make finding a temporary (or temporaryish depending on how things go...) motor easier?

[richfiles]

13 hours ago, qzgy said:

Umm possibly dumb question - would it not be possible to make/get an adapter between the 5 and 6 mm shafts to make finding a temporary (or temporaryish depending on how things go...) motor easier?

Once I realized the motor I was looking for apparently just flat out didn't exist in any meaningful manner, that's exactly what I ended up doing. I already made a post on my solution on my Kerbal Instrument Panel build thread, but I looked and found 6mm OD/4mm ID stainless steel tubing. I'll Loctite the tubing onto the shaft of a much more readily available 4mm motor shaft, and then i can mount the two 6mm bore timing pulley wheels to the extended motor shaft. I also ordered a small 6mm ID pillow block bearing to support the other end of the motor shaft. Since I'm cutting the shaft to length anyway, I can give the it enough length to actually support it by it's end.

Edited September 21, 2020 by richfiles
Please excuse the crudity of this drawing. I didn't have CAD to draw it to scale or paint it

[richfiles]

I bought a book last week, and it just arrived! I've been looking for this book for years. It's not unobtanium... It's just expensive. It typically costs around $122-190, and i have a digital copy, so it was never an expense I could justify. When I saw a copy pop up for $12.95, I jumped at it. I saw a similar thing happen in January, but the seller never shipped. I assume it was a drop shipper, and they found they couldn't get the book lower than the price I paid, so they just never sent me anything... It was annoying, but whatever. I took that gamble again, but thankfully, the seller pulled through! I got the $122 book for $14 shipped! Not only did the seller pull through, but it's an original printing, and the hardcover edition, no less! I never even noticed the listing mentioned it was hardcover! 

My complaint... They put a STOCK STICKER ON THE SPINE!!! NOOOOO!!!! I had to carefully peel it off. SO annoying!!! 

So why does the book matter to me? 
(Spoiled simply cause wall of text, plus a video, and mostly positive stuff... except the very last thing...)
 

Spoiler

 

Outside of local influencers, there were two figures who served as major intellectual inspirations that helped mold my interests in my early adolescent years: Rodney Brooks and Misha Mahowald. Brooks came first... I discovered his work when I saw his robots on the cover of Scientific American, while visiting my father in the hospital back in 1991. He had a farming accident that split his kneecap, and it took some time for it to heal. Brooks (who went on to found iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba) was an MIT professor at the time, and had created a series of legged robots that used simple control system he calls "subsumption architecture" to create hierarchically layered sets of simple instructions, that together, perform far more complex unified behaviors. That ended up being a very strong influence on my early teen years, and many years later, I was able to pick up a copy of that old issue of Scientific American, thanks to ebay. It led me to an interest in structured control systems, legged robots, and the concept of mimicking nature when creating robots. He's not really relevant to the book I just purchased, but I did get the idea of looking for the book, after seeing the old SA magazines online, and buying those.

The other person, and the one who wrote this book, was Misha Mahowald. Misha grew up only an hour and a half away from where I live, though I never knew of her back then. She ended up going to California to attend Caltech, and then to the UK for her post doctorate studies, and worked with the legendary chip designer Carver Mead. I saw her on the early 1990s PBS documentary series "Discovering Women". She was an early pioneer in machine vision, creating a neural network based retina on a chip, and later, a chip to allow digital communication of analog neural information between chips, and a "stereopsis" neural network chip to process the images of two retina chips into a unified stereoscopic image. She was doing, in physical hardware, pioneering work in visual image processing, a precursor to what we now do in software, using things like modern tensor cores. To be fair... We are still using dedicated hardware for processing neural networks, but now, that hardware is dedicated to performing the mass multiply/add calculations required to process digital values representing things like the analog weights of neural networks.

This book is basically her published graduate thesis. I've wanted a copy if it for years. I actually borrowed a copy via the state's library book sharing system, and scanned the entire book into a PDF. It meant I had a copy of the book digitally, but it was just a scanned book. Now I can finally say I own it proper. 

The video below is a copy of the PBS episode I saw a quarter century ago... (Geez... Now I just feel old...) and I highly recommend checking it out if you have any interest in seeing what the pioneering days of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks was like, or even just to hear the story of one woman taking her place in history, pioneering an entirely new field of science...

While I am quite excited to finally own this, I am once again reminded that this thread is a thread for negative things, and sadly, this story ends quite negatively...  Misha ended up facing a number of insecurities and self doubts during her studies. In the video, she says "I didn't know the difference between what I didn't know, and what was not known, period.", and that always stuck with me... Because she was going into what was then a brand new field, she often hit roadblocks, and far too often met with resistance from her peers, who often insisted she wasn't going about things "the right way". Those stresses were a perpetual burden on her mental health, and sadly, by the time I even learned of her book's existence, she was already gone... She was only 33 when her depression prematurely stole her brilliant self from this world... 

 

 

[TheSaint]

Our dishwasher died yesterday. Amusingly the wife and I were just talking on Saturday about how it had been hanging on for 12 years now, how many parts I had replaced on it, and how the door seal was starting to leak by occasionally and probably needed replacing. Apparently it heard us talking and, sure enough, Sunday morning the control board died. We just decided that it was time to put it out to pasture. Went to Lowes last night, bought a new one, I installed it over lunchtime today. I like this one because it has a four-bladed chopper in the disposal, and a PowerBlast setting! It sounds dangerous!

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, richfiles said:

My complaint... They put a STOCK STICKER ON THE SPINE!!!

Do you see?! The stereoscopic vision works!
Otherwise you wouldn't notice the sticker, looking at the front of the book.

So, it was just a system check.

6 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Our dishwasher died yesterday. Amusingly the wife and I were just talking on Saturday about how it had been hanging on for 12 years now, how many parts I had replaced on it, and how the door seal was starting to leak by occasionally and probably needed replacing. Apparently it heard us talking and, sure enough, Sunday morning the control board died.

Now you have to hire a new one, and pay to the carpenter for the new control blackboard to draw the daily work schedule for other labourers.

[Lisias]

Microsoft now owns Github and Bethesda.

Right now it's Sony who's getting their balls kicked, but... Tomorrow?

How this will affect the Open Source Add'Ons scene?

[kerbiloid]

Did it affect MSFS or GitHub?

[richfiles]

"Exception: Shipment failed to leave country of origin warehouse"...

Guess which part it is... Hint... It begins with an "M", and ends with an "otor"
The new motor that I found, with the 4mm shaft... The one that shipped right away...
Well, it's SOMEHOW managed to run into issues with shipping, and I do not understand why.
Why can't I seem to be able to order a stupid motor and not have someone utterly drop the ball.  

[richfiles]

As a fan of anime, I often rely on fan subs to be able to enjoy stuff... Today, one of the most prominent fansub websites shut down, and I am hugely bummed out by this news.
This easily sets the hardcore anime fan back a decade, in terms of difficulty in finding new and old content. I feel very bummed out about this fact.

[SOXBLOX]

I was carving a small piece, and managed to stab my finger with my detail knife. Sharp and pointy. I got the tip of my left index finger. About 10 days since and nearly fully healed, so not entirely negative, I guess.

No pictures, obviously.

[Nuke]

dune 2020 is now dune 2021. they bucked it all the way to next october. stop stealin my escapeism.  

[kerbiloid]

:(

A whole year to wait and worry: who won?

[richfiles]

My landlord put notices on everyone's door today... Surprise inspections tomorrow.
I've been wanting to do some "deep cleaning" lately...
I guess that means I'll be up late tonight doing said deep cleaning... Grr...

[Okhin]

1 hour ago, richfiles said:

My landlord put notices on everyone's door today... Surprise inspections tomorrow.

Is that even legal ?