Youtube comments of Patrick Berry (@MundaneGray).

  1. I went to that parade once. I had the bright idea of standing on the curb with a pebble in the palm of my outstretched hand, as a silent challenge to the ninjas: Snatch this pebble from my hand, if you can. But when I got to the parade route, I reached into my pocket and found that the pebble was already gone. Well played, ninjas. Well played.
    28000
  2. In 2015, David Burge described the process perfectly: 1. Identify a respected institution. 2. Kill it. 3. Gut it. 4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
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  3. I got divorced in 2017 at the age of 57. I’ve lived alone ever since. Not in a relationship and not looking for one. My life is better now than it ever was when I was married.
    266
  4. There’s a fine line between damage control and gaslighting . . . and she just crossed it.
    148
  5. I tell them that I'll be happy to negotiate salary and benefits when an offer is on the table. Until then, salary negotiation is premature.
    147
  6. Women also don’t believe that men can just sit and think about nothing — and that it’s peaceful and relaxing. We really are very simple creatures.
    109
  7. Kathleen Kennedy did worse than just ignoring the Expanded Universe. She stated with a straight face that it doesn't exist. "Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be."
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  8.  @louisduarte8763  That quote is from a Rolling Stone interview published November 19, 2019. And they HAD a full 3-movie story for the Sequel Trilogy. George Lucas had already outlined it before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney. Kennedy's people looked at his story treatments, said "Nah," and tossed them aside, apparently thinking that they could do Star Wars better than the man who created it.
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  9. And people line up to watch him do it. Myself included.
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  10. “And I have lost the vast majority of my friends . . .” Those people weren’t your friends.
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  11.  @twistedyogert  Not exactly. The production of the first movie involved making molds of Arnold's face, which were used to create the latex appliances that he wore for scenes that showed damage to the T-800's face. Those molds still existed when production of Salvation began, and they were used to create 3-D computer models of his 1984 face for CGI purposes. A body double (whose physique closely resembled Arnold's body in 1984) was used to film the scenes, and his face was replaced with Arnold's CGI face in postproduction. It was a pretty clever way of making the 1984 version of Arnold appear in the movie without the actual Arnold having to be involved at all. (They still had to pay him for the use of his image, of course.)
    46
  12. I think it's all about expectations. I went to see this film and came out of the theater very disappointed, particularly with the cliffhanger ending. I was so unhappy with it that I never bothered to go see the third film at all, and I wrote off the whole trilogy as a failure. Years later, I was curious about how the story ended, and I decided to rewatch the entire trilogy from the beginning. I was stunned at how much I enjoyed it. Why on earth had I disliked Reloaded so much? I couldn't even remember, but I think it was because I expected it to be more like the first film. When I actually rewatched it without expectations, and simply judged it on its own merits, I thought it was awesome. The whole trilogy is.
    38
  13. He plays Burg in The Mandalorian episode 6, “The Prisoner.”
    36
  14. Having her on the show was a mistake. These people only want attention. Don't give it to them.
    34
  15. In Wokespeak, “bold” is shorthand for not giving a damn about the consequences of your actions. It’s a classic example of claiming that a moral failing is actually a virtue. “Oh, did I ruin your franchise, turn your heroic characters into pathetic losers, and cost you billions of dollars? That’s too bad, but I was being BOLD, and that’s what’s important, right?”
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  16. It’s true. I moved to a small apartment after my divorce, and I had to be ruthless about getting rid of stuff I didn’t need. I’ve lived a very simple lifestyle since then, which turns out to be much better for me. I’m happier than I was living in a house in the suburbs that was full of unnecessary clutter.
    30
  17. About those companies that ask what you were paid by previous employers: how would they respond if a candidate asked how much they paid the previous employees who held the job? Would they disclose that information? I don’t think so.
    21
  18. Smug, arrogant, condescending, and narcissistic. What’s not to like?
    17
  19. Doomcock sums it up well: Without respect, WE REJECT.
    16
  20. That’s not how gifts work.
    14
  21. That’s correct. The heat comes from the water that circulates through the engine to keep it from overheating. That water then passes through the radiator, which dumps the heat into the surrounding air. The heater just diverts part of that hot water into a smaller radiator to heat the air that is blown into the interior of the car. But it’s waste heat either way. Not using the heater doesn’t prevent the heat from being generated. Using the seat heater DOES burn more fuel, because it draws power from the battery. The alternator has to replace that power by recharging the battery, which increases the load on the engine, consuming more fuel.
    13
  22. @ That is correct.
    13
  23. Dead and buried. The last time I watched the Oscars was over a quarter century ago.
    12
  24. Counsel, not council.
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  25. That is exactly why I stopped going to concerts. I’m not going to pay an exorbitant ticket price for the privilege of looking at the back of someone else’s head for several hours. In fact, even if the ticket were free, that would still be a waste of my time.
    11
  26. You keep calling this passive-aggressive, but there’s nothing passive about it. “We mean business” and “don’t mess with us” is openly aggressive. So is “We”re not asking.” This is how gangsters talk to people when they’re demanding protection money.
    10
  27. I can tell you a few ways to be first in line to get laid off. 1. Be the new guy. Last hired, first fired. 2. Be a contractor, not an employee. One of the reasons employers love to hire contractors is that they can be easily terminated at a moment’s notice. Need to cut costs? Dump all the contractors! 3. Be a technical writer. They are always seen as expendable. Products don’t really need documentation, do they? If they do, we’ll just have the engineers write it. 4. Be experienced. If you have decades of experience in your profession, that means you’re expensive. The company can’t afford you. So you’re terminated, and your job will be given to an inexperienced new hire — or even better, a random person in India who can be paid a quarter of what you were. So what if he’s not a native speaker of the language he’ll be writing manuals in? He’s cheaper, and that’s all that matters.
    9
  28. “These good looks and an unforgettable personality.” In other words, the bare minimum. Good to know. Also, “unforgettable” is not the same as “good”. Amber Heard certainly has an unforgettable personality, but do you really want to hang out with her?
    9
  29. I don't even use the Documents folder. I've never seen the value of piling all of the documents on my computer into a single Windows-created folder, regardless of their content or purpose. My document files are stored in folders created by me -- folders that are named and organized in way that makes sense to me. For example, my resume is stored in a subfolder of my Job Search folder.
    8
  30. Leo, I’ve noticed you tend to say “infer” when you mean “imply.” They don’t actually mean the same thing. Inferring is what the listener or reader is doing when they read between the lines or draw a conclusion about what is being said. The speaker or writer doesn’t infer; the audience does.
    7
  31. I have wondered about this myself. It's actually VERY common. For some reason, most people are unwilling to utter the phrase "I don't know." So they try to bluff their way through an answer, and it never works. No one is fooled. It's obvious that you're just BSing. So why do it? There's no shame in admitting that you don't know something. No one knows everything, but people think they have to pretend that they do. I'll never understand it.
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  32. It’s not your lap that’s the problem. It’s soft surfaces like beds, sofas, and pillows. These completely block the air intake vents on the bottom of the laptop, causing severe overheating. My daughter killed her first computer this way. When I bought a replacement machine for her, I gave her a lap desk and explained why she should always put it between the laptop and any soft surface.
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  33. If she says “I am the table,” ask her what that means. She won’t be able to tell you, because it doesn’t mean anything. The table is a metaphor. Her claim to be that metaphor is nonsensical. It’s her way of sabotaging the discussion. Because she brings nothing to the table, and she knows it. If a woman says “I am the table,” what she really means is “Shut up and give me what I want.” That’s your cue to walk away.
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  34. Yeah, brooms are a symbol of female domesticity. That’s why all janitors are female. No man would ever take a job that involves sweeping and mopping. Also, these witches are completely unaware of the Harry Potter franchise, in which ALL the wizards, male and female, use brooms to fly. And no one has any problem with it.
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  35. Council.
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  36. Patience is a superpower.
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  37.  @bretts8070  And let's hope that nobody ever tries to reboot or re-imagine it. Because they WILL screw it up.
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  38. That’s what I do. And the external drive is encrypted with a strong password. As Leo describes, traces of sensitive data might remain on the machine after the external drive is disconnected. But you can mitigate that. Use the Windows feature to delete temporary files. Empty the Recycle Bin and clear the Clipboard. Know how to clear the “recent files” lists in Windows and various apps. And so forth.
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  39. No one in their right mind pays any attention to celebrities when deciding who to vote for.
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  40. I don't believe in guilty pleasures. If I like something, then I like it. Why would I feel guilty? Because other people don't think it's cool? Not my problem.
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  41. The Left loves violence. They know that they can’t persuade people with facts or logic. So they try to bully, intimidate, and silence those who disagree with them. Leftists are thugs and cowards. Everyone can see it. And that’s why the people are turning against them.
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  42. Please stop calling him a “kid.” He is a 22-year-old man. An adult. He can serve in the military, own guns, buy beer or bourbon, own real estate, and enter into contracts without parental supervision. He is not a child.
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  43. I store recovery codes in my password vault. Each password record in the vault has a Notes field. The recovery code goes there, along with any other relevant data (such as a PIN or the security questions and answers for that account).
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  44. I would respond to that question by saying “Are you offering me the position?” If they say no, I politely suggest that salary negotiations are premature at the interview stage. When they have made the decision to hire me, I’ll be happy to discuss compensation.
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  45. Christine, about those contact lens cases: Teach your kids to use a checklist when packing for travel. I have to do this myself, or I’ll forget something important. I keep my checklist on my phone, but you might want to store yours on a computer so you can print copies when you need them. Hand a copy to each kid and say, “Check off each item as you pack it.” Also, put a 5-pack of contact lens cases in YOUR luggage, so when your kids forget the extras you just gave them, you can pull out another one and hand it to them (along with a stern Mom Glare). P.S. I love black licorice. But I support people who hate it, because that means there’s more for me.
    4
  46. Lionel Barrymore also played Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol." Potter and Scrooge start out as basically the same character, but Scrooge is redeemed by the end of the story. Potter isn't redeemed; he remains in a hell of his own making.
    4
  47. I’ve been using LastPass for many years. I did read beyond the headlines on this story, and I arrived at the same conclusion as Leo. There’s no risk to me from this, and no need for me to do anything.
    4
  48. The Drinker talks quite a bit about the problems with geography in this series, and he's not wrong about any of them. But he doesn't mention the one that bothered me the most. We see the Numenorean expeditionary force on board their ships, then the next time we see them, they're riding hell-bent for leather across the plains of Middle-Earth so that they can rescue the villagers from the attacking orc army. I won't even ask how they knew where the village was or that it was under attack. What bugs me is that if you look at the map, you'll see that no matter where you land on the southern coast of Middle-Earth, you cannot just mount up and gallop full speed into the Southlands (i.e., Mordor). THERE IS A MOUNTAIN RANGE IN THE WAY. It's going to take you weeks to get over that, and you almost certainly will have to do it on foot. Horses do not handle mountains well at all. One does not simply ride into Mordor.
    4
  49. Thanks for the tips, Christine. Just came back from Aldi with two dozen eggs (the price was $2.29 per dozen!) and a frozen pizza, along with a bunch of other food. I would have bought more pizzas, but there's no more room in my freezer!
    4
  50. All of my passwords are 24-character randomly generated strings of gibberish (except where the website is run by idiots who don't allow a password that long). Obviously, I can't remember hundreds of passwords like that. So I use a password manager. However, you can memorize ONE password like that. It takes a bit of work to commit it to memory, but you CAN do it. I have done this myself. I memorized ONE 24-character randomly generated string of gibberish, which is my master password. I let the password manager remember all of the others for me. But I'm in my sixties, and even though my mind is still sharp, I have to consider the possibility that my memory will deteriorate as I get older. So I have a backup. A copy of my master password is stored in a secure location. But I don't expect to need it anytime soon. When I have to access my vault, I type the master password from memory.
    4
  51. These e-mails ARE chain letters. Any message that urges you to forward it to multiple people is, by definition, a chain letter.
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  52.  @joanshealy1662  I can’t tell the difference. If you can, good for you. In any case, I keep a carton of the shelf-stable milk in my cabinet as a backup, just in case the milk in my fridge runs out and I can’t go to the store for more. So for me, “Is this exactly like ordinary refrigerated milk?” is the wrong question. The correct question is: “Is this better than no milk at all?” And the answer is: “Yes.”
    4
  53. I replaced both my desktop and laptop Windows computers this year, which involved transferring a lot of files back and forth between old and new machines (and, to some extent, between the two new machines). After spending a considerable amount of time trying to get file sharing to work, I finally gave up in disgust and just created a folder called Transfer on my Dropbox account. All of the machines could see it without difficulty, and that’s what I used to move files around. I shouldn’t have had to rely on Dropbox for that, but native Windows file sharing was useless.
    4
  54. I'm 62 years old, and I've been using (and playing) with computers since the mid-1970s. Not only that, I explain technology for a living -- I'm a technical writer. I encounter new technologies all the time (who doesn't?), and they don't intimidate me at all. I will find a way to learn whatever I need to know. I am not too old, and I never will be. My mother is 87, and she uses a Windows PC on a daily basis for e-mail, online banking, online shopping, and a few other things. She also has an iPad Mini and an iPhone. All of those devices have a lot of features that she's not familiar with, because they aren't relevant to her. But she knows how to use them to do what she needs to do.
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  55. “Rowling” rhymes with “bowling,” not with “howling.”
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  56. Anyone who has to ask this question should be required to listen to the "Weird Al" Yankovic song "Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me" at least a hundred times.
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  57. Never use a check to pay for anything if you can possibly avoid it. Checks are inherently insecure, regardless of the ink used to write them or whether they are sent by mail. If you have ever set up electronic payment by bank draft, you probably know that the payee only needs two numbers to do it: the account number and routing number of your bank account. Both of those numbers are printed at the bottom of every one of your checks. Anyone who has one of your checks for a few seconds (long enough to snap a picture of it with their phone) has all of the information they need to take money out of your bank account.
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  58. If you use the mobile app version of your password manager, you can probably access your vault using biometrics (fingerprint or face recognition). So if your master password is stored in your password vault, you can look it up that way.
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  59. Even goldfish aren't dumb enough to believe "science facts" that come from Internet memes or urban legends. Only humans do that.
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  60. I avoid this problem by not owning any IoT devices. None of my kitchen appliances connect to the Internet. I don’t have any Internet-connected doorbells, light bulbs, baby monitors, or cameras. In my home, if it doesn’t HAVE to be connected to the Internet, it isn’t. So there is nothing to hack.
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  61. If you are male, never comment on a female coworker’s appearance in any way. Don’t do or say anything to suggest that you have even NOTICED that your coworker is female.
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  62.  @edwardhewitt9229  Thanks for the condescending lecture, but it's irrelevant to my point. A previous commenter wrote: "They should have planned out a full 3-movie story for the Sequel Trilogy before filming began." I replied that they did, in fact, have one. At no point did I say that Disney was legally or morally obligated to use it. As for whether they SHOULD have used it, I can't say because I haven't seen Lucas's story treatments and I know little about what is in them. But I find it difficult to believe that a sequel trilogy based on those story treatments could be any worse than what Disney gave us.
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  63. I didn’t pay any attention to this show when it came out a year ago. Yesterday, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of the opening scene in which he’s in a diner, about to eat a slice of peach cobbler, and is arrested for murder before he can take a single bite. I was curious about what happens next, so I went to Amazon Prime to watch a bit more. I ended up binging the entire eight-episode first season in one day. It’s THAT good. Also, I now have a crush on Willa Fitzgerald.
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  64. This is the first time I have failed to understand one of your explanations. I just don’t get it.
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  65. This is inaccurate. All reputable password managers store your passwords in an encrypted database. The encryption key is the master password that you choose. All encryption and decryption is done locally, on your device. What gets uploaded to the company’s servers is your encrypted database. They can’t read it because they don’t have your master password. No hacker can read it either, for the same reason.
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  66.  @lauracoutinho5478  I just point out that it's premature to start negotiating salary during the interview process. The appropriate time for that is after they've offered me the job.
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  67. People still listen to radio? I haven’t turned on a radio since 2005.
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  68. My reaction to the question about sorting screws is "That's what interns are for." My son served as a volunteer intern in the scene shop of a community theatre, and that sort of time-consuming, unskilled task usually was delegated to him so that the technical director could focus on the tasks that required his experience and expertise. That's not to say that my son did nothing but grunt work. He got to help with a lot of set-building, including carpentry tasks like measuring and cutting lumber to create the pieces required for a specific set. But some grunt work was necessary, and it made sense to have the intern do it. For almost any master craftsman, I suspect that the same reasoning applies to apprentices. That's how you get your start in the craft, whether it's carpentry or metalworking or anything else.
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  69. After almost two decades as an AT&T Wireless customer, I kicked them to the curb in June and switched to an MVNO. This cut my phone bill by 80%. I haven't regretted my decision, and this latest action makes me very glad that I'm no longer giving them any of my money.
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  70. The Snipping Tool has a Save button.
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  71. Not really. How would you even identify what was supposed to be a joke if the entire movie is a series of unfunny, pointless, and stupid scenes? You would never even take the cap off the bottle.
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  72. It’s not “under” or “over.” Gravity works vertically. The paper hangs straight down. So the question is, WHERE do you want it to hang straight down? (1) On the side toward you, where you can see it and reach it, or (2) against the wall, where you can’t? Sane people answer (1).
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  73. Amazon is developing the next iteration of this idea, which they plan to call the Kindle Charade. It continually recites the titles of trendy books, but you don't have to buy or read them. You just pay a monthly fee for the "service" of impressing people. The device can't be used to read books, but it does have a fake screen that you can stare at while pretending to read them.
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  74. Her name is pronounced “rolling.”
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  75. He only pretends to be a cynical, black-hearted bastard.
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  76. The degrowth movement is just Malthusian doctrine with a new label. Malthus has been consistently wrong for over two centuries! Why do people continue to repeat his ideas as if they are anything more than debunked nonsense? It baffles me.
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  77. The only can opener in my kitchen is a safety model made by OXO. I think I bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond. It cuts into the seal from the outside rather than the top. I’ve had it for so long that I had actually forgotten there was anything remarkable about it. I do also own a P38 can opener, identical to the ones used by WWII soldiers to open their C-rations. As part of my everyday carry hobby, it’s always in my pocket whenever I go out. I’ve tried using it a few times, and it works just fine. Opening a can with it takes a bit of patience, but it gets the job done.
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  78. Star Trek and Doctor Who? Not that they haven’t been thoroughly crushed; they have. But Disney had nothing to do with it. Because the problem is a lot bigger than Disney. The entire entertainment industry has been infected with this disease.
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  79. You mean "hard to underestimate." It's EASY to overestimate the intelligence of people today.
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  80. Well, it’s worth considering that Rorschach was based on The Question, and in the Justice League Unlimited animated series, Batman and The Question got along just fine.
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  81. We wear what is comfortable for us, and we’re don’t give a damn whether these women approve of our choices. Actually, we WANT them to dislike our clothing. That will encourage them to stay the hell away from us.
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  82. @Mark Johnston Of course it's fake. Are you just now figuring that out?
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  83.  @kracky  Are you Kracky the Hooded One? I remember you from "In Search of the Unknown." Did you ever find out what happened to Zelligar and Rogahn?
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  84.  @langdonledwig3734  Are you talking about the Disney+ series? Kate Bishop learned her archery and martial arts skills from over a decade of intensive training, practice, and competition. Clint gave her some additional training in how to be a superhero, but he only had a few days to do that. She was already a world-class archer and excellent martial artist before they met.
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  85. The Critical Drinker is a fictional character. Will Jordan is the voice actor who plays him. And writes novels in his spare time.
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  86. Why would being away from home mean that you can’t check your e-mail? Mobile devices can do that.
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  87. She won’t be getting any more movie roles. All of the studios have seen what a public relations nightmare she is. None of them will want her anywhere near their movies.
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  88. You don't have to press Ctrl-C. The Snipping Tool automatically puts the snip into the Clipboard. If you edit it, then yes, you have to use Ctrl-C to copy the edited version to the Clipboard.
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  89. One of the Rings of Power actors states that “brat” means being “unapologetically yourself.” Oh, yeah, I get it! Like Donald Trump. He’s unapologetically himself. So when you say Kamala is “brat,” you’re telling me that she’s just like him. Good to know!
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  90. She’s not a “former” Bond girl. Once a Bond girl, always a Bond girl.
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  91. Disparu’s commentary is far more entertaining than the actual show.
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  92. Did you really just end your series by misspelling Milton Friedman’s name? Way to burn your bridges, man.
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  93. Oh no! The consequences of my own actions! It’s so unfair.
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  94. On the subject of overheating, many people don't understand how this works in laptops. Your laptop's air intake vent is almost certainly on the bottom. The feet on the bottom provide only a fraction of an inch clearance between the bottom of the case and the surface it sits on, but as long as it's a hard, flat surface like a table, the ventilation works fine. BUT . . . if you place the laptop on a soft surface like a bed, sofa cushion, or pillow, the intake vent is BLOCKED. This is an excellent way to overheat the machine. (My daughter killed her first laptop by doing this.) If you really want to use your laptop on a bed or sofa, get a lap desk (basically a pillow with a hard, flat top) and put that between your laptop and the soft surface. Lap desks are available for as little as $10 from places like Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.
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  95. Nonsense. A constitutional convention can amend the Constitution, but it would be convened by Congress if 2/3 of the state legislatures request it. The President is not involved. And no, he doesn’t have the power to “suspend Congress.”
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  96.  @MrT------5743  I know. I just think it’s cool that I can benefit from the accuracy of an atomic clock even if I don’t actually have one.
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  97.  @MrT------5743  indeed. My Windows computers, my iPhone, and my Apple Watch all correct their time automatically. And even though they are not monitoring the NIST radio signal directly (as my clocks do), I know that they are doing essentially the same thing via GPS or the Internet.
    2
  98. Obnoxious nitpick: At one point, Leo refers to a project that uses AI to interpret cuneiform tablets. Those are made of clay, not stone. But the tablets were often fired, turning them into ceramic pottery. One could argue that pottery (and even glass, which is made from sand, a.k.a. small particles of quartz) is essentially mineral in nature. Synthetic stone. So it amounts to the same thing.
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  99. I did it by deleting my Facebook account.
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  100. If you think checks are safer, you’re fooling yourself. I’m sure you would never set up electronic bill payment, but those of us who have done it know that it only requires two numbers: your bank account number and routing number. Anyone who has those two numbers can draft money out of your checking account. Those two numbers are printed at the bottom of your checks. Anyone who has access to one of your checks for long enough to take a picture with their phone can take money from your account. Checks are a HUGE security risk. Don’t use them if you can possibly avoid it.
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  101. I wish Microsoft would add a “don’t lie to me” setting to Windows. Don’t tell me you’re finished writing until you’re ACTUALLY finished writing. I don’t wish to be deceived into thinking that you’re faster than you really are. I can handle the truth. This would apply to other features, such as Fast Startup. Don’t pretend you’re shutting down when you’re really just hibernating. I don’t wish to be deceived into thinking you start faster than you actually can. If I tell you to shut down, that means I want you to SHUT DOWN.
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  102. ⁠ @wazzup233 No. Silicone and silicon are both real words for different materials. They are not interchangeable. This is true regardless of whether you are in the U.S. or the U.K.
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  103. I used to maintain Word and plain-text versions of my resume — the former for human readers, and the latter for ATS to suck into its database and use for keyword searches. Nowadays I just apply with my LinkedIn profile if the employer will accept that, which a lot of them will because it’s in a consistent and predictable format that they can easily import. I do still have a Word resume for those who want it, but it contains exactly the same information as my LinkedIn profile.
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  104. Zegler is an actress, and this is her latest performance. That's all it is. She's doing what actors always do: pretend to be something she's not, in exchange for money. It's her job, and I don't blame her a bit for doing what Disney clearly ordered her to do. But none of this is genuine, and it doesn't change anything. She's still the same smug, arrogant, condescending fool who expressed contempt for the Snow White story and threw her fellow actor Andrew Burnap under a bus. She hasn't apologized for any of that, or admitted that she was wrong. So don't be fooled. This is worse than deflection. It's gaslighting. Disney wants us to believe that the person in the Variety interview is the REAL Rachel Zegler, and all of her appallingly vain, ignorant, and insulting behavior never happened. But we're not stupid, and we haven't forgotten.
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  105. Skeptical is not enough. Be suspicious. When someone tries to scare you, recognize this for what it is: they are trying to manipulate you so that you'll do what they want. They're not doing it out of concern for your well-being. It's a callous and cynical attempt to control your behavior. But it requires you to trust them. Don't. Assume that they are trying to exploit you. Stop listening and walk away.
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  106. Usher? I haven’t seen one of those in a movie theater for at least 40 years.
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  107. I’m not a gym person, but I used to know a guy who spent a lot of time there. He HATED January, because it meant that the gym would be overrun by people he referred to as “resolutionaries.” They were there only because they had made a resolution, and within a few weeks, 99% of them would give up and vanish. But in the meantime, they got in everyone’s way and tied up the equipment, which they didn’t know how to use properly. They also knew nothing about gym etiquette. As a result, they made all the gyms unusable for the first month of every year. Then they disappeared, having wasted their money and accomplished nothing.
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  108. I wish there were some way we could abolish the idea of perfect safety, because it's a pipe dream. But so many people believe in it and waste huge amounts of time chasing it. In cybersecurity, the first thing you need to do is to let go of the notion that you can create impregnable defenses that will eliminate the threat of something like ransomware. You can't. Only after you accept that will you be able to actually improve your security by taking measures that reduce and mitigate the risk. In one of my previous jobs, I was part of a multi-year project to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. Postal Service. Our focus was not safety, but resilience. Yes, you want to reduce the risks as much as possible, but when you've done that, it's time to start preparing for the day when your defenses fail to protect you. Because it WILL happen. So you want to have a robust recovery plan in place. Instead of panicking and taking all sorts of hasty actions that don't do any good, you implement your plan to repair the damage and get your systems back up and running quickly. That's what reslience means. Most people think of cybersecurity threats as a unique category that you have to have special defenses against, but the truth is that you're talking about having a disaster recovery plan, and it doesn't matter whether your disaster is a natural one (a fire or an earthquake, for example) or a malware attack. A good disaster recovery plan will work well after either kind of disaster. That's why backups are important, for example. It doesn't matter whether your data was lost because your computer burned up in a fire or because your files were encrypted by ransomware. What matters is whether you backed them up. If you did, the disaster is just a temporary inconvenience. If you didn't, you're probably screwed. And Leo is right about people being the weakest link. That's why the cybersecurity organization organization I worked for had a category of risks called "insider threat," and it didn't distinguish between malicious and inadvertent insider actions. If a disgruntled employee (or one who has been bribed) exfiltrates copies of your proprietary data and gives it to one of your competitors, that's an insider threat. But so is a foolish employee who clicks links in e-mails or opens attachments without stopping to think about who sent the e-mail and why. In either case, the problem is the same: it's very hard to prevent damage inflicted by members of your own organization without making it difficult for your people to do their jobs. And a careless action by a dumb member of your team can do as much damage as a deliberate attack by a malicious insider. Intentions don't matter.
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  109. Help us, Seth McFarlane. You're our only hope.
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  110. Higher education has become a cult.
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  111. I’ve never seen Candyman, but I will remember him fondly for his excellent guest appearances in Star Trek and Babylon 5.
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  112. I’m a technical writer, and I once saw a job listing for a technical writer with a master’s degree in statistics. My immediate reaction was: “I’m not sure there is a single person on the planet who meets those requirements.” Then I thought: “If you you have an M.S. in statistics, why would you be applying for tech writer jobs?”
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  113. One thing that Leo didn't mention is that the Snipping Tool has a timer option. This is necessary when I need to capture an image of a drop-down menu or a tooltip -- anything that requires the mouse pointer to be in a specific location when the image is captured. You can tell the Snipping Tool to wait three seconds or ten seconds, which gives you time to position the pointer appropriately before the picture is taken. I don't need to do this very often, but when I do, it's an invaluable feature.
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  114. Those robots dance a hell of a lot better than I ever will.
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  115. Amala, “theologian” is pronounced with four syllables: THEE-oh-LOW-jin.
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  116. I’ve encountered this many times while trying to provide tech support for family members. When they report the problem as “I can’t do X” or “It won’t let me do X” or “It doesn’t work,” I’ve learned to respond by saying: “You’re telling me what is NOT happening. That isn’t useful. Tell me what IS happening and I may be able to help you.”
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  117. Christine, you ARE going share your movie list with us, right? Right?
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  118. Does changing the policy only affect that one specific removable drive? Or does it apply to all removable drives?
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  119. Yeah, brooms are a symbol of female domesticity. That’s why all janitors are female. No man would ever take a job that involves sweeping and mopping. Also, these witches are completely unaware of the Harry Potter franchise, in which all the wizards, male and female, use brooms to fly. And no one has any problem with it.
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  120. Life without parole.
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  121. More of this, please! I could watch videos like this all day. I want to know the story of every artifact in that building.
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  122. I didn’t know that hot water recirculation pumps in apartment buildings were a thing. My building definitely does not have one, because hot water is not centralized. Neither is HVAC. Every apartment has its own water heater and HVAC unit. In my apartment, they’re in a closet across the hall from the kitchen. The dishwasher is just a few feet from the water heater, but the pipe must take the long way around, because I have to run the kitchen faucet for several minutes to get hot water.
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  123. I like to watch things that entertain me. I think this movie will do that. You are welcome to insult my taste if you like. I won't hear you, because I'll be too busy having fun. More fun than you, I suspect.
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  124.  @mosh1987  Yes, that would be more honest.
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  125. The last time I went to a church was on Easter Sunday at the Episcopal church where my father is buried. The female pastor told a bigoted sexist joke from the pulpit during her sermon on the holiest day of the year. The point of the joke was that all men are morons, and that the only way for a man to be intelligent is for God to transform him into a woman. I didn’t stand up and walk out because I was there with my mother and didn’t want to embarrass her by causing a scene. But I will never set foot in that church again.
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  126. I have used the "recall" feature of Outlook in a corporate environment, but it's only practical in cases where you sent a message to one person, or maybe two at the most. As the number of recipients increases, the probability that some of them will read the message immediately approaches certainty. After that happens, recalling the message means that it vanishes from the in-box of those who haven't read it, but NOT from the in-box of those who have. Now you've made the situation worse, because the people who don't receive the message will hear about it secondhand from those who do, and they'll wonder why you excluded them. If you were trying to cover up something, then (as Leo pointed out) you have only succeeded in calling attention to it. You may be asked to explain what the hell you are up to. At this point, you probably wish you had just let the e-mail go to everyone and dealt with the consequences of that. It would have been easier to pass that off as a simple mistake. As numerous people have pointed out, it's far better to avoid sending an e-mail that you regret. But that's easier said than done.
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  127. There are no lanes. They don’t exist. The “stay in your lane” concept was invented by Karens: neurotic women who are obsessed with controlling other people.
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  128. You haven’t gone to a movie theater since 9 AD? Wow, that’s a hell of a dry spell.
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  129. Germany has gone to war against Russia twice before, in 1914 and 1941. Those wars did not end well for Germany. But sure, why not roll the dice again? What could possibly go wrong?
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  130. I'm pretty sure we still have secret ballots in this country, so how was she planning to find out who each customer voted for? I guess she could interrogate everyone at the door, but no one would actually have to answer her questions, or tell her the truth. What if I say I voted for Bernie Sanders, or P-Nut the Squirrel? This was never anything more than a virtue-signaling performance. She just wants attention and approval from her fellow leftists, so she makes smug, self-aggrandizing announcement. Trump voter just roll their eyes and buy flowers somewhere else, and by next week, everyone forgets about this empty and meaningless gesture.
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  131. What the hell, Drinker? If you’re going to reveal major plot points in your review, can you PLEASE include some kind of spoiler warning BEFORE you do that? I just bailed on the video about three minutes in, but you’ve already given away what is clearly the biggest surprise without any warning at all. I never expected a dick move of that magnitude from you.
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  132. When you’re a parasite, picking a fight with your host is not a smart thing to do.
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  133.  @Karebear42069  You are mistaken. According to “J.K. Rowling: A Biography” by Sean Smith, her name is pronounced ROH-ling.
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  134. I should also mention that in Outlook, even in cases where you send a message to only one person, and you successfully recall it before they read it, they may still be aware that you sent it. If it arrives in the recipient's in-box, they can see the identity of the sender and the subject line without opening it. Windows may also pop up a notification with the same information. If they use the preview pane, they can even see the first few words of the message without opening it. At this point, if the message vanishes from the recipient's inbox, there are two possible reactions. If the recipient doesn't know about the recall feature (most people don't), they're going to be very confused. If they DO know about it, they're going to realize that you yanked the message back (and you think they never saw it). Either way, they're probably going to ask you for an explanation, so you'd better have one ready.
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  135. Hi, Drinker. I would love to see you review Outland, the 1981 space western starring Sean Connery. It strikes me as your kind of movie.
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  136. They’re all psychopaths. Anyone who voluntarily plays Monopoly is a psychopath.
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  137. I spent nine years in college, and I only have one degree to show for it -- a worthless one. I have had a successful career in technical writing, but my college studies contributed almost nothing to that. It's a combination of natural ability and self-taught knowledge. The college courses that did the most to prepare me for my career were the three semesters of logic that I took as electives, for fun.
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  138. Most Americans don’t drink tea, and they have coffee makers. So the electric kettle and the Filterhalter are both unnecessary. I have been using a Sodastream to make my own soda for about 20 years. Shoe horns went away because Americans dress a lot more casually than we did a few decades ago, and we just don’t wear the kind of stiff dress shoes that require a shoe horn. As you mentioned, the folding ruler and the yardstick were replaced by measuring tapes, which are less bulky and easier to store in a toolkit or drawer. I have a couple of smaller ones that fit easily in a pocket.
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  139. It’s spelled “tirade.”
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  140. Who is the other person in this video? Is this an interview? The lack of context is confusing.
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  141. "Reticent" does not mean "reluctant." It means "not revealing one's thoughts or feelings readily." It derives from a Latin word that means "to be silent."
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  142. Scams are another reason to use a password manager (PM). Whenever you need to log in to a website, have your PM enter the credentials for you. If the PM says it doesn't have any credentials for that site, this means that you are looking at a fake version of the site that wants to steal your login and password. The PM doesn't provide them because it doesn't recognize the URL. This probably happens because you clicked a link in a scam e-mail, which took you to the fake site. Close that browser window and mark the e-mail as spam.
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  143. “At the very least, Doctor Who should be entirely British.” Yes. This should go without saying. I am American, and I would oppose the casting of any American actor as the Doctor. This should not be even a little bit controversial.
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  144. I love IAWL. A few years ago, I had the great good fortune to perform on stage in a community theatre production of this story. So I can actually say that I've been to Bedford Falls and met George Bailey. That experience gave me some of my fondest memories of my time as a stage actor. I'm basically retired from acting now, but if I had a chance to play a part in IAWL again, I would do it in a heartbeat.
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  145. There's no evidence that Einstein ever said or wrote that. And people didn't start attributing it to him until about 35 years after his death. Like most of the alleged Einstein quotes you see on the Internet, it's fake.
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  146. According to Wikipedia, Disney has released 33 films this year. That includes the ones that went directly to Disney+. I haven’t seen any of them. Reviewing the list now, I don’t see any that I regret missing.
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  147. I was rear-ended in a '76 Pinto hatchback, and I not only survived it, I got a good story out of the experience. It was late at night. I was stopped at a red light on a deserted street in Charlotte, NC. No other cars or people around, just me. In my rear view mirror, I saw the headlights of an approaching vehicle. It came up behind me and slowed down, but didn't stop soon enough. The car hit me from behind. The driver had to have been drunk. There's no other way you could fail to stop behind a vehicle that was sitting still at a red light. And the drunk driver must have panicked, because the other car backed up, swerved around my car, ran the red light, and took off at high speed. Hit and run. There didn't seem to be anything to do except assess the damage. I shut off the Pinto, got out, and walked around behind the car to take a look. There wasn't a mark on the Pinto -- not even a scratch on the bumper. But the other vehicle wasn't so fortunate. The road was littered with pieces of its plastic front grill.
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  148. The National Cathedral is an Episcopal church. The Episcopal denomination has been hijacked by woke activists. To be fair, so have all of the other major denominations. It’s all part of the Marxist “long march through the institutions.”
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  149. Andromeda? Seriously? Even in Star Trek, Andromeda is out of reach. A ship using warp drive would take thousands of years to get there.
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  150. Is there a reason I should care about what a Hollywood actor wants?
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  151. The traditional phrasing is: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
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  152. Adam, the philosophy about failure that you're expounding is what I would call "resilience." I was introduced to the concept when I spent a couple of years working for a large cybersecurity team developing strategies for a U.S. government agency. Their view, which I agree with, is that it's foolish for you to set as your goal the total elimination of risk. You'll never achieve that, and if you convince yourself that you have (that you have made your systems impregnable to attack), you will only make your organization brittle. You'll be complacent with false security until your security measures fail, and then you'll panic because you don't have a plan for dealing with it. (Why would you plan for something that you believe CANNOT occur?) So the wisest approach is what you described: identify all of the failure modes you can and prepare for them. Yes, take whatever measures you can to prevent those things from happening, but expect that some of them will anyway, and develop a detailed recovery plan for each one. When that day comes, you'll be ready, and you'll know what to do because it's all been worked out in advance. That is resilience, and it works not just for cybersecurity, but for any kind of disaster preparation and recovery.
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  153.  @NexusKin I’m pretty sure the Library of Alexandria was not a natural phenomenon.
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  154.  @oliviaw.2842 Thanks for your input, Karen. Where can I find the list of things that men are allowed to care about? I seem to have misplaced my copy.
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  155. “Girl math” is just a new name for what used to be called “wrong math” or “stupid math.”
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  156. I haven’t used a bank for 30 years. My credit union has excellent digital tools. I can do everything I need to do from their mobile app.
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  157. The three most valuable tools in your tech support toolbox are patience, perseverance, and Google (or whichever search engine you prefer).
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  158.  @carlchapman4053 When you are curious about this sort of thing, I recommend that you look up the word in a dictionary and examine the etymology (the origin of the word). This one originated as the Latin word “unicornis.” In Latin, “cornu” means horn.
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  159. I have a different question about these three files. Did the Microsoft programmers seriously think that they needed to include the word “file” in the filename so that we would know that the file is a file? Did they not notice that our hard drives contain millions of files that DON’T include the word “file” in the filename, but no one finds this confusing?
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  160. I am in the process of moving my family’s mobile phone service off AT&T to a small startup carrier. Ending my support of AT&T is part of the reason, but this will also reduce our mobile phone bill substantially.
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  161. Round 3. Harris ran for president in the 2020 election, and failed disastrously. She dropped out of the race on December 3, 2019 because her campaign had run out of money. At that point, she was polling at 6%. Her political career should have ended right there, but Biden picked her as his running mate because of her gender and skin color. She was a diversity hire.
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  162.  @NoEgg4u  You don't have to worry about losing what's on your Clipboard. Hold the Windows key and press V. This displays your Clipboard History. Since you haven't used it before, it's probably turned off. Just click the Turn On button, and now your Clipboard can contain the last 25 items you saved to it. By pressing Windows-V, you can scroll through the history and click any of the items to paste them. If there are things you don't want in the history, you can delete them individually or clear the history entirely. If you want to turn off Clipboard History, you can do that by going to Settings > System > Clipboard.
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  163. But if you don't want the Snipping Tool to automatically put your snip on the Clipboard, you can disable that feature. Click the three dots in the upper right corner of the Snipping Tool window and select Settings. Near the top of the list of settings is a switch for Auto Copy to Clipboard. Just turn that off.
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  164. It's Hallows, not Hollows. Get it right, Onion.
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  165.  @Puschit1  Four Star Trek movies, The Abyss, The Last Starfighter, Battle Beyond the Stars, Dune, Flight of the Navigator, Young Sherlock Holmes, Flash Gordon, They Live, Predator, Wargames, Alien Nation, Enemy Mine, The Thing, Escape from New York, Spaceballs, Willow . . . the 1980s were a freaking Golden Age of science fiction and fantasy.
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  166. My view of warehouse clubs like Costco is that they only make sense if you’re buying in bulk for a family. Am I wrong about that? My wife and I used to shop at BJ’s all the time for our family of four. But when we became empty nesters, we decided to let our membership lapse and just shop at Walmart. Now I’m divorced and living alone in a small apartment with limited storage space. I can’t see how a warehouse club would be worthwhile for me. But maybe I’m mistaken. Comments?
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  167. “A compelling movie will do just as well, if not better, on PVOD at 45 days as it would at 20.” Maybe. Unfortunately, Hollywood no longer knows how to make compelling movies. The last one I can remember seeing was Top Gun: Maverick, and that was three years ago.
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  168. “Subverting expectations” is just a fancy term for “bait and switch.” Which is a form of fraud, and the people who practice it are con artists.
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  169. No one voted for the anonymous White House staffers who ran the country for the last four years while we were all pretending that Joe Biden was president.
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  170. I've been laid off twice this year. Still don't have a job.
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  171. "I think there may be a a mistake on my bill. Can you help me figure it out?" That's not the passive voice. "Passive voice" is a grammatical term for structuring a sentence so that the object of the sentence becomes the subject. The passive-voice version of this example is: "I think a mistake has been made on my bill. Can you help me figure it out?" Using the passive voice is one way to avoid assigning blame, but it's not the only way. Another way is to state that a mistake exists without saying anything about who is responsible for it. That's what "there may be a mistake" does. It's effective, but it doesn't use passive voice.
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  172.  @wowkir What’s lame is that she misspelled BOTH of Sydney Sweeney’s names.
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  173. All this confusion can be avoided if you use a password manager. When logging in to Microsoft, I don’t have to remember which password to use. I let my password manager enter it for me.
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  174. No, the Democrats haven’t had a change of heart, because they never believed Trump was a “threat to democracy” in the first place. That’s just what they said in an attempt to scare people, because fear is all they have. It didn’t work, so they’re dropping it. That’s all.
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  175. I have the meat masher. I bought it at the world’s largest Dollar Tree in Burlington, NC. Used it last night to mash potatoes.
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  176. Why not just use the Snipping Tool? It does everything PrintScreen does and a lot more, and you have total control over where it saves your screenshot.
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  177. Harbor Freight is also good if you're buying just-in-case tools. I wanted to add a prybar to the emergency kit in the trunk of my car, and after a bit of comparison shopping, I bought a 15" flat prybar at Harbor Freight for $3.99. This was a much lower price than I had seen anywhere else, even in the cheap tools aisle at Walmart. Would it stand up to heavy use or last a long time? Probably not. But it will only see infrequent use. It may never be used at all. In a case like that, I think a cheap tool is sufficient.
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  178. “The following clip” and “the clip you’re about to see” mean the same thing. You really don’t need to say both. It’s redundant.
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  179. When I bought my TV in 2018, I opted for 1080p rather than 4K. I was pretty sure my 58-year-old eyes wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so why pay extra for it?
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  180. @ I’ve been wearing glasses to watch TV for half a century. Still doesn’t make my vision perfect.
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  181. “Overtake” does not mean “take over.” It means “catch up with and pass.”
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  182. Picking a fight with a billionaire is not a winning strategy. The best outcome you can hope for is that the billionaire decides you’re an insignificant pipsqueak and ignores you.
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  183. When Rowling wrote the phrase "constant vigilance," she was almost certainly paraphrasing the statement "Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty," which is commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson. There is no evidence that Jefferson actually said or wrote it, but the statement (in various forms) is over two centuries old. John Philpott Curran used it in a speech in 1790, saying "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." This quotation was in common use throughout the 19th century. Andrew Jackson, Frederick Douglass, James Buchanan, and William Henry Harrison all used it. It continued to be widely repeated in the 20th century -- Aldous Huxley quoted it on CBS Radio in 1956. If Hesse believes that Rowling invented it in 2000, she's appallingly ignorant of history. But that's typical of journalists in general.
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  184. The fastest way? Sell your house and use the proceeds to pay off all the debts at once. But that’s not practical for most people. It worked for my wife and me because we were splitting up, and we didn’t need a house anymore. (We both got apartments.)
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  185. No, I didn't see this movie. I only go to the theater if I'm so excited about a film that I can't wait for it to be available for streaming. I used to do that about once a month, but in recent years, the number of movies that make me feel that way has been dwindling. "Barbie" didn't even come close. The only 2023 film that has brought me to the theater so far is "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse."
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  186. Why are you still paying attention to anything this woman says? Her fifteen minutes are over. And she's not "G4TV's Frosk," because there is no G4TV. She's unemployed Frosk, and she speaks for no one but herself. Let her fade into the obscurity that she so richly deserves.
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  187. I don’t think I have ever felt so much schadenfreude before in my life. I can’t wait for the train wreck to begin.
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  188. I am equally comfortable with either format. I think this is because I was born in 1959. Analog clocks were the norm during my childhood, so I learned to read them like everyone else, and it’s just second nature to me. Digital watches became affordable when I was a teenager, and I was exposed to them sooner than most because my father was an early adopter of new technologies. Each time he got a new digital watch, he gave his old one to me. So I got used to the digital format while I was still young and pliable. Result: Purely as an artifact of when I was born, I have one foot in each world. The next time I see my millennial daughter, I will ask her how she perceives all of this.
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  189. There's another reason for a YouTuber to remain anonymous -- one that you didn't mention, but that I'm sure you are aware of. It's an effective way to keep the focus where it belongs. I follow several YouTube channels that discuss the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Those YouTubers don't appear on screen or reveal their identities. One even uses a computer-generated voice to narrate the episodes. The unspoken message is: "This channel isn't about ME. It's about the writings of Professor Tolkien and the world he created." I get a similar vibe from your channel. I think that by remaining anonymous, you establish that Einzelgänger isn't about you; it's about the philosophical concepts that you discuss.
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  190.  @highpath4776 Nope. Read the Wikipedia article on watches.
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  191.  @MrT------5743 I have three clocks that automatically sync to the NIST atomic clock. Two of them are analog wall clocks. The third is a digital clock-radio.
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  192.  @alexwright4930 But there are exceptions. I switched from a basic analog wristwatch to an Apple Watch when I was 62, and I don’t regret it. One advantage of a smart watch is that it can have a digital or analog face. You can switch between them a dozen times a day, if you want.
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  193. "But if you send a message to a large number of people and a large number of people mark it as spam, then the system, the receiving system, is going to pay attention. It's going to say, 'You know what? A lot of people think this is spam.' " Because it IS spam. Sending a message to a large number of people for ANY reason -- unless they ASKED for it by subscribing to your mailing list -- is suspicious behavior. And if the message is something that many of the recipients don't want or don't like, well, that's what "spam" means.
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  194. Samsung Blackjack II. I chose it for all of the wrong reasons. I was a Windows user on the desktop, and the Blackjack ran Windows Mobile, so I figured that would be easier to learn. Also, I wanted a hardware keyboard. But I was never happy with it. The screen was too small, and there was no pointing device (like a stylus or mouse). I should have known better. I had been using Palm devices for a decade, and really liked them. When I decided that I needed to replace the Blackjack with a touchscreen phone, my first choice was the Palm Pre -- Palm's last smartphone, and the first to run the new WebOS. But my carrier didn't offer or support it. My second choice was a Google Nexus, because I used Gmail and Google Calendar, and I wanted a phone with good Google integration. But my carrier didn't offer or support that either. Reluctantly, I settled for my third choice, which was an iPhone 3G. But that worked for me. The iPhone's Google integration was pretty good, and the touchscreen gave me the pointing device I wanted (my finger). The user interface wasn't difficult to learn, and actually resembled PalmOS in some respects. So the iPhone became my new Palm, and I've been an iPhone user ever since. But I wish I had given the Treo a try, back when that was still possible.
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  195. I reject the question. Why would we have to choose only one of those? A functional society needs BOTH.
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  196.  @Peter_S_  Where would those numbers come from? The question is “which is more important?” That’s a subjective value judgement. It’s not something that can be measured or quantified. It’s an OPINION. And my opinion is that both are important. Trying to turn that into a competition is pointless.
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  197.  @Peter_S_  You are right. I assumed that the purpose of deciding which one is more important is that we are being asked to choose only one of them. I cannot see any other point to it. Can you explain it to me? What is the purpose?
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  198. Some women see anything and everything as an excuse to attack men. They think this makes them strong and brave, but it actually makes them predictable, tiresome, and boring.
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  199.  @warrenjoseph76  Why would you skip this? If your Apple ID password is strong and it’s stored securely, this creates no security weakness. My Apple ID password is a 24-character string of random gibberish, and it’s stored in my third-party password manager, which is encrypted with a different 24-character string of random gibberish.
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  200.  @kw9158  How would a thief have my Apple ID password?
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  201.  @JiaxinYu  It can, but you have to enter the Screen Time passcode to do it. This should be different from your phone’s passcode, so the thief would not know it.
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  202.  @ama-ex2cb  When I tap "Turn Off Screen Time," the phone asks me for the Screen Time passcode. A thief would not know that.
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  203. This is a feature on iPhones. Go to Settings > Apps > Phone and turn on Silence Unknown Callers. When you receive a call from a number that's not in your Contacts, it goes directly to voicemail without ringing.
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  204. 37 has been my favorite number for half a century, for reasons that seem random to me. In middle school, I played on a soccer team for a couple of seasons. At our first practice, we were all given jerseys with 2-digit numbers. These were handed out randomly, and I got the number 37. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. A year later, at the beginning of my second season, new jerseys were handed out. Once again, purely by the luck of the draw, I received the number 37. At that point, I decided that it was destined to be MY number, and that connection has stuck with me ever since. Was this really random, or was the distribution of jerseys biased in some non-obvious way? I have no idea.
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  205. I encountered the opposite problem a few days ago: if your touchpad is disabled and you discover that you don't have a working mouse, how do you re-enable the touchpad using only the keyboard? Here's how I was able to do it on a Windows 11 laptop: 1. Press the Windows key. The Start menu is displayed. 2. Start typing "touchpad". The text you type appears in the search field. 3. After you have typed a few characters, "Touchpad settings" appears under Best Match. Press Enter to select it. 4. In the Touchpad Settings dialog, use the Tab key to select the Touchpad on/off switch. 5. Pressing Enter doesn't toggle the switch as you might expect. Instead, it expands or collapses some additional settings below that. Make sure they are expanded. 6. Use the Tab key to select the Reset button next to the words "Reset Touchpad settings and gestures to defaults". 7. Press Enter. The Touchpad settings are reset. The touchpad is now enabled. If you're wondering how I got myself into this predicament, I normally keep the touchpad disabled because I don't like it and never use it. Last week, I traveled to visit my mother in another state, and I took my laptop and mouse along. After I got there, I found that I had left the transceiver dongle for the mouse behind. (It should have been plugged into the laptop directly, but I had stupidly plugged it into a hub that I didn't need for the trip.) After reactivating the touchpad, I was able to use the computer. But I still don't like the touchpad, so I ended up borrowing the mouse from my mother's Chromebook, which she rarely uses. If that hadn't been available, I probably would have gone to Walmart and bought an inexpensive mouse.
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  206. This is one of the reasons I prefer to do my shopping online.
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  207.  @secretagent4610  Whoever said it, he didn't know any introverts. We can and do sit in a room alone. And we like it.
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  208. This is offshoring, not outsourcing. Outsourcing is the practice of delegating a business function to an external vendor. It has nothing to do with location. The vendor may be located across the street from your office, but if it is not part of your company, you are outsourcing. Offshoring is moving a business function overseas. It may or may not also be outsourcing. That depends on whether the overseas personnel are also employees of your company.
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  209. Stern doesn’t have to worry about me listening to his show. I never have, and the probability that I will start in the future is zero.
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  210. For me, adding more RAM isn’t a last resort. I prefer to do it proactively, by maxing out the RAM when I buy the computer. The additional expense is not large, and I consider it money well spent. Doing so means I don’t have to worry about insufficient RAM at all for the life of the machine.
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  211. Only if everyone else gets the same medals. Otherwise it wouldn’t be equality.
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  212.  @championmagnus  Agreed. At one point, my resume used table formatting to make everything line up nicely. Eventually, I realized that most employers were trying to import the resume into a database, and the fancy formatting was interfering with that. So I got rid of the table and made the formatting as simple as possible.
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  213. When I read your comment, I looked up from my phone to see if any 37s were visible in this room. The very first thing my gaze settled on was a digital clock. It was 11:37 a.m.
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  214. Don’t forward e-mails to anyone unless they ask you to. It astonishes me that people think this is an acceptable way to behave. If you habitually forward things to people you know without their permission, then YOU ARE A SPAMMER.
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  215. Potter already had more money than he could possibly spend, and it never made him happy. What he wants is to gain total control over Bedford Falls, which means he has to destroy the Bailey Building & Loan -- and the way to do that is to destroy George Bailey. Potter really thought he had found a way to do that, but he failed. So it's not a happy ending for him. Of course, even if he had succeeded, that wouldn't have made him happy. Potter is exactly what George said he is: a warped, frustrated old man. He no longer has the ability to be happy. He can only try to crush the happiness of other people.
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  216. Yeah, the writers of M*A*S*H must have been thinking of this movie. After all, the first commanding office of the 4077th was named Henry, and his successor was named Potter. OK, OK. I know you were thinking of a different work of fiction, one that involves wands and magical creatures. My point is that both Henry and Potter are extremely common names, and they're bound to show up in all kinds of places. It doesn't mean anything.
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  217. Now ask them the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day. Ask what happened on D-Day or Pearl Harbor Day. Ask them what Presidents Day is, or why we have Labor Day. Which came first, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day? The truth is that most people don’t know or care very much about holidays and their history. It doesn’t really have much relevance to their daily lives, unless they get a day off from work.
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  218. The ZIP archive format was never proprietary. The file format was released into the public domain in 1989, when the initial version of the PKZIP tool became available.
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  219. I started a new job a few months ago. After about two weeks, I received a text message on my personal phone from someone claiming to be the CEO of the company. He said he needed me to perform a task for him. I found it difficult to believe that the CEO even knew that I exist, or that he would contact me instead of his administrative assistant. But I played along, asking what he needed me to do. When he told me to go to a store and buy Xbox gift cards, I knew I was being scammed and stopped responding. I also reported it to the company's security officer.
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  220. Regarding pregnancy, Dave Barry said it best: “You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”
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  221. I have never been more thankful to be divorced and living alone.
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  222. If strawberries are that important to you, why are you in the Pop-Tarts aisle? The produce section is right over there. You can buy as many fresh, whole strawberries as you want. The Kellogg Company will not stand in your way.
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  223. Larry Niven once wrote that the career of a science fiction author has three phases. When you start out, you can’t be picky. If you’re offered a writing assignment, you take it, because you need the money and the experience. When you have started to make a name for yourself and you are more experienced, you have to become more selective about the work you accept; you have to learn how to turn down bad offers. Eventually, when you’re really successful, you have to learn how to turn down GOOD offers— because you get more of those than you can handle, and you need to pick only the best ones.
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  224. The idea that remote workers can’t collaborate effectively is pure BS. I’m a technical writer, and I just finished collaborating with another writer on a manual that had to be developed in a short amount of time. Both of us work remotely. I’m in North Carolina, and he’s in Indiana. We used Sharepoint, which enabled both of us to edit the same Word file simultaneously. We communicated with each other throughout the day via Teams — mostly by chat messages, but if necessary, we had a voice call and shared our screens. It worked beautifully, and we got the manual done on time. Our bosses were delighted with results. None of this required us to be in the same STATE, let alone the same room.
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  225. One thing Leo didn’t mention is that there is not a single documented case of “juice jacking” actually happening to anyone. It seems to be the technological equivalent of the “razor blades hidden in Halloween treats” myth.
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  226.  @BuddyStromboliDrums  Why?
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  227. Leo is a lot more diplomatic than I would have been. My response would be: “Because you are a spammer, and the spam filters are doing their job.”
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  228. Tinfoil hats don’t exist. They’re made of aluminum foil. Virtually no one who is alive today has ever seen tinfoil, or would have any idea of how to obtain some.
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  229. Then why give it to anyone? Star Trek is dead. Give it a decent burial and move on.
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  230.  @jamesamick3298  I was referring to The Orville. As far as I'm concerned, that show IS a Star Trek project. It can't use that name, but it embodies the essence of Star Trek in a way that nothing produced by Bad Robot or Secret Hideout ever has.
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  231. Molon labe.
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  232. So what happened to the stepmother? Did Elodie just steal her horse and ride away, leaving her alone in the desert to bleed to death from her stab wound?
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  233. This happens to me all the time. But Leo didn't identify the true cause: failure of websites to do basic email verification. The correct process is as follows: when someone enters an e-mail address to create a new account, the website sends an e-mail to that address, asking the owner of the address to verify that they are creating an account. The account is only created if the recipient of the verification e-mail responds to confirm the creation request. If the person trying to create the account entered the wrong email address, the verification email goes to the wrong person, who can simply delete it. No account is created. THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT. But many websites don't bother with email verification, because they're lazy or incompetent. They let people enter any email address they want, whether it belongs to them or not, and make no effort to check it. I have no sympathy whatsoever for companies that behave this way. When I receive their misdirected emails, I use the "unsubscribe" link if one is provided. If not, I just mark the email as spam. From now on, their attempts to contact their customer will simply vanish. That's unfortunate, but it's their own fault.
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  234. I stopped trying to protect my two children from profanity on TV when my younger child said, “Don’t worry about it, Dad. It’s nothing that we don’t hear on the school bus every day.”
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  235. I'm a technical writer, and I use the Snipping Tool every day as part of my work. I am often asked to update or reformat existing manuals, and this usually involves reworking a lot of the figures (line drawings or photographs). If the manual exists as a Word file, I can use Word's Save as Picture feature to save the figure to my Graphics folder for that project and then open it in my graphics editor. But sometimes the manual exists only as a PDF, and the easiest way to extract the illustrations from it is to use the Snipping Tool. In fact, I'm working on a document like that today, and the first thing I did was to go through it and use the Snipping Tool to grab all of the illustrations. I don't use PrintScreen, because I almost never want to capture an image of the entire screen. The Snipping Tool makes it easy to select only what I want and save it to the folder of my choice. On the rare occasions when I do want to capture the entire screen, it's easy to tell Snipping Tool to do that. The Snipping Tool is such an essential part of my toolkit that I have it pinned to my Taskbar, so I can always summon it with a single click.
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  236. I can confirm what JP says about gun owners being serious about gun safety. My introduction to gun culture was through the competitive pistol shooting sport, when my teenage son was invited by friends to attend IDPA pistol matches as a spectator and I went with him. Over time, he become more interested in the sport and began competing, first with borrowed guns and then with one that I bought for him. I attended many of the matches, and also went out to dinner with groups of the competitors afterward to get to know them. Every match was preceded by a safety brief in which the range safety officer reviewed and explained the rules of gun safety. Attending the brief was mandatory for every participant, even though most of them knew the rules by heart. During the match, each competitor was watched closely by the safety officer (SO), who would call out warnings or stop the match if a safety violation occured. These included things like having your finger on the trigger while moving, or allowing the muzzle to point uprange even a little bit. Minor infractions would result in a penalty on your score, but for anything serious, you would be disqualified from the entire match. That would happen automatically if you swept your own body or anyone else's with the muzzle, unholstered or handled your gun except when you were actually shooting a stage, or loaded your gun except when directed to do so by the SO. It's because of attending those safety briefs that I can now recite the rules of gun safety from memory, despite never having competed myself. My son is now in his thirties and still an active competitor, although being a husband and father limits his time for such things. (He and his wife met at the range.) He switched from IDPA to USPSA, and by practicing diligently, improved his scores and advanced through the ranks until he reached the highest classification, Grand Master, a few years ago. Needless to say, I'm proud of him.
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