Category: Life

Posted on
by

GPS navigation options we need:

  • I know how to get to the freeway from home.
  • I know how to get home from the freeway.
  • Don’t send me down someone else’s narrow residential streets just to save two minutes.

If I’m trying to get somewhere other than home after work, I’ll use GPS to get an idea of the time remaining and the fastest route. Since I’d rather avoid the freeway during rush hour, it keeps trying to send me on these zigzag paths through residential neighborhoods to avoid backed-up arteries or just avoid busy intersections. I used to follow those routes, but after a while I started noticing other cars ahead of me that were clearly doing the same thing. It’s not just one car being added to that lumpy narrow road with lots of driveways, stop signs, kids on bikes and people taking out the trash. It’s a lot of cars. And of course we’re following the same apps drawing from the same data, so we’re all taking the same side streets, not spread out among all of them.

If there’s a big difference, that’s one thing, but for two or three minutes? What’s the point?

Of course the navigation app seems so testy when I decline to be part of the problem, and it has to keep recalculating…

Posted on
by

It’s odd how some people will sling insults, threats and violence day in, day out (or support those who do), but the moment someone offers even a fraction of it in return, they call foul.

Sadly, a lot of people have convinced themselves that freedom consists mainly in the “freedom” to treat others like crap without fear of retaliation or consequence.

Posted on
by

Whenever I call more than one senator/representative/etc. office as part of a call-in campaign, it’s interesting to see what the staffers want in order to log the call.

  • Some want my name & full address.
  • Some want my name & zip code.
  • Some just want my zip code.
  • Some don’t ask for anything further.
  • Some interrupt me five words in to say “The senator already supports that bill.”

(You can tell when they’ve gotten a lot of calls on an issue.)

Posted on
by

Most social networks don’t give you the ability to backdate your posts. That’s good, because it provides a trail that you can point to, saying “Yes, I did in fact post this before it became common knowledge/was plagiarized/etc.” But other publishing platforms do. It’s helpful for things like transferring an archive from another site — though it seems a little weird (and vaguely dishonest) to backdate a new post.

That said, I do backdate posts on this blog from time to time, generally when:

  • The post is imported from another site (Instagram, LiveJournal, a comment somewhere, a Twitter thread, etc.), and I keep the original posting date. Basically it’s a smaller scale version of transferring an archive. Sometimes I’ll make a note, sometimes I won’t. But the post was already online somewhere on that date, even if it wasn’t here.
  • I’m splitting an old post into two or more smaller posts, in which case I’ll usually keep the date but adjust one of the times.
  • I’ve got an old draft that I never got around to posting, it’s no longer relevant today, but I’d like to make it available in its original context. In that case I’ll add a note that it was backdated.

There’s also the accidental backdating that sometimes happens when I create a draft in the mobile app and it decides to keep the upload date as the posting date. I try to fix these as soon as I notice. But that’s not really the same thing!

Posted on
by

Silly as it sounds to recall nuts for undeclared nuts, not all nuts are the same.

If you’re allergic to cashews but not pecans, you want to know whether the pecans you might eat have come in contact with cashews. And that’s not even getting into the peanut/tree nut difference!

In this case [Edit: link broken], a process breakdown at a roaster opened up everything to cross-contamination by every other kind of nut they sell. They’re recalling affected lots while they fix the problem.

»All pages site-wide with this tag