Minor victory thread
- Thread starter Thread Necromancer
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I screwed up the mix on my 10 year old 2 cycle leaf blower, and managed to weld it into a lump of metal. Oops. I was going to toss it, but I decided to try to fix it one more time. I knocked the piston loose and honed the cylinder a little, and it started right back up. Runs just like it always did. The end is probably in sight, but at least it's going for now.
I got out Milky Way shooting for the first time this year 
It was super clear and gorgeous out!
This is the preview of one of my shots of Jupiter, Saturn and the Milky Way. It clearly needs a lot of photoshop love and to be uploaded from my camera lol
It was super clear and gorgeous out!
This is the preview of one of my shots of Jupiter, Saturn and the Milky Way. It clearly needs a lot of photoshop love and to be uploaded from my camera lol
Got a couple of new pieces of art this week. Won a drawing on Dave Kellet’s patreon for a scratch of the Machito, main ship in his Drive strip. Also got a package from Michael Jantze, creator of The Norm strip, because of him making a great gesture on me ordering his Knocked Out Loaded book a week before he offered a special to his patreon supporters. He sent me a watercolor he did of The Norm cast.
Here are pictures:
Here are pictures:
Never have found a David... now I gotta figure out if it was ever produced. And... apparently never made production.
Had an interesting thing happen at the movie theater today. I went to see Incredibles 2 (review in the movie thread) this morning (11:00 AM showing) and wound up running into my sister and her family.
My nieces adore me and wound up sitting on either side of me for the movie.
However, this is the same sister whose husband said many hurtful things to me to the point I stormed out of their house during one dinner a few years ago. I posted about it, but not sure if anyone remembers. Since then, I've refused to visit their house, especially if he was there. And if he ever joined them to come here for a dinner, I wouldn't sit at the table and just eat in my room or leave the house until they left. Basically avoiding him at all costs, both because I'm sick of hearing his sexist, racist, homophobic bullshit but also ensuring he doesn't say anything hurtful to me again. Which, in the precarious mental state I've been in recent years, was a good call in my mind.
Anyway, he was there with them today, of course. Family outing and all that. I ran into my niece as I headed for the ticket guy. She pointed out her family waiting in line at the concessions. I was about to join them when I saw my brother-in-law was there. Then turned around and found my spot in the theater. However, knowing my nieces would want to join me, I strategically sat one seat into the end of a row so they could potentially sit on either side of me, but also to avoid having to interact with him. It worked. My sister and him sat in the row ahead of us and down a ways. I felt bad because it was a family outing, but my sister told me afterwards it's not a big deal since they just sit quietly and watch the movie, anyway.
But something interesting happened after the movie. We were in the hallway, talking about the movie, and I actively avoided looking at or even acknowledging my brother-in-law. Still in a very cheery way and never shooting him a dirty look or anything. Kind of like accepting something is in my radar, but not openly acknowledging it. I don't know if it was obvious. It probably was.
But it was a strange, positive exercise for me because I assertively ignored that asshole while still enjoying a brief time with the rest of my sister's family.
My nieces adore me and wound up sitting on either side of me for the movie.
However, this is the same sister whose husband said many hurtful things to me to the point I stormed out of their house during one dinner a few years ago. I posted about it, but not sure if anyone remembers. Since then, I've refused to visit their house, especially if he was there. And if he ever joined them to come here for a dinner, I wouldn't sit at the table and just eat in my room or leave the house until they left. Basically avoiding him at all costs, both because I'm sick of hearing his sexist, racist, homophobic bullshit but also ensuring he doesn't say anything hurtful to me again. Which, in the precarious mental state I've been in recent years, was a good call in my mind.
Anyway, he was there with them today, of course. Family outing and all that. I ran into my niece as I headed for the ticket guy. She pointed out her family waiting in line at the concessions. I was about to join them when I saw my brother-in-law was there. Then turned around and found my spot in the theater. However, knowing my nieces would want to join me, I strategically sat one seat into the end of a row so they could potentially sit on either side of me, but also to avoid having to interact with him. It worked. My sister and him sat in the row ahead of us and down a ways. I felt bad because it was a family outing, but my sister told me afterwards it's not a big deal since they just sit quietly and watch the movie, anyway.
But something interesting happened after the movie. We were in the hallway, talking about the movie, and I actively avoided looking at or even acknowledging my brother-in-law. Still in a very cheery way and never shooting him a dirty look or anything. Kind of like accepting something is in my radar, but not openly acknowledging it. I don't know if it was obvious. It probably was.
But it was a strange, positive exercise for me because I assertively ignored that asshole while still enjoying a brief time with the rest of my sister's family.
Well, engaging him with hostility in front of the nieces would probably have diminished you in their eyes, so the diplomatic solution was probably the best. You don't like him, fine, but that's no reason to taint everyone else's evening with your feud, and gives him less ammo to say something like, "See? Told you he was a jerk!" to the nieces later.
--Patrick
--Patrick
So this client:
The real minor victory is I landed a different contract, and due to needing some equipment was able to convince them to advance the first payment.
Which means I'll be able to pay the August mortgage.
Which is a Very Good Thing™.
It's tempered by the fact that it's macOS display driver work, which is a real pain to develop. On the other other hand, it's how I justified the advance - you have to test them on a second computer, since every compile cycle requires a reboot of the target machine, and if it crashes on boot (because hey, it's a driver and runs right next to the OS) recovery isn't trivial. You could use the development machine, but it's very time consuming to reboot the computer for every test, and it's hard to develop on a computer that is crashing during boot. The other macs won't work, this driver involves a thunderbolt 3 (usb C) device, and I've only got one machine with that port right now.
The third contract I'm actively chasing seems promising, but they're having a lot of internal discussions about project direction and funding sources. That's a hardware one, and if I don't have time I can involve my two friends/contractors - they would like the work, and I'd like to be able to give it to them, so it actually works out very well that they're dawdling, and that I get another contract I can't farm out to others. I never wanted to get into management, but I like the idea of being a source of enjoyable work for others. Who knew.
At any rate, my hands are full again as long as I do good work. It's a huge relief since I tapered off in order to take a month off for the new baby, and didn't have anything lined up for after.
Ah, maybe this should've been in the epic win thread.
I'm just glad to have something on my plate. The stress of being unable to fully meet our needs is pretty hard. Hopefully, we can chip away at the credit card debt this fall...
And I finally heard back from the first company - my estimate was twice the budget they allocated for it, and it appears they've found another company to do the work.
Guess I need to start looking around for more projects - I try to keep three in mind all the time, and now I'm down to two.
Might be time for that theremin kickstarter...
Hasn't gotten back to me since my last email - but they didn't outright say no or laugh in my face either. That's a good thing in my view - they're actually considering it internally instead of immediately responding "no way!"
The real minor victory is I landed a different contract, and due to needing some equipment was able to convince them to advance the first payment.
Which means I'll be able to pay the August mortgage.
Which is a Very Good Thing™.
It's tempered by the fact that it's macOS display driver work, which is a real pain to develop. On the other other hand, it's how I justified the advance - you have to test them on a second computer, since every compile cycle requires a reboot of the target machine, and if it crashes on boot (because hey, it's a driver and runs right next to the OS) recovery isn't trivial. You could use the development machine, but it's very time consuming to reboot the computer for every test, and it's hard to develop on a computer that is crashing during boot. The other macs won't work, this driver involves a thunderbolt 3 (usb C) device, and I've only got one machine with that port right now.
The third contract I'm actively chasing seems promising, but they're having a lot of internal discussions about project direction and funding sources. That's a hardware one, and if I don't have time I can involve my two friends/contractors - they would like the work, and I'd like to be able to give it to them, so it actually works out very well that they're dawdling, and that I get another contract I can't farm out to others. I never wanted to get into management, but I like the idea of being a source of enjoyable work for others. Who knew.
At any rate, my hands are full again as long as I do good work. It's a huge relief since I tapered off in order to take a month off for the new baby, and didn't have anything lined up for after.
Ah, maybe this should've been in the epic win thread.
I'm just glad to have something on my plate. The stress of being unable to fully meet our needs is pretty hard. Hopefully, we can chip away at the credit card debt this fall...
Post automatically merged:
And I finally heard back from the first company - my estimate was twice the budget they allocated for it, and it appears they've found another company to do the work.
Guess I need to start looking around for more projects - I try to keep three in mind all the time, and now I'm down to two.
Might be time for that theremin kickstarter...
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Have you considered creating a second partition on the drive? Perhaps 80GB in size with a bare install of the relevant bits which you then preserve as a .DMG for ultimate undo purposes? It would still be time consuming to do your testing, but at least being able to hold down the Option key at start to boot back to your main partition would make cleanup a snap.
--Patrick
I’ve done that before. It’s still a surprisingly time consuming procedure. The last time I did this I was handling three machines and four versions of OS X, and was so very grateful that I could boot off usb drives.
It would take ten hours of billable time to pay for the machine, and I’ll easily save that much time a few times over during this several hundred hour project.
I know some companies would just go slow, spend the extra time and bill the client more to pad their profit margin, but I can’t do that in good conscience. (I’m looking at you, automotive suppliers...)
Well at least now you have newer models to choose from, models with actual modern quad-core CPUs even in the 13in version.
--Patrick
Oh, and incidentally, now that the firmware bugs seem to be worked out, independent testing is showing the CPU performance of the six-core i9-based MacBook Pro to be on par with that of a twelve-core 3.3GHz 2010/2012 Mac Pro. Sure, the graphics performance lags behind, but hey there are now solutions for that, too.
—Patrick
—Patrick
I teach at a rather small school and have been attempting to run a D&D club for the last few years during our lunch breaks a few times a week with groups of students. Only 40 min breaks which equal out to about 30 min once everyone is settled. Never having played D&D as a kid (despite totally wanting to) it's been a bit of a learning curve but I've had a lot of guidance through podcasts like The Adventure Zone, Critical Hit, and Acq Inc/C-Team. Anyway, kids loved using DnD Beyond last year to tinker with some basic characters but were limited as I haven't purchased any of the online tools, just owning a lot of the books was enough of an expense for me as fundraising is often already spoken for. I've been in email contact the last few days with DnDBeyond support and while they don't have a special discount for educators, they were quite willing to gift me the core books (Player's Guide, Monster Manuel and DM Guide)!!! This opens up a lot of content for my kids and I'm really excited to explore it with them. Going to get a Master Tier subscription for my birthday so kids can access all the content I have unlocked on their own school accounts. . That's my excited ramble.
. That's my excited ramble.
So that's like, what, 3 combat rounds?
Usually less, depends how prepared, confident and focussed the kids are. Combat usually isn't a problem however, it's gently teasing the roleplaying out without rushing or forcing it that tends to be an issue.
Submitted my latest manuscript to a journal this week. Fingers crossed. Super glad to get the folder off my desk.
Turns out the rock place less than two miles away has cheap rock, cheap delivery, and you can have as much as you can load without machinery for only $15.
I paid $35 for them to load it for me, but it’s the principle of the thing that’s important.
Now I’ve got a half ton of 6A rock in my truck I need to carry into the basement.
I paid $35 for them to load it for me, but it’s the principle of the thing that’s important.
Now I’ve got a half ton of 6A rock in my truck I need to carry into the basement.
If only you had a large child labour force you could make do this while you sat back with a nice refreshing drink and supervised.
Editorially rejected.
On to the next one. Just have to reformat some junk and will send it off soon. Oh well.
GasBandit
Staff member
I'm actually using one of my vacation weeks next month! (I get 20 paid vacation days a year, but I have NEVER used all 4 weeks).
Ooogh, getting ready for it and getting back after it are gonna suuuuuck though.
Making the big drive through NM up to CO again, same as last year.
Ooogh, getting ready for it and getting back after it are gonna suuuuuck though.
Making the big drive through NM up to CO again, same as last year.
GasBandit
Staff member
And that's the real crapshoot. On that week, will there be an update? Will there be EIGHT in five days? Or will we go all of september with no updates? Who knows!
Fortunately, I've got the server update process down to the point where I can do it by phone, if I need to.
It's being editorial reviewed at the next journal. Fingers crossed.
So, I got a mail from my tenants saying there was a leak in the bathroom.
I asked the guy who installed the shower for me to go take a look. Turns out an old joint had come loose under the floor. He fixed it, and is coming back to fix the door, too, which had a loose knob. It's nothing too serous. The win, though, is he's not charging me anything. A contractor! Not charging anything!
I asked the guy who installed the shower for me to go take a look. Turns out an old joint had come loose under the floor. He fixed it, and is coming back to fix the door, too, which had a loose knob. It's nothing too serous. The win, though, is he's not charging me anything. A contractor! Not charging anything!
That just means you have two months of procrastination before you start right?!
