He has claimed the bathroom sink as his bed. While this is very convenient for petting the cat while using the toilet, he tends to sleep in the morning and evening which is also the most likely times I want to brush my teeth.

Fortunately, the kitchen sink is just around the corner, so it is not necessary to disturb the adorably sink-napping cat.

It’s English, so it’s difficult to be wrong, but that phrase do be weird.

It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

About 15 years ago I saw an independent film at a local theater and it turned out that the guy who made it was couch-surfing the country showing the film at small theaters and was staying that night with a friend of a friend, so after the showing we went over to the friend’s place to hang out and talk.

The guy who made the film was pretty cool and told us lots about the process. Basically he spent a year and all his time and money on it, borrowed money from everyone he knew, and pulled favors from all his friends and their friends to get access to locations for shooting, costumes, props, etc.

What it came down to was that at that level there is no process. You just call in every favor you can, make lots of promises you can’t keep, max out your creative problem-solving abilities, and hope like hell you can get it done enough to show before you completely run out of money and friends.

While we enjoyed the film quite a lot the dude was not terribly happy with it (all he could see at that point were mistakes and limitations), and was beyond broke (that’s why he was couch-surfing his way through the cities he was showing in, he could barely afford transportation to the next city).

Film making technology has come a long, long way since then, so you could probably make a similar quality film much easier and cheaper now (I wouldn’t be surprised if the expensive cameras he was renting at the time are outclassed by what you can do now with a nice phone and a second-hand Canon). But the rest is probably pretty similar. Lots of dollar-stretching and creative problem-solving.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

No, I agree that allegiance is a behavioral motivator, but I think it is distinct from loyalty and that people tend to conflate the concepts (similar to how people sometimes conflate or confuse infer/imply and borrow/lend).

Loyalty, a behavior, can be observed; allegiance, a commitment (maybe supported by emotion, maybe not), cannot.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s thumbthing weird about that image.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

loyalty is earned

For me, it’s not even that. Loyalty is not owed, nor is it earned. It is nothing more than a description of behavior.

Think of it this way: I always do my grocery shopping at Target instead of Walmart, even if I see that something is slightly cheaper at Walmart I’ll still most likely go to Target for it. Some might see that and say, “Look, he has loyalty to Target”, assuming that I shop at Target because I am loyal to that brand. But that’s backwards. Really it is that I can be described as ‘loyal’ because I consistently go to that brand. ‘Loyalty’ is a description of the behavior, not the cause of the behavior.

it can be used against you

Only if you have bought into the coercive bullshit that ‘loyalty’ is itself a reason to do something. Employee or customer loyalty is nothing more than an observation that people consistently support the company. That loyal behavior is seen because those people consistently have reasons to support the company. If you observe that people are loyally supporting your company, that is because they have reasons to do so (for example, you might be paying them to show up and do shit. Or maybe they think the shit they are doing is important or fun).

People who want something from you for less than it is worth will try to convince you that loyalty is something you owe them or that they have earned from you because if you believe the lie that loyalty is a reason for action that makes it easier to get you to give them something for free.

IMO acting out of loyalty is never good. That is a backwards application of the concept intended to make you to act against your own interests.

Some people like to flip the idea of loyalty around from a description of behavior to a reason for behavior as a method of manipulating other people.

Like, if people see me consistently supporting my friends even when that is difficult they might think I’m ‘loyal’, but that’s backwards. I’m not supporting them because I am loyal, I support them because I like them and want them to succeed (and hopefully they’ll support me too). If someone wants loyalty from me, that’s an immediate red flag that tells me they either don’t understand why I do things, or they don’t care and just want me to do whatever they want.

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn’t make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don’t have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one’s ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one’s own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it’s kind of a question of ‘who do you want to be?’. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing ‘negative’ emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says ‘mudita’, vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I’m kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

Just to add a bit; I don’t know anything about brain chemistry, but if I cast the subjective experience into these terms I would imagine that this filtering occurs at higher levels of abstraction than the mentioned sensory input. Meaning that you have conscious awareness of ideas that your usual habits of thought would filter out before they reached conscious awareness. The vast majority of those ideas are just fun, creative, silly bullshit that can easily take on a quality of profundity that it is tempting to take far too seriously, but sometimes they can inspire more long-term creative paths, or even just let you appreciate your sober experience of the world in new and interesting ways.

This is useful for many of us who spend the vast majority of our thinking time in very utilitarian goal-oriented patterns. These habits of thought, while useful for earning a living working in a kitchen or whatever, for example, can hamper our ability to experience other sorts of creative, playful, and novel patterns of thought that make life fun. Breaking out of those habits can help bring new, vibrant perspectives on our living experience.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

Thanks for this tip, very useful

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven’t started have a blank box next to them, tasks I’ve started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn’t been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I’m picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I’ll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we’re using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don’t make any effort to ‘capture everything’. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don’t keep very many active tasks, so it’s rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I’m too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I’ve got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don’t happen to have it I usually remember what’s on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It’s low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

That’s me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It’s great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

Your own hardware as a “service.”

TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.

I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.