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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I overall agree with technology connections on this with two caveats.

    I have, in my day, used some truly craptastic electric stoves that seriously struggled to get a normal sized pot of water to a rolling boil. This was definitely the cheapest, crappiest stove that an Airbnb owner could possibly find to furnish the kitchen with.

    I’ve also used some really crappy gas stoves but none have struggled that hard. So I think if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for budget brand stoves, you may find yourself really frustrated with some electric options.

    Also, my home stove is a somewhat less craptastic electric stove, but still not at all high end. I find that for some of my cookware the burners are too small resulting in some serious hotspots in the middle while you can barely cook on the outer edges even after letting the pan preheat for a decent amount of time. You’re always going to have some amount of a hotspot with almost any stove, but this one is really drastic, and I’ve never experienced anything so bad on gas stoves, probably because the heat escaping around the edges manages to heat the outer parts of the pan a little better.

    I’m not exactly pining for a gas stove, and I can’t have one in this house even if I wanted one, but it is a little frustrating sometimes as someone who likes to cook, which technology connections has admitted is not one of his many niche interests.

    My next stove will be induction, and probably every stove I ever buy after that.

    I guess the overall takeaway from this is, if you’re buying an electric stove and actually like to cook, don’t cheap out and make sure you get one where the burners can handle the size cookware you might use.


  • I work in 911 dispatch, my job is talking to people, and often quite unpleasant people at that.

    On my own time, fuck that noise. Live conversation kind of sucks. When it’s next based I can walk away from it, think about it, come back write my reply and hit send. Most of the time I can’t exactly walk away from a live phone, radio, or in-person conversation and say “hey, good question, I’m gonna go take the dog for a walk while I think about that and get back to you in like 10 minutes” there’s an expectation that I’m gonna be there engaged in the conversation and keep everything flowing, and most of the time that sort of urgency just isn’t needed. I want to be a part of the conversation, but I don’t necessarily have big chunks of my leisure time to set aside to just talking to people, but I can squeeze in a message here or there while I’m doing whatever else I’m doing.

    Take this whole exchange for example, I saw your comment, decided I wanted to reply to that, but I had some things I needed to take care of, so I did them, thought about what I was going to say, and wrote it out when I had a few minutes. You’re going to see it when it’s convenient for you, and maybe write your own reply, which I’ll see and reply to when it’s convenient for me, and so we’ll have a back-and forth conversation that may span a few hours or even days, even though each of us only wrote a couple messages.


  • I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)

    When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.

    We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.

    I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.

    You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.

    I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)

    Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.

    And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes



  • Slipknot puts on a pretty damn good show.

    They’re not a band that’s in my usual listening rotation, I don’t dislike them, they’re just not my usual kind of music. When I saw them it was a situation where someone I knew ended up with extra tickets somehow and I was more interested in the other bands they were touring with

    I’d say they stole the show but I think they were actually the headliner, so I don’t know who they would’ve stolen it from.

    I’m admittedly a sucker for a spectacle, and let’s be real, that’s kind of slipknot’s whole schtick.


  • Yeah, malls in the US at least are really dying in a lot of places.

    I stopped into one of the smaller ones near me a few months back, I had maybe an hour to kill before I had to meet someone for dinner and it was close by so I figured I’d walk around for a bit, and it was downright eerie.

    There were probably as many vacant spaces as actual stores, and half of the occupied stores were closed at like 5:00 on a weekday. Parts of the mall actually seemed like they only had some of the lights on, half of the escalators were turned off or out of service and there were maybe a couple dozen other people walking around the mall.

    There was one part of the mall with no open stores, dim lights, and I didn’t see anyone else around and for a minute it almost felt like I had noclipped into the backrooms.


  • Can’t speak for OP’s situation, but I live near one of the largest malls in the country, and there’s maybe about a half dozen smaller malls scattered around within about an hour or so.

    The big mall is still doing pretty alright, but if you were around maybe about 10-20 years ago, it’s pretty obvious that the crowds are way smaller than they used to be.

    The mall used to pretty much be the place to go meet up with friends, spend time walking around hanging out, a lot of times there would be different events going on at the malls, they were always packed Friday nights and weekends, etc.

    Now except for maybe a few key days during the holiday season, they’re just not busy.

    The smaller malls are almost deserted, lots of empty stores, and some of the spaces are being rented out for kind of weird purposes (I think one of our local politicians- a state representative something, has their office space in a mall) a few of them have closed down entirely.




  • I’ve always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don’t need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it’s not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I’m seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.

    Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.

    I’ve frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV’s a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It’s actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I’ve ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn’t fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn’t allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I’m pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It’s possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn’t)

    I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you’ve ever used.

    On the subject of toilets, I can’t think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It’s probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.


  • I think you’re going to get into some “no true Scotsman” territory here pretty quickly, there’s not exactly a worldwide organization that determines the “feminist agenda” or a universally agreed-upon checklist that determines that you are or aren’t a feminist if you check so many boxes. It’s going to depend a bit on who you are, where you come from, etc.

    For example, if you come from some sort of backwards ultra-conservative Christian background, it might be fair to call you a feminist just because you think women should be allowed to wear pants instead of a dress, because in that context you are, even if most of the rest of the world has long-since moved past that stage of feminism.

    I think most if not all TERFs probably hold some amount of views that could be called feminist from certain perspectives. Whether or not they mesh with any of the more mainstream views on feminism is a different matter entirely.

    EDIT: to be clear, TERFs absolutely do not mesh with my idea of feminism, to me you’re way behind the curve on feminism if you’re not recognizing trans women as women.


  • Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works

    Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.

    As part of that, they generally can’t be toll roads, and rest stops can’t be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn’t be competing with local businesses)

    There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they’re grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that’s neither here nor there)


  • You got some misinformation here

    The current Post Exposure rabies Prophylaxis (PEP) regimen is definitely not “a shot a day” for 20 days

    First day you get a dose of vaccine and a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG)

    Then you get an additional vaccine dose on days 3, 7, 14, and if you’re immunocompromised you get an additional dose on day 28

    And if you’ve previously received the rabies vaccine (for either pre- or post- exposure) you only need a booster on days 0 and 3.

    And the incubation period varies, like you said location and viral load plays into it, in humans it can be as little as a week, but more commonly it’s a couple months, and even up to a year. There are a lot of variables at play, and the sooner you can start PEP the better of course, but generally speaking it’s usually not a “rush immediately to the hospital in an ambulance or you will die” situation. If it comes to it, you usually have at least a couple days of wiggle room to start PEP.

    And no, bats don’t always bite the neck. Head and neck are pretty common, they’re usually pretty exposed, and bats fly so it would be kind of weird for them to bite you on the leg for example, but it’s not like they’re magically drawn to act out the plot of a vampire movie. It is true though that a lot of people don’t recognize a bat bite for what it is.



  • Yeah, overall the policies where I am are pretty damn sensible. Technically we’re not supposed to, but unless you do something stupid like show up to work high, I’d have a hard time thinking of a way you’d get in trouble for it.

    Of course if you ended up getting in trouble somehow on your own time, since it’s still illegal here it would probably lead to some sort of disciplinary action, revoked certifications, termination, etc. which I suppose is understandable

    It’s always interesting to me how different some of these policies are from one agency to another. I see a lot of dispatchers in other places talking about how intense their background checks were, and they had to do a polygraph test and all of that. My background check process was all pretty out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Filled out some paperwork, I don’t even think they called any of my references (although to be fair, I was able to list a few firefighters and such as references, and got a friend of a friend who works here to vouch for me, which I’m sure helped) no polygraph, did have to go to the county detectives to get fingerprinted during training, but technically I was already hired at that point, and that was about the extent of it.


  • I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.

    My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.

    I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.

    Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.

    I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.

    So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.

    And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.

    Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.



  • Current 911 dispatcher here, same kind of experience.

    Recreational is not legal in our state. FWIW, I don’t smoke myself.

    Seen our officers give plenty of warnings for weed, but really the only time anyone gets cited for it is when the person is already getting taken in on multiple charges and being a massive dick about it so the officers are really throwing the book at them.

    I know at least one of the sergeants in my county used to smoke a lot because he went to high school with me. I’ve occasionally seen him enter some colorful notes into calls, like that he gave someone a “warning for the electric lettuce”

    I know a handful of my fellow dispatchers smoke, and I’m pretty sure at least one of my supervisors does, and even more of my coworkers admit to smoking in the past (as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired, past drug use is not a disqualifier for our agency, though lying about it could be if something about it comes up on your background check, and unless they have reason to think that you’re under the influence on the job we’re not subject to testing otherwise)

    We pretty much all roll our eyes when we get a call where the main complaint is “someone’s smoking marijuana”

    We have to enter something about it, we can’t just ignore a 911 call for liability reasons. But we all know it’s a waste of everyone’s time and resources. We don’t really have a specific code to enter it as so unfortunately we usually have to enter it as something like “suspicious activity” which is a fairly high-priority call, but when we can we’ll try to bury it in something trivial like a noise complaint because cops don’t really need to be going out lights & sirens to tell someone to be more discreet with their smoking.



  • Something you may want to consider is a cell signal booster, cell phones are a bit limited in the size of antenna and how much power they can transmit at because everything has to fit in a neat little rectangle.

    But you can get a device to hook up to your car that will retransmit your signal at a higher power. With that you "might* be able to get a signal further out than you normally would.

    It would be useful for stuff like this of course but probably also just in general if you’re in an area with spotty service.

    I don’t have any particular brand recommendations or anything like that, I think WeBoost caught my eye as a pretty decent-looking option at first glance but I don’t know if they’re actually any good. They’re mostly a product I’m aware exists and I intend to look into more when I have some spare time and money because I camp and hike in areas with spotty reception a lot, but it’s pretty far down my to-do list, so you’re on your own for research right now.