Ditto. I have had tons of dental work. Fire up the iPod, and yes I still use a old iPod Nano for walks and dental work so I can be distraction-free. Toss in some nitrous and it is almost a pleasurable experience. I certainly don't dread going to the dentist.
Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
While not nearly as bad as what is in the article. Predictive text in Messages on iOS now suggests "cancer" when I type "can" and "chemotheteropy" when I type "ch". And to really rub it in "ma" brings up "magnesium". The magnesium one being the worst because if I type it that means they are doing a magnesium infusion and that means I am going to feel like I have been hit by a truck for the next two days.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
I was really into skateboarding from about 12 years old to 30. But back in the day I used to buy the Sony Sport Walkman's. The big yellow ugly ones.
When I would skate I had the Walkman in my left hand at all times. I used to fall a lot and learned to land on the Walkman. It became instinct to cover my glasses with my right forearm and land with my left hand so the Walkman took the hit. For anyone wondering my fingers didn't grip all the way around the Walkman so I didn't grind my fingernails off when I landed.
But those things were tanks. I bought the OG 5GB iPod when it came out and that completely changed the way I skated since I didn't have the trusty Walkman to fall on.
But that was also around the time I started to listen to more Hip Hop like Slick Rick so my entire style changed to a smoother more technical skate compared to when I was listening to Reagan Youth all day and just flinging myself off sets of stairs.
When I was getting my woodshop going I was hitting up estate sales/auctions. There was one I auction I scored a nearly brand new SawStop table saw, Dewault planer, and ShopFox joiner (kinda crap) for under 600 dollars. All the stuff was pretty much brand new.
I have hit the point where I have more tools than space.
I haven't noticed that in Netflix. But 80% of my use of the Apple TV is plex and a little app I wrote that reads directories on my computer running Apache and shows everything in a directory structure. And a bash script that runs through everything calling HandBrakeCli (if needed), generates thumbnails with ffmpeg, and then creates the xml.js file the app reads.
It took around six hours to build and I had zero experience with any tvos or ios development. Just a fun covid-project.
My main beef with the roku is the sluggishness of the UI. And I have a few of them in the house (ultras or whatever the top of the line one was as of six months ago. Amazon had a sale and I bought a few). I also have a bunch of Apple TV 4Ks.
Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.
Weird.. I use rclone sync to move files between OS X in my room to Ubuntu in the garage and both of those to Google Drive. It has always just moved new files or changed files.
I bought this book at a place called "Hungry Head Books" in Eugene Oregon in 1997. I was working as a projectionist at the time and pretty much had to kill 30 hours a week in the booth. This was before wifi or cell phones so I would buy a few books each week and just sit on the carpet and read while the projectors did their thing.
I was not a fan of the hippies. I lived on 15th and High (that is not a joke) when Jerry Garcia died. The hippies were lost for a bit so they flooded 13th in Eugene until they found Phish and moved on. It was horrible. I'm more of a punk rock guy.
But this book really got me going about permaculture. To the point where it was all I would talk about when I got drunk at parties. And people hated me for it. I guess I know how the bitcoin guys feel.
But I found out my aunt and uncle owned about a hundred acres near Klamath Falls. And they were cool with me doing whatever out there. Tons of lumber and there was already a well. So over a summer we built a cabin with working plumbing and a septic tank. And by cabin I mean the unibomber would have considered it a downgrade. We had no clue about what we were doing.
But it was fun to camp out and build something, even if it was shit. That was about as far as we got. There is now a rotting log cabin out there.
So lets say that there are a couple hundred thousand dead and you are pretty sure that 50% of the people out there have it. Are you going to go out for dinner or a movie? Not me..
But ignore me if you aren't saying that the restrictions should be reversed so the economy goes back to normal. A guy on CNBC just said that even if it means 400K would die. The economy just will not go back to normal anytime soon.
I have a friend I talk to daily for 5+ hours a day that works for a major UC school in California.
They can totally work from home and everyone kept passing the buck when pressed about this.
The other day the staff got pissed enough they got a answer.. Basically the IT staff is not all that great and the VPN doesn't work so they are having people come into the office while they know they should be working from home.
Since everyone seems to be all negative I will share a story about the greatest day of my life. This happened around 10 months ago and it involves hash browns.
Due to mouth radiation I had to have all my teeth pulled and then two months of radiation and chemo just made my mouth a nightmare. I hit the point where trying to get down warm chicken broth was impossible. Everything I tried to eat just resulted in hours of pain to get down a swallow. So I didn't eat for around six months. I have a feeding tube for slurry to provide nutrients. It takes a bit to get used to getting full without using your mouth. There is a bit of a disconnect between your mouth and stomach.
I hit a point where my neck muscles were so unused they almost stopped working. I couldn't even swallow a tiny pill. So the doctors started talking about putting a balloon down my throat and inflating and deflating it a bunch of times to get the muscles working again. Fuck everything about that.
So I decided to just suffer and I started eating the blue box. (mac and cheese, kraft dinner for those up north). It was all I ate for months. I like noodles al dente but I had to overcook them to the point of mush so I could swallow them. Then I slowly worked my way to firm once I was able to normally swallow again.
But back to the greatest day of my life. I had only eaten mac and cheese for months and I decided to get adventurous. We had frozen hash browns in the freezer. So I cooked some in a ton of butter. My neck was still really raw so I barely browned them and covered them in ketchup to help them slide down since I can't chew anything.
It worked and was amazing. Then I had the bright idea to cover them in cheese so I ran up to Safeway and got a bag of shredded cheese. That was next level shit. I used to love the fried tater-tops covered in cheese and ketchup from Taco-Time.
But yeah. I was under 100 pounds and I put on about 15 pounds in a matter of weeks. That was 95% hash browns and Safeway cheese.
I think I need to put the internet down. Everything is so negative. Six months ago my good day would be your nightmare.
I use Mintmobile (US) for my cellphone. They are a cheap provider. I pay $180 a year for 2GB of a data a month. They emailed the other day saying data is free for the next month.
Not sure if this is bad form to respond to my own comment here. But my comments here have probably been massively depressing. I have a positive one.
There was a radiation tech, a older gentleman. He noticed that my belt slowly was failing. So one day he told me to give him my belt while I was in the machine. He kept a leather punch in the booth and put in more holes in my belt while I was getting radiated.
That is the fucked thing about cancer. It is never over. Even if you come up clean in a PET it is always still there. Lingering. Forever..
The mental game after you recover is nearly as bad as the actual treatment. When I was between scans I did fuck-all because I could be dead in a month so I will just watch reruns of "Come Dine With Me".
https://i.imgur.com/3sVDwhQ.png
https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/