Was it red by any chance? The only red car I have ever owned got rear-ended 3 times.

Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!

Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

So it’s not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.

Right now, it is southwestern-style Indian upma with eggs and salsa. My wife invented that after randomly picking up a package of instant upma from a nearby Indian grocery and noting that it reminded her a bit of grits. We are afraid to tell anyone of south Asian background of this no doubt sacrilegious interpretation.

There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.

If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.

I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there’s a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.

But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like “Wow, did they just break hello world?” It’s a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.

Well, I managed to join a hispanic choir at a Portuguese church and I must say we’re having a blast, language barriers notwithstanding. I am of neither ethnicity but I just play violin so it doesn’t matter. And man, latino hymns rock!

Of course I don’t understand a thing the priest is saying. This week I thought hang on, I’ll just run Google Translate as he’s speaking. But I think there’s a problem. It could be he’s speaking Spanish with a thick Portuguese accent and it wasn’t coming out right? Unless he was actually saying:

…And sushi are big carts of yesterday and today as farms catalyzed for purposes. He is not saying about Jesus…

To me, it seems the right have been getting ever more extreme in the ugliest ways imaginable. The left, then, has to decide whether to become more inclusive of those who lean somewhat right but are feeling alienated at this point. Do they take in the refugees, or do they stick to their principles and leave a void in the middle? In short, it’s an identity crisis and people are taking sides.

As a Canadian, I look at US politics and see only a centrist and right party. In some ways, the Democratic Party is further right than our Conservative Party, though the latter would certainly want to change that if we let them. There are some Democrats who are uncompromisingly left like say Bernie Sanders, but they are in the minority.

Oh yeah! I still have one of those from the days when our son still lived with us and started crypto mining on my dime.

The nice thing about a foot is that it divides into 12 inches, which gives you many options for measuring portions of a foot compared to metric units. But the problem is not with the metric system. It is with our base 10 numerals.

It’s actually not that hard to count to 12 on your fingers. You can even do it on one hand by pointing your thumb at the sections (phalanges) of your fingers. If you bring your other hand into it, you can even reach 144!

Regarding the τ = 2π thing, I brought this up with my mathematician/classical Greek enthusiast brother. He said “Tau? Why tau? I would’ve gone with Ϡ (sampi). It’s not used for much anymore. Would be great to bring it back…”

Doesn’t ISO8601 prefer the comma over the decimal point for fractional seconds? I kind of remember being appalled about that some years back when I was looking into it.

Ooh, I sense the presence of another hill! The vernacular use of “kilo” as short for “kilogram” must stop?

I love that in the US media, you only ever hear about kilos in the context of drug seizures. Those evil drug lords poisoning the youth with bastardized metric jargon…

What is Ruby Chocolate? Everything You Need to Know

I’ve tried it a couple of times, but it’s a little hard to find.

Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure I did hear an American say altimeter once? I suppose if you were consistent in reversing all the rules, it could be chalked up to a dialect variation? I’ll let it go in that case. :)

The kilometre—with the accent on the ki and the re ending—is a unit of distance. A kilometer—with the accent on the lo and the er ending—would be a device that measures kilos, like perhaps a bathroom scale? centimetre, millimetre, speedometer, altimeter.

I’m actually fairly forgiving about people saying it the wrong way, but when Siri gives me GPS directions, it really grinds my gears. She should know better!

Have you tried ruby chocolate yet? I’m guessing you won’t be impressed.

I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.

I got to tour Bruce Nuclear. I still remember entering that building and feeling like I was on the Death Star with so much machinery stretching on and on.