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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Party lines were especially popular in rural areas; Dozens of farmhouses would share a single party line, so farmers could just pick up the phone and chat with whoever happened to be on the phone already. It was a huge source of socialization for people who otherwise would have been almost entirely isolated. Farmhouses often have literal miles in between each house, so socialization was difficult simply due to the distance. Party lines were basically pre-internet Discord servers, and you just shared the server with all of your neighbors.

    Many farm houses had two phone lines coming into the house; One private line for personal calls, and a party line for the neighbors.





  • Yeah, Harry just wanted to steal everything and vanish. His primary concern was simply getting away without any witnesses, so they could ghost with the money they had stolen. He wasn’t going to bother with petty theft, and was content to stay on the down low if it meant they’d be safe from the law.

    Marv was portrayed as being the dumb one, but he was outright sociopathic in his actions, and had zero qualms about blatantly harming others if it meant he’d get famous. His primary concern was with garnering infamy and making a name for themselves as thieves. He wanted everyone to know that the Wet Bandits had stolen from them. And that is diametrically opposed to Harry’s goal of ghosting after their big score.


  • It’s a reference to Asuka (the character on the GPU), and a very creepy scene near the end of the series. The main character jerks it over Asuka’s unconscious body, and we see his hand covered in white fluid (just like the thermal paste is covering the hand in this pic) afterwards.

    It’s a symbolic scene that is meant to turn the audience against the main character. Basically, he starts his journey with a very similar shot of his hand covered in blood. And the scene of him jerking it over an unconscious girl’s body is basically the end of his journey as a “good” guy. Evangelion is a very psychological show; The series is meant to turn a bunch of tropes on their heads, and it actively works against the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” trope. It accepts that what doesn’t kill you probably leaves you traumatized. So by the end of the series, all of the characters who started out as heroes have ended up broken and hurting, and are basically treated like Vietnam veterans.










  • It’s tedious, but it’s mostly just a matter of waiting for the water to heat back up afterwards.

    Unplug the heater, then run the bathtub until you’re out of hot water. Turn off the bathtub, and turn off the water supply going into the heater. Attach a garden hose to the bottom of the heater, and run it to a drain somewhere. Turn the hot water on somewhere like a sink, to provide a vent to the system; It won’t run because the supply is turned off, but it’ll at least allow air into the system for when you drain the heater. Use the spigot at the bottom of the heater to drain it.

    Be prepared for a gross rush of water at first, because all of the sediment and rust will have settled to the bottom of the heater where the spigot is. Once it’s drained, you can do whatever maintenance you need. For instance, you probably need to replace the cathode rod, which is designed to wear away over time to protect the rest of the heater from corrosion.

    To do a final flush, you can open the water inlet at the top of the tank. It’ll help drain any last remaining sediment out of the tank. Then turn off the water inlet, turn off the spigot, disconnect the hose, and leave the sink tap open while you refill the tank with fresh water.

    The whole process only takes like 30 minutes, and then you’re just waiting for the heater to come back up to temperature afterwards.


  • My wife was caught up in that Ebola scare, because she was on the same plane that the nurse (who had been treating Ebola patients and knew she had been exposed) flew in on. The feds came knocking on her door, and basically said that if anyone in the household left the house, they would immediately go to prison. They put ankle monitors on everyone in the household, and security tape across all the doors and windows so none could be opened without visibly breaking the tape. The CDC called every hour or so to do mandatory temperature checks, and they had to talk to every person in the household to make sure everyone was still present.

    Apparently she almost got fired over it, because her manager initially didn’t believe her. She tried to pull the typical “if you’re sick you need to find someone to cover your shifts. If you can’t find anyone, you need to come in” BS that is rampant in retail. It wasn’t until my wife had the feds call her manager and basically tell her “she’s 100% under quarantine, and if you encourage her to break it we’ll haul your ass in front of a judge” that the manager relented.



  • Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.

    For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.

    So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.

    So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.

    Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.

    Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.

    Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.

    We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.

    Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.


  • If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

    Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

    The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

    The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.


  • Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

    My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

    Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

    And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

    Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

    The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.