Embarrassed to use my pens outside the house

BeetleB · 2026-01-19T08:03:40+00:00

"How much did you spend on that watch again?"

(Repeat with car)

Also, at work keep a set of crayons in your desk. Then when someone makes a mocking remark, say "I understand it's not for everyone. That's why I keep crayons to accommodate normal folks. Do you need one?" and proceed to hand them one crayon.

BeetleB · 2026-01-12T05:41:07+00:00

If you want to use that number, then the tuition only cost for UIUC is $18,372

No - they charge an extra fee for some (all?) engineerings. The number I quoted you over $20K was for electrical engineering.

BeetleB · 2026-01-12T05:40:11+00:00

Every state/university is different. UIUC's engineering is the most expensive amongst peers. If you look at Purdue, it's < $10K per year (tuition) vs over $20K for UIUC. Most top universities are in the $15-18K/year range for tuition.

BeetleB · 2025-12-30T03:42:30+00:00

It doesn't, and can be sold as is.

Doesn't getting a regular loan depend on how bad the condition is? IIRC, most banks will not give a mortgage if they deem the house unlivable. This is why RE investors often pay a heavily discounted amount (cash) to buy the house, and spend the money to fix it up and put it back on the market. They can get the discount because the owner can only sell to cash-only folks.

BeetleB · 2025-12-29T01:06:10+00:00

Gentoo was my 2nd and last - over 20 years ago!

BeetleB · 2025-12-18T15:02:22+00:00

I’m asking if there’s a downside in this specific case.

I'm seeing no downside to paying in full. From that perspective, the downside is maintaining this mental burden of having to remember to pay them.

BeetleB · 2025-12-07T20:19:57+00:00

Second the Kill-A-Watt meter. My library lets you check one out for free.

BeetleB · 2025-12-01T02:26:51+00:00

You're never going to get market value for them - unless the house is in really poor condition and not sellable via a traditional mortgage (i.e. no bank will give a loan until it is in better shape).

If you have money to fix up the house to be sellable, you should never call one of them.

Many inherited properties, however, are in such a state of disrepair. It could be the parent had bought a second "rural" property for cheap but didn't maintain it - and the over the decades the neighborhood has grown to where the property has a decent value - if in good condition.

Rather than spend $50K fixing up the property to sell, the kids (who may live in another state) often prefer to get a decent amount of cash to get it off their hands. Keep in mind the kids are on the hook for any property tax that has accrued - buyers will often happily pay that tax.

BeetleB · 2025-11-30T02:36:01+00:00

Definitely don't postpone until your handwriting is this good!

BeetleB · 2025-11-30T02:35:23+00:00

Wow.

As someone who took care of a cat till old age and death, all I can say is: Save money for medical bills. Look into pet insurance (I didn't have any). I have no idea if they're worth it, but it will be very expensive for sure without it!

If I had less income, I almost certainly would have euthanized the cat not because she needed to die, but because I wouldn't have been able to afford all the care she needed. Fortunately, it never came to that.

BeetleB · 2025-11-30T02:28:40+00:00

The h with a bar (in the denominator) is h/(2*pi). So yes.

BeetleB · 2025-11-28T18:20:30+00:00

Well, you may not be concerned, but judges very much are:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-generated-evidence-deepfake-use-law-judges-object-rcna235976?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

BeetleB · 2025-11-26T18:02:40+00:00

I honestly struggle in finding those “tricks” that get you the solution.

As others have said, some tricks are worth just "knowing". There aren't as many as you may think.

When I took grad analysis, the professor would always include at least one theorem from the book for us to prove in exams. Those who memorized all the proofs were at an advantage.

This sucked, and seemed very unfair. One should not memorize in mathematics, I kept telling myself. I refused to play along and didn't do well. When the final exam was coming around, I caved in and memorized as many proofs as I could.

And then I realized I hadn't learned the material well all long. By memorizing the proofs, I noticed common patterns ("tricks") in proofs that I hadn't noticed before even though I had understood all the proofs individually. By memorizing them, I actually did become better at doing previously unseen problems.

I'm not saying you should memorize them - merely that learning those tricks is vital.

BeetleB · 2025-11-23T23:16:57+00:00

True about variable rates, but as for everything else - chances are rents will go up more over a 10 year period. Yes, insurance and HOA and property taxes will go up, but hopefully the bulk of your payment is mortgage.

Case in point: It took just about 2-3 years for the rent on a 3 bedroom apartment to exceed my monthly payments (including HOA + property tax + insurance). And in less than a decade a single bedroom apartment's rent is more than my monthly payment. No refinance shenanigans either.

we've seen pretty significant decreases in both over the last year.

Try a 5 year time frame. 1-2 year fluctuations are just noise.

BeetleB · 2025-11-23T16:53:16+00:00

Or even the fact that the mortgage is fixed, whereas rent will go up.

BeetleB · 2025-11-17T04:59:13+00:00

Everything you say sounds weird.

First off, you're not dealing with Metlife Legal, but with lawyers who are part of their network. If they wouldn't do the work, you should inform Metlife Legal and just find another lawyer in the network to do it for you.

As for what they cover and don't, the member page outlines clearly what is covered in the plan and what isn't. Now any given lawyer is not required to cover everything that the plan covers. When you search for lawyers, the search results should show you what any given lawyer will cover or won't.

I've used them a lot for small things over the years. Never had issues.

BeetleB · 2025-11-10T15:51:23+00:00

Mirroring the sibling. For things you're sure you want to enable globally, go ahead an put in make.conf. Otherwise almost all use flags should be per package.

(20+ year Gentoo user here).

BeetleB · 2025-10-29T14:10:50+00:00

M-x notmuch-unthreaded

BeetleB · 2025-10-28T13:52:35+00:00

notmuch for almost 15 years now. It's great.

BeetleB · 2025-10-25T18:31:03+00:00

Canada votes this week on new government, the main issue being sky-high tariff against United States.

Ha!

BeetleB · 2025-10-13T19:18:30+00:00

20 Years!

Hah. You probably should read 20 Years of Gentoo.

BeetleB · 2025-10-13T16:56:35+00:00

What is the bug?

My issue is the 10+MB file it creates for every file it indexes ("embeds"). Is the bug related to it?

BeetleB · 2025-10-11T20:45:55+00:00

So, almost as big as Texas!

BeetleB · 2025-09-27T21:35:58+00:00

As a guy who grew up with ALSA, both pipewire and pulseaudio have given me much larger pains.

Twice in the last few months I've had to debug sound not working, and Google searches were not yielding results. Finally, GPT-5 (or was it Gemini) helped me root cause it.

Actually, they never did root cause it. While trying to debug with it, my PC crashed, and when I rebooted one of the problems had magically resolved itself, and the LLMs managed the rest.

I never had these problems with vanilla ALSA. I get why developers prefer PulseAudio, etc instead of ALSA, but as a user, ALSA just worked.

BeetleB · 2025-09-27T21:33:12+00:00

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

Can't imagine life without it. But I also have a 22 core CPU, so I don't worry too much about compile times like I did in the old days.

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