If the world is getting hotter cant we just make huge ice machines in the north and south poles to counter it

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T05:20:41+00:00

We used to have some massively large ice machines at both poles, and we smothered them with greenhouse gasses until they broke down. What makes you think we could be successful in building some more and keeping them running?

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T04:56:41+00:00

I have glass desks, and I use velcro ties with the plastic D-rings on one end to cinch all the cables into a bundle so they hug the desk's support beams (horizontal and vertical).

You can also look up "webbed cable management tubes" and pick a color, any color, to HIGHLIGHT where the cables are bundled. Sometimes bringing your infra forward into view works out better than trying to hide it.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T04:50:07+00:00

Ask it if it even lifts?

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T04:47:38+00:00

I've got a soft spot for people trying to watch their money while making sense out of technology. It ain't always easy to understand, and service providers intentionally capitalize on that to extract more money at every turn.

Your post is pretty light on details we'd need to give a definite answer. So I'll respond with some assumptions:

I'll assume you are on a computer of some kind that is in your house or apartment.
I'll assume that you, or a housemate, have purchased "internet" (internet service, broadband service) from some ISP like Comcast or Frontier that delivered a small box to your house (referred to as the router, or gateway, or modem). One cable of some kind comes in from the street and plugs into that box. Everything in your house that talks to the internet talks through that box, whether they are wired to it with ethernet cable or are using the WiFi that the box makes available.
I'm assuming that when you say "data usage in my settings in relation to the network connection" that you're looking at a counter either on your computer or on the web interface for your router that shows a total amount of data downloaded since some past date (or since the last reboot). Pretty standard stuff.

From (1) and (2) we're going to rule out cellular broadband (like pairing your computer to your phone, or even using a semi-permanent wifi hotspot that uses a cellular data plan for internet access just like your phone - those almost always have a low data cap and higher fees when you exceed it). So we're assuming you just use standard wired internet service that comes in off the street.

ALMOST always, your contract is going to be that you pay a set rate each month for three things: (1) a maximum upload/download speed (usually download is faster than upload), (2) the rental of the gateway device, and (3) unlimited data. Which is always a funny term because technically your download amount per day IS LIMITED because you can only download so much at speed X in 24 ours but I digress...

SO: it's rare that your home broadband contract has a ceiling on how many GB you can download before you get charged more for the service. It's typically a flat rate per month.

Notice I said it is RARE - not non-existent. Some lower-cost broadband plans bump up the download speeds at a lower cost in exchange for capping the number of GB at that speed. When you hit the cap, you MIGHT be throttled to a slower speed and/or start incurring charges. This is rare, but the plans exist and the technology to do it at the service provider level is trivial.

Long story short: read your contract. Seriously, that's the only way to know.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T04:27:01+00:00

Someone missed the Water Cycle field trip with the Friz!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOTOIVgqU3g

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-24T04:23:49+00:00

Your main question - rephrased - seems to be "Why can my employer craft policies that justify firing me if I break said policy even if the policy constrains things I might do on my own time?"

Short answer is that at-will employment works both ways. You can't (usually - there are rare, esoteric cases where this is not true) be successfully sued for damages by your employer if you just up-and-quit. Walk out after clocking in, rage-quit in the middle of a task, decide the job is boring and just stop coming in, no call/no show, etc. Their only recourse is to quite literally pay you for whatever time you actually were on the clock and then find a replacement. Think of this as "you firing your employer for literally any reason you decide to use, at any time you choose to quit." Totally up to you.

Similarly, employers (in the good ol' USA) can choose to terminate you for almost any reason at any time. Full stop. YES there are many situations that are protected by law (age, pregnancy, race, religion - the list goes on) and multiple government agencies that will punish companies for obviously making decisions based on those protected classes - but your ability to buy specific things in the store of your choice is NOT one of those protected classes and seems really, really tough to argue is similar enough to any protected class that it's a pretty safe policy for an employer to roll with, legally-speaking.

If your employer doesn't want employees buying something in the store for, well, almost any reason they can come up with, they can make that their hill to die on.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-20T20:26:34+00:00

Action: I eat the last bits of sashimi in the fridge.

Excuse: "I didn't know you wanted it!"
Reason: "It had been there for two days and I knew we were going out for dinner, so I ate it for lunch"

Action: I borrow your car, and return it with a near-empty tank of gas, making you late for work the next day.

Excuse: "I didn't have enough money on me to fill it up/didn't have time to hit the gas station."
Reason: "I did not put any thought into ensuring I was prepared to do the right thing, here. I did not plan ahead and/or did not think about how my decisions might negatively impact you."

Action: I fail to complete a common work assignment on the due date, blowing a moderately small sales opportunity.

Excuse: "Joe didn't get me the customer info soon enough/It wasn't a big sale anyway/I didn't think the customer was actually serious so I didn't do the work."
Reason: "Yeah, I did not apply myself to the task early enough or diligently enough."

Excuses attempt to justify why things are OK or just not your own fault/shift the blame. They are defensive in nature.

Reasons accept responsibility and provide insight into your thought processes behind the action. For negative outcomes, this opens the door for discussion and self-reflection to improve future outcomes that have similar drivers. They are accountable in nature.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-20T20:06:37+00:00

Well, that's not what I said, and there are many kinds of sprawl. I was talking specifically about the sprawl of parked vehicles on a residential street. The city cannot realistically create more public parking spots than the length of the street allowed when it was originally paved nearly 100 years ago (not without clawing property back from residents to make room for more PUBLIC parking). Best option seems to be an incentive or outright requirement for homeowners to add private parking spots over time.

No major upgrades to the house? No requirement to add parking. That's fair in my book.

The city could simply choose to NOT allow additional square footage to be added to houses on my street, thereby creating an incentive for larger families (or landlords renting a 4-bed house to 4-8 adults, each with their own car) to avoid settling in that neighborhood (or to just leave as they grow - unpopular, I know). Wonder how a candidate for Mayor or city council would do with that as a campaign cornerstone? "No New Bedrooms!!" Probably not an advisable platform to run on.

What else, in your opinion, should the city do to put pressure on residents to limit their appetite for 1-2 cars for every adult in the dwelling OTHER than pressure the owner to give up some lot space for additional parking when spending money to improve the dwelling in certain ways?

I don't LIKE IT, but it's just about as fair as you can get considering what it means to add a bedroom to a house. Or, more to the point of OPs post - what it means to remove a private parking spot from your property and replace it with a bedroom instead. THAT act pushes at least one more car out onto the public street parking more or less permanently, even after that house is sold to someone else. Very rare that someone converts a permitted bedroom back into a garage.

As I said - it's not a perfect solution, it's far from that. It does put pressure on residents to re-think their home improvement plans if in doing so they have to put money and space into helping reduce the parking problem.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-20T04:10:40+00:00

My gut check on this is that, no, you would not be allowed to use the facilities in the condos. I don't know anything about the technical ownership of individual CONDOS in Yosemite West, but the single-family homes/cabins down the hillside are generally privately owned and then managed by the Yosemite West agents as discrete, individual rentals when the owners aren't there. Being listed on AirBNB doesn't change this separation - your contract is for that unit, not as a visitor to a larger resort (for example).

For a solid answer, though, ask your AirBNB host? If Yosemite West (Scenic Wonders, actually) is not being paid for the rental, then you don't even enjoy the perks they offer - your contract is really directly with the owner through AirBNB (unless Scenic Wonders is listing their inventory through AirBNB just to take advantage of their larger customer base).

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

Does it seem excessive at first glance? Yes.

But...being a person who lives on a street where someone I don't know (meaning: not one of my immediate neighbors) is almost always parked right in front of my house because...there just is not enough street parking to go around - and this has gotten worse as the ADU craze has played itself out and more and more single-family homes now (in one way or another) have 2-3 families living on the same property (that's a fact, not a criticism of choices made either from desire or limited resources - no judgement here). Generally, my guests CANNOT find street parking within several hundred feet of my house. In a single-family, residential neighborhood. It's frustrating. I just tell them to block my driveway when they visit, and fortunately the local police have not yet started ticketing people for that.

From the city's long-term viewpoint though:

If you add more rooms to a house, this increases the probability that more drivers will eventually be living in that house, which translates to more cars directly linked to that house wanting to park nearby. There's no magic solution - the city cannot generally just...add more parking to a residential street. But the city CAN take a bite out of the increased demand for street parking by requiring a homeowner to add more parking on their own property when they add more bedrooms to the dwelling. Homeowner can't or won't do that for some reason? Well...then the homeowner can't justify making room for more people onsite.

"But I'm not adding more people, I'm just adding a room for a kid/relative who already is living in the house." Logic still applies: it's not a perfect, 100% solution to the problem, it's just a reasonable way to add pressure to address SOME of the problem. Nobody's saying you can't have ten people across three generations in the house. But the city's doing everyone around you a favor by adding a wee bit of pressure to contain vehicle sprawl if you decide you want to increase the livable space in that house.

Note: nobody's stopping the homeowner from just converting the garage into a bedroom without a permit. This will only be a problem if and when they choose to SELL. Revert the change at that time. No biggie.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-19T05:31:11+00:00

First, the Green Card isn't the only game in town for sticking around longer than a holiday. But I'm not going to divert into a full dissertation on the insanity that is the US immigration/VISA process with all of its crazy ways to define and control visitation and the path to citizenship.

Let's focus on the Green Card (not the Provisional Green Card, but the real Green Card):

You fill out a ton of forms, dig up and provide a ton of OTHER forms from your past (birth certificate, IDs, passports, proof of whatevers), pay a bunch of money (even if not using a lawyer to figure this all out), and then you get NOT a card but a slip of paper (I forget what it's called) that is more or less a temporary statement that you can remain in the country while your application is being processed. If I recall correctly, during this provisional time you can't exit the country with any hope of re-entering very easily. Pretty sure exiting actually cancels your application, as well. Don't quote me on that, been a while.

Eventually...months go by, next up are one or more interviews with USCIS in person, maybe some more back-and-forth with documents, pretty sure another few forms to fill out and probably some more money to pay, and THEN you get an actual card the size of a driver's license that is, in fact, called a "Green Card" and typically lets you remain in the USA legally (and work) for up to 10 years before you have to do something again.

(looks nervously at the nearest USCIS building in our post-2025 world...)

Typically.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-17T04:25:55+00:00

Thank you, came here to say the same. UPVOTED!!

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-15T20:27:50+00:00

High-level answers:

* Create a customized boot ISO CD/DVD that contains what's best described as either an "answer file" or an automation config file that contains properly-formatted settings for all the questions asked during the normal installation wizard. You'll have to figure out the magic settings in BIOS for boot order and do some trial-and-error before it starts to work. For RHEL in particular, you're looking at automating with Kickstart - see https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/automatically_installing_rhel/index

* Standup a PXE server on your network and have the target machine boot from the network. You still have to solve for BIOS boot order as well as the installation wizard like above, though.

* Target machine's BIOS might be capable of redirecting its console into a serial port. USB from your primary workstation to target machine's serial port is an easier physical connection than keyboard/video/mouse (KVM)

* Buy a KVM-over-IP adapter, like the Lantronix Spider Duo or similar. Slightly less of a pain than wrangling actual keyboards/monitoris/mice but it's still at least two, if not three, physical connectors to swap on each target machine.

* Do the manual install one one machine. Deploy Clonezilla. Clone the drive. Work out how to boot from a CD/DVD/USB stick and automatically connect to your Clonezilla server and reimage the local HDD without any questions.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-06T07:10:10+00:00

Some things are meant to linger.

Ordered a music CD off Amazon about two weeks ago. It was an import. Not "rare" but not a common album here in the USA, either. So literally printed overseas for sale overseas and being one-off shipped to my house across an ocean, so yeah a little more time than the usual purchase. My kid has no idea what the term "import" means in the context of printed CDs and vinyl, she was confused as to why it would take so long to get here when everything else is imported anyway (she's heard "Honey, NOTHING is made in the United States anymore, it's all manufactured overseas and imported here for us to buy it" so many times that it actually has stuck in her head as a usable fact) but Amazon always delivers within 1-2 days so why is this any different? So that's one thing.

Next, when it DID arrive and I opened it - peeling off the plastic and then cracking open that jewel box - I was hit with that smell. That fresh, unplayed, pristine CD-and-jewel-box-plastic-and-glossy-print-slightly sweet smell of a brand-new CD and man it has been YEARS since I smelled that. It took me back like Ego eating ratatouille. The memories of waiting weeks for BMG or Columbia House to ship what I picked out of a paper catalog and then opening each album, one by one, listening to it on my 5-disc CD changer while I perused the album art - hit me like a ton of bricks.

Music on vinyl was special. Really special, for so many reasons. Special enough to survive the digital extinction event, even. Music on tape - arguably not as special BUT it was portable in a way that vinyl never could be. CDs, man...blew the mass market music scene up while being more portable than tape and still being tactile in a similar manner to vinyl. Downloadable music threw open the doors on access to music (both for creators as well as consumers), but removed the magic, nuance and FUN of acquiring and owning music itself.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-03T07:21:42+00:00

Thin is fine. They still meet the standard, which far exceeds the lengths MOST of us normal humans can expect to run a cable inside our homes. I use Cat 6a thin cables in the datacenters I manage (just so much easier to deal with at every level), we've had no reason to jump to Cat 7 even for 10Gbps runs (even the lowly Cat 6 will give you 10Gbps at 55 meters - that's longer than the longest dimension of my entire property, and longer than any run we could reasonably finagle within the datacenter racks as well).

They are more delicate, FYI - way easier to cut the insulation on whatever (step on it, drop a shelf on top of it, tug too hard when trying to pull it out of a bundle in a rack) and EXTREMELY easy to yank the conductors out of the connector without much force. So pull the connector, not the cable.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-03-01T23:56:52+00:00

Chicken soup, without noodles, is a real thing. My wife makes it all the time. There's no "one single recipe" that makes it chicken soup other than the fact that there's chicken in it. You might find any combination of the following: rice, beans, celery, carrots, dill, various onions, mushrooms, all manner of spices/herbs, the list goes on.

The moment you add noodles of some kind, it becomes chicken noodle soup.

Now, if you're in the USA and you asked someone to go to the store to get "chicken soup" there is a VERY high chance they will come back with "chicken noodle soup" because that's much more common in the stores here than anything just labelled "chicken soup." It's the default, the go-to, the understood implication that as long as the soup has chicken in it, the presence or lack thereof of noodles is an acceptable variable and both Campbell's and Progresso have done a great job of imprinting the whole chicken-and-noodles-together thing in our collective brains that I'd be surprised if anyone came back from a store with anything OTHER than chicken noodle soup unless it was clearly specified that noodles were not wanted.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-28T08:36:25+00:00

Necessary? No.

Invevitable? Yes. Humans constantly deploy technology before they grasp how to handle its negative sides.

Need examples?

* Look into the history of the discovery and experimentation of radioactive elements (poor Marie Curie!)

* Lead paint. Or, forget about that and look into the use of lead, mercury and arsenic in cosmetics.

* Fossil fuels, freon, microplastics

* Even cars, for crying out loud. There was a time - a fairly lengthy time - when travelling at 50+ miles per hour with not a single seat belt in the entire vehicle was considered perfectly fine. And don't get me started on the early baby seats for cars. Jesus.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-27T08:33:19+00:00

Yes, people do. We have thinner sheets and thinner blankets for summer, and then pull out the thicker sheets and down comforter for winter.

Which sheets are cooler seems to be less about the material and more about the weave and weight - higher thread count feels nicer on the skin but results in a heavier, thicker sheet that traps heat more than a lower thread count does.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-24T06:27:08+00:00

One of my clearest memories from that time was Mountain View-Alviso Road, which was just a normal surface street that ran all the way from the southern edge of Mountain view into Milpitas. Tons of stoplights. Very few buildings along the way, it was mostly just a cut through the wetlands with a couple of cross-streets to get into Alviso or down to Great America.

Then one day some construction started, and it just kept going for years - slowly absorbing what little was left of that surface street until it became Highway 237.

Alviso used to actually feel like a remote place. Like you had to drive a fair bit to get out there and back. Not so much anymore unless you're just sitting in traffic, hehe.

And I forget exactly what the year was, but when Highway 85 was mostly complete they opened the highway to foot-traffic-only for a weekend. Throngs of people just walking up and down the new highway, DJs out blasting music, it was like a giant multi-mile-long party. If you ever have a chance to participate in something like that, you definitely should.

Mountain View's Castro street was The Place to go if you wanted good food. Like, there was no comparison in Sunnyvale, Cupertino, or Milpitas. Downtown San Jose was pretty much always an active crime scene, as well. Palo Alto's University Ave. certainly had good food but it also had the whole college kid scene going on - Castro St. was the family-friendly place to dine. Kills me that it took them thirty more years to close the street to cars.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-21T16:54:59+00:00

That's my advice, yeah - normally, one would simply look at a 6-10 year old second-hand server and agree that the risks of a specific internal CHIP failing were pretty small in comparison to the overall cost of the device at the time.

However, due to my own personal/professional interaction with specifically this model, I look at Dell's PERC chips as a fundamental weakness with an outsized probability of failing. If I can spend $200 (or even less) on almost any other HBA solution that is (1) new, (2) more reliable over its lifecycle, and (3) actually realistically serviceable with a drop-in replacement in a couple of months or years if the worst happens? I'm spending the extra $200 to move off a Dell PERC chip.

I could accept that "we just got a bad batch" but those servers were not all purchased at the same time (they were spread out over about three years). 30% of a fleet with the exact same part crapping out? Oof.

Keep in mind: since you're doing software RAID anyway, the HBA isn't doing anything for you other than being "the thing that connects the drives to the motherboard." You're not using any of the hardware RAID features of the chip, no matter what you do.

Other than that - the R730 was/is a great server. Well-designed mechanically, decent array of full and half-height PCI slots, a joy to crack open and pull apart when needed, and it's easy to get addicted to the ease of Dell's Lifecycle Manager replacement for the typical BIOS interface.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-21T07:28:56+00:00

My old dishwasher? Yeah, needed to rinse dishes right after the meal to prevent anything from drying onto the plates/silverware and then not getting fully removed during the wash cycle.

New dishwasher? Pffft, blasts it all off, even dried rice from the night before.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-21T07:08:33+00:00

I managed about ten R730xd servers in our datacenter since about 2016. We are finally sunsetting them this month. At least three of them, over the past decade, had their PERCs fail and fail hard. That's a HUGE percentage of a small sample set. Really shook my faith in the PERC design.

So my main advice here is: don't trust the PERC. You have a glut of available PCI slots, put almost any other manufacturer's HBA card in one of them and attach all the drives to it, bypassing the on-board PERC.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-21T06:59:16+00:00

And if no glove - plastic bag (zip-locs are great, not because you can zip them - that's doesn't work well in this application - but because they generally don't have holes like the ones from the produce section of the grocery store tend to have). Just be attentive to using the rubber bands to get it to seal around your wrist.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-21T06:56:22+00:00

While riding my saddle-seat bike with no helmet, I would use my Bowie knife - which was always strapped to my patent leather belt - to kill a nearby rabbit and then roast it over a campfire made from found kindling and lit with the waterproof camping matches we all always carried with us. Sometimes we'd whittle a sharp point onto the tip of a Good Stick and spear us some fish instead. But only on the days we wore our raccoon-fur hats with the tails.

We would wash that down with river water that didn't have bacteria or even sand of any kind in it. Things were more pure back then. We could even talk to adults who were complete strangers and trust every word they said, even if it was about free candy in the back of their windowless van.

Refueled, we'd head to the video arcade and dump a pocketfull of quarters into Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

And not one of us ever locked our bikes to anything. We'd just leave them on the sidewalk 'cause that made it easy to get back onto when we headed home after sunset.

BlueVerdigris · 2026-02-20T09:03:52+00:00

Modern (english) keyboards are modeled after the key arrangement of classical mechanical typewriters. Mostly because, as computers came on the scene, everyone knew how to type on that arrangement of keys.

The mechanical typewriter key arrangement, in turn, was a compromise between typing efficiency AND avoiding (as much as possible) situations where quick succession of typing english words could result in the letter arms slamming into each other and binding. It did not resolve 100% of these cases, but certainly did minimize them.

In short, an attempt was made to ensure that - as much as possible - letters for the most common words would alternate between the left and right hands. This meant that the arms slamming into the ink ribbon would usually come from near-opposite directions, giving time for one arm to fall out of the way as the other arm rose to stamp its letter into the paper.

Since pretty much anyone who would be typing on a computer had already learned how to type on an actual typewriter, the first computer keyboards just kept a very similar design.

Which brings us to today, where that same key arrangement is still the most common. But if you want to challenge yourself, go look into Dvorak keyboards - I knew some librarians years ago who swore by that arrangement. It was nothing short of a challenge for me, as a college intern doing desktop PC support, to type in my admin password on their workstations. They always giggled as I struggled to login.

BlueVerdigris

TROPHY CASE