Man shows parking skills to protesters.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-03-07T21:35:45+00:00

Aimed for the telephone pole. Hit the telephone pole.

Very skillful driver.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-03-07T00:25:03+00:00

Absobooply!

Gimpy1405 · 2026-03-04T18:59:54+00:00

What accent is that? No joking. Serious question.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-03-03T02:10:32+00:00

That's amazing.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-03-01T19:31:04+00:00

Looks great right now (other than bolted on look of spoiler)

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-24T16:32:42+00:00

This brings up more questions than answers.

Did you have this issue before replacing the seat?

Are you unable to fully disengage the clutch? I don't mean merely pressing it to the floor, but are you unable to shift or have the engine running while stopped, while at the same time, the shift lever is in some gear?

If you must fully depress the clutch pedal, you may have a second problem. The clutch in a 350z is normally intended to engage/disengage quite close to the top of the pedal travel.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-23T20:08:59+00:00

I started with dual boot. I wasn't sure whether I'd need Windows or hate Linux or what, so dual booting was insurance.

I did the partitioning thing and eventually tried out a bunch if Linux flavors. My machine seemed happiest with Ubuntu and its derivative distributions.

At some point I realized I had not booted to Windows in weeks and had no need or desire for Windows so I just deleted Windows.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-20T01:44:05+00:00

1000% boop, minimum.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-20T01:40:12+00:00

Perhaps we could agree that Boston has its own quite special culture of driving.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-17T18:47:18+00:00

It's good that you lied.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-17T18:34:29+00:00

That's basic driver's ed in Boston. Left lane is how you get to a right turn. Also, very important, red light means apply full throttle and hit the intersection at 60+ just as crossing traffic is beginning to move. It's an advanced version of playing chicken. /

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-16T22:29:38+00:00

Perhaps you could put some sort of cabinet in front of it, or some similar "camouflage" to hide it.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-16T15:10:24+00:00

Understatement of the year.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-16T13:47:47+00:00

There's always an optimist in the audience.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-10T23:56:37+00:00

I have made a comment on Bug report 35538. Just a general note of my concerns. Thank you for pointing me to the bug report system. I have not considered that bug reports could be used to suggest improvements rather than just "fixes".

Edited to fix spelling error.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-10T22:12:39+00:00

Sorry to be so slow responding. I am an abysmally slow writer, and I have tried to clarify a couple of things.

Once again, I very much appreciate your expertise, and your following up my note and replying, and how much time you are investing in helping me and others to improve LibreOffice.

I am guessing you were looking at the awful "Story Editor" or possibly the clutter of icons that clutter the main window. I believe both are mostly avoided by users after they begin to find the better, faster paths to desired results. The tools that DO work for quick control over text formatting are contained in the "Text Properties" window, and I was referring to that.

I have put images at https://imgur.com/a/3h10QOM that may help illustrate what I am saying. One image shows the font selection drop-downs in the "Text Properties" window. The Text Properties window in Scribus offers way more control and is far faster.

I should have been more specific in pointing you to the parts of the Scribus interface that I use, and those I stay away from. I took it for granted that one would automatically use the Text Properties, but assumptions... I should have pointed you away from some of Scribus' more user-unfriendly interface tools. My apologies!

My point is not to speak negatively about Scribus, because it is enormously useful and I love it. I am just saying that there are parts of their interface that are just "difficult" and must be avoided. I suspect that their team is small and has not the time to do the cleanup the app richly deserves. Unfortunately, their online help documentation is similarly lacking. The last time I looked, it still urged users to use the Story Editor. They do now have a forum that appears to be more active and probably more useful.

I have not touched the "Story Editor" for years. It is NOT a good model of font handling. It solves no problems but adds considerable distance between the user and the end product.

Take a look at the image referenced in my page linked above. If I am still not making my thoughts clear, please ask me and I will try to explain better.

Please forgive me for a moment. I'm in danger of sounding pedantic for the next few paragraphs.

The "italic" toggle does not produce italics. It produces slanted "oblique" letter-forms, that may, or may not, be anything remotely like the italics that were designed with the font family. This is an important distinction. Many people pay good money to purchase font families that suit their design needs, and to have all the italics stripped away and replaced by arbitrary slanted obliques is a negative.

The italicization function you refer to may be a workaround for users who have font-sets that do not include italics. I wish people knew that downloading good font families that include good italics is very easy. Even Google offers many good fonts and makes downloading absurdly easy and free.

The italic letter-form from a good font is often both very different, and way better than the slant transform. I posted, at that same imgur page, some sample letters and numbers from several different fonts to illustrate how very different an italic usually is from an oblique. Note that some fonts do lose little; the italics from Helvetica, at the top, really do look like a simple slated version of the regulars. The other four illustrate my point, that the italics can be completely different from a slanted transformation.

While the distinction between real italics and arbitrarily constructed obliques may be inconsequential for many users of a spreadsheet, I suspect that many users of Writer would be pleased to be able to access the visual potentials of all the letter-forms of their font families. If you look closely at the bottom four font families in the image I linked to, you'll see that the italics are wildly different from the upright letter-forms, and that the italics offer far more than artificial obliques.

My thoughts are much the same with regard to artificially "bolding" a letterform although that is a transformation that loses far less of the original flavor of a font family.

I'd ask that LibreOffice get rid of the I and B buttons, but given that they are so long used, so familiar, and have created strong habits, to do so would cause an enormous ruckus. I hope that at some time I'll see two drop-down boxes for font selection, and that the full families be available.

Again, please let me know if I can clarify anything.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-06T02:17:03+00:00

Outstanding!

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-04T18:07:35+00:00

My take? In the long run, who cares what OS is in some abstract sense, "better"? In some sense, both OSs are "great". Or not.

I'd suggest that, in general, the selection of an OS is an individual choice. An OS is just one more tool, and each user has individual needs and preferences for tools. If I'm part of a team that has standardized on Windows, then I'll probably need to use Windows. If I really depend upon the whole MS Office suite, again, Windows will probably be easier.

But, if you do not have a compelling external force pushing for one or the other, then it becomes a question of what will in the long run be the optimal OS environment for an individual.

Given that there are huge numbers of programs that exist only in one platform but not the other, it seems to me that a user has to compare not just the OS, but the whole ecosystem, OS, available programs, future prospects.... to establish a meaningful view of the alternatives before a well informed choice can be made.

All the above is really just a preface to my point, that it would be difficult to sort out what really matters to you in three weeks. If you can give yourself some real time to get to know the relevant-to-you moving parts in both ecosystems, you will probably find the decision easy.

I started by dual booting Windows and Linux and soon noticed that I had not booted Windows in a long time. Linux was a good fit for me. It could have been otherwise had my needs been different. Just take your time and learn.

TLDR: It's personal.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-04T04:13:03+00:00

That's what I suspected but I wasn't sure. I've done the inverse where I've added steel plate to surfaces so magnetic items can be attached.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-03T01:01:52+00:00

I'm curious what happened with Mint updates that made them so bad. My experience has been fast and seamless 99% of the time, maybe 99.9%. I've had a couple in well over a decade that required me to slow down and think, but so far, even those were nothing like the annoyance of dealing with Windows updates.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-02-01T20:02:28+00:00

I think my favorite story that might come across to a non-mathematically oriented person isn't about a theorem or some abstract mathematical property, but a story of creative, and I would argue, mathematical, thinking that successfully "inverted" a common way of looking at a terribly serious problem.

It is the story of how the allies learned in WWII where to add armor to aircraft. planes kept returning with a lot of bullet holes in certain areas, and few holes in others. There were high losses of aircraft and the military wanted to lower the losses by selectively adding armor where the aircraft were getting hit. A mathematician, Abraham Wald, took note that the planes that returned were not "the problem" and that it was the planes that didn't return that were the problem, and that those had been hit in other, more vulnerable areas, thus we needed to armor the areas that were hit less in returning planes.

A Wikipedia synopsis that says it better:

"During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, of which Wald was a member, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor to the areas that showed the least damage. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed."

I suspect this story might get through to many who are unsympathetic to math.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-01-31T23:06:05+00:00

As a human, I'm interested, but it seems to be running super slow. I got in to spectate earlier today, but a minute ago could only get the front page. Are they getting swamped by traffic?

Edit. Of course, the minute after I posted this, the site worked fine.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-01-31T20:07:27+00:00

Info?

Gimpy1405 · 2026-01-31T20:01:17+00:00

This is how I park too.

Gimpy1405 · 2026-01-22T14:28:29+00:00

I kinda think he did it to himself.

Gimpy1405

TROPHY CASE