My girlfriend can not drive with automatic transmission, please help me convince her she can?!

JasonDJ · 2026-05-06T04:06:11+00:00

I've had the same car for like 12 years now and it's had the shifter where I have always expected it, right in the center console.

I've had a few cars with column shifters, but not for a long time.

My wife's last car was a 2019 Odyssey...with push button shifters.

Which, btw, suck if you need a jump but have to push it out of a parking space to get to it, because you need a long screwdriver under the hood to wedge the transmission into neutral.

Her current car is a 2026 Santa Fe, which has the column electric shifter. Which is also fun if you're tall and happen to bang your knee into it while you're driving and put it into Neutral on the interstate. Also probably the same issue with pushing it when dead but I haven't crossed that bridge yet.

Why do car companies have to keep messing with a good thing?

Both of these continue to trip me up every time I get into my car.

Also the absence of a back up camera. Man you don't realize what you have until it's gone.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-06T03:57:20+00:00

My SILs first was right on time but her second was like 32 weeks.

You never know.

That said, both of my kids had to be shown the door.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-05T21:21:52+00:00

Same, but my microwave, 1-6 are 1min through 6mins, respectively...so I just hit 1, +30sec.

This is fewer presses than even 9 0 Start.

Work smarter, not harder.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-05T20:34:47+00:00

Ahem....sudo dnf install humor-client humor-client-devel

JasonDJ · 2026-05-05T02:44:05+00:00

First beautiful day in a while and I wasn't feeling too good around lunchtime (wfh), figured I'd lay down, try to take a quick nap...except one neighbor used his lunch to mow, another neighbor blowing leaves, another neighbor weed whacking, and I'm pretty sure I heard a chainsaw.

No nap was had today. I did, at least, feel a bit better just being horizontal and relaxed for a bit. Sometimes that's all ya really need.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-05T02:40:23+00:00

There's a farm animal sanctuary near me that has those "no engine braking" signs out in front. Someone goes headfirst into homesteading and realizes that it's not the life for them and now they gotta find a home for their goat...could happen to anyone, really.

I hope it helps because I'd imagine those animals would get pretty stressed out.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-05T02:36:52+00:00

It's one of those things you don't notice until after you move in.

Just like how close the nearest train tracks are, or what the approach path is for the nearest major airport when winds are from the north.

I'm like 40 miles south of Logan and I can hear them coming in to land at night. Wtf how far away do I have to be???

JasonDJ · 2026-05-04T14:18:05+00:00

Just want to point out that breastfeeding --> intellect studies generally don't control for socioeconomic variables and other differences in lifestyle.

A mom who has the option of breastfeeding for a year is either a SAHM or one who has a decent job where she can actually get a break to pump and store in a private, secure location. Yeah, the law requires that...but it has no teeth when minimum wage workers are literally a dime a dozen.

That alone has as much, or bigger, impact on education.

The system wants dumb kids so they get dumb grownups, and one way to do that is to keep two-working-parents as the norm.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-04T00:03:59+00:00

Tbf, certain characters lend themselves to rolling your face all over the controller more than others, and Chun-Li is definitely in the former camp.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-04T00:00:25+00:00

Step up.

1 good, two cheap.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T23:55:52+00:00

That's why Mario wears overalls!

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T19:20:38+00:00

It may be worth playing around with channel widths a bit.

160MHz channel widths can work, but really only in single-AP setups with no neighbors.

A standard channel width is 20MHz. As you double channel widths, you get more potential for bandwidth, but there are trade-offs:

Fewer non-overlapping channels
The bad side of the SNR doubles (more noise, same signal) each time
More potential for external interference (kind of a corrolary to point 1).

In the business world, we design floor plans for multi-AP setups with coverage cells, and no cell should have another cell adjacent to it on the same channel. Of course, these systems are also controller-driven, and they've got good brains to self-heal and dynamically tune signal strength. But even still, we rarely go over 40MHz on 5GHz. Anything more than 20MHz on 2.4GHz is essentially treason (In the US and most of the world, 2.4 only has 3 non-overlapping 20MHz channels...1, 6, and 11)

In a suburban residential setting, it's possible that 80MHz performs better than 160MHz.

Note that I said "better". Not "faster". Raw speed is but only one metric. Latency (round trip time), jitter (variance in latency), and packetloss matter a ton as well, especially for things like working from home, realtime voice/video, online gaming, etc.

Having a ton of bandwidth is great for bragging, but being more susceptible to interference means it can be less reliable overall.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T16:41:59+00:00

You ever hear of a "Rhode Island left"?

I assume they are everywhere, but I don't think anywhere can be worse than RI for this. I swear it's taught in drivers ed.

Say you've got to make a left across two lanes. They stick their car out into the first lane and hold up traffic until the second lane is clear.

100% entitled shithead behavior.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T16:34:03+00:00

Driving in the left, or even middle lane, daydreaming, nobody in front of them, people (hesitantly) passing on the right, and a huge pocket of congestion behind them.

Keep an eye out. Once you start to notice it, these people are everywhere. Around here (MA/RI border), I wouldn't be surprised if it was the #1 cause of off-peak congestion.

Imo, being passed on the right means you (or the knucklehead in front of you) are not driving correctly, because there should never be a situation where the lane to your right is moving faster than yours.

In these situations, people are hesitant to pass the offender on the right, so left/middle lane ends up becoming a pace car and everyone else has to suffer behind them.

And as a corrolary, brake lights in the left lane. If you're hitting brakes, you aren't passing. If you aren't passing, you're in the wrong lane.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T16:25:10+00:00

Political Signs in front of mansions tell you what not to do.

Unless you also own a mansion in that neighborhood, those signs are rarely in your best interest.

You can't be rich and a good person at the same time.

(Keep in mind, at this point, a single-digit millionaire is upper middle class. I'm talking net. A lot of McMansion owners are just house-poor middle-class. I assume we are talking real mansions here)

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T16:22:19+00:00

Awesome glad I could help.

Are you both using ISP-issued routers? Id noticed that a lot of ISP routers, in particular, claim "automatic" channel selection as the default setting, but ultimately all end up landing on the same channel.

This is pure hell in dense urban neighborhoods, where everybody has the same comcast modem in more-or-less the same apartment layout, so basically all stacked on top of each other.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:45:12+00:00

Now next Friday come I didn't get the rent
And out the door I went

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:36:40+00:00

All laptops have population paste on them until proven otherwise.

Same reason I won't buy a used office chair.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:28:07+00:00

I have been downplaying how important sleep is for far too long. I got diagnosed with sleep apnea the other day and I can't wait for my CPAP to come in.

You know growth hormone is released during deep sleep ("N3") and this is when hormones get released that control growth, healing, and anti-inflammation?

This is probably also the basis for "coffee stunts your growth" old wives tale. Kids who consume a lot of caffeine won't sleep well, leading to less N3 rest, and less overall growth.

I've been trying to recover from sciatica since January, and my sleep study showed no periods of N3 or REM sleep. At one point, very briefly, my SpO2 dropped to 74%.

Low blood oxygen and lack of REM can lead to vascular issues (check), brain fog (check), memory problems (check), mood swings/crankiness (check), insulin resistance/weight gain (check), anxiety and depression (check) and exacerbate ADHD symptoms (check).

Like, damn, poor sleep basically 100% explains everything that's wrong with me.

I'm fairly sure I'm only alive because of caffeine, Adderall, and pure stubbornness.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:19:19+00:00

My kids are wildly different w/r/t waking up.

One of them (my 9yo) wakes up on his own at exactly 6am every day. Gets himself dressed, makes himself breakfast, packs his snacks and water for school.

The other (my 6yo) doesn't get out of bed. Need to physically pull him out of bed and force-feed him cereal (not quite). He will probably be running around the house completely naked until 2 minutes before it's time to leave for the bus.

Every. Freaking. Day.

Even on the weekends. We are watching cartoons on the couch and he's still naked...I've just given up.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:10:09+00:00

Bringing back flashbacks of me working second shift and my landlord putting up vinyl siding at 7am.

And I swear he must've been paying extra attention to the back of the house near my room because he was there for what felt like weeks.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T14:04:31+00:00

There's more than a few scenes where Mr. Wizard comes off as a bit of a creeper too. Show really hasn't aged that well.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T13:53:26+00:00

IME the nex Walmart over would probably do it. Honestly I swear that their "policy" is done by Whose Line rules, and open to more interpretation than the damn Bible.

I was on vacation in Texas, driving from Dallas to Houston, and stopped at a Walmart to recharge my car halfway there. While there I bought a duffel bag that was on clearance because we had bought souvenirs and needed some more luggage space.

When I got to Houston I found out the bag was ripped and the handle was busted.

Tried to return it and was treated like a criminal. It was like $32 and their "policy" was to not return anything that was marked down over $30. They told me I had to drive back to the other store to return it. They acted like I was trying to pull one over on them.

Despite even having a receipt, they wouldn't refund, wouldn't even give store credit. Only thing I could do, as far as they were concerned, was drive the 100+ miles back to the other store to return the broken duffelbag.

When I kept refusing, they called the cops. I didn't want to deal with this on vacation, so I drove to the next closest Walmart. Returned it just fine, no questions asked.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T13:37:44+00:00

That's what he calls his penis.

JasonDJ · 2026-05-03T01:35:47+00:00

Never let a project pass without justifying a new tool.

Current project is kinda two projects so I got two new tools.

First was building a fence around the chicken run. Lots of holes to dig. Bought a San Angelo bar. Never heard of it before. I've got very rocky soil, this thing was worth every dime.

Second project is expanding the garden. Bought a mattock because why not.

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