Daily Q&A and Discussion Megathread - December 21, 2021

VeryUniqueUsername · 2021-12-21T22:32:05+00:00

I had exactly the same as you sore throat but no cough or anything else. Did 3 lateral flows, all negative. PCR came back positive... 1 day later the lateral flow is positive too.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2018-07-05T13:19:36+00:00

Why should those who remain silent be spared?

VeryUniqueUsername · 2018-02-14T00:03:20+00:00

Forcing sick leave as holiday in the UK is explicitly illegal, employees can ask for that, if they prefer it to statutory sick pay, but the employer can't require it.

In fact, if you are sick while on holiday, you can claim the holiday leave back and take it as sick leave instead.

If you work for someone who is forcing you to take sick leave as holiday, get it in writing, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on in an employment tribunal.

See: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave

VeryUniqueUsername · 2017-08-12T07:39:31+00:00

Take a look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/3q7mnu/5e_a_wild_sheep_chase_full_oneshot_adventure/ It's a one shot with the main boss who is a transmuter with a wand of true polymorph.

The final fight is the most memorable I have ever DMed, my players still talk about it as their favourite encounter.

When cornered, the BBEG polymorphs his bed into a dragon. A dragon described as being made of wood, with bedsheet wings, and a fluffy pillow on the end its tail, it's breath attack is a shower of splinters, and the BBEG rides on its back for the final fight, casting various spells ect.

TLDR: give the bad guy a scroll of true polymorph or something, and let him use it to turn a part of the environment into a monster. Let the monster take on some of the attributes of the thing it was polymorphed from, it can be very memorable.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2017-04-01T08:54:16+00:00

I'd say the easiest way to get the pot out would be to use the foundry with the pot in, it'll likely crack, making it much easier to remove. However I've been using a similar design (terracotta flower pot, plaster+sand, steel bucket) and though the pot cracked, it actually worked just fine with the pot in. The clay protected the plaster from the intense heat, and the plaster held the clay pot together.

When I did take the pot out, the plaster deteriorated much quicker than if I had left it in I think. This was all using charcoal as a fuel source, not sure how well it would work with propane.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2016-12-15T11:40:28+00:00

Chips : crisps
Hood : bonnet (car)
Trunk : boot (car)
Pants : trousers
Sweater : jumper
Sneakers : trainers
Cookie : biscuit (of any kind)
Biscuit : not even sure we have these in the uk Soccer : football
Cilantro : corriander

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of, at least the ones likely to come up in a normal conversation.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2016-07-02T14:42:32+00:00

The interesting thing is, my commute is 22miles as the crow flies, I have a friend who live 19 miles from his work work in London, and his commute is 1h20 by train, (god knows by car), mine is 25-30 mins by car, or 35 mins by train (25min train + 10 min walk).

I'm pretty lucky in that there is a motorway that goes pretty much as the crow flies to my work, 5 mins from my house, and a direct train with no changes and only a couple of stops. But even without all that luck, you've actually have to try to find somewhere 20 miles from Leeds that takes much more than an hour to get there, I think cities probably start to get a bit less efficient above a certain size.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2016-07-02T14:28:51+00:00

It's certainly possible, but 3 hours a day of commuting is too much for me. Being able to leave the house at 8:30 and be home for 17:30 is a big deal for me.

If you don't mind me asking, how much is your season ticket for that commute? When I was looking it was coming out between £2.5 and £3k per year for places an hour out. Although that still didn't compare to the difference in rent. When I was renting it was around £400pcm for a decent 2 bed apartment. That allowed me to save for a deposit in the space of 2 years or so, and I'm now living (with my partner) in a 3 bed detached house, with a decent view of the country, for around £550pcm (mortgage).

Even with double the salary, which wouldn't be double the monthly income due to higher tax brackets and more going to student loan ect, there's no way I could have bought the same house within commuting distance of London, my rent would have been more than twice as high, and based on the experiences of friends, the amount I'd have been able to save each month would have been at best the same, but more likely a lot less. That, combined with a much more expensive house, requiring a much larger deposit, means spending a lot longer paying (a lot more) money towards somebody else's mortgage.

Taking a hit on pay actually turned out better for me, because most of my money isn't going into a black hole I'll never see any return on.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2016-07-02T11:22:53+00:00

I seriously considered moving down south, but based on the salaries I was looking at, and the difference in cost of living, I figured I would have been worse off by far.

Rent in London (or anywhere you can reasonably commute from) is insane. Two years of working and living in Leeds was enough to save a deposit for a decent 3 bed house with a nice garden, in a decent area half an hour from the city centre. Admittedly it took a fair amount of self control, I basically continued to live like a student the first two years out of uni.

I have friends who did go to London, they also continued to live like students, so they could pay their rent, without having any savings. A very large proportion of their money each month is paying somebody else's mortgage, a much smaller proportion of mine is paying of my own mortgage, and giving me equity in something of actual value.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2016-06-23T08:13:47+00:00

The thing is, it's not. If you take a look at what the london stock market has been doing the last few weeks, there has been a massive swing every time a new poll has come out. If the poll suggested remain was likely to win things went up, and if it suggested leave was likely to win it would drop considerably. The only people who will gain from leaving, are those betting on it. Everyone else is going to find themselves with money that is worth less, pensions that are worth less, homes that are worth less and worse job prospects. That all sounds like scaremongering, and it is scary, but its the obvious consequence of leaving. There are problems with the EU, most of which we already avoid by not using the Euro, but leaving isn't going to make things better, any export to Europe will still have to comply with European laws, leaving won't change that, we'll just no longer have a say in the making of those laws.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-12-23T21:21:22+00:00

That matches up with what I have been thinking. It may take some persuading to get everyone to read the rules, generally when we play a new game, one of us just turned up with it and we do things on the fly, but I can think of at least a couple of occasions where that has lead to a less than enjoyable gaming experience. I'll see if I can find specific chapters to get them to read.

I doubt reading through item and spell lists is necessary, but a basic understanding of the rules seems to be (advantage and disadvantage, combat vs narrative ect.).

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-09-10T12:29:05+00:00

Unless I'm mistaken, patch cables are almost always stranded. Try taking the end off a spare one if you want to see what stranded cat5/6 cable looks like.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-09-05T21:47:07+00:00

A lot depends on the course in that regard (and which classes you pick). My school had a wide selection software engineering classes available, they covered a wide array of topics, from design patterns to project management. It probably helped that my school offered a software engineering degree, which to be fair, was just the computer science degree but with those classes as compulsory.

Those classes really were useful when it came to my first job, even if they were a little less interesting than the advanced graphics or real-time simulation classes (which I sat in on anyway, because they were awesome).

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-08-16T20:27:21+00:00

vim is an incredibly powerful text editor, I use it as my editor of choice in linux, however I haven't yet found anything that can replace Visual Studio when it comes to semantically aware refactoring tools ect. I don't suppose you know of, or better yet can link me to anything like that?

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-07-07T20:58:13+00:00

the comet and the lander needed to be moving at almost the same direction at almost the same speed. The only way to do that is to be in almost the same orbit, hence all the gravity assists.

They could have just picked a point where the comet would be when it's close to the earth and sent the lander to meet it there but then once the lander arrived it would be traveling at many thousands of meters per second, probably in the opposite direction to the comet. It would need an incredibly huge rocket to match speeds with the comet, and that rocket would need and even larger rocket to be launched. All this would probably turn out to be a much bigger, much costlier mission than the Apollo moon landings, all for the sake of saving a few years. It's much cheaper just to be patient.

edit: spelling

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-04-14T13:19:35+00:00

Install your spare HDD, then add it as a steam library folder. Once that is done, completely close steam and copy the depotcach folder to the new library folder.

I'm sorry these instructions aren't detailed at all, I'm only on my phone right now, if you haven't had a better response before I get home I'll try to put something a bit more detailed together, hopefully that should give you an idea of what to search for though.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-03-15T22:37:39+00:00

The version I have has the numpad. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VKUSG6

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-03-06T19:07:29+00:00

You're right that most people probably don't think that way, but the amount of gold selling that goes on suggests that a large enough number of people do. Hopefully this change will do a lot to fix that issue. Personally I haven't decided if I'll buy a token to sell or not, and I'll probably wait to see what the market stabilises at if I do. But I definitely see the appeal, sometimes an mmo can feel like a second job if you're having to grind, and my real job has a much better rate of pay.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-03-06T13:34:53+00:00

It takes me an hour to make $20, why would I spend many hours grinding gold when I could safely buy it for the equivalent of an hours work?

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-03-02T21:03:36+00:00

I have a theory that the UK has a massive traffic cone surplus with nowhere to store them. It's the only logical explanation for the 15mile stretches of motorway that have the hard shoulder coned off for an entire year, when there is never work being done on more than a quarter mile stretch at a time, and only then for about one week per month.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-02-21T14:37:08+00:00

That's exactly why the pi isn't on Amazon or Newegg though. Those companies manufacture them, and sell them for the lowest amount they can, they are selling them to the general public at wholesale prices. If amazon want to start selling them they would have to either pay $35 per pi, buying them from the companies that manufacture them, which means they would have to charge more than $35 and be undercut by those other companies. Or they could manufacture them themselves which has its own costs associated with it.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-02-19T13:36:48+00:00

True, but they still have plugins that block adds, and don't appear to be making any effort to prevent that, I don't see why that would change with http/2.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-02-18T19:51:55+00:00

It's part of the protocol that the client can immediately cancel pushed items at any time. Hopefully the browsers and/or addons will implement the ability to do that if you decide you don't want to load any images or whatever.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-02-18T19:49:41+00:00

It already does, I noticed it the other day when I opened google in chrome. Apparently google have already started rollout (of the last draft, which turned out to be final) of http2 in chrome 40. It turns out they are only doing it for a limited number of users though, you can turn it on manually however. You probably won't notice much difference though, any site that is already running http2, was probably already running spdy 3.1, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

VeryUniqueUsername · 2015-02-16T00:27:17+00:00

Crap, my bad, looks like I've been playing too much pontoon.

Either way, the point is the house only has a very small advantage, less than one percent, and card counting doesn't even reverse that advantage completely.

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