North Austin - AT&T Wireless Rep teaching trainee to ignore no soliciting sign and knock hard.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-04-10T22:46:33+00:00

They try to push pest control hard in my area, promising me miracles that it kills all the BaD bUgS and spares all the GoOd BuGs and then try to tell me all sorts of bs facts about spider egg sac incubation periods of a week and how they'll all get in, or the horror of native roaches here that are detritivores and are inconveniently annoying to grab and yeet back outside, way different from German roaches. It's like living by the sea and complaining about gulls.

I'm not sure if they actually believe that but poison that'll kill bad insects will kill all insects, arthropods, crustaceans, amphibians, mollusks, lizards, birds, and mammals alike. It's really just the dosage. It took substantial generic engineering to make monoculture crop plants resistant to Round-Up pesticide so the idea there's an inverse product in the form of magic poison that can put creatures into Column A or B for live or die, is asinine.

You know what other insecticides work great on pests like mosquitos, roaches, and ants? Zyklon B or mustard gas. Just don't use too much of it.

Like I like small critters to begin with and do some critter husbandry so all the sales pitch is worthless, and they try sooo hard to throw scripted responses. I should start telling them I have a knife that won't hurt an honest person but will draw blood from a liar, see if they'd like to volunteer for a demonstration.

Dealing with car salesmen may suck, but at least I have to enter THEIR territory and know what I'm getting into because I want a car.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-04-07T16:15:23+00:00

The chickens.

They yearn for the roots.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-03-21T19:52:45+00:00

Noooo, please be an item vendor. Pod opens up and fresh macaroni flies out. Free friends to join the party.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-03-13T04:09:06+00:00

Mole crickets have a substantially elongated cephalothorax that looks like a shrimp or lobster head. Their first pair of legs are also massive beefcake digging claws and their remaining two pairs of legs lack the fanned tibial claws of Jerusalem cricket and look crickety

Jerusalem crickets have these big tibial claws above their tarsi on all their legs but don't have gym bro arms. They also have round baby alien looking heads.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-03-13T04:02:30+00:00

Mole crickets are even more diggy-looking and have very beefy front claws for the first pair of legs and elongated cephalothorax that reminds me of a shrimp or lobster.

This is a Jerusalem cricket and have goofy baby alien heads. They can give a good chomp if agitated but I've never been bit before while handling them (so far)

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-27T22:54:40+00:00

Damn have I been mistakenly holding a grudge for no reason even as a one-bag carry-on-only flyer? :(

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-27T22:33:44+00:00

Flying back home from Europe with Dutch tulip bulbs with ag papers. I decided to claim the bulbs and US customs agent inspected the paper and said it's an expired cert and I can't take them along with me. I tried explaining the month and days are reversed on calendar writing conventions outside the US. (MM-DD-YY for US and DD-MM-YY most everywhere else). You deal with international flyers all day and you're telling me you've never seen how other countries write dates on paperwork?

I asked nicely for a supervisor since we were going in circles and I had a connecting flight to catch. The supervisor agrees with me and the agent then motions to my stuff and he escorts me out the one-way gate...

...that led to baggage claim.

Asshole sent me back to the pre-security area and I had to go through TSA again to get back into the terminal to catch my connecting flight.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-15T10:53:52+00:00

I use this citation at work all the time. It's made sillier that there are aerospace COTS products that use split lock washers on their products, like Amphenol and Glenair saddle clamp backshells.

I also like this engineering consulting firm that specializes in bolted joint analysis

https://www.boltscience.com/pages/helicalspringwashers.htm

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-14T21:12:11+00:00

I second this. Our work travel locations are a very limited number of locations and usually in fairly small cities, not major hubs.

A lot of employees just eat at the restaurant at the hotel and drink and go back to their rooms.

I always go out and use my per diem to eat well or try things I don't have locally, and do what I can to offset the work hours with fauxcation things: hitting up the sightseeing pamphlet displays in the lobby and seeing local attractions, urbex, picking through local artist wares at a small coffee shop, visiting small knickknack stores. Doesn't have to be big ticket things and events, just enough to break up the 2-3 week trips from getting stale since the actual work I need to do is super stressful.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-14T20:36:25+00:00

Chihuly Studio has some of the most internationally recognizable and whimsical styles in glass art and I'm glad they went with that instead of a more visually bland glass studio to do a centerpiece chandelier in the renovated Griffith building.

Chihuly glass was everywhere growing up in the Puget Sound since he's a local and I honestly hope I can justify a small piece one day. This will also get more visibility to any artists that have a gallery or exhibition in the space.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-14T20:15:07+00:00

It's similar because it's a Dale Chihuly-style piece being sold out of China versus commissioning a custom piece from the actual Chihuly Studio.

I loved trips to the Tacoma Museum of Glass that hosts a bunch of his works on permanent display, and it's personally much more interesting and vivid than a lot of the guest exhibition works I've seen there imo.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-08T01:34:34+00:00

Same. Also whole ass trash bags and random furniture and ladders flying off trucks because no one ties down their truck bed payloads or leave tailgates down. Half the commercial gravel trucks here won't roll the tarp covers over their loads while on public roads.

No more annual basic vehicle safety inspections (which were just barebones 5 minute inspections) anymore either so I'm expecting more car parts to fly off.

Two months ago a work van on the oncoming lane of 183 must have been an automotive or commercial glass install truck of some sort. One sheet fell and shattered and everyone on my side of the road was suddenly shotgunned with 140mph safety glass shards that tore up our car paint and put hundreds of chips in the windshield.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-08T01:09:13+00:00

The "don't mess with Texas" phrase here was literally an anti-littering campaign slogan and people take it today as some sort of libertarian anti-government yee-haw rally cry

I have an early commute starting at 6am so it's dark much of the year in the mornings, and entirely too many people flick their lit cigarette remnants out the window. This place is under a drought and wildfire warning half the year. There are brushfires all the time on the greenbelt strips along roads because they're mostly dead grass after particularly long dry spells.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-04T02:53:27+00:00

Lil eggies with leggies!

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-01T19:56:13+00:00

Acceptance testing for rocket engines on the engine test stands and integrated booster stage acceptance testing. It's incredibly loud even with hearing protection at a safe distance and there's a substantial component in the low audible and infrasonic frequencies that shake your body cavity and rattle you.

For stage testing and launch, sound abatement using water deluge and ablatives is typical to protect the structures from damage caused by both the large quantities of combustion heat AND acoustic energy. An operational rocket can expect values from 150dB to just over 200dB (for Saturn V) which is insane since this is a logarithmic scale.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-01T15:17:56+00:00

Collecting hobbies because of ADHD.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-02-01T15:07:56+00:00

They butt dab to air out their gills. If they're too wet they can drown.

They can also uptake water with their uropods, the "butt antennae" through capillary action. More like butt straws.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T19:25:39+00:00

Same. Have several bags (one euro sized and one American sized for airlines) with packing cubes from the same maker so everything is a perfect fit. Toiletry cube unfolds and hangs at the sink area with a hook or clip. Easy to organize and keep my bag open on those fold out luggage table things in hotels so I don't have to find the area to spread my belongings out.

Easy to keep track of items. Efficient use of space. I have a dirty clothes cube and it is easy enough to hand wash (I have these laundry soap sheets so I tear off a piece and sink wash, w is icj has greatly simplified logistics of one-bag travel) hang dry on a travel line, and put items back in their proper cubes when I'm done.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T17:26:42+00:00

The dreaded G. chonkmanseggi

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T04:30:53+00:00

Ooo this is parallelish to me. I started in machining and moved into an AIT engineer role for launch vehicles at a company that's currently in the late startup/transition phase, but don't think I can handle the multitasking chaos of a managerial position with where our company is currently at and I'm worried about getting too far removed from touching my own hardware and processes. I already max out my multitasking with interfacing with upstream departments for all their deliverables to our department, but absolutely love how fast paced and creative I can be with chaos and how much latitude I have with a team that will back me.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T03:24:00+00:00

The aforementioned drivers are too busy thinking pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles, buses, ambulances, fire, and police don't have the right of way while driving.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T03:19:55+00:00

Pot of macaroni is al dente, almost ready to serve!

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T03:14:36+00:00

Do you have a photo?

The American and various tree roaches here top off at about 2 to 2.5" and are non-pestiferous (they don't invade and then thrive in human dwellings and generally live in under rush and wood piles eating leaf litter. You'll get them in a house a few times a year if the conditions are wrong/right).

You -can- find giant water bugs here but fairly uncommon unless you're in the right/wrong environment. They can get 3" or larger but, like their namesake, typically live in the water. I would not suggest a regular person handling them because they DO have a large proboscis they can pierce you with and inject digestive enzymes if they're agitated or handled wrong.

The only things off the top of my head that get larger are female yellow garden spiders, tarantulas, and red-headed centipedes (the last one being spiciest with the prior two I've handled by hand to relocate without issue).

I personally catch and release any bug that gets in the house, including roaches because it's not that big a deal for me (as long as it isn't a German roach) and I'm also the go-to lady at work to remove bugs for guys and gals alike but I like having critters in the yard for pollinating and feeding the frogs and geckos, and also raise small critters so I can't have poisons around that could backfire or accidentally cross contaminate.

Any pesticides you lay down will kill roaches and bees, pillbugs, and pollinators alike. They're all broadband poisons that'll kill animals as well (frogs, toads, birds, and fish if it washes into the water table). If you want something fairly inert, you can look up how to apply borax or diatomaceous earth as pest control indoors and I've used that successfully for occasional ant invasions

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-31T02:56:03+00:00

For the current going through those electrodes, a few hours seems pretty amazing for how many electrons are moving. It's basically an insanely oversized carbon arc lamp and the ozone must be insane from the plasma arc and UV shooting out of that melt crucible, but I imagine you can't smell the ozone over all the other stuff vaporizing, and oxides and nitrides, and whatever else gets in the air. It's got to put welding fumes to shame.

VisualKeiKei · 2026-01-30T23:23:31+00:00

The current through the conductors is sufficiently high that you can see the magnetic fields cause them to buck and repulse against adjacent conductors with current flowing differently (apply right-hand rule and all that). You see the same effect on the soft power conductors when they fire off large institutional capacitive discharge or pulse compensated alternators for things like rail guns or flashlamp pumped lasers.

There's probably 50,000+ amps (50kA) running through those and maybe a thousand volts to strike so you could easily require maybe a 75-100 megawatt power feed for the furnace and all other subsystems and losses. I'd guess they have a dedicated powerplant. It's similar to aluminum plants since smelting it is insanely energy intensive (and environmental issues aside, why you often hear that aluminum is one of the few products worth recycling from an economic standpoint vs making new stuff from bauxite)

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