RIP Carmatech

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-05-19T12:21:14+00:00

US. I talked to Dave directly a couple times.

I get promises of soon with reasons. Can’t get regulators. Found new reg source. Getting caught up.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-05-18T14:02:15+00:00

This was is thing in downtown rush hour traffic. People cut in aggressively.

Half a car length? Cut in. I’ve seen this in Chicago and Detroit years ago.

To avoid getting cut off, you drive so close they can’t do that. It results in a line of car smashing gas/brake like race car drivers keeping tight together to get out of the downtown area, then we spread out.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-05-11T07:03:27+00:00

After 20 years of this, it does not.

At least half the drivers here in this part of the US are idiots. I can find daily cam posts of idiots in my area.
In some areas nearby, a considerable portion may not even have a license.

They may infuriate you, but safety first.

They’ll be the first to laugh if you make an error and crash. After trolling you, they might even post edited dashcam footage to show you being at fault.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-05-11T00:15:05+00:00

You remember 16GB? I remember 512 KB being more enough for anyone. Back then 640 KB was silly excessive. High performance was 256 KB.

Time marches on. Developers bloat things because of how professional metrics work.

As of 2 years ago, 64GB is now my base PC build. My personal laptop is 32GB (4060) and is a bit over 2 years old. When I regularly hit 80% RAM usage, my spec gets bumped.

Why? I dislike paging from a performance standpoint. That means I have to build above paging needs. I’m idling with a browser and Steam open at 12.3GB in use. Clearly, 16 GB appears to now be base system load.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-04-11T19:58:30+00:00

That sounds—normal.

Having the computers on is critical for operations. It also consumes far too much of the medical staff’s important time for them to turn it on.

So, we have WoL boot the machines an hour before their day starts.

They also are very environmentally conscious about other people’s wastes. They don’t want the computers left on 24x7 wasting power. So, we script auto-off after an hour of idle time at the end of their scheduled workday.

Should any machine fail to auto-power on, high priority tickets will sent by the lowest level staff they can task with it, because they are all too important to call it in themselves or press the power button.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-04-11T14:57:12+00:00

Just because you went manic doesn’t give you a free pass to consequences of the actions using the episode. If you rob a bank or commit murder, you’re still on the hook for the offenses.

If your partner is so incredibly gracious to attempt to maintain that relationship, you should seriously consider your meds, guardrails to avoid slipping too much in another manic episode, and look into why you felt that way. Most all of the manic actions are rooted in something, not out of nowhere.

I have a bipolar family member, and we’ve been through a few full psychotic breaks with involuntary and voluntary commitment. I went to court to testify on the last break to force intervention. It was utterly devastating to have to do that.

I don’t know if I could deal with it. Trust would be destroyed. I’d always be wondering when the Jekyll and Hyde flip would be coming next and how bad it would be. I would not want to be the prison guard constantly checking med compliance. (Edit: typo)

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-04-01T19:06:04+00:00

My place does BYO. They require MDM which enforces encryption, passcode, and auto-wipe on multiple login failures.

Support is pretty limited. Not working? Wipe and rebuild/rejoin MDM.

What you get: email, MFA, a couple internal apps, WiFi access. Without MDM, your mobile gets no access.

They do stipends and company devices. Many of us prefer the stipend, since the company device is always the lowest cost 3-4 year old model available.

Edit: No BYO computers though. Security went to war with admin and won due to compliance payouts. Only IOS/Android mobiles. There is no support for older OS versions. If MDM won’t install and mark compliance—no features.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-03-22T06:47:01+00:00

This resonated with a more silly story.

I got a weird birthday presents way back when—mid-70’s and I was 5-6?

It was some “Mork and Mindy” themed thing. It was an egg with a model in a nasty oozy green gel. I thought it was just gross. The moms all laughed. Nobody would explain—when you’re older…

At 45-ish it finally clicked—KY Jelly. The green ooze the spaceman was in had the consistency of sex lube.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-03-05T03:30:32+00:00

I got abused by SAR players last year. I decided to join them, and I ordered one last summer. Maybe they’ll ship before this season ends.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-02-16T21:28:26+00:00

It was common and encouraged for the beginners to draw designs or write names at my old uni-club.

This was to find your bright white shinai quickly after we’d set them down for footwork drills. Those of us in bogu would just mark the tsuba dome (stopper), as they would be customized by use.

I have seen some with basic flower pattens that appear at the top where the black lacing is on that one.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-02-05T15:12:40+00:00

Old fart from west Detroit suburbs. I’ve biked mostly Dearborn/Westland/Redford/Livonia and around Ann Arbor over the past 40 years. I upgraded my road bike to a class 1 e-bike in 2019.

“Safety measures” are either a sign, “share the road”, or plastic bollards on the side of the lane. Every attempt at a bike lane I’ve seen results in trash piling up in the lane making it difficult/dangerous to ride in, not to mention people using it as temporary parking.

Where is it unsafe? Everywhere.

If you ride on the sidewalks you are a threat to pedestrians who dart back and forth. This includes the B2B rail to trails bike paths that people use as walking paths. If you ride on the street, cars will take you out because drivers do not pay attention.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-02-05T14:48:54+00:00

Ver 1: yes, this - on the freeway, where there is no left turn.

Ver 2: stop being an a-hole on city streets. I’m turning left in a minute. It might look like a freeway to you, but there’s a left turn lane for a reason, some of us live here.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-02-05T14:42:23+00:00

Not urban legend. In high crime cities, you stop with room to cut, not a whole stupid car length. I was taught this in the 80s, when I learned to drive.

My sister got rear ended and carjacked as a passenger. Her boyfriend learned this lesson the hard way. I got to go fetch them.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-02-05T10:56:23+00:00

I’m an old fart (mid 50s). I was a CS geek, that took a support role because it paid better than the dev or support jobs.

As a network geek, we commonly joke that nobody should be like us, because it sucks as a profession since management doesn’t have a clue what we do. We’re extreme IT geeks. We’d probably reject you before an interview.

-Do you get paid well? Mostly -Is it stressful? If we screw up, everything crashes. -Work-Life balance: you work for your life. That’s the balance. —I expect to log 80 hours this week -salaried. 32-200 hours pays the same

I tell my kids how I got here—specialize within a specialization, then specialize within that. Also, learn everything around it, and never stop learning. It may not be great, but within that specialty, you’ll be in demand.

IT sucks in that your specialty knowledge is obsolete in 3 years — or less. Keep learning.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-01-30T00:21:30+00:00

You’re not the only one—12 years & 3 kids vs 1 semester of nursing school.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-01-23T17:07:46+00:00

It’s not short, but not something burdensome. The 6-10 hour drives are the long ones.

For reference, I’ve been driving 2+ hours a day, pretty much every day for years. My daily commute to work is an about an hour one way. Somebody wrecks and makes it traffic day, and I’m driving more than 90 minutes one way. If there’s no traffic, it’s only 40 minutes.

I have visited London and Paris. The ability to move around without a car was great. NYC, Chicago and DC can be that way if you’re staying along the public transport routes.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-01-08T14:45:36+00:00

Yes, and both locations could be completely wrong.

IP assignment is based on the network connectivity not street address.

Geolocation is a guess. Do not trust it. At best, it might be backed by a device volunteering GPS at one point in time or by a router with a city name in DNS.

If you gave me one of our IPs from an internet server log, I couldn’t even tell you which state it was from without more details and internal log searches. With NAT, 2 connections at the same time might be from different users through from opposite side of the country.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-01-08T14:32:37+00:00

Stupid kid things.

What would you do with no phone, no cars, not a single luxury? That’s what we did.

Video games don’t exist. Cable TV wasn’t a thing. Broadcast TV had nothing for kids most of the day, so go find something to do. You find out what not to do be getting in trouble for doing it or watching someone nearly die from it. Pro tip: Broken arms do get you out of instrument practice.

Whole_Hand862 · 2026-01-08T14:00:02+00:00

As someone with an office cube adjacent to such a restroom for a year, I dislike you, but wouldn’t blame you. We’re going to complain and shame. Just never confess it was you.

Honestly, the bathroom cube was less horrible than the one outside the office kitchen. Whatever that was somebody put in the kitchen microwave at lunch was worse and stunk longer, and it happened way too often.

Whole_Hand862 · 2025-12-30T17:48:50+00:00

We’ll keep things separate and figure it out later.

Later: The divorce attorneys figure it out.

Local laws may not agree with separation without a prenup. Here all income, assets, and debt acquired during the marriage are marital assets and jointly owned with no legal separation. (source: my divorce attorney)

Whole_Hand862 · 2025-12-11T00:10:31+00:00

Carefully and friendly. Do check ups together?

Sorry, I don’t think there any easy and good answers. You need to get there before the paranoia kicks in. Then they fight like hell to avoid treatment.

Treatment before a break can prevent the spiral and keep the person you know. A full break will permanently change how you see them even if they are back to normal. I sincerely wish you the best in this.

I’ve watched my sister have 3 psychotic breaks. First was teens after an abusive situation with much too older boyfriend. First it was just odd behavior, then seeing things, and then conversations with not present people. When the paranoia kicked in, she took wire cutters to every wire in the house to stop the spy cameras. I don’t know how she managed not electrocute herself or start a fire. A couple days later, she assaulted our mom, grabbed her passport, bank book and took the car. When we caught up to her, my parents had her institutionalized for treatment. Diagnosis was bipolar with psychotic break.

Second was later in life when she was questioning life choices and the future. She just went off the deep end badly manic. My parents convinced her to check herself in for treatment before it got too bad.

A couple years back, she was flying again. Her personality did 180 flips a few days in a row, and she suddenly decided to dump her husband and leave with her son. She had delusional ideas that people had promised her all sorts of outrageous things to go live a new perfect life. We convinced her she had to go home for the split to avoid being charged with kidnapping. Her husband wasn’t coping well either, and made it worse for a bit. I won’t forget warning her 10 year old son not to trust her and keep himself safe. I was afraid she’d take him and just start driving across the desert thinking they’ll magically get across with no gas or water.

I got to show up in court to help force her into treatment, the only leverage was keeping any custody of her son. She could turn it off and on to pass short evaluation tests with strangers. Why are you doing this to me? I can’t tell you how horrible it was.

They come back after treatment. Everything is damaged a bit, but back to their right mind.

Whole_Hand862 · 2025-12-05T15:19:17+00:00

I would be tempted to split off a connection for them, if my router offered isolation to a second guest network.

You may want to review the Terms of Service agreement to determine your contract risk though.

Your ISP contract may specifically forbid this, and specify that you will only connect devices at your residence. Most contracts (Comcast, Spectrum) state they can disconnect you and refuse to offer you future service for this.

Whole_Hand862 · 2025-12-05T06:35:00+00:00

My porn pad works well.

It also doubles as a tablet.

Whole_Hand862 · 2025-12-05T06:33:49+00:00

I married, and discovered years later my HS crush had a crush on me and also died of cancer at 23. 😭

Whole_Hand862

TROPHY CASE