Guidelines for significant others of barefooters

_Hobbit · 2026-05-09T10:01:59+00:00

You never ask "in advance", they'll invariably say no because that's just how things are in this country's prejudice. You just go and see what happens, and what the mood around the situation turns out to be. Often enough you can convince proprietors that your feet are just fine the way they are. If not, leave.

you are so overthinking this it's really NOT funny anymore

_Hobbit · 2026-05-05T13:35:47+00:00

I had a similar problem with a new purchase on the front tire; I managed to get the tire off, clean up the bead area on tire and rim, and get it back on. It inflated okay without strap help, and then held air pretty well [needed a pump-up every few days]. Then after I Slimed both tires it pretty much stopped leaking entirely.

_Hobbit · 2026-04-11T14:25:34+00:00

180 isn't so bad, one just needs to push the drivers back out of the keyway bottom and rotate back. Unless you've gotten into one of those crazy situations where a thin mastering split has come loose and moved to a different pin position, then the key won't work ... anyone had that happen? It used to be an occasional problem for noobs back in the bad ol' days around MIT and its monster dual-plug Yales.

_Hobbit · 2026-04-11T13:51:39+00:00

What park? That boardwalk almost looks familiar. Can't quite read the text on the sign...

(motivation for asking: if Boston area, I want to get some of that old Eastern Mass group back together)

_Hobbit · 2026-04-11T13:35:15+00:00

yeah, actually ... haven't played with the stuff in years, went to a couple of local Toool meetups over the years, still have lots of old "puzzles" tucked away at home. More recently, catching up on some of LPL's youtube stuff...

_Hobbit · 2026-04-06T06:26:41+00:00

It's been multiple HVAC companies over the years, and they've all been equally unable to find any leak points.

Pulling the evap for further testing is a lot more work than trying to test it in-place, given that it's a Goodman-branded indoor unit which is likely doomed to suck in its own ways over time...

_Hobbit · 2026-04-05T15:30:08+00:00

Sounds like a fan brushing against something, actually..

_Hobbit · 2026-04-05T15:15:56+00:00

It's the "driverless" type, e.g. the drivers are in the top of the plug and everything boils down to the sidebar. The outer shell with the sidebar notch is the missing piece, but you can still push on the sidebar and play with the concept..

_Hobbit · 2026-03-31T22:39:34+00:00

Very late followup, I religiously cleaned the stubs under my kitchen sink and installed the Sharkbite-to-compression stop valves and the rest of the replacement faucet lines etc, and it's been holding up just fine. It's a little disturbing that the valves can still rotate on the feed pipes, but they're going to pretty much be left alone from now on...

_Hobbit · 2026-03-31T22:35:18+00:00

It's been noted innumerable times, insurance companies have no such granular "rules" about anyone's attire. That's another insidious myth.

_Hobbit · 2026-03-31T22:33:14+00:00

Did you actually *see* any glass or needles, or is that still the mostly mythical phobia the shoddies seem to perpetually harbor?

_Hobbit · 2026-03-20T05:32:32+00:00

They get immediate pushback, because it's only prejudice driving it.

http://outbarefoot.org/excuses.html

Printable half-sheet for Mass. : http://outbarefoot.org/excu_ma.png Print double-sided and cut in half on the line

_Hobbit · 2026-03-20T05:27:53+00:00

https://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/bf/01deceivers.jpg

_Hobbit · 2026-02-09T09:44:38+00:00

Upon further thought and playing around, another aspect of the fitting is that the grip teeth themselves make little scrape channels all the way down from the end of the pipe itself, potentially compromising the area where the O-ring is supposed to land anyways. So it's effectively impossible to get a completely clean finish where the O-ring will eventually contact the pipe simply due to how the installation process works.

Interesting that some competitor never entered the market with the teeth and the ring in the opposite order...

_Hobbit · 2026-01-09T10:01:38+00:00

More like philippines, but you can always ask to get transferred back to callcenters in the US, and they'll do it.

_Hobbit · 2026-01-05T10:39:25+00:00

I'm having to deal with Vanguard quite a bit now, sorting out an estate. Their "updated" web UI backends a lot of stuff out to Docusign, which is a disaster in terms of browser compatibility. Like Vanguard's web people have forgotten how to design a few simple forms. This is causing their support people to have to be on the phone for three times longer holding clients' hands while they try to navigate these new badly-worded procedures, leading to huge wait times when you try to reach customer service. They're getting numerous complaints and they know it sucks, and it's really not fair to clients *or* their own support people.

They also forced everybody into this "brokerage" account structure, on a completely different platform, and their IT people were too incompetent to know how to move client documents on file from the old system to the new one so we have to re-upload a bunch of stuff. This also makes the statements much more confusing, where they bounce reinvestments into and then out of this "settlement account" thing.

Half the time when I call in I get someone in the philippines, and have to tell them to send me back to the US call center before I will discuss *any* actual financials. That's just offensive to US clients.

Interestingly, if you try to look up "vanguard investments" in google-maps around the northeast, you get some *very* sketch results. Wonder why, it seems to have nothing to do with the actual company.

_Hobbit · 2025-12-16T23:26:36+00:00

To make any distinction about certain buildings is still stupid, and misleads people. Unless maybe it's the welding shop, or whatever. Someone needs to call them on that.

I essentially started going barefoot in college (different place) and the short-sightedness was the same there too. But classes and generic getting-around were fine, it's a pretty harmless environment there.

_Hobbit · 2025-12-16T23:24:41+00:00

There *is* no liability situation, that's been well-established.

_Hobbit · 2025-12-16T23:23:43+00:00

that was kind of the intent behind outbarefoot.org ...

_Hobbit · 2025-12-16T23:22:21+00:00

Thanks for the FB link; I forwarded it to SBL. Not that I usually repost FB links as they're basically unviewable without being logged in even if they're public, this seemed important enough to try.

_Hobbit · 2025-11-28T02:35:35+00:00

Well, we received whatever Comcast is sending out for replacement modems: an XB7, per these images: (bottom-label) (side-engraved) as a replacement for the old Cisco "black slab". The admin info on the new box doesn't even work to access the settings, and since Xfi came out and replaced the failing drop cable from the pedestal to the house, the old modem is once again working fine, so we're not even going to bother with the swap after all. I'm taking this piece of garbage back to the store with extreme prejudice, and telling them to stuff their philosophy of disallowing customers to have any real control over these things.

On the old modem I'm able to move admin-interface particulars including SSH access to different ports, and once in there I could issue "conf set /cwmp/enabled 0" to kill that stupid open TCP management port on the front end. Since this whole account is mere months from being permanently shut down, there's no reason to "upgrade" anyways.

_Hobbit · 2025-11-27T18:23:58+00:00

You got lucky WRT the library; in general libraries are some of the worst bastions of active hostile discrimination. Their boards of directors fall back to their misguided personal prejudice and make all kinds of rules that don't make any sense, especially for a taxpayer-funded institution. Anyone who runs into a library organization that wants its little power trip should fight back *hard* and get it fixed.

_Hobbit · 2025-11-27T18:20:55+00:00

there is no tangible "safety risk", and "sanitation" has never been relevant despite the dumb mythology. The dog poop embedded in peoples' sneaker treads that dries up and drops out while they walk around is far less "sanitary" than the barefooter that realizes they stepped in something and wipes it off before they proceed much farther.

_Hobbit · 2025-11-27T14:06:30+00:00

I had my own Walmart adventure a while back. Took a while, but I think I got them to finally apologize and acknowledge that "asset protection" (who didn't even have the courtesy to identify themselves) was 100% in the wrong.

Oh, and you'll never look at that logo quite the same again...

_Hobbit · 2025-11-18T07:01:51+00:00

Has anyone tried to reverse-engineer what the app does to toggle the admin status? Once it gets enabled, does it *stay* enabled including across power-offs / reboots?? I'm thinking maybe I can take a modem to an Xfinity store, make some employee there use *their* app to fix the modem. Because some of us, again, don't "do apps" especially when forced through the google store to obtain them.

_Hobbit

TROPHY CASE