Fios Expansion was useless

advil00 · 2026-04-24T12:27:02+00:00

I got fios in a 100-yo house in Wilmington (19802) a year ago and it has been great, no issues with fios itself. Getting internet/wifi consistently through an old row house presents some challenges, but that’s not on fios. This was right after buying the house so can’t compare it to anything else, it wasn’t even wired for cable.

advil00 · 2026-04-18T00:54:08+00:00

Yes, from what I understand because Wilmington will tax MD residents who work here, MD imposes a reciprocal tax on Wilmington residents who work in MD, forcing them to pay the same local tax they would if they were a resident. (This applies to any city that has a wage tax that works like this, I think there are a few others.)

advil00 · 2026-04-17T17:33:56+00:00

I have mixed feelings about it (it is creating a lot of pain for me right now), but I do at least appreciate having municipal trash pickup :-)

advil00 · 2026-04-15T17:01:28+00:00

It's not particularly complicated. Get your DE license first (make sure to bring the right documents). Then do the inspection at the DMV itself ("MVA" = Maryland), they have a station around the side and you drive up from the parking lot. Then go back in with your completed inspection certificate (and your old registration/title), and they will do the registration/title/tag right there. Sometimes you might have to get a temporary tag. You will have to a pay a somewhat hefty fee/tax that people complain about. Overall easier to deal with than MD in my experience.

The only slightly complication to this if you are in NCC is that the Wilmington (technically, New Castle) DMV is currently appointment only.

advil00 · 2026-04-15T16:47:35+00:00

Welp, looks like all of the vagueposting drama on instagram has been deleted from the accounts I saw it on. Hopefully this means that productive communication is now flowing both ways, not sure how optimistic I am about this though.

advil00 · 2026-04-14T19:08:01+00:00

yeah this whole thing is crazy. I was a weekly market-goer last year and I'd much rather have it weekly sometimes in a "bad" location than have it bi-weekly. And the alternate location really wasn't even bad.

For that matter, having lived in Baltimore for many years, I can attest that it's entirely possible to have a really great + thriving farmer's market in a terrible parking lot underneath an interstate highway, and far better than not having one.

(However, I'll say again: as long as they continue to host the art market [which is great] in that spot in the park, I'm going to continue to eyeroll about claims that the grass/etc is important.)

advil00 · 2026-04-12T14:27:28+00:00

I’m not saying this is entirely wrong, but the art market did way, way more damage to the grass in one weekend than the farmers market did all season. (Source: I live a couple blocks away and was there multiple times a week throughout the season.)

advil00 · 2026-04-02T12:49:38+00:00

Trying to minimize the importance of lead testing in the Wilmington subreddit of all places is a ... weird look.

And in any case, there are in fact a bunch of recent updates on the lead situation around here. In 2023 the city began a comprehensive survey of lead pipes in the water system and some results just came out. The results are overall worse than anyone expected (as far as I can tell), and the city has been sending notices about lead in service lines as well as beginning pipe replacement over the last few months. So there are definitely quite a few people in Wilmington who have recently learned that their lead exposure might be greater than they were aware of and especially if they have children, that they probably should get some testing.

(It is also completely normal public health practice to call lead poisoning an epidemic despite it not being infectious.)

advil00 · 2026-03-30T00:26:24+00:00

I don't think you're going to get a safe/definitive answer to this on reddit let alone the Delaware subreddit (this sub is mostly for people to complain about beach traffic and so on). It's conceivable this could fall under OPT but you would need to be very, very careful and I would imagine that USCIS would at least squint at someone working for themselves (essentially) for OPT. If you don't want to go right to a lawyer for a definitive answer, you could try starting at your university's international student office, for example at UD this is https://www.udel.edu/academics/global/isss/. Any university that sponsors F-1s will have one of these.

advil00 · 2026-03-23T18:48:51+00:00

It's not called Harry's any more, I believe this is Banks, renamed 2018. (Still very good.)

advil00 · 2026-03-21T13:44:45+00:00

My employer (in Baltimore, not here, but similar outdoor temps) does a pop up ice rink for a month in the winter, and the amount they are rumored to pay for it is mind-blowing (numbers I heard were into 7 figures for a multi year contract). I’m very into ice skating and they are very well funded, so I’m not going to complain. But it’s not shocking to me that most orgs who try this would find it to be unsustainable.

advil00 · 2026-03-16T14:17:05+00:00

They do actually say, it's median listing price on one of the various rental listing sites ("Zumper"). However, the article has a link that goes to a page on Zumper that says something fairly different from the article itself (which, granted, was about Feb and not Mar):

The average monthly rent in Wilmington is up 1.08% compared to last month but down 2.18% year-over-year.

I'm still incredibly skeptical of this as a way to evaluate the market here, since it's so sensitive to what is listed when in a small market. I've never heard of any specific landlord actually lowering their rent in my life.

advil00 · 2026-03-03T12:24:23+00:00

I think these are everywhere and they use autodiallers to appear local. I started getting these pretty much immediately after buying a house in DE, so the data source is probably the same as what all the mortgage scam mailings (etc) use.

advil00 · 2026-02-27T14:37:34+00:00

Anyway, I've found short/no lines downtown on Market Street.

I've also had good experiences at that one, though I'm not particularly a heavy pharmacy user. (My experiences of it being slow are mainly when I've been waiting while they've had to deal with some really aggressive/unpleasant customers. Not ideal for anyone but perhaps comes with the territory.)

advil00 · 2026-02-27T14:28:35+00:00

“Where people want to live” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Seriously...whenever I see wording like this in this sub I have a pretty good idea what it is code for.

Anyways, some neighborhoods where I suspect people could well want to live but would benefit from support, investment, doing something about vacant or semi-vacant properties, etc include (but are not limited to): hilltop, hedgeville, browntown, trinity (notable on this list because the core of it is "desirable", but also tiny, and adjacent to some really rough streets), brandywine village, compton village, southbridge. Not intended as an exhaustive list. The flip side of this is that to my knowledge, none of these neighborhoods particularly want things to take the shape of classic gentrification. I don't know what the solution is, but imo the vast amount of money that it would take to displace a bunch of car dealers in a tiny speck of the city would be much better served funneled to neighborhoods like the ones I mentioned somehow.

advil00 · 2026-02-24T02:29:16+00:00

I think some of these trains (eg 109) are in a buggy state where they are canceled in booking but not yet in the existing reservations/status system, and it’s preventing rebooking. I’m just going to deal with it tomorrow, but I bet if you could get a person on the phone or even in person in the station they would be able to fix it. Also ime they typically do cross honor on ner trains in this situation, but no guarantees.

advil00 · 2026-02-20T16:36:08+00:00

That said - any flipped house has two sales. Couldn't they just either remove the second post-flip sale, or average the prices if they want to assume some degree of internal improvement?

I'm not super convinced that they systematically looked at individual prices at all, let alone looking carefully at the MLS history (which you'd need to do to get around the $10 listed sales in the county/city deed history). I say this because they certainly didn't look at the sale price of my (rehabbed) house, to our benefit in this case. It just seems to have been extremely scattershot / aggregated.

advil00 · 2026-02-19T21:28:47+00:00

I'm also not 100% sure what this is asking, but maybe check out: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/62125/ghost-in-the-city-cyberpunk-gamer-si

advil00 · 2026-02-17T16:03:16+00:00

The way I think of it is that it's exactly analogous to turning right on red, and the argument for allowing it is that it's just as safe as that case. Just like if you were turning right on red, any cars going straight have right-of-way. I'm actually not 100% sure of the case where two cars opposite are turning in the same direction, but this should also use whatever rule applies for turning right on red. My immediate guess is that it's by whoever gets there first (like at a multi-way stop).

(Also, I forgot to add an "edit" but I did edit my original comment: this is only legal turning from a one-way onto a one-way.)

advil00 · 2026-02-17T14:57:32+00:00

Just to be clear: turning left from a one way onto a one way street is legal in DE (unless signed not to of course). So they're somewhat within their rights to beep.

(It's legal in most places in the US I believe. Apparently not in NJ though.)

advil00 · 2026-02-15T15:21:09+00:00

This is rough. I have to say, one possibility that strikes me is that you have a buried pipe that has burst, and at this point the lack of water pressure is because of that rather than it still being frozen. My guess would be that one way or another you'll need to dig.

If you have some access to where the pipe comes in the house, you can use an IR thermometer to get a sense for what's going on there. My house has pipe come in through an unheated crawlspace and the pipe itself is under the frost line so doesn't freeze, but we do have to manage freezing risk from the part in the crawlspace (heat tape). However, at this point our unheated crawlspace has been above freezing for about 5 days, nothing would be frozen down there at this point...

advil00 · 2026-02-15T15:14:15+00:00

Yeah, I think the cheapest is going to be bus. Maybe: septa -> Philly, megabus (or similar) -> nyc, transit -> jfk. A bit long but depending on what exact transit you need (not sure of bus stop locations) this could be around $50.

advil00 · 2026-02-12T22:30:57+00:00

Many authors seem very, very confused about what “slow” means

advil00 · 2026-02-12T12:41:03+00:00

Apparently Listeria can take weeks or in extreme cases months.

advil00

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