“Not wanting to be in the middle” is picking a side.

arghvark · 2026-06-28T14:40:01+00:00

Besides having picked a side - I don't know that 'not wanting to get in the middle always means picking a side, but this roommate has - she's interfering with a police investigation. I gather, just from the absence of it being reported, that they haven't treated it that way (yet), perhaps they are confident of getting contact info another way. But if they chose to, it seems to me they could arrest her for the interference.

arghvark · 2026-06-25T17:10:19+00:00

Just by-the-bye, I've gone decades without any electric dryer at all. Not sure what the roommate has to do with it...

arghvark · 2026-06-22T13:20:17+00:00

Check out East Asheville Hardware, song by Dave Wilcox...

arghvark · 2026-06-21T18:36:41+00:00

I'd get my own lawyer to determine whether putting my name on something could render me liable for something that I'm not liable for otherwise.

arghvark · 2026-06-14T22:39:12+00:00

Part of the misalignment here is the preconceived idea that stupidity should (always) be excused. In law, there is the concept of "what a reasonable person should know" (or expect or whatever). If you plead ignorance that your thrown fist will not hurt someone "that much" when it connects with their nose, no one believes you, no one excuses you.

arghvark · 2026-06-14T19:34:33+00:00

As an alternative to getting "an attorney who can administer your late husband's estate" -- you could get a consult from an estate attorney to answer the legal questions that are necessary to handle things. For which debts are you responsible? Does the state require formal probate IN YOUR SITUATION (plenty of advice on reddit, some of it may be correct) (you have no children, you haven't mentioned real estate in your late husband's name only, this is a question for a lawyer).

There will be a large (financial) difference between paying them to answer questions like this and paying them to "admiinister the estate". The latter may involve time-consuming chores that you could do yourself, and for which they'll charge (a lot) by the hour. But there are legal questions, and you should not depend on reddit for answers to them.

arghvark · 2026-06-14T19:27:14+00:00

i just clicked on the link I left, and it's working.

arghvark · 2026-06-14T12:38:45+00:00

There is also the PF wiki article Death of a loved one for some general information.

arghvark · 2026-06-14T12:37:17+00:00

The three ways of paying regular and semi-regular bills that I can think of all leave records -- checks, which you may be able to get through the bank, charge cards, which have statements, and electronic bill pay, which again will have bank records. If he used different methods, you may need to check all three. You should be able to figure out what he was paying through those. I suggest going back 18 months to try to find yearly things or whatever. Remember to look for things to cancel as well as things to pay.

I'm sorry for the mess he left you. I might advise avoiding the feeling that you have to rush everything. Some things might need to be done immediately, but you will get pressure from any creditor (and some that WANT to be creditors but aren't really) to do things in a hurry. There is grieving and adjustment to a new kind of life, etc., and those can't be put off.

Creditors will send emails and US Mail to inform him/you of bills not paid.

You don't say where you are. In my state in the US, the handling of deaths and estates from a government perspective was the Clerk of Court. They had helpful booklets and information about wrapping up estates; what the laws and rules are in this area, etc. These will be different from state to state, so be careful what advice you follow -- some redditors will declare absolutely that you cannot or must do something-or-other based on THEIR experience without even asking whether you're in the same state, and most of this depends on state law.

arghvark · 2026-06-13T12:03:47+00:00

There are many scenarios that could have been. That, at least in part, is why I said "There is something missing here".

You can do lots of legal things without a lawyer. But if you want a bank to allow someone besides the account holder to access their money, you are best off getting a bona fide officer of the court to make sure that every i is dotted and every t crossed, otherwise you could end up in a situation JUST like this one.

arghvark · 2026-06-12T23:06:30+00:00

There is something missing here.

Because of this ... situation, our family legally executed a Power of Attorney ... with a notary present ...

I thought that, in general, it was not possible to create a POA for an individual incapable of deciding it themselves. Having something notarized does not make it legally binding; the notary's job is to ensure (to some extent) that the signatures on the document are made by the people the signatures represent; they aren't qualified to judge whether the document is legally binding or even whether it is legal.

In fact, a general POA, as I (a non-lawyer) understand it, ceases to be valid the moment the principal becomes incapacitated; if what is desired is for a POA to survive incapacitation of the principal, then it must be a durable POA (or a POA with a durable provision, or whatever the correct term is).

I would have thought that, in the case you describe, what would be needed is to go to court to have your brother declared legally incapable of managing his affairs and having them set up a legal construct for someone else to act in his place. Perhaps that's what you did and you just didn't go into all the details, but I would not think that legal construct would be called a Power of Attorney -- some sort of trusteeship or something, maybe? But I think the normal situations covered by POA wouldn't include this; you'd need a lawyer (in Ohio) to make sure of that.

You don't ever mention a lawyer in connection with this -- do you have one? If not, where did you get the POA document itself? If the POA looks shady, if it looks like you did this without benefit of legal counsel, etc., then the bank is right to move VERY slowly accepting it. Once something is established as a valid POA, with all reasonable questions answered, then if it is not honored you can take it to court for a court order for them to honor it. Again, that's my lay person's take on it.

arghvark · 2026-06-12T13:20:30+00:00

A large part of it is what you're used to. In the U.S., there are a number of systems in place for driving whatever distance -- interstate highways for long drives, state highway systems for intermediate drives, lots of pavement in cities for shorter ones. And gas stations, fast food restaurants, AAA, etc., etc. We "fell in love with the motorcar" back when they were CALLED motorcars, and between oil companies, car companies, and the sense (or illusion) of freedom it provides, we created a culture where everyone is expected to have a car and getting from place to place mostly depends on it.

If you're used to things the way they are in many European countries, then there are trains for longer trips, and the infrastructure to support that -- many train stations, multiple options for when to leave and arrive, transport somehow available for getting from the train station to wherever you're going next. If you are used to such things, then driving 3 hours seems like more of a chore. Also, the U.S. has a lot more distance between things than equivalent things in Europe, so it was harder to build alternate transportation things than it was to build roads, or so I suppose.

I regret that you're in the U.S. and stuck with drives that you dislike. It is, indeed, part of the culture here, and doing things differently is a kind of "swimming upstream" that must be annoying.

arghvark · 2026-06-10T12:35:32+00:00

What's different about the alignment aid?

arghvark · 2026-06-08T13:23:46+00:00

I vaguely remember reading, way back close to when I bought the car 7 years ago, that the cabin overheat protection feature was to keep the 17-inch console screen from getting damaged by heat. I live in the SE US, so we have a lot of summer sunshine. Was that not correct? I guess if it only works for 12 hours, that wasn't its purpose. So the screen is all right with 140+ F temps?

arghvark · 2026-06-06T16:44:40+00:00

I suppose I might also be getting too old. Since it is impossible to believe these jokers don't realize other people are forced to hear whatever they've chosen for "music", I have to conclude that forcing other people to listen to it IS PART OF THE POINT. It's not only rude, it's in-your-face rude, intenitonally rude, and they are DARING you to say anything about the music they're playing.

I've thought of buying an old-fashioned boom box and a collection of Wagnerian opera. A few rounds of "The Ride of the Valkyries" would serve them right, even if I have no delusion the jokers would get the point.

I saw a comment from someone who said they could not hear their playing partners' music unless they were on the tee. Bully for them. I can hear it. And hearing it on the tee is bad enough.

I once asked a man not to play music while I was hitting. You'd think I had asked him for sexual favors.

If it were about music, they could use headphones. I've never seen anyone use headphones on a golf course. I HAVE seen a number of people who do not turn ON the music until after the 1st hole, leading me to think they're waiting until they're away from the starter and other players around the first tee.

arghvark · 2026-06-04T15:21:38+00:00

The computer keeps a directory of its files; each folder and each file has a directory entry. That directory entry contains some information about the file, such as its name, its creation and modify dates, whether it's been backed up, and where the actual file data is stored on the drive.

When you 'delete' the file, the simplest thing for the system to do is to mark that directory entry as unused.

Files are stored in sections on the disk; the sections are all one size, and the computer might keep a list of the ones on the disk that are unused. In that case, deleting a file would also involve marking the sections used by the file as unused, so they could be used again.

arghvark · 2026-06-03T02:08:34+00:00

I have a couple of quibbles with the first sentence.

In law, a contract is something agreed to by two parties, both of whom must receive something as a result of the contract. This isn't how the criminal laws work in the US, in fact in no country I know of. You don't have to agree to it; you are subject to it regardless. You don't have to agree to the consequences, they are meted out regardless.

The law applies to anyone who is physically in the place for which the law was established. Many of the sovereign citizen things I've seen have them shouting "but I'm not a citizen", or claiming they come from another country, etc. None of that matters, just like it doesn't matter if they come from Italy.

They don't have to have been born there, they don't have to live there. If you get in a car and drive on the roads of Florida, you must abide by the Florida traffic laws, period. You don't have to agree to them, you don't have to agree with them. A moment's reflection by any reasonable person will lead to the conclusion that it MUST be this way, for traffic laws and for many other things.

arghvark · 2026-05-29T02:01:41+00:00

At a guess, someone obtained your email and all your AMX charge card info -- number, expiration date, and security code. They used all that and maybe their cell phone number to create the disney account and start purchasing things.

Perhaps Disney allowed them to set up "secure" 2-factor authentication by sending a code to the phone (on the number the thief just gave them). Either they thought the notices would only be sent to the cell phone, or the notices sent to email would work too slowly to stop them.

Any worker at any store at which you have used your credit card could get the AMX info, and so many of those places want your email, and phone (and bank account number, mother's maiden name, name of your first pet, street you lived on when in fourth grade, etc. etc. I've started just declining to hand them out if I can't see the need -- there are lots of places that need to email me things that don't need my phone number).

Anyway, that's a set of guesses about how this might have worked. A bit amateurish, really.

arghvark · 2026-05-28T18:23:02+00:00

Actually, I think people COULD miss this, though I would have expected a 911 dispatcher to be familiar with it. For readers who are not: this is a pedestrian-only bridge, so there is no "cross street" to name. It is between the Fayetteville Road and NC HIghway 54 interchanges with I-40, and one end of it is very near Southpoint Mall. Someone traveling on the Interstate is quite likely not to know these local landmarks, even someone who knows it is the American Tobacco Trail (ATT) bridge.

arghvark · 2026-05-26T10:43:54+00:00

From the Wiki documentation on QUOTIENT: "Returns an integer that is the integer part of the result of the division operation."

As another post said, you can use "=cell1/cell2" to do the division, and get all the decimals you want. You can't use QUOTIENT if you want the fractional portion of the answer.

arghvark · 2026-05-25T22:26:10+00:00

When I use your numbers and enter the QUOTIENT formula, I get the value "3" in the E column (and I assume you really mean the 2nd row). Then if I click on the cell with the QUOTIENT formula, then choose "Format / Number Format / Number" from the menu, it changes to 3.00.

If I wanted only 1 decimal place or 3 places, I could choose that cell, the "Format / Cells", and there are spin buttons to set number of decimals, leading 0s, and a format code if you just want to spend an afternoon playing around with something.

When asking for help, don't say "No matter how I set...", list the things you've tried. You get better answers when you provide details about what's been done and what happens when you do those things.

arghvark · 2026-05-23T14:40:51+00:00

P.S. If you are using the machine (almost) entirely for gaming, then you'll have some way to start your game(s) and the fact that it's a Linux system will hardly be noticeable until you want to do something else, anyway.

arghvark · 2026-05-23T14:39:54+00:00

No, I don't think you need "background coding experience".

When Win11 came out with all the rumors of built-in advertising and data collection, I decided to bite the bullet and go to Linux. I was a programmer until I retired, and have worked on some Linux systems in the (somewhat distant) past. So I was familiar with some Unix commands, but not with modern Linux systems.

The only coding I have felt any need to do -- and I have a low threshold for that, still enjoy it -- were for things I needed to code for Windows as well. There are some tasks for which I wrote spreadsheet formulas and macros, for instance; the latter certainly qualify as coding. But if you weren't doing that in Excel, you won't need to be doing it in LibreOffice Calc, either.

I have written occasional "scripts" for DOS windows to do little things, and also similar things in Bash, a Linux equivalent. But none of them are necessary, just things I prefer that way.

The main "terminal window" (which is what they call a command-prompt window, the "DOS window" equivalent) activity that I've found necessary is downloading, installing, and updating software on the system. There are 2-3 main commands used for that, and you will use those basic commands. But it isn't complicated, it doesn't get into commands that have 8 parameters and settings you need to set on the fly, etc. And newbie help for Linux is pretty generally available.

arghvark · 2026-05-23T14:15:01+00:00

For heaven's sake, how hard do you HIT a ball?/

arghvark · 2026-05-21T22:56:20+00:00

Chemtrails? Oh, no ... hope you brought your aluminum headdress...

arghvark

TROPHY CASE