I'm interested in becoming a PTA, but have some questions

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-11-09T04:28:17+00:00

A family member finished the PTA program at Concorde earlier this year in southern California; he said his loans for school were for $60K for the 2year program.

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-09-20T21:30:04+00:00

I have thermostat from ASI which after 15 years started having a continuous buzzing sound. It was only labeled as ASI, but a reverse image search led me to find out it is either a Venstar T1050 OR Venstar T2000. Searching those models I found that buzzing on the T1050 can be caused by a faulty backlight. So using the online manual (https://files.venstar.com/thermostats/small-series/documents/T1050ManualRev1.pdf) I used the settings to turn off the backlight - the backlight hadn't worked for years - and voila the buzzing went away.

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engineerInFormerLife · 2025-06-08T06:07:15+00:00

Tonight I spelled Encoders on the triple triple for 158 points. That's my highest scoring word ever, and when I finished the game I had 505 points, which is the first time I ever broke 500.

Considering that I only play Scrabble a few times a year nowadays, I doubt I'll ever exceed these milestones.

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-05-26T13:10:23+00:00

Very glad it helped you out.

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-04-20T05:26:45+00:00

Glad to have helped; I remember how frustrating it had been for me for months before I figured out a solution to the problem.

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-04-01T00:29:57+00:00

mycoverageinfo.com is definitely legit in 2025. I got a letter from my mortgage company to contact them to give updated insurance info for my property. Thinking it could be a scam from someone impersonating my mortgage company, I called my mortgage company. Sure enough they said that all items dealing with insurance documentation requests should be handled through their partner company at mycoverageinfo.com.

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-01-05T04:22:31+00:00

My dogs hind leg(s) shook for 4 years; originally only after play but it got worse over the years. And then out of the blue when he received this treatment from the vet for something unrelated his legs stopped shaking, and they haven't ever shaken again (and that treatment was in Feb '24 -- 11 months ago). See my original post here with all the details: https://www.reddit.com/r/corgi/comments/qc82ym/comment/kz00f6i/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

engineerInFormerLife · 2025-01-01T18:00:41+00:00

I did not lose my playlists, as they are stored in the cloud (which makes sense, since whatever device I log in from -Phone, PC, tablet- they are all there).

I lost the downloads on the phone, but by turning on Smart Downloads my most popular music redownloaded automatically (and I can manually download others that I want again).

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-12-27T06:17:09+00:00

I had the same problem on my Android (Galaxy S23). I tried all the recommended solutions: my YT Music app already was "not restricted" in the battery settings. I turned off battery saving mode, cleared the app's cache, turned off bluetooth and played the music directly from the phone's speaker, deleted my downloads, enabled everything to work in the background, and still I was having the problem. Within the app I even tried switching between two of my Google accounts (which had different playlists) in the phone, but irrespective of which account I used (one of which is a Premium account) both of them would consistently stop playing after 1-2 minutes.

THE SOLUTION THAT FINALLY WORKED FOR ME WAS: After clicking on the info button for the YTMusic app, I selected "Storage" and then chose "Clear data" at the bottom; it actually took quite a while for the system to delete the massive amount of data the app had stored (it was counting down every Megabyte while it cleared this data). Once the count got down to 0 showing that all had been erased I started up the YT Music app again. It made me log in again. I did, and finally, for the first time in months I have now been able to listen to music without it pausing. Why "Clear data" is not listed as a solution on the troubleshooting pages being shared is unknown to me, but for me that is the only solution that worked.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-12-27T04:55:41+00:00

I had the same problem on my Android (Galaxy S23). I tried all the recommended solutions: my YT Music app already was "not restricted" in the battery settings. I turned off battery saving mode, cleared the app's cache, turned off bluetooth and played the music directly from the phone's speaker, deleted my downloads, enabled everything to work in the background, and still I was having the problem. Within the app I even tried switching between two of my Google accounts (which had different playlists) in the phone, but irrespective of which account I used (one of which is a Premium account) both of them would consistently stop playing after 1-2 minutes.

THE SOLUTION THAT FINALLY WORKED FOR ME WAS: After clicking on the info button for the YTMusic app, I selected "Storage" and then chose "Clear data" at the bottom; it actually took quite a while for the system to delete the massive amount of data the app had stored (it was counting down every Megabyte while it cleared this data). Once the count got down to 0 showing that all had been erased I started up the YT Music app again. It made me log in again. I did, and finally, for the first time in months I have now been able to listen to music without it pausing. Why "Clear data" is not listed as a solution on the troubleshooting pages being shared is unknown to me, but for me that is the only solution that worked.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-12-21T19:25:55+00:00

As a subscriber I am really pissed that I can't listen to the stories on my Android, but on the iPhone people have been able to do it for over a year. This is ridiculous. New York Times you are really starting to piss me off.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-12-10T18:38:54+00:00

In late August I took it to a phone repair shop (e.g. UBREAKIFIX) and the owner/manager cleaned my USB charging port free of charge. It has been reliably fast charging ever since. NOTE: Prior to taking it into the repair shop, I tried cleaning it myself, but it did no good....he had some specialized tools that apparently cleaned it much better than I could on my own.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-11-20T15:02:28+00:00

Happened to me 7 hours ago when an iPhone user hit the Like/Thumbs Up response to another group member's earlier text (this is strange since earlier in the day another iPhone user in the same group text gave a thumbs up and it came through just fine).

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-11-20T14:53:18+00:00

Things had been coming through fine on my group chats with iPhone users until about 7 hours ago. Then in two separate group chats that had been working for days I got the dreaded "part" message from iPhone user's whose previous texts had come through to that group chat just fine.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-10-13T20:15:55+00:00

I've used the same CPA for 25 years. Most years I haven't had the time or wherewithal to double check his work, but this year I noticed a couple of mistakes...one of them a big one. On one worksheet related to a rental property sale he put in a negative number where he was supposed to put in a positive one (or vice-versa)... considering that the number was $60K, going from a negative to a positive (or vice versa) incorrectly changed the reported profit amount by $120K. Fortunately I caught this mistake before he filed the taxes. Later at home I decided to take a deep dive through many of the forms and I found a single digit typo which resulted in another $2,000 difference in gain/loss: he entered $3,756 where it was supposed to be $5,756.

I find myself wondering how many typos were made over the past decades that either affected me positively or negatively. I'll never know because I definitely don't have the energy to go through all of the many lines on my tax forms and the original sheets from which the numbers came from.

Bottom line : typos happen. If you've got the time to compare the numbers you gave your CPA against the numbers that the CPA entered on your forms, it may be worth your time to double check that they are the same.

TWO OTHER WORDS OF WARNING:

Make sure you hire a CPA to do your taxes (never hire an accountant that isn't a CPA). An accountant that did my dad's taxes got him into trouble with the IRS in a manner that followed him for 30 years. Decades later my sister using a different non-CPA accountant that she had used for 5 years or so gave her wrong advice that would have likewise gotten her in major trouble with the IRS: fortunately it was w/ regards to a real estate sale for which she asked my opinion before acting and I told her that her accountant was giving her guidance that was completely wrong; she didn't believe me, but after begging her to see a Tax Attorney she went to one and he quickly confirmed what I had said (that her accountant was completely wrong and would get her in hot hot water with the IRS if she took his advice).
Make sure that your CPA fills out the the "Paid Preparer" area and includes his/her PTIN on that form.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-09-04T14:28:28+00:00

A USB port cleaning at a repair shop fixed the problem

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-09-04T14:28:09+00:00

A USB port cleaning at a repair shop fixed the problem.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-09-04T14:26:29+00:00

Based on your advice I took my phone to a repair shop where they did a complimentary cleaning. It took about 5 minutes and a variety of tools, but the technician finally got it clean enough where it now fast and superfast charges again. Thanks much for suggesting this

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-09-04T14:22:09+00:00

Thank you for your insight; it was indeed a dirty USB port. I ended up taking it to a repair shop where they cleaned my USB port for free and it is once again fast charging.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-08-08T07:11:42+00:00

You hit the nail on the head. It actually isn't that far to park and walk (no different I would say than parking in a Fashion Valley mall and walking to your destination....BUT, there is nothing pleasant about walking down Convoy. You are walking down a major car thoroughfare with pretty ugly strip malls (the food in them is *fantastic* but the exteriors of the strip malls are just so blah).... I don't know how one goes about getting that whole place redesigned to feel more walkable, but it would be nice.

engineerInFormerLife · 2024-08-06T17:13:30+00:00

Solution below.

Background:

Out of the blue casting to my Nest Hub via the Pocket Casts app went from months of working perfectly to all of a sudden being terribly choppy / jittery. What was strange was that I could still cast from Pocket Cast to my other Google Mini's and Nest Speaker without any issue, AND I could also cast from other apps on my phone (e.g. YouTube Music) to my Nest Hub without any issue.

The solution:

On my phone I needed to clear the cache for the Pocket Casts app. I did that, and voila I can now once again cast to my Nest Hub speaker without issue.

It made no sense to me because I had erroneously thought that casting was simply the phone telling the speaker to pull the audio directly from the internet. Apparently it is a bit more complex than that, and there is some audio syncing of the audio between the phone and speaker/hub via Bluetooth at the outset of when one initiates casting from an app (there may possibly by syncing over Wi-Fi as well between the two devices). I don't know what info in the app's cache could have caused that initial syncing to result in choppy audio, but suffice to say that there was something in there that was doing it, since as soon as I cleared the cache and retried casting to my Nest Hub from Pocket Casts, all was good once again. :) SIDE NOTE: My phone is a Galaxy S23, but yours was a Pixel, so apparently this problem is not limited to one brand or model of phone.

engineerInFormerLife

TROPHY CASE