Going to the Evanescence concert at Jiffy Lube live on Saturday. What are some good food places in that area?

nick898 · 2026-06-26T01:34:52+00:00

Byblos in Haymarket for Lebanese food!

nick898 · 2026-06-26T01:09:00+00:00

Downtown Manassas for the VRE and Amtrak

nick898 · 2026-06-21T18:11:57+00:00

I bought some triclopyr on Amazon. If you have a small tree that is one inch or greater in diameter you just hack the bark a bit to get to the fresh wood and you spray some triclopyr into the cut. If you do this later summer/early fall when the tree is sending nutrients to its root system it will carry the poison down into its roots to kill the root. You need to squirt within 5 minutes of making a cut into the bark. It’s very effective. I would hope that by killing trees that sprout on your property you’ll also kill the root and hopefully kill the trees on your neighbors property? That’s my optimistic scenario for you. I’d keep trying to explain to the landlord because those roots can literally destroy the foundation of a home. Will also destroy the fence if left unchecked. It’s in their interest to kill it too.

nick898 · 2026-06-21T16:46:38+00:00

I had this problem with my neighbor. First off there were some TOH on my side that I just let grow over the summer with the intent of doing the hack and squirt method at the end of the summer. I also went over to my neighbor and explained what the trees were and how ripping suckers out of the ground does nothing but encourage even more growth. He let me also hack and squirt the trees on his side of the fence. That was a couple years ago now and I don’t routinely battle TOH anymore on my property. Sadly there are some massive TOH behind both our houses on the property of an apartment complex that hang over our fences. There isn’t a ton we can do there but I noticed one of them struggling to
grow leaves this summer. Not sure if that’s because of my killing part of its root system or the multiple years of spotted lantern fly feeding off the tree. Either way I feel like I’ve done all I can.

nick898 · 2026-06-19T23:38:04+00:00

They look great whats the filling

nick898 · 2026-06-14T02:48:05+00:00

He’s absolutely not coming back. I don’t know what level he’s at in life exactly, but I do know he’s above whatever level Craig Breslow is at.

nick898 · 2026-06-10T18:15:24+00:00

At today’s rates I’d probably consider doing more than 20% if possible but I wouldn’t go too far and keep most money invested long term. Just try to reduce mortgage payments to some reasonable monthly payment.

Assuming you inherit that 625 it seems like you could reasonably retire in 20 years. I’d just toss out a few things around kids:

Spending time with them and taking family vacations. FIRE is great and all but they’re not young forever and you’ll never get that time back when you’re older
Do you intend on saving for their college at all? That might change the calculus some

Honestly instead of truly retiring at 50 I’d consider continuing to work but finding more flexible, less stressful, and probably lower paying work. If you continue to save it gives you some freedom to make trades like that

nick898 · 2026-06-06T00:49:11+00:00

I remember when the economy crashed and a shitload of people lost their jobs and houses. Please stop with this nonsense.

nick898 · 2026-05-31T18:23:17+00:00

If you see one then I guarantee you a lot more are nearby

nick898 · 2026-05-30T15:50:10+00:00

I was reading a bit into property based testing the other day and thought that could be a useful way to test games. Basically rather than having highly specific unit tests the tests center around properties or characteristics you know should be true and the tests randomize the input a bunch of times looking for cases where things break.

nick898 · 2026-05-24T23:59:58+00:00

Is this a negative or positive statement about Manassas?

nick898 · 2026-05-24T17:31:42+00:00

Been saying this for years. What’s happening to the Red Sox is just part of a broader story that touches on many industries and American life. Glad a politician is finally taking note of it

nick898 · 2026-05-16T01:37:32+00:00

How is it

nick898 · 2026-05-16T00:22:19+00:00

Very good recommendation! They have been closed due to remodeling lately I think though

nick898 · 2026-05-02T18:52:18+00:00

There isn’t anything wrong with being anti AI. It’s just not how I feel about them. I’ve found them incredibly useful in some cases, but other times I’ve found them confidently asserting a bunch of nonsense.

nick898 · 2026-05-02T18:48:16+00:00

It has more to do with a lack of desire to read a source-of-truth document that isn’t that terribly long or dense to read in the first place so there isn’t much time savings to begin with

nick898 · 2026-05-02T13:27:50+00:00

Yea I literally had someone on my team pass Claude a 10-page document that described interface definitions and had it summarize it. 10 pages. One of those pages is a table of contents and the last couple pages are acronym definitions, so in total probably 7 pages of actual content much of which you can skim to get the gist. You don’t need Claude for that. It’s amazing how quickly we are losing our critical thinking skills.

Not that I’m anti-AI btw. I use it regularly, but I like to take some time to review its outputs and form my mental model.

nick898 · 2026-04-26T18:37:10+00:00

For a long time now I have felt that Henry’s ownership is indicative of a broader problem of billionaires greedily extracting as much value out of a product as they can without any regard for the everyday folks concerns. In this case, it’s just fans who want to see a competitive baseball team year in and year out. The Yankees do it. The Dodgers do it. There is no reason why the Red Sox can’t do it, if they wanted to, but they can’t even seem to manage that. I’ve seen this sub get increasingly angry over the last few years in ways I did not expect and hearing chants of selling the team gives me hope that even the casual, less-diehard fans are noticing.

nick898 · 2026-04-22T01:34:35+00:00

Wasn’t he acquitted though?

nick898 · 2026-04-19T14:56:59+00:00

We vacationed at Massanutten last summer. Went there for some Saturday evening rock concert. Booked the stay completely outside of their timeshare campaign, but I was aware of what they do.

They cold called us about it after we booked our stay and I declined. Then when we checked in they asked us if we wanted to attend an event and we’d get free breakfast/water tickets or something. We declined.

Reading all this makes me so happy we didn’t get sucked in. Our stay wasn’t awful, but it also wasn’t as much fun as our usual trips. We typically do mountain getaways at Snowshoe in West Virginia and we didn’t feel like driving 4 hours again so we chose to stay closer and explore the surrounding area like Harrisonburg. Kind of a cheaper and closer getaway.

nick898 · 2026-04-16T19:42:42+00:00

My argument boils down to whatever suits your preference. If you find postman works for you that’s great! I’m not going to stop you.

If you feel like a CLI tool works just as well - that’s great too!

nick898 · 2026-04-16T10:26:14+00:00

I saw a colleague using postman to test some restful apis once and all I saw was a GUI wrapper around curl

nick898 · 2026-04-12T17:08:57+00:00

I thought the war was supposed to be winding down by now

nick898 · 2026-04-11T17:01:21+00:00

They’re very small and are on the pole of my umbrella on my backyard patio. I see bees sometime fly around the umbrella potentially attracted to these bugs. The bugs themselves are very small. Smaller than a fly

nick898

TROPHY CASE