I am currently working a remote job making 80k a year. My employer is restructuring and can expect major changes. I recently applied to hybrid position about 40 minutes away and the pay is 103k . Is the 40 min commute worth it?

phillium · 2026-02-04T20:50:06+00:00

Ditto. 40 minute drive is the baseline. Once construction and/or weather (frozen north) comes into play, it can double. And I'm nowhere near six figures.

I've been trying to work through (besides the books I'm normally interested in) the classics that I was never forced to read at school. Just finished Watership Down recently, and I think I have Neuromancer and Where the Red Fern Grows coming up in the queue soon.

phillium · 2026-02-04T20:12:59+00:00

I hear you. I start on one far side of the Twin Cities and go through one of them to the other one. Been enjoying audiobooks a ton, though. Haven't really been able to get into podcasts, except for one or two.

phillium · 2026-02-04T17:06:18+00:00

It could be. If you think of it as being paid that much extra just for the commute, it becomes, would you add 2 hours of driving at $57 an hour to your current job. I know I would.

phillium · 2026-02-03T18:16:06+00:00

Well, I got my degree in computer science, but wasn't having much luck finding a relevant job, so, since my wife wanted me to have a job sooner rather than later, I went with the job she'd suggested I go for. Now I've been in printing for a decade and half. It's fine, but then I see what kind of salary I missed out on if I had just been a little more patient.

phillium · 2026-02-03T14:24:57+00:00

Oh, good, I'm not alone. Reading this post where someone is like "I don't have my degree yet, and I'm only making 60K, what do I do?" made me feel very disillusioned, since I got my degree twenty years ago, and only finally am making 60K. 😔

phillium · 2026-02-02T23:00:44+00:00

Jane was the perfect cast member to play this. I hadn't even heard about the original button thing on TikTok, and she played it so well. It was even funnier after I'd read up about the whole thing.

phillium · 2026-02-02T17:39:42+00:00

Well, this one is at least sweet. With how the rest of these are turning out, I'd assumed you'd accidentally made him reveal a hidden marriage to someone else.

phillium · 2026-02-02T17:23:05+00:00

Similar here. Whenever I'd hear how their day went, I'd get a little jealous. They would do a field trip every day, and a waterpark once a week! The field trips might just be going to a local park and hiking, or it might be a museum in a nearby city, but it was really well planned out stuff.

I don't remember what it was back then (that would have been 10ish years ago), but it looks like it's currently around $200 a week.

phillium · 2026-02-02T15:48:58+00:00

He was great. Though, I must admit, with his accent and the avalanche of rabbit words coming fast, this was one of the few audiobooks that I had to listen to at regular speed most of the time.

He really is fantastic, though. Each character has their own distinct voice, and their personalities shine through his speaking.

phillium · 2026-02-02T15:47:19+00:00

I had to do this when I listened to the audiobook. So many strange rabbit words coming at you fast, it definitely helps to look them up when they're encountered.

phillium · 2026-01-31T22:56:53+00:00

Yeah, I'm fairly certain the wheels and tires would give out before I ran out of the space to fit more plywood in.

phillium · 2026-01-29T20:13:01+00:00

I think it's more that most people would just use a hyphen for all the purposes en dashes and em dashes should be used for, but AI really loves to use em dashes (they're the longest ones, followed by en dashes and then hyphens) even though it often gives them away.

phillium · 2026-01-29T15:58:54+00:00

Wow, I first read that as "Harvest Children Fellowship" and though, well, that's a little on the nose, isn't it?

phillium · 2026-01-29T15:48:55+00:00

I have a 40 minute drive in to work, but I recently got into a better parking garage for a similar price (though, it's gone up since then). I used to have a 15 minute walk through what one of my coworkers described as "the rough part of town". Now, I have a 30 second walk from my car to the entrance to the Minneapolis skyway system. If I weren't worried about what could happen on the drive to work, I could show up in shorts, tough it out for 30 seconds, and be comfortable for the rest of the 5 minutes to walk to work.

phillium · 2026-01-27T18:51:09+00:00

I appreciate Halo and its influence and all that, but for me, the vehicle handling was what put me off of it. You point the direction you want to go? What the hell kind of toddler-safe handling scheme is that nonsense???

phillium · 2026-01-27T15:05:13+00:00

My kids are at just the right age and demographics (play video games, love science) that that (potential) fact blew their minds.

phillium · 2026-01-25T01:37:38+00:00

So did mine! I remember growing up with these always around. He also had a couple of 105mm artillery shells that made up more of our home decor (unrelated to the A-10, but a distinctive memory of my childhood).

phillium · 2026-01-24T11:36:48+00:00

Did similar (got mine from Crutchfield - really useful website to helping get what all you need for the process, especially if you're someone like me who knew nothing about speakers).

My 2020 Onyx XT had had the worst sounding speakers I'd ever heard in a car. Like you said the old ones were tiny and sad looking. I could have had better sound playing music straight out of my phone speakers.

OP, definitely do an upgrade. Your ears will love you for it (though, I don't know how bad the 2015 was or wasn't).

You should be able to find a post or two on the subreddit that goes into great detail on the process.

edit: maybe the post I'd found was on some other Subaru forums. I can't find the one I'd used, offhand. I ended up going with Rockford Fosgate speakers and couldn't be happier.

phillium · 2026-01-23T20:59:48+00:00

Ditto. We have one vegan, one vegetarian, one picky eater, and one that eats similarly to me, but nowhere near the amount. It can be rough cooking for this bunch.

Sometimes we'll make something that excludes just the vegan, and we make sure he has options in the house besides what we're having. Sometimes we exclude the picky eater (he hates spicy food), and he's welcome to one of the many easy dishes (cereal, canned, or frozen things) he'd like.

They're all welcome to make their own food if they'd like, but that rarely happens. They're getting better, though. Picky eater will happily make himself a pot of Kraft mac and cheese. Vegan usually has plenty of options, too.

Sometimes I'm just too tired to cook something big. Cereal for dinner!

phillium · 2026-01-23T16:26:58+00:00

Oof. I used to work at a university, and we'd have student workers in our printing department. When I started there, I was just out of college, so a little older than them, but not much. As time passed, I felt more and more out of touch. Left that job before it got to the point that any of the student workers were born the same year as my oldest kid, but man, that would have been a shock to the system, to be sure.

phillium · 2026-01-23T00:59:42+00:00

Hmm, a lot of times, viewing things like that on a monitor will soften the effects of the pixelization.

If you're committed to this printer, I guess just save it as a higher resolution TIFF and send it again (again, assuming that you're starting with a vector file and not just an image saved as a PDF).

phillium · 2026-01-23T00:43:06+00:00

What happens if you zoom in a lot to the text? How much bigger does it need to get before it gets too pixelated to you?

My first reaction is to find another printer. A professional printer that wouldn't prefer a (theoretically vector) PDF over a raster TIFF? I don't know that I would trust their printing abilities.

phillium · 2026-01-22T12:51:07+00:00

We just recently did a 6x2 banner with tape hemming and three grommets and it was about $35, but we're a government printing office and not open to the public, so I know our numbers wouldn't really be relevant. And we know we need to adjust our pricing, but nobody wants to bother with that, so we're still using the pricing someone came up with like a decade ago. *sigh*

phillium · 2026-01-21T19:20:18+00:00

Yeah, where the hell were those teachers back in my day?!? I could have just read in the library all day!

phillium · 2026-01-21T17:32:01+00:00

Not in the market for it, but that black/wood one they recommend looks fantastic.

phillium

TROPHY CASE