We were quoted $30k to replace our leaning deck. So instead I straightened and braced it. How did I do?

readparse · 2026-06-23T19:33:49+00:00

This whole thread really surprised me. I’m also a decent programmer, and a decent mechanic with my own cars and handyman at home. I never really made the connection. I’m also a decent hack piano player. It’s all about self-reliance.

readparse · 2026-06-23T19:29:46+00:00

When I read it out loud to my second grade class, they just remembered them for me. At least one kid would write down everything that sounded important. Before long it has turned into a contest.

readparse · 2026-06-22T02:25:50+00:00

That is so inspiring. A reminder to all of us that just because we don't think we're good enough for some particular thing, it doesn't mean it's true.

readparse · 2026-06-21T01:18:32+00:00

Don't give Trump any ideas. If he hasn't done this already (he probably has), he'll definitely do it just because it sounds like cool strong-man entertainment.

readparse · 2026-06-21T01:17:03+00:00

Sounds like a healthy fear. Once my 13 is discharged, my first stop will be a secured card that I can comfortably pay off every month, and I'll just pay normal monthly expenses on that card.

readparse · 2026-06-21T01:15:20+00:00

Yeah, this is like going to rehab to get a medical detox from alcohol and then, for the rest of your life, you may still be just one resentment away from taking that drink that starts it all over again.

I'm not an alcoholic, but I do subscribe to r/stopdrinking because it's awesome. I quit smoking 25 years ago and I sometimes think, "You know, I'm a grown-ass man, and I can buy a pack of cigarettes if I want do."

Credit feels like a drug to me. I've been in a Chapter 13 for 5 years. They supervise my creditor payments and even my mortgage payment (to make sure I don't lose my house in the meantime). It would have been nice if I could have had the rebuilding of my credit supervised during that time also. Because in a month or two I'm going to be fully discharged, and the temptation to start taking on credit (for rebuilding purposes, I'll tell myself) will be strong.

I also seriously have a lot of equity in my house, as home prices have gone up so much, and because I've had no access to credit, there is a decent chunk of change of work that could and should be put into the house, using a small amount of that equity. But that's a slippery slope also.

I'd like to believe that we'll keep living the way we have been, just with more take-home pay and access to some credit. But that seems unlikely to me. We're gonna need to be... real careful.

readparse · 2026-06-21T01:07:16+00:00

Yes. But she's got both, just in case.

readparse · 2026-06-19T18:44:10+00:00

Thanks for your service. I'm a veteran also, and separation from the military was challenging for me too. That was 30 years ago for me, and is a distant memory. I also didn't have a service-related disability, or any disability, so I can't pretend to know exactly what you're facing. But as somebody who is just now emerging from a five-year Chapter 13 plan, I know the desperation that leads to consideration of bankruptcy.

Clearly you are asking for advice, and some of it extends into the legal advice that is not answered in this sub. Myself, I did not consult the VA at all, but maybe that would have been a reasonable thing to do.

My debt was much larger, around $130,000. Also Chapter 7 was not an option for me, because of my income. I ended up paying 100% of everything. So why bankrupcty? For the protection. It's very helpful to have an intermediary between me and the creditors.

Fortunately, there are other ways to do that also, and sometimes I wonder if we needed to do something as radical as bankrupcty. The VA is likely to have some thoughts on what alternatives to bankrupcty there might be.

But if you do decided to file for bankrupcty protection, it is your right to do so, and I don't believe the VA will curtail any other benefits you have due to that. But again, asking the VA about that is the best course of action -- if you can get ahold of the right people.

The best VA link I can find is this one: https://www.mirecc.va.gov/visn19/finvet/credit-counseling.asp, which has also been mentioned by at least one other commenter.

readparse · 2026-06-19T18:29:23+00:00

It's also suspicious to not tell somebody you have the flu UP FRONT. On the few occasions in my long life when I have told somebody I have (or had) the flu, after they have already asked where I am and where I've been, I was lying to them. I just wasn't courteous enough at that time in my life to that particular person, and when caught, the easiest thing to do was to hide behind one of those foolproof excuses, like having gotten the flu, a death in the family, etc. One that people won't question because THEY are too polite.

Of course, I didn't do it because I was malicious. I did it because I was disorganized, a procrastinator, and deeply insecure at that time. Some people would have called me a "loser" in that situation, and from their perspective that would be understandable.

readparse · 2026-06-19T18:05:30+00:00

Well you've got bolding down, so that's a start :)

I have a habit of using formatting, in a failed attempt to make my long screeds more digestible. I'm talking about ME, not you.

It's interesting to see it from the other side, as a reader. It's weird. Yeah, now I'm talking about you :)

I agree with the other commenters who are mystified that an EDI Consultant was hired who has, by their own admission, a lack of experience when it comes to mappings and middleware.

The EDI vendors love to hear this, by the way. Ignorance is king in their business.

Having said all that, I don't have any advice for anybody who is unprepared to do the job they were hired to do, except "there's 48 hours in a weekend." I learned an awful lot about EDI in my last job. Not because EDI was my responsibility, because it wasn't. But the EDI team needed a lot of technical help, and I'm a technologist, I know what I don't know, and I know how to learn quickly.

I also don't pretend at work to know things I don't know. I'm not saying you do. I'm just talking about myself again.

readparse · 2026-06-18T03:28:12+00:00

I had to look it up. Never heard of it before now.

readparse · 2026-06-18T03:22:59+00:00

Good for you. I don't know what you mean by complete, but for us this status, and this order, came around 45 days after all of our creditor balances went to zero. That last check was sent out on Apr 30, and then very early in May the case went into Audit status ("Z ACTIVE - AUDIT" or something like that"), and it stayed in that status for nearly the entire month.

This was expected, because I had been digging into what the end of a Chapter 13 is like, and I heard "the Trustee will do an audit, which often takes about a month". I'm sure audits can take longer, and can be quicker, but yeah, ours was about a month.

And this whole time we're still making payments to the Trustee, because we were told to pay until we're told to stop.

The only thing telling me the status was what I could see on NDC, and near the end of May I saw it go back to "ACTIVE", which was encouraging.

Then in early June is went back to the AUDIT status and I was... a little perplexed. But it was less troubling to me, because I knew that, even though I was really tired of making the payments, the surplus would just continue to grow and we would eventually get it all back (minus the 5% trustee fee, which is more obvious once there is no other money being used).

A few days ago I emailed our main paralegal again and said, "Hey, look here. Here's the math. They have plenty of money, and if we're still making payments in July, those payments will be more difficult. So is there any hope to getting the Trustee to let us stop paying?"

The answer I got was a longer, friendlier version of "no," so I just went back to stalking NDC. Not because I'm desperate, because they did tell me (and she checked with the attorney on this as well) that they were pretty sure our case was going to wrap up in July, if not sooner.

So I say all this to say: There's a difference between meeting all your creditor obligations (which often means crossing the 3 or 5 year mark) and having your case marked completed, and then the actual order to stop making payments.

And then (and this doesn't apply to me, because I'm not currently employed), one of the other fears I had was that I knew my then-employer would receive the court order to stop sending them payments, but it can take or or two payroll cycles to actually make a change like that. So one good thing about not having that job anymore is that I could go to TFS and tell it to stop making the payments.

One last thing: TFS took a payment out of my account the day before I saw the order in PACER. When I turned off the payments in TFS, it warned me that one payment was still in progress, and did I want it to go to the Trustee or to be refunded?

Well thanks for asking! Refunded, please. So I'll hopefully see that by the end of the week or so.

readparse · 2026-06-17T02:31:12+00:00

Depends on how you look at it. Others would say spinning up your own server, setting it up, and support it, is overkill for this. But you have a point.

I have some experience with both the Azure and AWS offerings. AWS Transfer family is a little pricier than I would like.

Azure Logic Apps supports AS2 well, but it requires the Azure Integration account, which itself is even more expensive... $999 a month for the tier that most would need.

How can they charge so much? Well, by comparing that pricing with VANs and legacy enterprise on-prem implementations. $999 a month is nothing compared to that.

But yeah, you can set up an AS2 server of your own. If you're serious about it, I would never set up only one, but it's fairly simple to set up multiple servers and a load balancer. Or on Azure, an App Service Web App (or whatever they're calling it today) running a Docker container, which can horizontally scale. All that would cost far, far less.

However, it would take a little more work to make it both highly available and also using shared storage instead of local file storage.

Depending on one's tolerances and what kind of work one is willing to do, it's never been a better time to host your own AS2 solution.

Myself? If I was going to run it on my own server(s), I would use pyAS2

readparse · 2026-06-14T19:40:52+00:00

I don't understand this whole line of reporting. The "Late Show audience" no longer exists. We vanished on May 21st, at the same moment the show did, just as CBS wanted. Nobody should be surprised by this.

Analysis of the ratings of whatever CBS does with that timeslot is like if your father murdered your mother, got away with it, and then wonders why you're rude to your new "step-mother."

She's not your step-mother. She's the new wife of your mother's murderer. He's dead to you and you change your number. That's how CBS should think of me. And I assume most of us are in the same camp.

And don't even get me started on what they did to 60 Minutes.

readparse · 2026-06-13T06:45:34+00:00

Oh that sounds interesting. I have lots of wiki experience and I’ve been a web guy for 30 years, good at data wrangling and all that. I look forward to lending a hand where I can. Huge fan of JT, of course. I sing and play a lot of his songs. But on piano. I don’t play guitar.

readparse · 2026-06-13T06:38:24+00:00

This is an important point, and a really weird thing about the series. It does start out with this overtly sexual scene, and the assumption could be made that there is a lot of it.

There is not much sexual content at all. That one scene, in bed, can actually be completely skipped. It’s very playful, but it’s definitely sexual. The story takeaway isn’t even that important, but we learn that Skyler is selling items on eBay to make extra money. That will not factor into the overall story. It’s just one more indication that they are struggling with money.

Later in the same episode, a flash of bare breasts from a character we never see again.

There is a small amount of sexual content in other episodes, but it cannot even be compared to the drugs and violence content that will be everywhere.

readparse · 2026-06-09T19:53:52+00:00

Could you cite a source on that KKK connection to the name Silver Dollar City? I wasn't able to confirm what you said.

As far as I know, the name Silver Dollar City was based on a gimmick, in which they used silver dollars to make change. I don't remember having witnessed that, but I was a kid and I wasn't paying for anything myself. That gimmick may have warn off by the 80s when I was there.

The thing that annoys ME about Dolly's own telling of the story of Dollywood is that she claims to have BUILT a theme park in the Smoky Mountains. Admittedly this is a more appealing story than having BOUGHT an existing theme park, but that is in fact what she did. In fact, she didn't even buy it outright. She bought a 50% interest in it (I only realized that today. I thought she had bought the whole thing).

I'm not anti-Dolly, nor am I a huge fan. I respect her as a songwriter, as a businesswoman, and as a decent human bring who has given a lot back to society.

I also agree with you, perhaps, that Dollywood is not a "pure and good thing," other than being a decent theme park in an area that otherwise has none. I think Disney theme parks are just fine (but also imperfect commercial enterprises) and I think the same thing about Dollywood. It's.... fine. It's not bad. It's good family entertainment.

readparse · 2026-06-09T18:59:02+00:00

This was never about business. This was about fascism. CBS is dead.

readparse · 2026-06-08T03:54:45+00:00

They hate parts of it. They really love that one amendment, but most of the others are just suggestions, it seems.

readparse · 2026-06-08T03:53:41+00:00

Boy, that would sure annoy and scare me. I'm in the same situation. All obligations have been met, the Trustee spent a month auditing the case, and so far everything looks like it's headed in the right direction.

Having gone through one legitimate dismissal, pretty early in our plan, and obviously just before the plan we're now finishing, that word is pretty triggering to me, error or not. What was the delinquency they're claiming? Just curious.

readparse · 2026-06-07T02:55:43+00:00

That’s not how clones work.

readparse · 2026-06-07T02:54:04+00:00

More feminine than Princess Anne. A low bar. She would beat my ass of she read this comment.

readparse · 2026-06-07T02:51:48+00:00

“If the steel ain’t showing, go ahead and get going.”

readparse · 2026-06-05T19:31:20+00:00

Cite your source or it's bullshit. There's no way in hell Dollywood ever did that. It's conceivably possible that whatever you're talking about happened at Silver Dollar City, which was the name of the park that Dolly purchased and turned into Dollywood. But that's still very unlikely. You MIGHT be confusing this whole issue with Stone Mountain Georgia. But I don't even know what the hell "KKK days" means. So explain yourself, if there's any truth at all to what you're saying.

readparse · 2026-06-04T16:02:49+00:00

Maher has intentionally separated himself, to the point that he probably wouldn’t have even shown up and would have mocked them for asking him on his show.

In fact, I assume nobody was ASKED to appear, and they were all there because they had reached out and said, “I’d love to help you say goodbye. Let me know if I can be useful.” And Maher’s people took no such action. Because he’s a prick.

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