“Because I’m not poor! I got all the water I need from food”.

My boomer dad, constantly suffering from health issues because of poor hydration. Does not help that the only liquids he consumes are beer and wine.

After my mother passed, I spent more time with my father than before, just because I thought it was the right thing to do (and my siblings really did not care that much). I realized why I did not have a lot if contact before, he us a classic toxic boomer narcissist.

Spending more time with him did not mean that we grieved my mother’s loss as a family, it was just him monopolizing the grief and needing an audience wallow in self pity. I had no say in any aspect of the funeral, he did not listen to anything I said, he never even once asked how I was, and when I talked about stuff from my life (because someone else asked), he started talking over me, making the conversation about him again. Classic narcissist parent playbook.

At some point i was fed up, and told him as much, which of course did not go over well. Complete disbelief, he acted as if I had insulted him, yelling, accusations of being ungrateful, all the bells and whistles. Not a single thought that this behaviour might have been wrong. I just left and cut contact. After a week or so he wrote me what I think was meant as an apology. What he “apologized” for was that because of his greatness, he was always the center of attention which of course emphasized my insignificance, which he can see made me feel bad. It was so grotesque that I burst out in manic laughter, my wife was seriously worried.

The good thing about this, it made me slowly unwrap what I now realize is a lot of childhood drama (which I thought was normal), and understand why my siblings basically don’t want anything to do with him. Still struggling to take the step to seek professional therapy (which I know I need), but I already feel better starting to understand that how my father treated me was not because I am worthless, but because he was a really bad dad.

But that’s additional value! Seriously, they Factor the price of NaOH into their cost efficiency estimation, yes, they use the retail price of NaOH to offset the sodium cost, and only by that are comparable to synthetic aviation fuel. This is beyond ridiculous.

In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.

I guess it shows how out of touch (old) I am that it’s completely bewildering to me that there could be people who do not understand folders … on a computer. Phones, tablets, yeah, I get that, those actively make it harder and harder to access the folder structure. But computers?

Scientist here, a lot of my job is writing texts with references to other literature of the field, or reviewing such texts (or PowerPoints). Main screen has the document open, the other is actually in portrait format and has gazillions of open pdfs on it that are relevant to whatever I’m working on. I had to get this setup for working from home because productivity dropped immensely with only one screen.

This so much. I have a three days a week home Office deal, and I did Not, We, Fr for some time and it sucked. Monday I just could not find a proper start for the workday, which in the end translated to doing more work in the evening. Same on fridays, where I just did not find a proper cut to end the work day. So bad it even went into Saturday mornings. Now I do Tu-Th as home Office days, which works amazingly.

I am thoroughly confused, isn’t “Dudette” a term that’s used for female Dudes? Or “her Dudeness” if you aren’t into that whole brevity thing.

To be really inclusive, I would also use the term for female dogs, like, “Hey, dogs and…”. Yeah, no,.sorry, I’ll show myself out.

Schnutzeplotzepfnitzekatz!

Guess the language…

Part of my work is to evaluate proposals for research topics and their funding, and as soon as “AI” is mentioned, I’m already annoyed. In the vast majority of cases, justifiably so. It’s a buzzword to make things sound cutting edge and very rarely carries any meaning or actually adds anything to the research proposal. A few years ago the buzzword was “machine learning”, and before that “big data”, same story. Those however quickly either went away, or people started to use those properly. With AI, I’m unfortunately not seeing that.

You can buy alcohol at Disney?! With everything being so prude about drinking in public in the US, this completely amazes me.

Or whenever using your credit card online. The pro version would be that it turns off functions successively depending on your BAC. At some point the only unblocked function would be to call a cab to go home.

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

Put a smile to my face to see so many cats (and dogs) involved.

When I get up and do my morning business on the toilet, the cat comes and rolls around on the bath mat in front of my ear scratches and cuddles included. Turning on the bidet (yes, hidden flex) is the audible clue that business is concluded, he gets up, wait patiently in the door frame while I start brushing my teeth. I then walk downstairs (while brushing my teeth), cat as added tripping hazard on every step. He again waits patiently while I start the coffee maker, and only when I open the door of the cat food and treats cabinet, he starts being agitated until I put food in the bowl and put it down for him. And then there’s always this glance back, blinking before he digs in, and this very moment is my treasure for the day.

I started with a Santoku brought from a business trip to Japan, don’t think it was a special brand. It was 50 EUR (that was almost 15 years ago), but for me that’s how I got into it. Now I am lucky enough to have a friend who’s a blacksmith to get custom made knives.

I usually recommend the Haiku Chroma series as entry level, or if you are looking for a western style chef’s knife, I’d go with a Wusthoff classic. Both are a bit more than 100 EUR, so I’d always recommend to go to a shop and get a feel for them and what works best for you. Important thing is western or Japanese style handle (shaped vs. round), and a length and weight you feel comfortable with.

That switch flipped a few years ago. Unfortunately it only did so after my mother passed away, but I suddenly realised that I don’t need my dad’s approval in my life. And that he’s a toxic narcissist which I don’t have to like or have in my life. Understanding that, I could unravel a lot of crap from my childhood, which helps understanding some things that are wrong with me today. I guess the switch that flips when you understand that your parents don’t necessarily need to be good for you is a really important one.

A really nice kitchen knife. I use it daily and it makes cooking so much more fun, which translates into eating less junk food and take out, saving a ton of money and being more healthy.

Just the other night my wife commented that I’m turning into Ron Swanson: after spending the day in the workshop making a bookcase for an oddly shaped nook in the house (carpenter quoted me a price so high that just with this project the nice miter saw amortized itself) I fired up the grill to cook a nice porterhouse steak, while nursing a nice dram of lagavulin. I even work for the government

Not just the internet, consumer computing as a whole became a shitshow. You need accounts for everything, Microsoft pushes you hard to use their online service, the default becoming that you to log onto your own computer you need to go through their online Microsoft account, which is terribly unsafe (if your ms account gets hacked, the hacker had access to you system). After “software as a service” more or less has been normalised, I’m just waiting for hardware going down that path, too. I’d say it begins already that I had to create a NVIDIA account to actually update drivers. Soon, this account may not be free anymore.

To most issues like this there are workarounds, but sometimes you have to dig deep. So it’s either you need to spend time to make things work like you want, or accept all this crap. For me, this is fine, because I like the tinkering. But I am also *administrating" most of my elder family members’ computers, which is a nightmare because of that. “So I saved the document, where is it on my computer,?” - “If you used the default OneDrive crap, it just is not on your computer…”