We always think we’ll get it out for some special occasion, we just haven’t hosted one ourselves in a while. We think we might after we settle from this move, but who knows.

They kind of died for a little while. I remember seeing Weird Al talking about how they didn’t make any music videos for one of his albums, I think mid-/late-’00s. Then when his next album came around YouTube had made them so important that they made some sort of video for every song on that album. They weren’t all fully produced like in the heyday of MTV, but they wanted to have something to upload.

I guess I had one or something like it when I first moved out. My parents gave it to me along with a matching dining table, all of which had been sitting in their basement. My wife wasn’t a fan of it and when we moved out of the house we listed it for sale, eventually selling it for a few hundred dollars, after sitting on the market for close to 2 months and dropping the price a few times.

My parents were upset when they found out; it turned out they had had that table custom made earlier in their marriage when they could finally afford new furniture. They said they would’ve bought it back for more than we got had they known. But a couple days later they begrudgingly realized they didn’t have room for that furniture and it wouldn’t have made sense for them to buy it.

A few years later they moved into a smaller home since all of us kids had been grown and moved out for years. As they tried to sell furniture and other things they weren’t going to have room for, it became depressing to them to see how little these things were worth that they had spent a lot of money on new. They had a set of china for each of us kids, one they bought or received as a wedding gift, others they had inherited from dead relatives. But it became apparent that we all preferred the same set, the one with the simplest design, yet it also was clear that we would only rarely, if ever, use the china and it’s largely a waste of space for any of us.

I think we might even have our set already, but we never use it and it’s not on display. If we have it it’s in the bottom cabinets of a console my wife loves. Also there are a couple very nice crystal bowls my uncle bought us, that my wife is almost terrified to get out of their box out of fear of breaking them. We understand they’re all nice items and expensive, but we might’ve preferred to have that money spent on things we’d get more use out of.

Better than Kit Kat and no Nestlé? Color me intrigued!

Better [Home & Finance] later faced a whistleblower lawsuit that was dropped, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that produced no action, and a disastrous 2023 SPAC merger. The company’s stock fell 93% after the merger, while losses continued to mount.

[…]

Better’s annual sales dropped from $1.5 billion in 2021 to $70 million in 2023. Garg says the company is now on track for $200 million in sales this year.

Hershey is giving other candy/food manufacturers below-market deals on chocolate or above-market licensing deals to produce their chocolate candies in the USA so Americans don’t discover how much better chocolate tastes without butyric acid. Inexpensive foreign chocolate could destroy The Hershey Company and there are big companies like Nestlé or Mondelēz that could do it relatively easily but instead let Hershey’s produce their brands under license with butyric acid added.

I loved how shooting on film cameras the focus would literally be set by using the tape measure and adjusting the focus on the lens accordingly, except for the time I forgot I’d been given the set our school had that was in meters instead of feet and wasted about 150 feet of 16 mm film.

This feels like Bender breaking up with the Planet Express Ship in the middle of battle.

“Eh, the moment seemed right.”

On our honeymoon, where we stayed we got a credit that we could use towards the spa or the high-end fine dining restaurant on the site. We chose the restaurant and even with the credit I think our bill was over $200, before tip. It was by far the best meal I’ve ever had, though, and our waiter was excellent, far beyond anything I’ve ever had before or since. He had extensive experience in fine dining, previously working many years in New York City at famous places, I think the Waldorf Astoria or something like that. That was when I understood the level of skill that can be attained in that career and how important that is to the fine dining experience.

Historically I would say I’m not a fan of turning over so much control to the car. However, since 2022 we’ve typically driven up to see my wife’s parents twice a year, a journey of roughly 1,200 miles/2,000 kilometers each way, because even flying normally wouldn’t get us to their rural Quebec town much faster and would cost a lot more. We got a newer Hyundai a couple years ago and it has some self-driving features taking advantage of the adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping systems. It can even change lanes itself when you activate the turn signals, although you still have to keep your hands on the steering wheel and that doesn’t work well half the time. I have found it works well enough in rural freeways with little traffic, and if I use it in those areas I’m able to handle more of the driving share on the trip and seem to be more alert and fresh in the heavier traffic areas around major cities. I test drove one or two GM vehicles that had a completely hands-off system, which I found freaky, but would probably appreciate even more in those rural stretches.

I still like the traditional model for paid software where you pay once, and then future major upgrades can be purchased for a discount; it seems like a fair way for the developer to support continued development while allowing the customer to decide if they prefer to stay on an older version.

It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.

Free as in beer, not as in speech, and DaVinci Resolve at least has a $295 upgrade for additional features, although last time I looked that upgrade is included with certain hardware purchases from Blackmagic.

Legalized extortion. Interestingly, reading up on the organization, they seem to operate globally, not just in the US.

This happened all the time on the New York Subway when I lived there 20+ years ago. But there you were usually only 2-5 minutes away from the next station and you had the ability to go to a different car, so most people just ignored them. You’re not going to find many commercial flights that are less than an hour gate to gate, though, and frequently many hours in duration.

Article from August 20, 2003

Did you want to settle?
Never, never. That’s the difference between the way an employee and an owner thinks. They attacked my family’s name and came into my community and made us look bad. There was never an instance of me wanting to give in. I would have loved to have fought it. But when (the BSA) went to Congress to get their powers, part of what they got is that I automatically have to pay their legal fees from day one. That’s why nobody’s ever challenged them–they can’t afford it. My attorney said it was going to cost our side a quarter million dollars to fight them, and since you’re paying their side, too, figure at least half a million. It’s not worth it. You pay the fine and get on with your business. What most people do is get terrified and pay their license and continue to pay their licenses. And they do that no matter what the license program turns into.

I wonder if that little poison pill about having to pay the legal fees for the Business Software Alliance from day 1 is still true? I’d also be curious to see a follow-up today for how they’re using FOSS in their business. There are a lot more resources today than there were in 2003!

I’m realizing I like smash burgers from fast food places. For me Shake Shack tops that list, with Freddy’s a close second. I was surprised at how good I thought Sonic’s smash burger was since I usually haven’t been overly-impressed with their food. Not a smash burger, but I do like Five Guys, although they’re really expensive. None of those I would describe as particularly fast, though.

For something that’s actually fast, as in my food can be ready as soon as I get to the window from when I ordered at the drive-thru intercom I’d say Wendy’s is currently my favorite. They changed their burgers after founder Dave Thomas died and I haven’t liked their changes to the traditional lineup, but the Double Stack or Baconator/Baconator Jr. are good. The others like McDonald’s, Burger King, Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. are consistent, rarely bad but also rarely great. You’re in Canada and I’ve noticed when we go visit my wife’s parents up there that McDonald’s is often running some limited-time variant on their burgers, often the quarter pounder, and sometimes they’ve been good, or at least interesting. We don’t seem to get those in the US, so if you want a fast food burger you might want to at least try them since you have easy access.

My recommendations might not mean much, though, because I haven’t been particularly impressed with the A&W burgers I’ve had in Canada. I’ve already forgotten what I really don’t like with them even though I had one a few weeks ago, but I think it’s something like the buns are weirdly grainy and the meat is loose and has an odd flavor. I like the root beer, though, in spite of your paper straws that start breaking down way too fast.

People keep acting like this is unprecedented, and maybe it hasn’t specifically happened this way before, but boom/bust seems to happen every few years.

To hear my dad and other older folks talk, though, it sounds like things were really good in the ’90s and they haven’t seen commission checks like that since.

GameStop beat out Hot Topic in bidding for ThinkGreek, with a winning bid of $20/share compared to Hot Topic’s bid of $17.50

So many of the foreigners visiting for the World Cup have missed out on another great American culinary tradition smh my head