They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I’m just giving them the nickel.

I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It’s expensive, but it’s also pretty great. We’re actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.

I didn’t discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we’re sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.

If you have reason to believe someone is in mortal danger, your response shouldn’t be to mail a letter giving them 30 days to respond.

You send police to the scene where they secure the potential suspect and make sure there’s nothing going on.

It’s actually 5.75% annually.

6.25% would compund to 27.4% over 4 years.

PS3 is the trickiest. They had that weird Cell architecture which is more difficult to emulate than simply “less-powerful x86” emulation required for more-recent consoles.

The whole reason he tried to keep weapons from Ukraine was because he was given instructions by Putin to make Russia’s planned invasion easier.

Trump being Trump, he tried to extort some political favors or of Zelenskyy first, but clearing a path for Putin was always the goal.

Was that the first one that had M Bison as a playable character?

I’ve run across a few sites that allow me to check out entirely through Google Pay or PayPal, but not many. I still don’t love the info going through Google, but at this point they already have all my information, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference at this point.

And of course for anything that needs to be shipped they are going to need a name and shipping address.

I would like to seeegally mandatory “guest checkout” options with protections on data use. They’ll need to keep some kind of invoice/receipt of the transaction, but it should be illegal to use it for any other purposes than order/purchase tracking for guest accounts.

Lifetime vs annual.

You have a 100% chance of your life ending in death. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen this year.

Stop using vehicle footprint for trucks on CAFE standards.

Starting in 2012 truck fuel economy standards changed to being based on vehicle footprint, which essentially outlawed small trucks and encouraged manufacturers to keep making them bigger and bigger.

It’s why the Ranger, Dakota, and S10 were all suddenly discontinued. The Ranger eventually came back, but is now bigger than the F150 was before.

It’s hit cargo vans too. Between 2021 and 2023, all small cargo vans (Transit Connect, Promaster City, and NV200) were discontinued as they got passed by stricter fuel economy standards that penalized them for not having a larger footprint.

Aren’t cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they’re getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.

Most people who carry guns are doing it for self-defense, not civil defense.

The rules of an Active-shooter event are:

1. Flee
2. If you can’t flee, hide.
3. If you can’t hide, fight back.

Carrying a concealed weapon doesn’t change that. I have a little 380 pocket pistol I’ll occasionally carry. It’s low-capacity, low-power, and low-accuracy. No way am I volunteering to take on a psychopath with a long gun who isn’t worried about collateral damage with my little pea shooter, and anyone Who expects me too just because I’m armed can kiss my ass.

I carry a pistol to protect me from muggers and car-jackers, not to protect the public.

Yeah. I’ve noticed the new generation coming into the workplace can’t do shit on a computer.

They’ve grown up on apps that have simple interfaces and limited options. Give them the freedom and power of a workstation and you’ll find they never learned to learn real software.

Younger than the Dynatac.

Younger than the Dynatac.

I’m really, truly not trying to be flippant. But welcome to the first taste of adulthood. What you plan for your life and what your life becomes are very different things. I am not who I expected to be. I am not in the career I expected. I don’t have the same interests I expected, and I only have like 2 friendships from my high school days that I’ve really maintained.

But the thing is, none of that is necessarily bad. I enjoy my job, but as a high schooler “municipal development” wasn’t a career to dream about, even though it can be very satisfying.

I have different friends and interests, but they’re not worse. It’s just that the world broadens as you age.

You can’t really know who you are until the training wheels come off. That’s where you’re headed by the sound of it. Is it scary and stressful? Absolutely. But when you come out of it you’ll be the person you are, not the person somebody expects you to be.

The 20s were an amazing time where everything in my life got flipped around more than once. Now that I’m a few decades past it, I can better appreciate how much I grew in that time.

I also miss having a more cooperative body.

Bioshock.

I don’t think there will every be a more satisfying twist for me. The twist was about me, the human playing the game, and only works because of the nature of the format.

It was perfection.

Correct. And I appreciate that. A couple wanting a religous wedding should know that the pastor that’s blessing the union supports them.

In this case it is. All 50 states are required to perform gay marriages as of June 26th, 2015. The ruling took immediate effect nationwide. Clerks were having to hand-edit marriage licenses to allow for same-sex certificates because within an hour of the ruling people were showing up at courthouses to get married in states where it had been illegal.

Churches aren’t required to perform same-sex marriages nationwide, however.