The reason that ill-tempered Canadians don’t exist is that when a Canadian becomes mean they are magically transformed into a Canada goose, and flap off to find a flock.
Author: H Walker Jones, Esq
A professional programmer with a sordid past involving sysadmin, tech support, and cooking.
Can Confirm
90% of driving in/around Boston is going “oh shit, I’m in the wrong lane” and trying to cut over last minute (while everyone else does the same thing in all the other lanes)
It’s the Little Things
Small things make me happy.
I run a local Active Directory domain on my home network with a Samba back-end.¹ Over the past few weeks I’ve been building out a second domain controller, but I didn’t have 100% replication – it replicated AD and DNS, but not DHCP.²
After a short outage yesterday (due to an update) I decided that this had to change. So I:
- followed the instructions,
- realized that the instructions were out of date,
- figured out the correct procedure,
- completed my setup, and
- submitted a revision to the wiki.
It’s a small step, but I’m such a nerd that I’m riding high – one, because I’ve scratched an itch and have redundancy in my domain; and two, that I’ve visibly contributed something useful to open source (small as it may be).
¹ For along time it was powered by a single Raspberry Pi, but keeping that up to date became a struggle because it’s a little too low-powered. But that’s all another story.
² This isn’t a completely useless situation. It’s much easier to recover from a domain-controller crash if you still have a standing domain controller. (A solo-domain-controller recovery is much more complicated recovery.)
Lies, and the lying liars that tell them
There are strangers in your life that you should never lie to:
Your doctor or therapist because they won’t judge you, want to make you healthier, and can only make the best treatment plan with your full cooperation.
Your lawyer because they won’t judge you and can only provide the best legal advice when they know all the facts.
Your dentist and oral hygienist because, regardless of your lies, as soon as you open your filthy mouth they know whether you’ve flossed or not.
Three men step out of a car…
Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car driving down the highway. An officer pulls them over and asks Heisenberg, “Sir, do you know how fast you were going?”
“No, but I can tell you exactly where I am,” Heisenberg replies.
The officer gets suspicious and decides to search the vehicle. Opening the trunk, he discovers a dead cat in a box.
“Do you know there’s a dead cat back here?!” the officer exclaims.
“Well, now I do!” replies Schrödinger.
Getting frustrated, the officer decides to take the three men in for questioning — but Ohm resisted.
Garlic Baked Whitefish
This is a super-easy recipe. My first time trying I went from pre-heating the oven to dinner on the table in under 30 minutes.
The source recipe calls for tilapia, but it should work with nearly any white fish. Really there’s no reason it couldn’t work well with darker fish like salmon or tuna, though being thicker you may need to cook longer and flip the fish halfway through, as well as increase the other ingredient amounts.
This pairs well with rice and roasted vegetables.
Garlic-Baked Whitefish
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Pre-heat oven to 400° F, with cast-iron pan inside
- Mix up the melted butter, lemon juice, garlic, and red pepper flakes
- Toss fish into the pre-heated pan and sprinkle on some pepper. You don’t need to grease the pan first, dry is fine, the fish won’t stick.
- Pour the butter mixture evenly over the fish
- Bake for 12 minutes
Adapted from https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a19665918/oven-baked-tilapia-recipe/
Dashcam to the Rescue!
This shall come as no surprise to anyone that lives in or near Boston: my car got hit by another car while driving in downtown Boston. This is an every day occurrence, and is why many people avoid driving downtown.
The downside:
- my car got hit
- it must be fixed
- we didn’t make the appointment that I was picking up Alpha child for
The upside:
- nobody was hurt (in either car)
- the damage is relatively minor
- it wasn’t my fault
- I have a dashcam 🙂
Turn on the closed captioning for additional viewing fun!
Note several so-very-Boston things that occur in this video:
- a car crash in perfect driving conditions (shouldn’t happen)
- the two guys on the sidewalk that briefly glance in our direction, then keep going (principal of don’t-get-involved)
- the woman who takes advantage of the break in traffic to jaywalk (no fucks left to give)
Sadly, the other driver was scurrilous and claimed that I had swerved from the left lane into the right before stopping suddenly. (That would also be a very Boston thing to do, if it had happened.) Our insurance companies found in my favor after reviewing the dashcam footage, and my car’s damage is fully paid for – nothing out of pocket, no deductible.
I will not drive without a dashcam ever again. I wish I could provide a review of my particular unit but, sadly, it’s not made anymore – a review would be pointless.
I do recommend that anyone and everyone get a dashcam, though. Besides proving the details of driving incidents, you can accidentally capture some really cool stuff.
If you like watching dashcam footage, may I recommend dashcamgifs on reddit?
Massachusetts Names
- Barnstable
- Billerica
- Chatham
- Gloucester
- Groton
- Leicester
- Leominster
- Methuen
- Peabody
- Quincy
- Reading
- Waltham
- Woburn
- Worcester
No, I will not tell you how to pronounce them.
Found Out
I probably shouldn’t have fucked around.
– Guy who found out
Only Child
I was an only child… but it took a lot of effort.
—Alpha Child
We had been riffing on the Steven Wright joke, “When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.” Alpha’s ad-lib made the joke that much darker. I am quite proud.