Found out that I have been torturing my CPU for the past two+ years... My PC is a very compact case (NZXT H1). It would spin up the biggest fan, which is the CPU all-in-one watercooled fan, pretty fast and would stay constant at that loud level. I was under the assumption that a temperature sensor was broken and that it would just go up too soon. What I did not know until yesterday was that my CPU fan was spinning entirely uselessly because the waterpump was turned off. So my poor poor CPU would get any load, its temperature would rise to 100C, and it would attempt oh so vigourously up the the AIO fan's RPM. The water pump, not impressed by this, wouldn't budge. So my CPU has been thermal throttled to a measly 799hz for god knows how much. No wonder VR minigolf is too much of an ask for my system, dropping frames left and right at a cinematic 25-35fps. I was this close to buying a new AIO cooler after debugging all this with o3. It however was smart enough to suggest "hey, could you just double check to see if the cables are connected properly?" after which I discovered that the pump and the fan were plugged into each others slots in the motherboard. An easy five minute swap & fan curve change later and now my PC is FINALLY quiet and runs 120fps of whatever I throw at it. Turns out that 120hz minigolf has ball physics as smooth as a physics undergrad modeling a cow.
Yeaaah they made two screws from the wrong material, potentially causing a shortcut. I thought they did a pretty good job of quickly providing new screws, so it should be fine now, especially since it has not caught on fire when I, inadvertantly, really tried to for the past years.
I told my sister two and a half years ago that our mother was either going to die of MRSA or she was going to die of C-diff. It's looking like C-diff. "dying of a bacterial infection because you didn't do your physical therapy so you can't wipe your ass cleanly so your UTI hospitalizes you so you catch a killer bug that murders you with diarrhea" is Dante's Inferno stuff for this woman. Fuckn My sister, however, wasn't always mistreated by her so she's trying to save her life. I've been counseling her through it all and providing what advice I can. She ended up extracting the bitch (and her senile husband) to a Romanian-run homecare in Redneckistan, CA, where the C-diff came back super-mean. The senile husband has been busily flushing his diapers which backed up the plumbing which flooded the house which caused three staffers to quit. Meanwhile my mother is such a cantankerous bitch that two skilled nursing facilities (where she did time recuperating from various bouts of c-diff) have already refused to take her back. There are two things that suck: 1) My sister is neglecting her own kids to deal with this bitch who, now that she's chased away everyone else, is treating my sister the way she always treated me 2) My sister is not having a good time with it so I'm having to be simultaneously sympathetic while also dancing around the subject of "she's been this nasty to me my entire goddamn life" The bitch disowned me over email about 30 seconds after the offer on the house was accepted. She'll probably be dead before I can move in. My daughter overheard me conversing with my sister in the car and asked what's up; I told her "your grandma is going to die of a nasty infection because she didn't keep up on her exercises enough to be able to wipe her own ass." My daughter responded with "this may be an insensitive question, but are we going to the funeral?" to which I laughed and said "hell nah I doubt there will even be one." I've been grappling with the certainty that I'll never get to live in this house. I will be dead before that happens. It's just the law of the universe. The silver lining is in counseling my sister through her misadventures, I've been able to explain and rationalize and predict the bitch's behavior in such a way that it helps my sister cope. At one point I said "she judges her happiness on a relative scale; it's not really important that she's objectively enjoying herself, what's important is that everyone around her is more miserable than she is" and I heard it and I realized that my sense of doom about success and personal advancement isn't some superstitious outcome of low self-esteem, it's a learned bias well-grounded in my own personal experiences growing up. I still don't think I'll live to sleep under that roof. But I now know why I think that. One thing's for fuckin' sure she never will
Putting in an offer on a house. Who knows what will happen. There's not a ton of interest in it which is wild because it's in phenomenal shape including a new foundation which for being surrounded by 100 year old homes that's genuinely shocking. Needs a new roof, and electric service is only 100 amps, but otherwise everything is immaculate. Great neighborhood too. We're worried we're missing something but we've gone over disclosures as have our realtors and my partner's parents and none of us noticed anything shocking or that would suggest low interest. Pictures of the house were staged with the owner's furniture and she's an older woman so we think that could be why, that it showed poorly in pictures. But otherwise not the foggiest notion on why people are passing over it. And the best part is that in 9 days we leave for an 2 week international trip.
I know less than fuckall about the SF housing market but having saddled myself with a project in which - Plumbing - Electrical - HVAC - Structural - Architectural - and Landscaping have all cried "uncle" at one point or another, I can share a few insights: 1) If it needs a roof, most people looking at it will assume it needs a fuckton more. Changing out the roof is maintenance everyone does with stunning regularity because if you don't you can't insure your house and if you can't ensure your house and also can't afford a cash bond, your city can foreclose on you. My house needed about $400k in plumbing, electrical and HVAC and it had a new roof three months before I bought it. 2) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a new roof, most people looking at it will assume that there's something deep dark and deadly that the sales agent is hiding. 3) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a bunch of other new shit, the assumption is that the foundation was necessary to avoid the house being red-tagged and all the stuff that isn't a literal life-safety issue is left to do. None of these are certain. Think like a flipper, though: money is dumbly expensive and you may be seeing something that another flipper is trying to get out from under. Everyone I talk to assumes I'm flipping my house; the median home price in town is now like $1.8m, why on earth would you buy something that ridiculous to live in when clearly there's money to be made? Disclosure has also gotten ridiculously stupid in the past 24 months. Used to be you'd have your inspection period and you'd come up with a laundry list of items to knock the price down. You'd throw all the broken shit at them and they'd haggle over what it was worth. Then someone decided to sue a seller for not disclosing something they knew about from a prior inspection and lost so now you get your inspection period, you add up your costs, and you say "we're reducing our offer $25k; you don't wanna know why and we don't want to tell you." And hey you know what? Maybe they don't want to reduce their price $25k. They tell you to pound sand, they take it off the market for 30 days, and then they relist it. It doesn't show as a reduction. It doesn't show history. It's a brand new house for a brand new set of yokels to come look at. You can literally play this game until someone stupid enough comes along to pay your ask. I have a friend who's been shopping in Reno for 18 months. They made an offer on a place that looked pristine and as soon as they said "we need to do another inspection to see if this is going to cost $50k or $550k to fix" the seller's agent stopped answering the phone and the earnest money reverted. I'm rather proud of breaking Redfin. I came back with "we will offer you $300k under ask, no reason" and they came back with "ZOMFG so outrageous" (her) "my f'n ex-wife" (him). I came back with "if you take the offer I'll show you why" which was enough for her to go "okay fucking fine" and enough for him to go "see here how this bitch managed to do $350k worth of damage to this house? We're petitioning to have the divorce settlement opened back up so the reduction comes out of her half." Redfin responded by saying that I had gained $450k in equity the very next day, and then 30 days later decided I'd lost $150k in equity in the past 30 days because of the giant crater I put in the housing market. The Seattle Times ran a graph of county sales over the past year and shit was thin enough on the ground that I can literally see where I dragged down the housing market for the whole goddamn county. So I know a thing or two about bargain hunting. And what I will tell you is that every single person you will find, you will talk to, you will work with? From your realtor to your inspector to the first contractor you call? They're all assclowns. They are nebbishes, they are dipshits, they are morons, they are fucktards, they are woefully out of their depth and the simple fact that they're available to you means that they can only drive you deeper. I just fired my third architect. She fucking sistered rafters onto rafters she drew at the wrong angle, despite having a picture in the prints showing the correct angle, and then said "well you said yourself this was a complicated project." When I told her that it would have been cheaper to put in a new roof she said "I thought you were." Then why the fuck are we sistering to rafters we're demoing bitch And, of course, she submitted prints that show sistered rafters to demo'd rafters. Because she's an incompetent floozy. But they all are. I had a lot of contempt for the building trades back when I was an architectural consultant. I tempered it somewhat for a while because I've had good luck with some contractors. But I realized a couple months ago that I had five buildings in the national AIA top ten in 2004 and almost nobody gets to work at that level in architecture. The architects who pissed me off back then were the ones with Wikipedia pages, not the ones operating out of the spare bedroom. It's been alternatively terrifying and edifying that one contractor after another has come back with "oh, I see it now." Or "man this house is going to be cool." Or "yeah, I get it. This just works." Because I've been trying to renovate a great house owned and built by a unique guy who got taken advantage of by parasites. And it's been inches from majesty for thirty goddamn years but there have been too many bloodsuckers and not enough genuine practitioners to even fucking attempt what I'm doing. It's a soul-scouring amount of work and I'm on the verge of tears many times weekly. And if you're looking at something in the Bay Area that needs a roof?
i have been tweaking about the future lately and I'm strongly considering becoming an emt. i can't remember if we have anybody that has done that on here, but i wanted some insight on that and also from people who have made drastic career changes
I know a few former EMTs. My take is that it's a good interim career that opens you up to other things - one I know transitioned to property developer, another transitioned to midwife and then pharmaceutical rep, another is transitioning to full-time musician. My suggestion is to look at it in terms of "I want to spend the next 5-10 years as an EMT" instead of "I want to be an EMT" and see how that hits. We interact with EMTs on the daily and the guys in the rigs generally don't do it forever - they either cycle into admin or they cycle out to other jobs.
i think "the next 5-10 years" is exactly what i need right now, and then i worry about the pivot when i get there i've been doing some searching and there are programs where a company pays for the course if you work for them for a year after you get certified, and to be honest even if the job they lock you into sucks, I'm fine with a year of a shitty job because it actually means getting a job, and at least they give you hours i'm already moving so i might as well go in headfirst, right?
any chicagoan hubskiers? we have our apartment for july