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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.


  • Ideally you notice it from the shore and avoid it as others have mentioned. If you’re swimming in one you’ll realize soon enough you’re getting taken out from the shore.

    I got caught in one when I was a teenager off Mission Beach in San Diego. I’d already been out swimming in water deeper than I could stand in for a while and, getting tired, started heading to shore. After some time I realized I wasn’t making any progress at all. It took me a little while more to realize what was up: I was in a rip current. Thankfully I’d had an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, AZ of all places that taught us kids how to escape one and I remembered - swim parallel to the shore a good distance and then try swimming back in again and check your progress. Repeat as needed if you’re unable to make progress. I followed those instructions and eventually was able to get back to shore, utterly exhausted. I can’t help but think how lucky I was not to have missed that day of school.










  • I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

    The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.


  • I was once very poor and now pretty well-off. I’m generally happy to try and pick up the bill when I go out with friends and family because I’m thankfully in a place in my life I can do that and I remember how thankful I was for the generosity of others early in my life. Unfortunately I’ve found some people get offended… that my picking up the bill is some power move to show I’m rich so I’ve become reluctant to do that unless I’ve explicitly invited them to dinner or whatever. I don’t want people to think I’m showing off and trying to make them feel inferior so if they’ve invited me or it’s an otherwise group event, I assume they’re paying their own way and didn’t come with the idea that someone else was paying for them. If somehow I’m the one whose credit card it ends up on because the place won’t split the bill, I’ll let people know how to Venmo me or whatever. It’s not because I’m worried about the money though.