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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • House on the Rock

    When I moved to Wisconsin back in 2006, House on the Rock was one of the first things I heard about from my neighbors to go see. My wife and I looked at the website and said “we’ll go see it someday.” Well, that day was about a month ago as back then we started having kids and getting used to living in a new place. However, over the past 19 years I’ve had people tell me that “you’ve got to go see it.”

    Now… I understand.

    Is that place a monument to a man’s ascent to brilliance?

    Or his decent into madness.

    There was stuff in that museum that I took DAYS to process and I still really am unable to understand what it was I was looking at. It took my family and I FOUR hours to walk through it. It could have been a LOT longer if we actually stopped to study more than what we did.

    I’m 55 years old and I’ve seen and done a lot things in my life… None of it prepared me for the sheer onslaught that is House on the Rock. Walking out of it I told my wife that I rather chaffed at the entrance fee when I paid it… Now, I’m not sure if they charged enough.

    If you’re ever anywhere close to South Central Wisconsin… Take a day and go see it.

    It doesn’t just live up to the hype… It so far exceeds it that trying to explain the place will never do it justice.









  • Donate money to your local food banks, homeless shelters, or any other non-profit that has a good reputation for assisting those in need.

    If someone approaches you asking for money, absolutely under no circumstances should you give it to them. Be sure to say that you do not carry cash to give them. Then if you are feeling that you need to give to them, then offer a meal or buy groceries using a credit card. You’ll find that most of them will decline.

    They are using YOUR GUILT to get their next drug fix most of the time. That guilt is artificial and the result of manipulation techniques they are employing against you. It is rather contemptible to be perfectly frank.


  • If I’m just casually thinking about something. In other words, it is a subject that does not require too much to come to a conclusion, then I actually think in words. That process can provide a solution almost immediately, to taking several minutes.

    If I’m thinking about something that requires a lot of cognitive function, then my mind essentially goes blank. Either I no longer think in words, or the memory of what I was thinking about is not laid down in long term memory until I come to a conclusion. Or if my “sub-consciousness” took over the heavy lifting and my cognitive functions were left out of the loop. I honestly have no idea, but if it is something I am truly concentrating on, I will have no actual memory of the thought process that brought me to a conclusion.

    Some of the most confounding things that I have had to think on, I literally slept on it and had a finished thought when I woke up. I have done that several times in my life. Again, not sure if it was just that I needed rest, or if my brain actually worked the problem while asleep and delivered it when I awoke.



  • I wanted to be a pilot.

    By age 16 I had several hours towards my private license.

    My junior year in High School I started looking universities with aviation degrees, or engineering. I had settled on Rose Hulman and one other (been 40 years so don’t remember the place, but it was one of the top aviation colleges in the US at the time.) I actually was accepted at “the other place”.

    It all came crashing down in the last conversation I had with my enrollment counselor and he asked a question that hadn’t been asked of me in the prior many conversations I had with him.

    “How is your eyesight?”

    You see, I’m legally blind in my right eye and in the US, pilots are required to have 20/20 corrected eyesight. In order for my right eye to be 20/20 I would basically have to have a telescope hanging off my face.

    I never did get my private pilots license, which I can get even with my eyesight, but I would never pass medical for a commercial ticket.

    Yes, I did look at training in other countries and yes there are a few that only require perfect color vision, which I do have. The problem was my parents absolutely forbade me to travel to another country.

    So that was that.


  • Canopyflyer@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world[deleted]
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    1 month ago

    Spent 2 weeks hiking in around the Red River Gorge, Kentucky and Sheltowee Trace back in the late 80’s. Only time I got wet was when it rained, or found a creek to take a dip in.

    When I got home, even my own Mother would not hug me. She sent me off to the bath where I stayed for over an hour.




  • Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.

    Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I’ve worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I’ve ever seen up until that time and since.

    They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They’d bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered “nothing” every god damn time.

    They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a “B”) a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.

    We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.

    Fuck IT Security. It’s a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.