The casing on the outside of my air fryer is plastic, but the inside, where my food cooks, is all metal. 🤘

Google Maps is convenient, yes. But I’ve been trying to de-Google my life recently, and finding alternative map programs has been difficult.

I was using OsmAnd~ for a while, then switched to Organic Maps. Just recently, I’ve switched to CoMaps, since Organic Maps started including affiliate links and could potentially be harvesting user data to sell.

It’s always a struggle, trying to find free open-source software (FOSS) that provides a reliable service without collecting your information.

EDIT: As part of my de-Googling, I’ve been trying to find software through F-Droid instead of the Google Play store, since Google can potentially track my apps and their data usage through their store. CoMaps is available on F-Droid.

“…Are you crabs yet?”

Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”

I had this problem learning Norwegian.

• “And” is “og”
• “Or” is “eller”

Everytime I see “og” in a Norwegian sentence, I immediately want to translate as “or.” It keeps tripping me up! “Eller” feels like too many letters to be “or,” so I keep translating it as “and” instead.

Thank you. As a former IT guy, I’ve been trying to keep my family away from Apple products. They’re way overpriced for their limited and locked down functionality compared to everything else out there.

My dad had Parkinson’s late in his life and my sister replaced his Android with an iPhone, specifically so she could give him this fitness tracker. He spent the last few years of his life struggling to figure out a new phone, and we could never get the damn app to work anyway. He fell all the time and it never once reported it.

I spent 20 years in the IT field and getting my computer-illiterate family to consult me before buying computer tech is like pulling teeth. I offer them free consultation and support all the time and they just go out and buy spyware-riddled junk on their own. They only come to me when their stuff is no longer useable.

My sister finally stopped buying iPads… only for her to go and buy Amazon Fire tablets for her kids. I had to go in and lock them down because they were constantly shoving ads into every function of the tablet. Her kids kept trying to buy games because they were constantly being advertised to them. And guess who left their credit card credentials on the tablet?

My apologies, /rant.

Why?

I’m just about to turn 41 and I had several experiences with long-distance relationships before I got married. Heck, I got hitched before online dating became a common thing; I totally missed the boat on that. I feel like online dating would’ve made my life much easier because I’m an introvert who sucked at talking face-to-face with anyone I had a crush on. But I could chat online all night and seduce practically anyone with my charm and wits. I had serious game as long as I was behind a computer screen, haha! And I was pretty handsome in my youth, so I never disappointed when people met me in person.

In 2001, I was 17 and long-distance dating my best friend’s 3rd-cousin. She lived about 3 states away. We got to know each other through AOL Instant Messenger after my friend asked me to chat with her one night. We’d be chatting all night, keeping each other company with only typed words. I only met her twice in person. The second time, she decided that the long distance relationship was too hard to maintain. She was about to graduate and go off to college anyway. I still had another year of high school before I was free.

A few years later, when I was 20, I had joined the US Air Force and was stationed in Japan for my first assignment. I found myself dating a local Filipino girl. She was 27, and the most advanced tech she owned was a flip phone. Planning dates was awful because I didn’t even own a mobile phone, so I had to hang out near my landline phone at home and wait for her to call when she was ready for me to pick her up. She would soak in the tub for 3+ hours each night before our dates, so I spent most of my evenings just sitting at home, waiting for her call. She didn’t own a car, so I had to go pick her up.

In 2005, I got deployed to Africa for 4 months. I basically told my girlfriend that I would be unreachable while I was there, but if the opportunity arose, I’d try to contact her. I wrote her a few letters while I was gone, and even sent a few brief emails to her phone. She had some email service that would forward messages to her flip phone, but only if it was less than 20 characters. She didn’t own a computer. I got to call her only once, but we were limited to a 5-minute call, and someone was always listening to the conversation, to make sure I didn’t discuss classified information.

I came home from Africa and my girlfriend was so excited to see me again, she planned to spend the night at my place. But after a very passionate “reunion” that night, she suddenly got very quiet. She wouldn’t look at me and refused to talk. After coaxing her for a bit, she finally opened up and accused me of cheating on her while I was gone! When I asked where she got that idea, she said the sex was so good, I must have been practicing with other girls! I tried to explain that it was just the pent up emotions from being abstinent for so long, but she wouldn’t hear it. She had thoroughly convinced herself and she dumped me that night.

I went home on vacation to visit family shortly after that and wound up meeting the girl who would eventually become my wife. She was the college roommate of an ex-girlfriend of mine whom I was still close friends with. My soon-to-be wife and I spent a few days of my vacation hanging out, then I went back to Japan and we stayed in touch over AOL Instant Messenger. We chatted almost every day and got to know each other really well.

When I got sent to Oklahoma for my next assignment, less than a year later, I was only a few states away from my eventual wife, and she asked if I would be willing to try a long-distance relationship with her. I had finally received my first-ever mobile phone (a flip-phone) and I made an effort to call her at least once a week. Outside of that, we stayed in touch via email or through AOL Instant Messenger. About once a year, when I had saved up some vacation days, I would drive the 7+ hours out to her home and I would spend a week or two staying with her before returning to my military base.

A year later, she graduated college and wanted to move in with me, but I got deployed to Iraq a week before she was supposed to move in. So I mailed her a house key and told her to make herself comfortable and I would be back in 4 months. While I was deployed, we chatted almost daily through Gchat, Google’s attempt at an instant messenger program embedded in Gmail.

I eventually came home and we lived together for about 9 months before I got a new assignment to South Korea. I was going to be stationed there for 1 year before being reassigned to Germany. I couldn’t bring my girlfriend along, so she went back to her home state for the year. I promised we’d meet up in Germany a year later.

A half year later, I went home on vacation and proposed to my then-girlfriend. She said yes, but also dropped a bombshell: she didn’t know how to keep a steady job if she was just going to be following me around the world, moving every few years at the whim of the military. So she asked if I was okay with her joining the military as well. She had learned a lot about military life and how excellent the benefits and pay were, and she wanted to try it for herself.

So I took her to a military recruiter, got her signed up, then I went back to South Korea for the second half of my year-long assignment.

But I told her, if she joined as a single woman, she would get a random assignment somewhere in the world and I might never see her again. So I suggested that we just get the legal paperwork for marriage out of the way so she’s legally tied to me, then we can plan a big wedding some other time when we’re living closer to home. If we’re legally married, then the military would keep us assigned together.

So we looked into the legal process for her home state and found out I didn’t have to be physically present to get married, and we were allowed to sign the marriage license in advance of the ceremony. So she mailed a marriage license to me, I signed it with a legal notary as witness, then I mailed it back to her and she signed it as well.

Then she asked a friend of hers who was an ordained minister to perform a brief ceremony to legally wed us. My wife invited her military recruiter as a witness and they performed the wedding ceremony from her bedroom. I joined the ceremony over Skype, from my dormitory room in South Korea.

During that time, I only lost connection once. Webcams were not very reliable in those days (around 2009), so it was a miracle I only dropped the call once during the ceremony.

After the ceremony, her recruiter borrowed the wedding license to update her status as married before she officially joined the US military. 5 days later, my wife left for military basic training and it was almost a half a year later that I got to see her again. I couldn’t reach her while she was in training. I got assigned to Germany and my wife followed me there about 3 months later.

And that was pretty much the end of my struggles with old-fashioned long-distance dating. In 2009, I got my first-ever smartphone while in Germany (an iPhone 3S) and staying in touch with people became a lot easier from that point on.

Oh yeah, and I had the worst time staying in touch with my family while I was in the military. My mother would always mail me calling cards (back when long-distance phone calls were expensive as hell). She expected ME to reach out to HER, though. I gave her my email address, but she almost never emailed me. She thought it was MY responsibility as her son to call her.

Suffice to say, I didn’t have much contact with my family in the 20 years I spent in the military. Long-distance phone calls were expensive and difficult to figure out when I was stationed outside the US, and I was always a bad conversationalist on the phone. If I couldn’t see who I was talking to, my brain would wander and I’d lose track of the conversation. I learned at 37 years old that I have a bad case of ADHD, which explained my struggles with staying in touch with people who weren’t physically nearby.

My wife and I moved in with my dad when I retired from the military a few years ago, but my mother had divorced him and moved across the country by then, so I still struggle to stay in touch with her. I’m trying to text her more often, but she’s extremely old-fashioned and expects me to call her instead of messaging. She’s 100% a boomer (born in the '40s) and is completely tech-illiterate. It’s very frustrating. She doesn’t really believe in ADHD and thinks it’s just an excuse to be lazy, so she regularly plays the victim when I don’t contact her enough. Which just makes me dread calling her.

So I guess I’m still struggling to communicate in an old-fashioned way with my mother, even to this day. But I’m pretty good at staying in touch with other friends and family via more modern communications.

They couldn’t get Leslie Nielsen to reprise his role (since he passed away 15 years ago), so they called the next closest name in the Hollywood phone book: Liam Neeson.

Personally, I hooked up a micro PC to my TV to use it as a giant monitor. I use a small wireless keyboard and mouse to control it from the couch.

Then I use Firefox with uBlock Origin (and Proton VPN) to block ads while I access YouTube from a browser on my TV.

I’m very anti-advertisement, so I don’t even watch TV anymore. My TV is a glorified streaming PC; I stream all my shows and movies online and block ads that way. No commercial breaks!

I also built my own Plex media server and ripped all my DVD and Blu-ray discs to it (and even some old VHS tapes!), so I can stream my own media from anywhere; through my phone, tablet, laptop, etc. I primarily use it to watch my movies and TV shows on my living room TV.

I also ripped all my old music CDs to mp3 and added them to Plex, so I now have my own ad-free music I can listen to on the go. I stream it through the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car’s Bluetooth. It’s like ad-free radio, except I can play whatever I want to listen to in the moment.

I mean, in that political circle, he’s highly respected. Just not with the people of the “kingdom.”

If we’re dressing them like kings, I feel the last one should be a jester, not a clown.

Hobbies are about enjoyment, not skill. You should never measure your accomplishments with hobbies based on how good you are at them.

That said… when I was younger, I only indulged in hobbies that I had any skill in. If I sucked at something, I typically gave it up quickly and looked for something else to do.

Video games were an exception. I enjoyed the gameplay so much, it didn’t matter that I was awful at them. I’d grind the same levels over and over, hoping to finally beat it this time.

Interestingly enough, I’m actually really good at video games now. Not professionally so, but I have a lot more skill than most of my friends. I’m usually appointed team leader in any co-op games I play with my friends because I’m really good at tracking the mission objective and keeping everyone together. And now that I’m retired young, I spend a lot of time gaming throughout the days, which only makes me better.

I don’t play games for the challenge or skill, though. I mostly play to enjoy an interactive story. So I usually turn the difficulty down to the easiest option so I don’t get stuck from progression at any point. I can handle really difficult games, but I just don’t want to. Unless my friends want a challenge, then I’ll crank it up and then be constantly bailing them out from the nightmare they chose to play.

I must’ve been tired last night… I stared at this meme for so long, not able to make any sense of it. What does the Cold War have to do with refrigerators?! I finally put down my tablet and went to sleep.

This morning I picked up my tablet, saw this meme again, and immediately thought, “Oh, the COLD war.” Duh.

I cancelled Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ a couple months ago. No more streaming subscription services for me! I’m very anti-subscription.

Except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix but for educational documentaries. Even with the cost of my subscription doubling in the last 4 years, I’m still only paying about $30/year for it. Way cheaper than Netflix, and highly educational too!

I also set up my own Plex media server, then ripped all my DVDs and Blu-rays to my computer so I can watch them anytime, streaming from anywhere. I don’t have to worry about content disappearing because the only time something vanishes from my Plex server is when I manually remove it myself.

Plex itself also has tons of free movies and TV shows streaming through it too. Mostly stuff that’s open license. So even if you don’t have your own media server set up, there’s still tons of stuff to watch without paying for a subscription.

Basically charisma (the rizz part)

Think of it like “cha-rizz-ma.” It’s just a slang abbreviation, using only the middle sound of “charisma.”

Fellow old guy here, in my early 40s. I had to figure out where “rizz” came from before it really clicked for me.

I saw the “Women in Metal” title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

SQL is the language. Its name is also an acronym, for “Structured Query Language.”