Someone on reddit commented: "We tried that here in Germany. It didn't work out so well." That comment always sticks with me.

I recall our class getting a lecture in high school one time because we "rushed through it" and were being very disrespectful to the veterans who gave their lives for this country. Uh, okay...

I'm in a club that has the word "International" in the name. Yet they do the pledge of allegiance before meetings...Uh is it really "x Club, International", or is it "x Club, Murica!"? Most of our non-US members were Canadian, so I always wondered what they were thinking. "Smile and nod, boys...smile and nod..." would be my guess.

How I imagine that would go:

I used to work in a hardware store. One day a guy came in looking for a skyhook.

After we called his boss to confirm the situation (this was well before cell phones), we all had a good laugh. I think the boss was shocked he fell for it.

Lower Decks visiting DS9: "Just circle around and pretend we're in awe of the pylons."

I was in grad school when I realized I didn't know how to learn. I skated in high school and college, though looking back, some of those higher level classes in college should have been a sign that there was a problem, but I pulled it off with reasonably good grades.

It was a year or so into grad school before I realized I needed to learn this stuff without relying on the professor. I graduated, but not by much.

Well he does sound like an authority on crime. Committing them.

It's so crazy how true that is.

If you follow politics, the recent deal between Biden, Democrats, and the Republicans gave Republicans everything they supposedly wanted for border security. They aren't voting for it because Trump wants to keep hitting Biden on that issue during the election. It's fucking insane.

4:20 is the traditional time to smoke marijuana.

Wait, I thought downhill skiing was the risky one. What are the risks of cross country skiing? I would have expected that to be pretty safe, aside from exhaustion and tree wells.

One of our cats goes into "poor, unloved kitty" mode sometimes. It's a long mrrrroooowww that makes you think he's feeling all of the sadness in the world.

It's like, "Dude, we're upstairs. Come up and cuddle with us." (We work from home, and our offices are upstairs.)

We also used to have a female gray tabby that was a sound engineer. She'd find the places in the house that would echo her meows the loudest and let loose there. The house is so quiet since she passed, and we have other cats and a dog. On conference calls, it was much more likely you'd hear her than the dog or the other cats. (The dog has a louder bark, but he rarely uses it.)

Lots of houses in the US have heat pumps already.

This is about one state in the far north pushing to get them into more houses. Older heat pumps would not have been very effective there for most of the winter. Newer models can still produce heat in much colder temperatures, so they are adopting them.

I started with Linux using Slackware in the late 90s. I had to give up on it - first on the desktop around 2007, then on my server maybe 5 years ago. Dependency hell. For the server, the final straw was when I got some Ubiquiti equipment and needed to run the Unifi controller - I just did not want to deal with figuring out the dependencies and then worrying about them every time I updated.

The desktop and laptop run Kubuntu, and the server runs Debian. It's so nice being able to update things without having to worry. And I haven't noticed any effective difference in stability or anything like that. Just that much less time I spend maintaining things.

Sorry, Patrick!