technothrasher

I travel a lot with my 13" MacBook Air and can't imagine wanting to deal with anything bigger and heavier.

I'd definitely say the 20% is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Anybody who has eaten raw and roasted cacao nibs should be able to easily identify the same flavors pervasively in chocolate, and which are from the raw cacao and which are from the roasting. Although the more sugar, dairy, and other adjuncts in the chocolate, the less the cacao flavors come through.

I live on a shared driveway with two other neighbors. The zoning laws in my town require an HOA for any shared driveways. So I technically live under an HOA. But we’ve all agreed to not fund it or bring it to life in any way. We just work out the shared responsibilities of the driveway informally over a bottle of whiskey.

I had an interaction with a raven in California that made me sure it has seen the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. I was sitting on the ground, and it was behind me. It clearly wanted a bit of the sandwich I was eating, but it didn't move a muscle. Every time I turned around, it continued to be dead still, but was just a little closer to me. When it was finally about a foot away from me and just as statuesque as ever, I told it to buzz off because I wasn't going to feed it. It seemed to have understood and just walked away slowly, looking back at me occasionally with a hurt look in its eyes.

One of my son's old toys is up in some box in the attic. Whenever I go up there, about one in three times it says, "The lions says 'Roar'", when I'm walking back down the attic stairs. I don't know why that is what trips it, as walking up them doesn't seem to, and I don't know what box it is in and can't be bothered to look for it the pull the batteries out. It's been doing that for years, as he's in college now.

"These people are factually correct in everything they say"

Are they? I don't know the German movement, but the talking points I hear coming from US BARF people seem to mostly be a mix of FUD, naturalistic fallacy, anti-vax, and misunderstanding of biology.

I know you meant it just as an off-hand joke, but sadly there are most definitely people who hate kittens.

I've made it a rule to only donate significant money (whatever "significant" might mean) to charities where I know the people and/or have visited them first hand. I love the idea of donating for a kid's education, and indeed have been "sponsoring a child" at jhamtse.org for the past several years. Because I've met the principles of the place, and have had family members involved on the ground there, I know the money is well spent. I know the "sponsorship" doesn't actually mean the money only goes to help that one individual kid, but I don't mind, and I like getting the updates about the progress of this particular boy.

Touching someone when asking them to do something is a well known psychological trick. It immediately increases intimacy, which makes the person more likely to do what you ask. Though it can also backfire if the person is particularly sensitive and finds the intimacy uncomfortable.

I have essentially gone with option 2 in my Audi A3. Every time I turn the car on, it puts up a dialog that warns me that I've made the terrible, terrible decision to not allow remote data and forces me to say, "no, do not turn it on for me now," before I can do anything else on the screen. Every, single, time.

I actually feel better about making edits if I know people may revert them. I don't have the time or interest to dig in deeply to what exactly they want, so I normally wouldn't contribute. But if I know people double check and fix mistakes, I'm more likely to try and be helpful with the app.

> Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.

I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.

I beat you to it by eight years. I was 16 in 1987 when I asked my father to lend me $5K to invest in Microsoft. It was at ~$0.30/share. That would have been around $8.5M today. He said no. To be fair though, he likely said no simply because he didn't have it to lend me.

> I don’t think we have to judge countries by their countrysides.

My least favorite place in the US is Manhattan, and my least favorite place in Japan is Tokyo. If I couldn't judge a country by its countryside, I suspect I would hate most countries.