Post Race!

[dday9]

Then I thought maybe my TV was doing something wonky with the VGA but a VGA to HDMI didn't work either.

[dday9]

Finally some 91% alcohol on the expansion pack and cartridge loader did the trick.

[dday9]

Next I'm going to introduce my son to games like Legend of Zelda and the Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and Cruisin' the World.

[dday9]

Basically I get to relive my childhood with my son.

[dilettante]

I think I have a classic 8-bit and a SNES here somewhere. If so they've been boxed up a while. The kids don't want them and eBay prices aren't high enough to be worth my trouble yet.

[Shaggy Hiker]

At one point, I had a VecTrex tucked away somewhere. It's long gone, now. These days, that would either be a valuable collectors item, or a forgotten bit of trivia. Probably the latter.

[dday9]

I literally never heard of it until now.

[dday9]

Woah, that was super ahead of its time!

[Shaggy Hiker]

It was pretty good. Many of the games that could be added in were kind of trivial. You eventually would beat them or they would beat you. There was no middle ground. Either they were so simple that you would win every time, or they reached a level that was impossible and you would lose every time. I barely remember most of them.

However, there was an asteroid game that was really awesome. It was easy enough, and fairly routine, up to level 13, at which an invisible killer ship appeared. You basically couldn't see it unless you were looking for it and had really good eyes, and it would lock on you and kamikaze in. There was no real running from that, you either shot it first or you died. If you made it past that level, some increasing levels of weirdness started happening. It wasn't even clear if they were intentional or a bug. Even that killer ship seemed more like a bug than an intentional inclusion, as who would add a maniacal, invisible, opponent?

[dday9]

Ah yes, Adam Smith predicted this with "The Invisible Hand of Game Developers"

[Shaggy Hiker]

In this case, it was more of an "invisible finger of game developers". I might be wrong about the level at which it happened, too, as it might have been 32, not 13. Both numbers come to mind. Whatever it was, it felt like there was "the game as intended", a barrier that may or may not have been intentional, and then an infinite, barely thought out, expanse beyond that. If you could survive that invisible hunter, they never showed up again. You could then play on for a very long time in bizarre levels that seemed to be almost randomly generated rather than incrementally increasing difficulty as the earlier levels were.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Set out for a bike ride this morning, but quickly realized I had fixed the wrong thing. I fixed the front brakes, but they were working okay, and probably only needed a minor adjustment. It was the front derailleur that was a problem, and I think there's something broken in the mechanism. Without that, I would have been doing a LOT of pointless pedaling, as I couldn't get to the high range.

I decided that getting in a ride wasn't going to happen, so I went for a walk and got some yard work finished.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I just had a message from OneDrive about "My Memories From This Day". I was using OneDrive as a backup for a programming project (until I switched to GitLab) and nothing else. Those "memories" messages pick up whatever image file and show that to you. The images from that project are icons and the like. It's kind of funny seeing them.

[dilettante]

People here are trying to bring on Summer early here. We've had some warm dry days and the grills are coming out.

Neighbor had me over for her "Grilled Potatoes Alfredo" which has ground beef and broccoli and was pretty good. I brought a fruity salad based on chopped apples, celery, and rehydrated sweetened cranberries tossed in lime juice. We ended up sharing it with a young single guy across the street from her who says he smelled it. He says he doesn't cook, so he brought some Bell's "Light Hearted Ale" IPA.

[Shaggy Hiker]

We had summer. It was fun. Maybe it'll come back in a few days?

[dilettante]

We didn't break 70 degrees, but with the sun and some imagination we enjoyed not having nightly freeze warnings for a while.

We've actually only now entered the period where crabapples and redbud trees bloom along with daffodils and tulips, so we can't complain too much.

[dilettante]

I've been chuckling like an idiot for the past hour, thinking of a video where a Brit mentions what saying "RC Cola" sounds like to him. Hint: not the best cola.

[dday9]

Is RC Cola still a product?

[wes4dbt]

Is RC Cola still a product?

Haven't seen it around for a while but I don't buy soda's anymore.

[dday9]

I started buying Dr. Pepper with Cream Soda Zero and honestly feel like my parents with Diet Coke.

[dilettante]

Is RC Cola still a product?

I see no evidence that it isn't. That said I haven't noticed it for sale but I don't monitor such things.

[wes4dbt]

Is RC Cola still a product?

$4.98 at Walmart for a twelve pack. lol

About all I ever drink is beer, wine and lots of water.

[dilettante]

I was just hung up on the image of somebody encountering it for the first time thinking "Arsey Cola? Bleh!"

[Shaggy Hiker]

I went for a nice 30 mile bike ride, yesterday. Not sure of the actual distance. The loop is normally about 30, but it's spring, which means that road construction has started. I tried sneaking past one piece of construction, only to find that the road had a giant trench dug all the way across it. I still would have gotten past, except that there was active work going on at the site. They likely would have gotten really mad at me.

Therefore, I had to detour, which may have added two miles. I did go through a second, closed, construction site, but there was nobody there to say anything. Technically, I was even wearing a hard hat (bike helmet) and high-visibility clothing (bike shirt...I looked like a giant, slightly unripe, banana). Still, they probably wouldn't have been happy with me.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm going to do it again Sunday morning. Hopefully, the construction won't be happening seven days a week, though they might.

I'm not nearly as sore as I thought I'd be, this morning.

[wes4dbt]

Went to go shopping and my car battery was dead. That was out of nowhere. Only 2 1/2yrs old. Hadn't given me any problems. Took AAA about an 1 1/2hrs to get here. Had them replace the battery, surprisingly their price was cheaper than Autozone.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Cell failure.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Nice thunderstorms, yesterday. They were nice because we got the light and the sound, but neither rain nor wind. That was because the storms missed my area.

[dilettante]

Ghost riders in the sky?

[Shaggy Hiker]

I wasn't looking. Could have been. This would be the right country for them, and that was the right weather for them.

[dilettante]

I ran out of string trimmer line and decided to buy a pack of prewound spools.

Convenient, but the line ran out 5 times as fast (or more) as with the bulk line I'd been using. Also, throwing a spool away that often seems like a criminal waste of resources and more crap for the landfills. I thought this set would last long enough to minimize the damage. I don't think that way any longer.

Does everyone buy this wasteful stuff, or do most people spend a little effort now and then to wind new line and get more life out of the spool?

I've been using the spool that came with the tool for at least 8 years if not more. The tougher line from my old bulk-pack donut clearly spewed far less waste fragment into the environment too. And that's without even talking about the packaging.


I don't go crazy "being green" but I don't see any good reason to go out of my way to be... "brown" (?) either. Even the guy at the local hardware store says people are getting lazier, dumber, and more wasteful. He doesn't think most homeowners even know they can rewind and reuse the original spool.

This feels like yet another inversion, where "deplorables" turn out to be far better people.

[dday9]

I'm not sure I even know what you're talking about. Are you talking about the spools that go in weed eaters? If so, I wasn't even aware that they sold prewound ones. I always just buy the line and respin it up myself, it doesn't take very long but it is annoying trying to get the last little bit out when replacing it if I ran the weed eater too hot and the line started to melt onto itself.

[jdc2000]

I purchase the bulk packages and wind it onto my spool. The trouble I have is that the local hardware stores almost never have any of the correct line in stock. Even finding it in stock online is a challenge.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I don't use a weed trimmer. I mow the lawn, but for the rest of it, I planted what I wanted, and let them fight it out from there.

[dilettante]

Trimming isn't voluntary here.

As the California riche have come in building McMansions they have changed zoning and pressured for aggressive enforcement. We now risk ticketing and fines if we don't do things like shovel snow and trim walks in "an expeditious manner."

[Shaggy Hiker]

There are places here where trimming isn't optional, too. You may have it a bit different, or you may not, but out here, there are covenants for nearly every neighborhood. Covenants dictate all kinds of weird things about vegetation, upkeep, and other such things. Covenants also tend to evaporate over time. As long as they are enforced, then they are enforceable. Once some aspect of them stops being enforced, then that's it. Legally, once you stop enforcing a part, it can't later come back into force, which means that bit by bit, the covenants evaporate, since each article can only be removed and no new ones can be added.

I saw the covenants for the community I live in. We're supposed to be maintaining a playground for the kids. There's a house on the spot where the covenants say we're supposed to be maintaining the playground, which is a pretty sure sign that THAT covenant has evaporated. Considering the community is bounded on two sides by extensive parks with extensive playgrounds and recreational fields, that covenant was always a bit odd, but perhaps the parks weren't there when the community was built?

By the time I bought, all the covenants for the community had evaporated. I'm free.

[dilettante]

These aren't covenants but actual ordinances.

[Shaggy Hiker]

We only have covenants and covens, and it can be hard to tell which is witch.

[dday9]

I live just outside the town limits (grant it my town's population is only 2,100) so I can pretty much do anything I want here as long as it follows the parish. The parish is so lax that its basic stuff like you need 5' of distance between dwellings and property lines, if you get a sewage treatment instead of septic you have to follow certain rules, but overall it is pretty lax.

[dday9]

There's some rules in the town like you can't own chickens or rabbits, but people do it anyways.