Dude! I had this exact alarm clock when I was a kid!

I'm 40 now and use my phone as an alarm clock. I haven't had a dedicated alarm clock in like 15 years now.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he'd be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn't believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know... he didn't learn his lesson.

She serves as a distraction, so other Republicans can get away with things that seem tame compared to the drama she's stirring up. It's just misdirection; otherwise, Republicans would've ousted her themselves for hurting their party.

Remember when Mitch McConnell was in the news constantly for deliberately halting progress to serve his party's goals? We don't even hear about him anymore; not since Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert took center stage in the shitshow.

America.

Personally. I don't consider it a vacation until I'm cut off from everyone and everything. Let me relax in peace for a while, without distractions.

Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

I was gonna say, you guys get YouTube ads? I'm still blocking them, so I'm still a target for Rick-rolling.

It's actually a mistranslation from Swedish to English. It's supposed to say waterproof.

My wife and I were stationed in Germany for a couple years with the US military. Her only experience with a foreign language was some classes in French in high school, which came in useful since we were stationed near the French border. But while we were living in Germany, we decided to learn some German so we could get around easier.

We took a trip up to Berlin one week and my wife was trying her best to speak to a vendor in German, but she was really struggling. The vendor decided to switch to French instead. Apparently, her German had a heavy French accent, since that was the only other foreign language she had practiced. She was able to finish the conversation in French.

When I lived in Germany for a while, my wife and I took a train across the country one winter to Munich for the Christmas markets. We stayed in a hostel and walked the streets, enjoying the various stalls. I'd never heard of Glüwein before (hot, mulled, spiced red wine), but it was fantastic! It was an amazing experience and we didn't have to worry about parking lots or figuring out public transportation. Everything was within walking distance and we ended up touring all of Munich on foot.

I wish the US would get off its ass and get some high speed trains set up. We just need to keep oil and auto dealers out of the discussion because they keep shutting it down. Like Musk's "Hyperloop" project, which he proposed to stop legislation from approving high speed trains, but then intentionally did nothing with, so we just don't develop trains to replace his Tesla cars.

My wife suffers from this. It's called clinical anxiety and depression, with a heavy dose of ADHD. She needs medication to keep it in check, and some days, even that's not enough. Trying to get her out of the house every few days is like pulling teeth.

On top of that, my wife is an introvert by nature, but you'd never know in a social setting, as she will talk everyone's ear off all night long. I found out that's her nervous tick; when she feels the social anxiety kicking in, she just lets the ADHD take charge and will run her mouth non-stop. When she gets home from any social event, even just a quiet evening hanging out with a close friend, she'll collapse from exhaustion and sleep for half a day afterward.

I wonder if this has anything to do with my Starlink connection dropping out in the middle of the night. Maybe a handful of the lost satellites would've been passing through my area in the night.

Several times in the night, between 2 and 4 AM, my connection blips for a few minutes. Which is normally not a big deal, but I'm a night owl and usually awake all night. Plus it interrupts any online services I have running overnight, so I've lost progress on projects I'm working on throughout the night.

Meh, Starlink is just a temporary fix anyway. I live out in the countryside, where I've been lucky to get 20-30 Mbps speeds for years. Starlink brings high speed Internet to my home (100-200 Mbps speeds), but it's been kind of unreliable. And their single public IP address for my entire network messes with my home servers that require their own independent IP addresses, so I can't run any of my online services from home. Not without buying a dedicated VPN server out on the Internet somewhere that I can route my traffic through.

Thanks to Biden's high speed Internet initiative, I'm finally getting a dedicated fiber line out to my house. Gonna take at least a year before the local ISP wires my region, but once that's in place, I'm throwing out Starlink.