NotAnArdvark

To the people going "everyone is," I'm thinking you may not know a veterinarian.

We have a rural vet, so she's mostly a 1-person operation (she has a vet tech). She gets calls at all hours, from people she doesn't know, who are desperate, rude, or both. She was telling me about a woman who called about her puppy who was struggling to breathe. It was an hour drive away, and from experience she knew she needed to be up front that there was going to be a fee for her coming out. After being told what a shitty person she was, the woman just hung up. So, there was a puppy out there, struggling to breath, and either the vet needed to drive two hours on her weekend to help it, and possibly not get paid, or quite likely this dog dies some slow painful death.

People seem to think they're entitled to a vet, and when she can't see someone as soon as they'd like they get angry. When it's time to pay, people can get angry. There was an accident by our town and the fire department brought in two dogs that were thrown from the car and in bad shape. She had tried to make them as comfortable as possible while trying to contact someone from the family. She ended up doing a bit of work, but when the wife of the driver was finally found she simply refused to pay anything. Said she didn't ok any of it.

So consider that a vet goes into this profession because they love animals, but day in and out they're seeing them suffer terribly, and often much more than is necessary because people are ass holes. From beyond our own vet I've also heard lots of stories of people just ghosting after they've learned how much some treatment will cost, or wanting to put down animals that are just "too old." Vets sit at this intersection between helpless animals and how society treats animals. Well, and now how people treat people.

I have email going all the way back to 2013 or so, and don't like the idea of all that information sitting readily available for hacks, warrants, or automated scanning. I move mail older than two years into a local Thunderbird folder to limit what's sitting online, while also letting me search for recent emails while out and about.

Aside from that, I like that I can still access emails while offline, see all my inboxes, contacts, and calendar in one place. Also, I've got enough "apps" that run in the browser.

Actually, sudden account closure without recourse (which Google does) is another reason to make sure I have local copies of email too.

Adopt a cat. The are so, so many excellent cats (and kittens) out there with no home. Save a life instead of bringing another cat into the world.

2nd'ing Vorta+Borg. It's also really easy to find off-site backup options compatible with Borg. I'm using BorgBase, which offers ridiculously cheap storage, the choice of EU and US destination, and supports the development of both Vorta and Borg.

Pressing the "Home" key will take you to the top of a page (Function+Left on Mac I think), unless I'm misunderstanding what that extension does.

For that amount of money I think Brinks could have sprung for an escort. It sounds like the level of security they were expecting from Air Canada was "looking at waybills closely", which even if AC did it still feels grossly insufficient.

I installed the Fakespot extension and then went looking through my past purchases. It seemed to work really well and called out things as shady for products that I can say, first hand, were actually kind of sketchy.

This is only slightly related - I lost a small number of files with DreamHost object storage, and they were charging more than S3 per GB.

So, I agree you usually get what you pay for, but also make sure the provider is all-in on the product. I think DreamHost really isn't interested in their virtualized/cloud offerings.

I would say the technology for cloud gaming is here today, but the home internet connections of a lot of people aren't ready yet.

You witness this a lot with video conferencing. People tell one person their audio/video is shitty, and that person just shrugs and says "yeah, I have bad internet." In my head I'm screaming "Well, what have you tried?!" or "I see you sitting beside the refrigerator there!"

Ooh, we're not at the speed of light as a limit yet, are we? Do you mean "point A to point B" on fibre, or do you actually mean full on "routed-over-the-internet"? Even with fibre (which is slower than the speed of light), you're never going in a straight line. And, at least where I live, you're often back-tracking across the continent before your traffic makes it to the end destination, with ISPs caring more about saving money than routing traffic quickly.

As someone who takes an ADHD medication, I find the idea of a drug shortage terrifying. Life gets so, so much harder when I'm unmedicated.

It's like the difference between walking on a sidewalk and walking in sucking mud, with stuff falling out of your pockets you have to keep going back to find. You build a life that's only possible thanks to your ability to walk on sidewalks. If you suddenly find you can only get around by walking through mud, even with a huge amount of will power, you're going to watch your life fall apart as you just can't keep up the pace of your old life.

Every once in a while I'll use dish soap and my fingers, then dry with a microfiber cloth.

Microfiber cloth and whatever that glasses spray is works ok, but after a while it feels like I'm just pushing smudges around. Dish soap for the microfiber cloth will also fix that.

When I see people using their shirt to clean their glasses I cringe inside.