Schindler’s List

It is a cinematic triumph and a film that everyone should see. With that said, I am unable to ever view it again. The scene where Schindler is breaking down realizing that if he didn’t have expensive items he could have saved more people just absolutely killed me.

8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.

The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.

The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.

The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you’re supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.

Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.

We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.

But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.

I’m a Gen X’er… Not sure if the Lemmy’s word limit on posts would allow me to list it all.

So here are a few:

Drank from the garden hose? Check

Rode in a car without seat belts? As a toddler? As a baby? Check

Rode my bike all over town with no helmet? Had an accident that put me in a coma for 48hrs because of not wearing a helmet? Check

Harvested tobacco on my grandparents farm? Check (Anyone who has done this by hand, working with those stakes knows the risks.)

I started skydiving in the early 90’s. My mother was absolutely appalled and constantly berated me about how “dangerous” it is to jump out of an airplane.

The truth of the matter was I was far safer in free fall than I was during most of my adolescence.

I have two Wireless Access Points (WAP) and a separate router/ firewall. The WAPs are meshed, meaning as a WiFi connected device moves through my house, it will be automatically handed off to the WAP with the best quality.

Power and channel of the two WAPs use are automatic. I live in a fairly dense neighborhood. Meaning my neighbors are so dense they barely have done any configuration of their WiFi. There are also a lot of them. The main thing I worry about is having just enough transmit power to give a good quality connection within the house, without being so strong it interferes with my neighbors’ networks.

I would never leave the management of my home network to an ISP. With that said, I’ve been an IT professional for 30 years and got my start in networking.

My upstairs WAP often works at higher power, but I don’t remember seeing it at 100%. It is fighting all the other WiFi routers that are nearby. There are so many that there are no clear channels on 2.4GHz and very few at 5GHz. The WAP in the basement is better shielded, so I almost never see it at high transmit powers.

My router is a separate unit that provides routing, firewall, IPS/IDS, DNS, and management for itself and the WAPs.

No, you almost never require 100% transmit power out of a WAP. The best thing is to have a good quality WiFi router or WAP and set it to “automatic” for channel and power settings. That way the unit can determine what is best for network quality on the fly. It will be better at it than you logging in multiple times a day doing the same thing manually.

It is a cinematic triumph. Peter Cushing himself called it his greatest role! Well, he might have said that.

Fun fact that I actually just learned today. The cast made from Mr Cushing’s face for his scene in Top Secret was used by the SFX wizards working on Rogue One to digitally recreate the actor for the movie.

Imagine that, a casting for a prosthetic made over 40 years ago was used to recreate the image of Peter Cushing so that he could appear as Grand Moff Tarkin again.

Have to admit, that rather stunned me when I read it.

Older Gen X’er here.

This list was basically a Tuesday for me back in the day.

SIR/MADAM! I call foul! Most foul!

Your list is horribly disingenuous, due to the absence of Val Kilmer’s greatest movie:

Top Secret

1985 Pontiac Sunbird and my parents had a 1986 Buick Skyhawk. Both were exactly the same car, just different front fascia. Same crappy 1.8L SOHC engine and terrible build quality.

Both cars blew head gaskets at 50,000 miles and my Sunbird blew it again at 65,000miles. Neither car were ever overheated. The A/C on both cars died at 60K. Various parts of the exterior and interior were just plain falling apart. The cars’ performance was absolutely abysmal.

The cars were so bad that I haven’t purchased another GM product since, nor will I ever buy another product from GM. My Dad had bought a mid-90’s Oldmobile 88 and it was actually OK for the most part. It just ate alternators, until I convinced him to put an upgraded aftermarket unit on and that problem was solved. Later he bought a Chevy Traverse and that thing was an absolute piece of trash. He had to put timing chains on it at 70k and that was a $2500 bill. The power steering also went out on it multiple times. He had the steering rack and power steering pump replaced multiple times.

I traded my old Sunbird in on a 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S and THAT was my absolute favorite car of all time. I autocrossed it for several years and it never broke. I’d love to find one to restore. I have owned multiple Toyotas in my 39 years of driving. My current car is a Camry Hybrid.

This is exactly why an automobile should be treated as a depreciating asset, rather than an investment.

You fix a car if it will cost less than half of its value at the time of the repair. If it cost more than half, get rid of it at the first opportunity. There are caveats to that rule of course. So don’t fault yourself for buying another car.

You had some bad luck and that is just a part of owning a car. In commiseration, I invested $2500 into an Acura TL that I dearly loved for timing belt and some other 100K maintenance items. Only to have its transmission blow up less than 4 months later. The $2500, plus the transmission replacement would have been well over half the value of the car. I traded it. For a car that I still own and absolutely loathe, but it’s been reliable and I’ve put over 160,000 miles on it. My oldest kid now drives it.

The short answer is:

Keep your current car. It’s basically new. From a manufacturer that is notable for the reliability of its products. You also know its maintenance history, which is incredibly important.

Have your payments kept ahead of depreciation? Meaning, can you sell your car for enough to pay off your loan? Just so you know, that’s almost always “no”, but your results may vary. You would also be forced to buy another car. 7.59% APR sucks, but are you able to get a better rate now on another car? Do you have the down payment for another car? Again, you may not have any money left over from selling your current car and paying off the lean.

If you can refinance it at a lower the rate, then absolutely that is the path you should take. If not, then taking a more global look at your finances are in order to make the payment more palatable.

My wife is a Rheumatologist. She actually had a patient attempt to use an article SHE WROTE to argue against her diagnosis. The article the patient was “citing” was not even applicable to the symptoms the patient presented.

Not just circuit breakers, but why are high powered circuits being used in the habitable parts of the ship?

Even modern cars no longer run high amperage circuits to the driver’s controls. Back in the old days, you turn on the lights, the light switch carried a full 12v and a lot of current to control relays. Today, the light switch and turn signal stalk use a signal circuit to tell a body control module what to do.

The bridge of a Star Trek ship should have control panels running on the future equivalent of 5 volt signal circuits that tells a distant and well shielded control module to switch the ultra high powered circuits.

That leads me to the one thing that has always bothered me about Star Trek and its transporters and replicators. E=MC^2… When a replicator creates food or an object, it would take at least the same amount of energy to make, as it would if the same amount of mass were destroyed in a nuclear reaction. That DOES mean in areas where those devices are installed there ARE ultra high powered circuits (EPS conduits) in the wall. So high powered that they have the equivalent of multiple nuclear explosions flowing through them every second… YIKES.

Told a janitor to not unplug the equipment rack in a closet to plug in their vacuum cleaner. Why they thought that plugging in their vacuum there, rather than just using the outlet not 6 feet away outside the closet is beyond me.

Further, why that closet wasn’t locked in the first place. But this was almost 30 years ago and it was another time in IT.

I spoke with the janitor and she started plugging in her vacuum in the adjacent outlet. Then I went to the director of IT and got the capitol cost approved to secure all of the networking closets in the building, which there were 6, one for each floor. Only the one floor was an issue as that closet also house a sink and drain for the janitors to use. There wasn’t another place we could move the networking equipment to without laying out a lot of money.

As someone that literally spent 25 years driving a manual, including various stints in racing. Manuals have seen their day.

It used to be if you wanted better mileage, you drove a manual. If you wanted to be faster on the track, drive a manual (caveat there is drag racing.)

Today? The computer is just better at controlling a transmission. I drive a Camry Hybrid now and not having shifts is REALLY weird and the drone getting up to highway speeds is annoying, but I do like the 45mpg. Not to mention, when I sat down to learn how the Toyota Hybrid Drive works… It’s a pretty clever system.

There are a lot of times that nostalgia gets the better of me and I wish I had a car with a manual. My oldest is possibly joining a skating team that is a 2 hour drive away. It’s tempting to let him use my car and then buy an older manual for myself as a toy. I’d love to get a hold of another mid-80’s Corolla GT-S. I autocrossed one back in the late 80’s early 90’s. It still remains my favorite car I’ve ever owned.

That might be true at this moment. In another year? It will be used by billionaires to buy another island, or politician.

SS will be privatized, then that private company will go bankrupt in the next few years and all the money in SS now, will be “mysteriously” gone.

Fellow X’er here. My wife and I have worked with a financial consultant for the last 20 years. From the get go she said not to count on SS at all.

We have always considered all that money we paid into it to be just… Gone. That’s pretty much a reality now.

I hope the billionaires enjoy what our money buys for them. It will probably be another politician.

Been in a plane crash.

It was a Beech 18 that experienced fuel starvation on climb out. The pilot raised the gear and belly landed it in a freshly tilled corn field off the end of the runway. It was a lot like being in a car accident, just lasted longer with a lot more rending metal noises. The port engine was ripped off and was sitting about 50 feet behind where the plane came to rest.

It wasn’t cool, believe me…

Quite the metaphor mixing you’re doing there.

Must say I rather like it.

Here are the older edition books I have. My 1e DMG and PH have been lost to time. That copy of the Monster Manual is one of the originals. The Deities and Demigods though is NOT one of the issues with HP Lovecraft’s monsters in it. I have seen one of those editions, one of my local games stores has one for sale for over $300, but that’s not what I have. Not shown are all the 5e stuff I have. In my youth it was a challenge to save up enough to buy material when it came out. As an adult, especially since I got the wife playing, yeah… I’ve indulged quite a bit.

54M here. Rolled my first D&D character in 1978. Played GURPS, Twighlight 2000, Traveller, you name it I probably have at least dabbled in playing it.

Today I play D&D 2024 and 5e, Call of Cthulhu, Castles and Crusades and a few others. Some on Roll20, or Foundry VTT (which is awesome BTW.) My primary gaming group is all fathers and mothers spread out across the country.

As far as actual Computer games, I used to be into Flight Sims, but dropping $500 plus on JUST a graphics card is just not something that is going to happen. It’s not the wife acceptance factor, it the sheer balls the graphics card manufacturers have charging that much for their crap. I still dust off MS FS 2004 and run it on my Dell Precision laptop, but my machine won’t run the latest version. I would like to see if it would run Battlestar Galactica Deadlock though.

Otherwise, I have had a home server for many years. It runs Proxmox and I have containers running Plex, Homeseer, SMB (acts as my NAS), and it provides backup services for every other computer in the house.

For reference, I am an IT Professional, with about 30 years in the business.

And where…

THE FUCK…

Is the FBI?

If that’s not a terroristic threat, then what is?