One of the most interesting words in the English language is the word “fuck.”

It can be used as:

As a transitive verb: “John fucked Mary.”

As an intransitive verb: “Mary was fucked by John.”

As a noun: “Mary is a fine fuck.”

As an adjective: “Mary is fucking beautiful.”

It can be used as a greeting: “How the fuck are you?”

Surprise: “FUCK! You scared the shit out of me.”

Anxiety: “The day is really fucked.”

It can even be used as nearly every word in a sentence: “Fuck the fucking fuckers.”

Farscape

Yes.

The multithread Passmark score on that CPU is 13254.

That’s many times what you really need for the work you’re describing above. There are a lot of games it could play pretty easily and games are far more demanding than a Zoom call.

The 7000 series Latitudes are actually OK machines for the most part. Once in a while Dell will have a model with a problem, but not enough to really worry about. As far as storage goes, spreadsheets and the like do not take a lot of room. If you want to lug around a lot of media files, like movies and TV shows then you will run out pretty quickly. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry about it.

For my personal systems and those for my family I usually pick up older Dell laptops/towers and refurb them myself. I usually get several more years out of them. The system I’m typing this on is a Dell Precision 7550 that I rebuilt a year ago. Its predecessor was a Precision 7540 that my youngest uses to run games on and do his homework. My 7550 runs Battlefront II and BSG Deadlock easily.

9 to 10 hours a day for me.

But I work from home and work in IT. Also, my two main D&D groups play online as we’re spread out all over the country.

Japanese Literature Course. Dr John (what he liked to be called) was the professor and I had him for an English class already and liked him.

The class was not overly large, maybe 12 people and we met in a conference room rather than a typical classroom. This event was a couple of weeks into the class and Dr John was getting increasingly… Erratic… I guess is the way to describe him. The class was supposed to be more about open discussion than lecture. However, it was full of sophomores who for the most part were used to sitting for lectures. I think Dr John was getting more and more erratic during class in a hope to get the students participating. It had the opposite effect unfortunately, until he started saying some things that I thought were just wildly incorrect and I called him out on it.

I literally got a look on my face, which he noticed instantly and he asked what my opinion was… And 19 year old me replied to my doctorate level professor; “Dr John I think you’re full of shit.”

Everyone’s eyes went wide and people looked stunned, including me because it was an instinctive reaction on my part. I fully expected to get kicked out of the class, but Dr John actually smiled and asked; “Ok Mr Flyer, please explain to me just how I’m full of shit.”

And I did… At least I tried to as at the time I was just a 19 year old moron attempting to take on a middle aged man that had decades of study. What ensued for the rest of that period was he and I going back and forth. Of course he easily dismembered all of my arguments, but he was respectful and we had a real dialog going on. I felt I learned more in that one hour than the previous three semesters.

While that day helped break some of the other people out of their shells, I ended being the only person in the class that earned an “A”.

My oldest when I pick him and my youngest up from school one day:

“Dad, have you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons.”

Me with tear in my eye thinking about all the books, miniatures, dice, and other accessories from playing D&D since 1978. Only stopping when they were born because I didn’t have time and my wife and I had moved 500 miles to a new city. This was before the days of Roll20 and other VTT’s and I didn’t know anyone in this area back then.

Tonight is leftover night.

Chicken in Red Thai Curry sauce over rice that I made this past weekend.

Je ne parle pas Francais.

Wind and Truth is my personal longest single book listen as well.

Otfen.

I graduated at 42.

Was I embarrassed? Why would I be?

Any windows you want to restrict access to, plant these things:

Pyracantha

They are no joke. Just remember, if you need that window for emergency egress it will not be a pleasant experience. Probably better than dying, but not by much.

30 year IT Professional here…

^ That guy gets it

55m here.

Half the energy, but still all the work plus some to do.

Not my video, but I did ride it that year at the World Freefall Convention.

Quincy Helicopter Ride 1998

One time, this was back in my skydiving days so a very long time ago, the drop zone’s CASA 212 was down due to a bad hydraulic pump. The pump finally arrived and the DZO asked me to help him install it. He was a certified A&P, I just had a lot of experience wrenching on cars but it allowed me to get a lot of free jumps due to helping him out on things like this.

He handed me the pump, which was a LOT lighter than I expected and told me with a smile: “Don’t drop it.”

In inquired as to how much it cost and he replied: “$10,000.”

I was holding a pump in my hands that weighed barely 10 pounds that cost more than my car (this was circa 1998 or so).

A couple years later the igniter box on the port engine died and I helped him replace it… That was a cool $15000. The engines were about $250,000 a piece back in those days.

In 2016 I was hired onto a team at a national insurance company. We did Problem Management and Major Incident Management. When I was brought aboard there were five people on the team.

Problem Management, by its nature is not all that high stress. It can get sticky especially if you’re working a Problem that has the C-Suite’s attention, but most of the time you’re working with techs that just want to get things fixed.

Major Incident on the other hand is a baptism in fire. That brought that team together and we all got to the point that we watched each other’s backs and stepped in automatically when needed without having to be asked.

6 years after leaving that job, it was a contract position, I’m still in contact with almost all of the team.

I can smell them too.

It was fun to take a hammer and hit the entire roll at once. They actually made quite the noise.

For reference, I was born in 1970 so yeah I grew up with those things.

I work from home and try not to nap. Napping can interfere with getting a good night’s sleep and I have difficulty with that enough as it is.

With that said, there are times where I will lay down for 20 minutes to reset the clock as it were. Usually about two or three times a month. I used to try and nap often, but stopped when my primary informed that it can disrupt my sleep pattern. And yes, my sleep pattern was royally screwed in those days.

Now, if I feel I need a nap I try to exercise. Either go out for a hike when it’s warmer. I picked up an elliptical off of Nextdoor and use it when it’s not nice outside. Yes, it’s tough to not just flop into my bed, which sits behind my workstation rather than hit the elliptical, but I managed to form a new habit.

You are ready to own an airplane if you can wake up in the morning, burn a $100 bill and flush it down the toilet without feeling anything.

You are ready to own a helicopter when you can do the same thing, except with ten $100 bills.