Canopyflyer

55m here.

It’s not so much feeling “old”, but feeling “worn”.

I definitely am slower and physically less capable than 20 years ago. Mainly due to a L4/L5 disk bulge sitting on a sciatic nerve. That has had a dramatic effect on my physical fitness. I just flat out cannot do intense workouts as I once was. Still, I’m in better shape than most of my peers.

You always were an asshole Gormon.

Raspberry, Dark Chocolate, Chambord. The Chocolate Passion Cookbook has my absolute favorite cake ever on its cover. My wife makes it for me every birthday. If she doesn’t make it for me, she makes it for our oldest’s birthday, which is only 2 weeks after mine.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Used this against my controlling mother, who liked to lay BS at my feet and make me think it was my responsibility to fix. When it was HER that caused the whole thing. The look on her face when I hit her with that phrase and just turned around and left was priceless.

There a LOT of things that are just flat not your problem, even if someone else tries to make it yours.

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 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.

When used properly, yes absolutely.

Vinegar is very useful in balancing flavors in recipes. Personally, I love balsamic vinaigrettes far better than other dressings. Malt vinegar on french fries is better than ketchup (and no I’m not British). Mario Batalli’s “Chicken in Cooked Wine” would be very boring without a healthy dose of red wine vinegar.

Everyone has different tastes. I personally detest olives, passion fruit, and rye bread. My wife absolutely loathes eggplant.

Random bonus content, mainly because I made this last night for dinner:

My Alabama White BBQ sauce recipe:

3/4c Mayo

2 TBSP Sugar

1tsp Prepared Horseradish

2TBSP Apple Cider Vinegar

1/2tsp Salt

1/2tsp pepper

1/4tsp cayenne pepper.

Throw all the above into a food processor and blend till smooth. Great on chicken and french fries.

I have to agree with you.

Actors that have been “de-aged” or simulated just don’t quite cross the uncanny valley for me. I loved Tron Legacy, but the de-aging on Jeff Bridges was just off. So those scenes with CLU and in the past just drew me out of the film.

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.

SIR/MADAM! I call foul! Most foul!

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

Top Secret

That is a generally accepted rule for repairing a car. It is not hard and fast, as it is not a simple decision. So you are correct, it’s not right, but it is also not wrong either. It’s a matter of whose yacht you want to finance? Your mechanic’s, or your lender’s.

The only time I would consider putting more than half the worth of a car into fixing it, is if it is a vehicle that is difficult or impossible to replace. Case in point is I have a friend that has one of the last Toyota Camry’s with a manual transmission to come off the production line. He bought it new. About 4 years ago at a bit over 200k on the odometer, he replaced the short block, plus a lot of other work to essentially make the car “new” again. His total bill was over $10k, which is more than the car is worth in total. Why? He just loves it that much and Toyota no longer offers a manual in the Camry. He hates automatics and has declared it will be a cold day in hell before he ever owns one.

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 lien.

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.