Fail of Your Day

Hold up that’s six answers for five questions.

Thank you. The “and” in place of a question mark threw me off.

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Silicon Valley is such a weird place. You got in theory some really bright people working out there. You also have at least two top-notch universities out there (UC Berkeley and Stanford). And yet, you get such idiocy out there as well.

Too much money brings with it a dissociation with reality. It also brings a bunch of fanboys. So ya got a few crazies because money drunk and a bunch of wannabee moneydrunkards playing copycat. The end result is the antivax movement or drinking water that turns green after a while.

Not to mention, you get a lot of folk who think because they’re an expert in one specific thing, that they can trivially or naturally be experts in all things, and a culture of “Disruption” idolized by people who don’t actually have much of an idea about the thing they’re disrupting.

That aside, an actual fail of today - Once again, thanks to Telstra, my internet connection is out. Thankfully, this happens semi-regularly enough that I’ve got my home network set up in such a way that I can trivially switch to the optus business connection until it’s fixed, but that means slow speeds, and a tiny download cap, because Telstra are the only available option for a high-speed connection at this address. Which also means as soon as it’s business hours, I get to waste time playing phone tag with Telstra support, again.

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The Mac Pro we use to host Mac VMs has a corrupted hard drive. :frowning:

The black trash can? At least the drive can be replaced.

I’m not sure it’s bad, just didn’t like the hard shutdown that happened when the power went out while we were all on vacation.

My security system was randomly informing me that the garage door was being opened all Magfest, after some investigation I’m pretty sure it just got so cold that a wire stopped making solid contact with a terminal block but it stopped acting up before I got home.

So I’m kinda curious. I had a heating pipe burst and flood my room this winter, as did a few of my colleagues, I’ve heard of small drafts pointing at thermostats destroying heating systems by throwing them into overdrive. @Burritoad’s wire stopped making contact. All this points to something really obvious:

The north east US has seasons and isn’t completely prepared to deal with a very cold winter.

My question is not really answerable in text form. (but go ahead and try if you have something to say) What is it like in places where it’s basically always cold? In places where you have a snowmobile in your garage? Do these places also have pipes burst when it gets as cold as it is now in CT? Do these places also have loose wires due to extreme cold?

I come from a place colder than where I live but not as cold as I’m envisioning. Moncton still had a summer season (albeit a pretty rainy one with lots of construction) So anyone know what it’s like to live in North Alaska? Or North NWT?

I would assume if its always cold your houses are built to handle that better. New England and places like it need houses to also survive a hot summer. You don’t often get places hardened for the extremes, just average at managing nominal hot and cold.

We had ultra harsh winters in Michigan, but also hot summers. Pipes never burst (they’re not run in exterior walls), sprinkler systems were drained every fall, and houses were well insulated. Even when it was freakishly cold for long periods of time, it was never an issue.

In the Boston suburbs, our house had pipes burst in the mud room on occasion, but the house was built in the 1800s so I have no idea how new anything was.

Boy do I hate arguing with one of my co-workers about technical stuff. He’s always like “do it this way because it’s good/better”, but seems to have no capacity to explain how he got from doing x to that being better in whatever way. Seems like the way to resolve this is always forcing him to actually write it out and then seeing that oh, it’s actually a bad idea.

To be fair, even the average house in my suburban Massachusetts town is pre-WWII, whereas most of Michigan was made in about 1960.

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I realized when reading this that I’ve never lived in a house with a sprinkler system. I literally only think of them in a lab/school/business setting.

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Sprinkler systems are extremely uncommon in single-family homes in the US.

You were talking about lawn sprinklers though.

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I’ve always lived in multi family houses, and I think the same about lawn sprinklers unless it’s the kind you hook up to a valve on the outside of your house and let kids run through when it’s hot.

My townhouse has an emergency sprinkler system in the ceiling in case of a fire.