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Caught a picture at 2:44 PM when the eclipse was at its maximum here: That was with 4x zoom on my camera. Amazing how small the sun and moon are when you're trying to take a picture of them.

I second the :puke-r: . I once had a neighbor (not German) who didn't shave her armpits. In the summer it looked like she had a squirrel under each arm. :hurl:

So in other words you probably wouldn't recommend buying bitcoin or bitcoin cash now as an investment?

I few months ago Office 2016 prompted me to activate it again. I had to sign in with my office account and reenter the product key but it worked. Today it prompted for activation again. Nothing I've tried worked, including and uninstall/reinstall and reactivation. MS says the product key is...

Honestly, four bits per cell scares me. Three bits was bad enough in that you had to distinguish between 8 voltage levels. Now we'll have 16. I'm more concerned with how long the cells will hold data than with the number of writes. With wear leveling it's pretty much impossible for most people...

Well, they do have their (cough, cough) reputation to uphold, so it might be fair to assume these will make as good paperweights as their HDDs.

I agree. Who is going to want gold or silver when they're starving? Add solar panels and wind generators to your list of things which will be valuable if the SHTF.

Ironically, the only thing which gives gold its value is its scarcity (same as bitcoin). If a solid gold asteroid hit Earth tomorrow gold would probably be worth less than tin. It has a few industrial uses but in general it's too soft and too heavy. Maybe it would be used in place of lead where...

He means they'll still be viable decades from now, either to use for their intended purpose, or to trade for other goods. Can't say the same about either bitcoin or the US dollar. Maybe Bitecoins will be worth something though. At least they'll have intrinsic value as dentures.

Fixed. The other link was about "shitcoin".

After reading this I'm seriously thinking of putting about $5K into bitcoin after August 1. To me it seems there's not much downside. Worst-case unless bitcoin completely crashes I won't lose my principal. The upside though seems huge. I'm skeptical of $500K BTC but even if it goes to $20K in a...

Seems that way to me also. Just reading about it a bit yesterday, it seems the first ones in get rich. Once the word spreads, mining quickly becomes an arms race where you've lucky to break even. While that's happening the cryptocurrency rises in value to reflect the added difficulty mining but...

I never even heard of this until seeing this thread. To me it sounds like nonsense. Fake mines for fake currency. Or maybe I'm missing something. Definitely sounds like a fad to me, just like beany babies (or the baseball cards my late father "invested" in which are probably worth a few cents on...

Interesting. For what it's worth my place isn't multi-wythe brick. It's wood frame with a one-layer brick veneer. And there's already some kind of crappy 1950's insulation between the brick and the wood framing. Pumping foam into the cavities between the framing seems like the easiest way to...

I think I would blow my brains out if I had to live somewhere that hot. As things stand now I'm finding the 4 months of hot weather in NYC more and more intolerable. Retirement in Alaska is starting to look good.

Same here. It hasn't been unheard of for me to keep my bedroom at 60°F or even lower during the summer and 75°F in the winter. To me it makes sense. My body is tired of hot or cold, and wants the exact opposite. Yep. Mid 70s might be fine if you're sitting or sleeping but it's downright...

:lol: Same here, although mostly to program microcontrollers. Occasionally I end up on foreign language sites, so I tend to pick up a few words here or there. I had French in high school. I still remember enough of it to find my way around. Would love to have learned Chinese. That's probably...

Normally it's not a problem if the people on the other end are competent. My main worry would be that my account might not be credited properly if there's no balance due.

In the event you can't get it setup maybe just pay enough in advance to cover the bill. I'm not a fan of paying bills ahead of time, but at least this avoids any issues of the bill not being paid. That sounds pretty good. Even if your sightseeing time is fairly limited, at least the hotel...

I've been paying virtually all my bills online for a number of years now. The only time I have issues is when they update security procedures. NYC Department of Finance is very annoying in that regard. They ask you change your password something like every six months. BTW, is that going to be a...

That makes two of us. I can't stand hot weather.

That's also on the list of things to do. It's a brick house, so I think the only option is to pump foam insulation in. Unfortunately, they have to make a bunch of holes to do that.

It was awful. My normal preference is low 70s when I'm not active, and mid 60s when I'm doing chores or other physical activity. Unfortunately, my A/C was going full tilt all day. That was as low as it was going to get. If I oversized the A/C so I would get decent cooling on outlier days like...

This was on July 22, 2011: That's the hottest I've ever seen it get here but it's normal summer highs for a place like Phoenix. The official high was 104°F in Central Park but parks are always cooler than the surrounding areas.

Right, like I said it's likely enterprise will be the last bastion of HDDs. As things stand now there is little reason for your average person to have an HDD when 250GB is enough storage for them and you can get a 250GB SSD for under $100. SSD prices stopped their freefall this year, but that...

They're looking solely at STRs, which is the one metric which largely doesn't matter for most users. The key metrics are total cost, cost per GB, and to a lesser extent access time. All other things being equal, most users will choose the lowest cost per GB. However, they're willing to pay a few...

That's actually pretty decent travel time for 18 miles. My sister's commute is ~35 miles, entirely on Long Island, and it regularly takes her well over an hour. My brother takes about an hour to go 15 miles and he's driving entirely within Queens. When I worked in Long Island City it took me at...

Honestly, taking a bike to work under those conditions would be crazy. 25 miles each way plus working 10.5 hours really isn't feasible. That said, in the long term if it's possible to live closer to work that would make much more sense. 19.5 miles is way too far. That must take you at least 1.5...

The poor horse would probably pass out from heat exhaustion where he lives.

Or you could take Amtrak or fly as close to your destination as they can you, then rent a car the rest of the way. To me taking a long trip in a car would be torture. No bathroom, can't get up to walk around, with the bonus of being rattled to death on our bumpy roads. Well, I don't think I...

It's not nice to drive anywhere in the NYC metro area unless traffic jams are your thing. And cars cost a hideous amount of money for what they are. If you're rich and have clear roads to drive them on I guess they're an OK toy. If you work for a living you can probably retire a decade earlier...

True but bikes are a lot less costly to keep running, especially if you learn to do all your own repairs. I've read the average trip length by car is something like 4 miles. That's easily done on a bike, even for someone in average shape. Don't know how long a commute snowhiker has. It might...

This might be telling you to ditch the car for a bike. Never had a car myself. The bike worked just fine in cases where public transit or walking weren't viable. Cars have been money pits for everyone I know who owns one.

For what it's worth I rarely use the big chainring. I have 53/42 in front and 11-25 10-speed cogs in back. That works out fine for most riding keeping it on the 42 tooth chainring. Only time I might want to go on the big chainring is when I'm sustaining over 30 mph. That doesn't happen too often...

I wonder if someone in his family passed. I was absent from the forums for quite a while after my father died in 2006.

Don't feel bad. I actually got fired from my first (and only) work-study job for not showing up during study break. I thought I had my shift covered, but the guy who said he would cover it was a no-show also. To make a long story short, it was a blessing in disguise. Next semester my grades...

I wasn't directly aware of it, but I was curious why SSD prices are still the same or slightly higher than they were about a year ago. If they had been following their historical trajectory, we should have seen at least a 25% drop.

Sanitation plows the streets but you're responsible for shoveling the sidewalk adjacent to your property. Thankfully we don't have a corner house which would be about 120 or 140 feet of sidewalk. Just 40 feet to shovel plus the steps and walkway. I'll let the snow in the driveway melt on its own.

Just shoveled. This snow is very heavy, which is typical of March snow. 8 inches of it weighs as much as 2 feet of mid-winter snow.

I'm just pointing out that you can use statistics to "prove" anything you want. Absolute numbers killed annually is yet another way to look at it since that takes into account both safety per passenger mile and use. By that metric cars kill about 100 times as many as planes in the US in a...

I'm not sure that deaths per passenger mile is a great metric. That skews the statistics in favor of modes which make longer trips. Point of fact, takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of flying. If the average plane trip was the same length as the average car trip the difference...

The problem with a plane is that you really can't get up and walk around whenever you want. I couldn't be mostly in a sitting position for 14 hours. Besides that, there's the fact that planes crash, and you almost always die when that happens. From NYC a trip to Asia without flying would...

No. Thus far I haven't had much desire or time to do long distance traveling, not to mention I've lacked the funds. It's something I may do after I'm able to retire.

It's been 26 years, 5 months since I've been on a plane. That was actually the only time I flew in my entire life. While the flight was uneventful, I decided then and there I'll never fly again. Not a very comfortable way to travel compared to a train. And it's one of these low risk but high...

I think their eventual APUs with the Zen architecture are more intriguing. For those who don't really need a separate graphics card, a Ryzen APU would be close to Intel's offerings in terms of content creation, and the graphics engine should be better than what Intel offers in terms of...

Probably. What I did looks very good on a resume. The only issue is I need to work primarily at home since I'm the caretaker for my mom. Unfortunately, my mom started getting dementia in the last few years and needs someone there. My brother and sister both work full-time. It's not an option for...

I wholeheartedly agree here. Depending upon either a bonus (or overtime if you're an hourly employee) to make a decent amount isn't a good way to live. On another note I might be joining the ranks of the unemployed later this year or next. The project I was hired for is moving to the next...

The more I read about it the more I think Trump is an alien.

Is there any proprietary manufacturer software loaded on the drives? I saw USB 3 Lexar drives which performed miserably (i.e. speeds of a few MB/sec) due to encryption software. Repartitioning and reformatting the drive fixed that. Also, I've found USB drives are much faster with either FAT32 or...

Snowpocalyse in NYC. First time this year I actually need to shovel.