NeX

I'm a married man

Does a new home count? Technically it's a townhouse. And I rent it. But still.

Just found out that the townhouse we've been looking at just had a cancellation, so I can start moving in as early as this weekend! Woooo! Doubling my square footage for way less than double the rent, nicer area (no drug dealers living above me), and a patio for a full size grill! The only thing left is to find someone who is willing to take over the ~6 month remainder of my current lease, otherwise I'll have to invoke some annoying Ohio law that says the landlord is obligated to diligently pursue another tenant to fill my vacancy and release me from the lease at that time. Not what I want to do, but I'm definitely not going to pay double rent. Either way, I'm pretty jazzed, and it should be a slow and steady move since we don't have to be "out" of this place with any urgency, meaning I don't have to take any time off of work!

Does anyone here have any experience? I'm thinking about trying my hand at winemaking. I've developed a huuuge love of wine, especially reds, and it sounds like a lot of fun and an interesting hobby that doesn't require too much time. Low risk, High reward, and easy peasy gifts haha.

Amen to all of this. My biggest problem is that if I'm really getting into a discussion that warrants long periods of typing, they're usually centered around some sort of research, so I'm changing tabs and copy/pasting links and references - which, like WaeV said, often results in my hitting the backspace with no text field selected, and losing all of it. I really just started typing shit in Notepad++, and then pasting it into the field afterwards. That's often why my longer posts have little to no formatting in them, because by the time I've ranted it all out, there's no more time for that bullshit. Also, if it happens, I never retype. I just leave and cut my losses. Forgot to mention, there used to be an extension called "Lazarus" that had a decent reputation for remembering form-data. Unfortunately it seems to have bought the farm in terms of quality. I can't imagine a simple extension to retain the contents of text fields for X minutes after last interaction would be that incredibly difficult, or even memory intensive. Yet trying to find one yields nothing satisfying.

Like, the ancient map? Probably not - and it would require in-map scripting for it to work anyway. That's how the syncing is pulled off between server and clients.

Forgot to tell you fuckers I got a new kitten recently! Her name is Ciri (after Cirilla from the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), and she's a tortoiseshell! She's about 4 months old now, but was 3 months when we got her. She's been spayed already (which is a bit earlier than ideal, but no changing that :/), and we're taking her for her rounds of vaccinations and deworming. She just got her second rabies vaccine last Saturday, and she's a spunky little cunt. After the shots she always gets a bit down and sleeps all day, and she was so cute and settled into our older cat (Spooky)'s bed that we didn't want to put her in her crate for the night. Since then we've let her go free at night and when we leave - which she loves - but damn is it driving me nuts, Spook too. She'll use our bed as a springboard at night, jumping up and running across both of us, just to jump down the other side and run back out of the room. The other night I woke up at 3 a.m. as she jumped onto the bed, and proceeded to stand on my back for about 5 minutes, for god knows what reason. I didn't want to roll over and flip her off, since the bed is kind of high, and I couldn't reach her over the covers to grab her. Shooing her was ineffective. Pics: Ciri Spooky

Does anyone mess with UE4 at all? I've decided to take the leap and build a portfolio for myself by learning UE4 and messing with level design and all that jazz. To expedite it, I've decided to give the project "Glassed" a go, since they seem to have no programmers or level designers, and it provides both an organized format for level design and a familiar environment to what I'm used to (Halo theme). Depending on how things go with the team, I may or may not be in it for the long haul - but there's a lot of quality work done for it already, and I think tackling a whole project start to finish on my own would be a silly way to begin delving into a new engine.

It's very intuitive as well. The Blueprint system is fantastic for a visual logic representation. It's much easier than having to worry about actually scripting some of the events, and they claim that it's almost as fast as the C++ scripting (dubious face). Either way, using the wire systems for materials is very slick. I'm currently playing around with the in-editor BSP system and the geometry brushes

Welp, I racked the wine on Sunday (6/26) to the secondary fermenter. I had a really busy weekend with my fiancee's bridal shower stuff, so while I meant to take specific gravity readings on Friday night, I didn't get around to it until Sunday. This is....not ideal - I let it sit for too long (ish), and the gravity was at an even 1.000. Secondary fermentation and racking are supposed to happen at a SG of about 1.010-1.020, so it's a bit higher alcohol content than I wanted for this, but I can keep it on track for the rest of it with a little vigilance. Worst case scenario is that it turns out a little bit stronger than the average of 13-15% ABV, which isn't necessarily a bad thing...? Here is a picture of the racking process with the siphon (and my fiancee's lovely hand ). The top container is the "Big Mouth Bubbler" which is basically a carboy with a very wide opening to make stirring and adding the juice easier. That's the primary fermenter. It's being drained into the lower container which is a regular thin-neck carboy for secondary fermentation. Unfortunately, I used the wrong tube for the first portion, and it let in more air than desired, resulting in a bit of foam. I swapped it for the proper tubing right after this picture, though, and the foam went away mostly on its own after that. Floating on the top of the must in the secondary fermenter/carboy are oak chips, to leech tannin and that earthy/woody flavor that wine normally gets from an oak barrel....without the barrel. Nice little touch, I think. Now I wait a few more days until the SG is <0.98 and then re-rack it into the primary fermenter and add the clearing solutions and metabisulphite solution to kill any remaining yeast and prevent further fermentation. It'll sit in there for about 2 more weeks until it hits a good clarity, and then it is racked a final time into the secondary for bottling. Will post more pics soon, including some custom labels I whipped up in PS that I'd like some feedback on - I'm going to use them for our wedding - assuming this wine doesn't taste like ass

Way to fucking be, mate

Sitting at 8GB currently, but that's with an old i7-2600 series and a DDR3 compatible motherboard. Once I feel the need to upgrade the board (and CPU), I'll be going with 16GB of DDR4. So far the UE4 editor is the only program that's even come close to taxing the 8GB that I have, and even then it's usually fine. 16 would just give me a little more breathing room with storage capacity, but the increased speed from DDR3 -> DDR4 should be a nice stacking bonus as well. I can't imagine anything over 24GB would do much other than sit there. Even our really nice $5k workstations where I work only have 16GB in them.

Yeah I was hesitant to even post this here, I think I'm more mad about the time sitting there waiting in anticipation for him to come back with the ticket than about the actual fine....

I know right? I was expecting >400, but with it this low the cost of time to go to court wouldn't be worth it

Fuuuuck. Driving home and eveyone was going like 5 under the speed limit in the left and middle lanes. Merged right to go around, had to speed up to make it before a semi in the right lane....aaaand ran right into a state trooper. Nailed me going 84mph in a 70mph zome. Uff. Ticket was only $109, but I wasn't even mad. Officer was pretty cool, definitely the nicest I've ever had the (mis)fortune of dealing with. I will admit I was anxious to get home after a long day, I was being a bit of a jackass. Totally deserved it, stick fuckin' sucks.

Not sure it's worth the time, to be honest. I can only imagine that the pool of players for MD is even smaller than that of PC/CE. It's your time, if you think it's worth it, then have at. I'm just surprised anyone still messes with this stuff on a day-to-day basis

As someone who vapes, that is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life, and I've seen some stupid shit done by vapers in the past. If the capsaicin made his lungs secrete too much mucous, he could easily have died from that, drowning in his own stupidity. Ha, I did enjoy watching him suffer though.

I agree with Krazy about it being a silly and frowned upon tactic among respectable server operators, and that you should simply name your server something creative. However, I think dissemination of information is a great thing about OC, regardless of its uses. Since this isn't really a cheat or anything nefarious, I'll spill the beans: Getting started: The first thing you'll need is a better text editor than simply notepad.exe. I recommend Notepad++, it's a fantastic tool that I use every day at work and home for anything from to-do lists and notes to writing scripts and actual code. It's not as nice as an IDE for some things, but it's my favorite text editor that I've ever used. Notepad++ Download Page Now, I assume you're using SAPP - I don't know if it's required, but I never tried this without it. Open the "/sapp/init.txt" file. As you may or may not know, ASCII characters have a set indexing that you can use to convert sequences of hex digits (0-F) into ASCII characters. Alt codes are a little different, and encompass ASCII, Unicode, and some other character sets as well. ASCII is the most basic and was the first widely used text encoding format, using only 1 byte (8 bits) per character, and indexed from 0x00 - 0x7F. ASCII Table: you've probably seen it before Most of the first characters in the ASCII table are meta characters, for use in formatting or delineation, throwbacks to earlier times. Now, it's been a LONG time since I set up or messed with a server's name, but IIRC the character that you need is the SOH (Start of Header) character, #2 on the ASCII list and with a hex code of 0x01. For Halo, the sv_name command takes a string argument that will be the server name. It's constrained to a certain size, I think 64 characters by default although SAPP may have enlarged that since I last checked. Getting the character: With Notepad++, there is a tab in the toolbar at the top of the interface: "Plugins" Inside of that is a sub menu called "Converter", which contains bothASCII -> HEX and HEX -> ASCII. At this point we know which character we need, and using the chart we can see that the Start of Header character is hex "01". In Notepad++ simply type 01, highlight it, and then use the HEX -> ASCII conversion to get your character. Alternately, I went ahead and just pasted the character a bunch of times in a .txt file that is attached at the bottom of this post. The end result will look like this inside the init.txt: sv_name "<SOH><SOH>" Keep in mind that there won't be any "<>" brackets surrounding these special SOH characters, in notepad++ they look like a black box with those letter inside it. Each one is worth 1 character. If you leave only the SOH as the name, it will be blank. If you put many SOH characters in front of your actual server name, it will bump it up the server lobby listing. Just like 'A' comes before 'B' in the lobby, SOH comes before all other characters. So the name: "<SOH><SOH><SOH>My Server!" will be listed before the name: "An Awesome Server!" Even though no one can see the SOH characters. So it will look like some magical 'M' name has been sorted before an 'A' name. Use this how you will. This has been a nasty annoying secret for a long time, so here's about as idiot-proof a guide as I can make at work without using copious amounts of screenshots or making a video. EDIT: I guess I can't figure out attachments, so here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4NXHWcfElCoa1E5ODljS1QzYnM/view?usp=sharing

Yesterday the must's specific gravity was about 1.04, so I added the yeast nutrient and let it go. It should be ready for racking and secondary fermentation within the next few days (fingers crossed!) A nice little formula for ABV is ( OG - FG ) * 131 = ABVOG = original gravity FG = final gravity (end of secondary fermentation) Now, most merlots end up with a final gravity of about 0.95 - 1.05. This batch's orginal gravity was around 1.095, and since it's down to 1.04 before primary fermentation is even finished, we can make the assumption that it'll fall somewhere between 0.95 and 1.01, giving us ABVs in the range of 11% - 19%Sounds pretty good to me! On a related note, keeping the temperature at a consistent 65-75oF has been slightly challenging. It hovered around 74 for the first few days, and by day 5-6 it was only down to 73, and there was a...stink to it when checking the gravity. It was a rotten egg smell, a result of sulfur dioxide (SO2), a result of the yeast being stressed by the high temperature and not metabolizing the sugar as efficiently. I started leaving on the AC unit in the room with the must at the expense of it being quite chilly in the house. Apparently (duh...) the active fermentation generates heat as a byproduct, so the must was consistently 2-3 degrees above that of the ambient room temperature. So keeping it at 70 was actually maintaining that bad temperature. Since I turned the AC on over the weekend, it's hovered right around the 68-70 mark, which accounts for the sudden rise in activity. The smell was almost completely dissipated yesterday as well, which is great! It remains to be seen if the SO2 will negatively impact the flavor/odor of the finished product, but from what I've read, if you correct the temperature problem early the SO2 will reabsorb into the must easily and come out during the degassing process like normal. If not, I may have to siphon the wine over a copper plate or through copper wool to catalyze a reaction to get it out for good. Unfortunately that means moving 6 Gallons of wine across the copper about 10 times, and at a flow rate of around 100mL/s. Not a great way to kill a few hours, but good to know that's the worst case scenario. I'll post an update after racking it and settling in for the long haul of secondary fermentation!

Desktop goes to sleep at night, but sometimes I forget. Not a huge issue IMO. Solder crystalization happens so slowly and only at consistently high temperatures, so if I shrink the potential hardware life of some components even from 5-year max to 3-year max, that's about the life span of relevance (give or take). I doubt it's that big a problem though, seeing as I've left most desktop PCs I've ever had on 24/7 and can count spontaneous hardware failures as 0. So it's relevant, but not super important. Power consumption is also kind of a silly reason to turn it off. My electricity bill went from $150 -> $56 after the winter was over, the major difference being that AC is now on all day/night and the baseboards are no longer active. If all the power in my entire house combined is only costing me $56, then there are way larger things to worry about proportionally than my PC. Microwave, refrigerator, AC units, washer/dryer...the consumption from a 24/7 PC that isn't rendering some advanced 3D animation all day every day should be negligible. Laptops get turned off when I'm not going to be using them for hours, because I've never had good luck with batteries and sleep/hibernate. It's a funny little 50/50 for me: Put it to sleep: won't need it for 2 days, until I open it in a rush to do something and have to hunt the charger because it's at 5%. Turn it off: gotta use it 20 minutes later and am drumming my impatient fingers on the keyboard as it loads up.

That is definitely the ideal. The issue is that it isn't that way, so there is a definite need for intervention :/

BOOOOOOO I WANNA ARGUE

In this point and later references to the Enlightenment, you're making references to the Social Contract, while I think we were specifically (TCK and myself) discussing person-to-person contracts. I would agree that the US Constitution is a valid Social Contract, but that they are not synonymous and they cannot be interchanged for one another in terms of the agreements made in their context: Two people entering a person-to-person contract are both willing participants by definition of the action. A person born in the U.S. is arguably not a willing participant by definition. Although as citizen possess the right to leave the US and renounce citizenship, this is not always a reasonable expectation, and the terms of "leaving the contract" are much higher in this sense. Although a P2P contract possesses similar costs to breaking it, it can allow for terms of breaking, be renegotiated, or simply not be signed at all. Natural born U.S. Citizens receive the decisions of their forefathers as their birthright, and these decisions are binding. I'm not saying there's a better way, I'm just not sure that approaching the issue from the angle of the US Constitution and Social Contract theory is completely sound. I agree wholeheartedly - however I do not think it is the government's place to ban the latter, only the former, and even then only because there appear to be no viable alternatives in a realistic sense for day-to-day use. I wish that there were more meaningful statistics there. It says blind screening increases the probability of preliminary advancement by 50%, but not what the original rate was. It also just says "severalfold" rather than any meaningful number. Basically they say that there are 5% female players in 1970, and 25% today, and that blind screening "makes lots of difference for them in good ways". lol

Well, comparing that to ecosystems or natural selection is....either a bad choice of analogy, or a vast misunderstanding of the principles of evolutionary biology. Right here, you're telling people that if they want to have equal rights and protections under the law, they need to collect in a place and become a big enough voice to protect themselves. Oh, you can't drink at this fountain because you're black. Why? Because this is my private property and I may do with it what I wish. Don't like it? Move yourself and all of your kind somewhere else until you compose a large enough portion of the population for that place to be a haven. Those are some interesting notions. This would breed all manner of tribalism, factions of whatever 'like mindedness' exists in the area banding together. It also is a preemptive isolationism, where no one is ever forced to leave their comfort zone. Talk about cultural stagnation, holy shit. I try my best not to be confrontational, but these sentiments are short-sighted and reactionary. No society in history has ever suffered because they became more reasonable or tolerant or accepting of other cultures. I'm not talking about "immigration" or any kind of ethnic takeover, as can easily be cherry picked out of context from that statement - I'm speaking purely of the enforcement of a set of ideals that people should be free from discrimination. This kind of subjective moral solipsism is the most common issue I see regarding moral philosophy or ethics. Morality can easily be objective, without the need of inserting some kind of sky-fairy into the mix. It's really quite simple - you start from a worst-case scenario and work your way up from there. It doesn't have any kind of "this is right" or "this is wrong" - but it makes it very simple to place concepts and actions along a spectrum of "worse <-> better" with respect to others. Worst case scenario: everyone suffers as much as the possibly can for as long as they possibly can. Anything that is not the worst case, is better. Nothing can be worse. You aim your sights to work away from that standard as much as possible. Laws and debates should absolutely seek to minimize suffering, to the greatest degree possible, for all parties. That's the only kind of agreeable morality that isn't biased or pejorative towards or against a group of people. Ok - I don't hate this argument. If you truly take someone's private enterprise to be as sovereign as their mind/body, then it's a rational analogy to compare the two. I don't think anyone's business or private enterprise is nearly as sovereign as their mind or body is - because it exists in the public sphere. Now, I don't think anyone should be forced to service those they don't wish to. That's actually a close tie to indentured servitude. As a moral standpoint, forcing someone to do something against their will that which is ordinarily done by choice is a gross overstep of any government. A business should have the right and the freedom to discriminate. A man should have the right to deny the holocaust. By these, I mean that they should have the freedom to destroy their own reputation. I disagree to heatedness the values someone would hold for them to think this a moral place to stand, but that falls beyond the scope of both this discussion, and hopefully the law. However: I don't think that the business or enterprise should have the right to terminate employment for specific reasons such as race/ethnicity/gender/sex/religion. Refusing services on those grounds is entirely different than terminating employment. By allowing business to fire or refuse to hire based on those demographics, it's allowing the repression and oppression of those people, and it is not an easily surmountable problem. Workers rights and laborers treatment is one of the areas in pure free market capitalism that simply isn't sustainable. The dollar will trump freedom and rights wherever the law does not specifically prevent it. Look at the shitshow that is the U.S. cable/ISP market - it's an abysmal show that the market cannot regulate itself with some basic ground rules, the same way that child labor laws and unions were needed to prevent labor exploitation in the past. Now - I would propose a good way to avoid this altogether is to simply bar the questions from taking place in an interview at all - that would go further, I think, by both preventing discriminatory hiring practices, as well as preventing the reverse of affirmative action. Unless someone's <insert feature> prevents them from doing the job, it should not be a factor for employment at all. The employer has no need to know of my gender identification, and I have no need to tell them. If you are in a right-to-work state (like I am) the contract may be terminated for any reason at any time by either party. I don't particularly like that law, but no one can deny that it's cut and dry. The only problem to me is finding a sweet spot, where you can't fire someone "because they're black" or "because they're gay", but you can fire a gay/black person for incompetence and the like without having to fear discrimination backlash. However, I don't see a good resolution for that without a lot of thought. To summarize, I find you view of morals and morality unsophisticated and lazy - a solipsistic and nihilistic approach to it, where everything is subjective to everyone so why bother to analyze it, let's just not talk about it. I agree with your stance on discrimination being a right for a business in its services/goods it provides, but not as a factor of employment. However, I think that the way anti-discrimination be accomplished in the employment case is not by "making it illegal", but by taking it out of the equation of things your employer should know about you. Easier said than done, obviously. "Free to leave" seems to be your idea of legislative discrimination against minorities and social inequality, which I find deeply troubling. It seems very lazy to assume that the answer to these problems is relocation and the resulting tribalism. Sure, but why? This is the correct thread for that sort of thing, is it not?