bluGill

I have a large external battery that I carry at camp at times. Mostly it sits at my tent getting charged on solar, but I have carried it for an short time to charge my battery while doing something else. The youth at the camp don’t carry a phone, but I often get asked to look something up for them so it is useful. Not to mention when there are no adult activities to keep me i entertained.

Fortunately for me, one of passions is programming computers, which pays a lot of money. After spending eight hours a day programming computers - who am I kidding? I can’t program my computer eight hours a day - Never could. Fortunately, my company gives me several hours of meetings every day and so I can program computers in between and not get burned out. There is the reality of having your passion and your job being the same type. You’re gonna get burned out. There will be times when you have to do things that are boring and tedious and you can’t put it off until later when you find the energy.

Fortunately, I have multiple passions. When I get home at the end of the day, I couldn’t possibly sit down and program anymore, but I can cook a good meal for my family every day. Even cooking I have to clean up after myself, which is, let’s just say, not something I enjoy. Often the rest of my family will help clean up, but I have to take a part of that.

I’ve been playing mandolin for almost 30 years now. I regularly hear someone who is actually good at mandolin playing. I’m just jealous at how good they are. But the reality is, because it’s my passion, but it’s just something I’m an amateur at, I don’t have to be good. I can skip doing those three octave major scales. Many people are better than me - Many of them haven’t been alive for 30 years and yet they’re a lot better than me. But I can tell by listening to them play that they haven’t skipped a lot of the practice that I’ve skipped over the years. But that’s okay because this is just a passion and if I don’t feel like it, well, I don’t have to feel like it.

So my question is, what is your budget like? And what is your personal passion for piano? If you love piano, there are a ton of online study programs in piano. There are a lot of local music teachers who can teach you piano, the parts you’re missing. Firefighter isn’t the best income, but I’m sure that you could throw other parts of your life away and thus come up with the money to take a degree in piano.

You can probably find a local college that is willing to give you a music major for a small price. And since this is just something you’re doing for fun, you don’t have to do that piano degree in a couple years. You can take eight years to get a piano performance major (that is, as a part-time student, only take two or three credits a semester). There is nothing wrong with that because it’s not going to be your income in the future anyway.

Do you really want to though? It’s an option to get the music major, but you have other options. You are perfectly justified in saying, “you know what, I could do that, but I’m not actually interested in it. I’m going to do something else at a time”. Maybe you decide, piano is interesting but taking up too much time and you get yourself a tatting shuttle and learn another hobby which is even more useless than any of the others. More power to you. Or you can start on the piano major and along the way you discover that there’s some required class in something that turns out to be become a new passion for you that also turns out to pay a lot of money in so suddenly you switch majors to and you find a new job. Great if it happens and if it doesn’t, well who cares you already have a career

You should take an active effort to read the intelligent comments of people who disagree with you. I don’t know how you hand downvotes and blocking and so I can’t tell if this is a comment that is directly at you to change your ways or if you already are doing this and you are only downvoting/blocking obvious garbage. Too many people, when they see a point of view they disagree with, assume immediately that the other person is stupid and that common is garbage. But that is false. It is, however, a very hard bias to overcome in yourself. Something I struggle with, too.

A large shower with two shower heads. I had that in a previous house. It wasn’t as nice as it sounds. Only reason it wasn’t a complete water of space is the design of the house (after four remodels) had a weird space that wouldn’t be useful for anything else anyway so may as well make the shower a little larger.

Yes, but not as an out of the box solution. Tape drives use standard sizes, and standard interfaces (often serial attached SCSI). You can buy a tape drive and a USB encloser that lets you put your own drive in it and the tape drive will work. You need to make sure the USB encloser provides enough power, is big enough, and has the correct interface, but it will “just work” if you select the right parts and plug them in. Do make sure you read the spec - some cheaper enclosers may not support USB3 data rates which you tape drive may need to work well.

The USB designers made the decision back in the day that they would not design a protocol for CDrom (then important), tape, or other such things. Instead they designed a “here is how to transmit SCSI over USB”, which makes it cheap to design USB to SCSI adapters and that is what has been done.

Do you need tape? Do you really need that much data? Archival grade DVDs can store a few GB (an order of magnitude less than the TBs you asked for!), and probably easier to find/source.

Large companies still use tape for their large data sets. Tape has some useful advantages that make it worth it in very specific situations.

The first is when you have a lot of data - if you have several hundred of even thousands tapes (likely including duplicates!) then the quantity of data you have backed up is large enough the tapes are the cheapest.

The second - as hinted above - is duplicates. If you don’t want the data lost a tape is a good answer to have several copies. While a disk might be cheaper, they are fragile and computers are not designed to swap disks that often. Even USB which is designed for swapping isn’t that good: the connector will physically wear out a lot faster than you would expect making the costs much higher to manage this. Plus the labor to plug/unplug a lot of drives will get you.

Third, some tapes come in a write once form. If you have data that (often for legal reasons) you need to store such that it cannot be modified later then tape is often you best answer to ensure the data really wasn’t changed. (either by an executive hiding their tracks, or an attacker trying to put ransomware on you).

That said, for most reading this, a few disks in a NAS is better than about 98% of people have and if you have snapshots on the NAS probably good enough for everything (your only risk is fire or theft of the NAS - if you cannot live with this get a second NAS elsewhere, or a cloud backup), similar cost, and has enough other useful features that you want it anyway.

I don’t think there is any practical difference between our two positions.

There are jobs everywhere. You just have to find them. Odds are his your partner’s relocation package includes help for you to find a job, use it.

They have already moved on from you, move on from them. You owe them two weeks (notice) and that is all.

My Grandpa always had a “hello” mat because he would say hello to anyone, but not everybody was welcome.

CDs - they are still commonly sold by artists and then you can do whatever. I rip them to .flac myself.

Right now I have them all on jellyfin, but I’ve been doing this for years and changed server programs many times (I’ve yet to find something I use at home). Originally I reencoded to .mp3 and put them on a CD for use in my cars now I reencode to .mp3 and put on a USB stick for my cars.

Streaming is moving more and more to “access to millions upon millions of songs and have them play randomly is something you cannot get”. Sure the streamlining library may have millions and millions of songs. However they do everything by a very limited playlist and so you get the same 50 songs.

That is a bad thing. While therapy can’t solve every problem, it can solve a lot. That American’s can admit to using therapy means we can get the help we need when needed. I don’t know how, but Europe needs to fix their culture and get people the help they need, not be smug in the “we don’t need it” attitude which harms those who need help.

The good news is now you know you are not supposed to be able to do that. So you can try it with confidence: if you can’t get it back together - it was already trash so there is no lost and you don’t even have to feel bad for breaking it. And you just might learn something( or figure out how to fix it!) and thus have the the makings of a good blog post.

If a single person working alone can install them in a weekend - which happens all the time - a pro who has experience in doing this often should be able to do it for $1000 or less. It is a lot of labor but not more than $4000 worth. At least not the normal case.

The other thing we need to do is investigate why they charge so much to install heat pumps. I can buy a mini-split for around $1500 (depending on size), but they will charge me $4500 to install it - which seems unreasonable for the labor.

I would guess that the tattooer had no clue. That is incompetence better explains this than malice

That doesn’t change anything useful. There are many not for profit health insurance companies in the us - they are no cheaper and don’t have better service than the for profit ones.

For many people owning their own housing is the wrong decision. That means somebody else needs to own their housing and that person may as well be you (depending of course on your situation - it isn’t for everyone)