Minor rant thread. Post your rants o' the day here!

Last night was a mad scramble in preparation for today's weather event. I've had my parents' 00 Tundra occupying the good part of my driveway since Sunday, getting shocks, CV axles, and a full front brake job (including 231mm caliper upgrade), which, as per usual, has turned into much more of a PITA than expected because I can't get the bastards to bleed (which is a ranr unto itself). Meanwhile, my RX7 has been sitting at their place, and I wanted to get it home last night before they brined the roads, so I left the FRS there instead.

Since I hadn't mounted the snow tires on the Scion yet anyways, my plan was to get the truck working last night and take that to work today instead. I ended up finally bailing on that plan around 10 last night, and had to have SWMBO take me to fetch the FRS, mount the snows, and drive to the gas station to air them up, since my little compressor got run over and I didnt want to piss the neighbors off with the big one.)

I almost said berkeley it and rocked the no seasons, but mounting the snows turned out to be the right move. Today's 1-3" snow prediction turned into 8" and counting, and my usual 55 min commute turned into over 2.5 hours and nearly double the distance. Trucks stuck left and right on my usual route, so I ended up having to bushwhack down random backroads, some of which completely unplowed. Without the Blizzaks, I'd be stuck on the side of the road right now.

I drive an FR-S. I driven said FR-S in snow on the stock 3 seasons.  You wouldn’t be stuck on the side of the road. You would have never been able to leave the driveway. 

bigeyedfish said:

Dusterbd13 said:

Just walked into the diner. They're playing Christmas music. Already.

I want to double up on this one.  What the hell?  On the bright side, my four year old is still singing Spooky Spooky, which is hilarious, and more seasonally appropriate.

The trashy neighbors in my neighborhood put up their Christmas lights last week. The people next to them still have their Halloween decorations out.

I'm not ready for this 

In reply to Appleseed :

Better yet, I would have been stuck at work. I think I've maybe driven it in the snow once on the all-seasons, knowing it would be a 4 season daily I pretty much factored the snow tires into the purchase price. It's fun as hell with a little bit of traction.

Just found out I only get one day off next week.. and than is not really a day off. We have a Chinese singer coming in to do a concert on wednesday.. doors are at Midnight, show is 1am. That kind of destroys my thanksgiving off and my usual wednesday. Friday, because they could not get enough hands to do the show scheduled then, I am 10am till the show loads out at 2am (roughly) and then back in at 4pm the next day. OT is nice for holiday purchases, but really?

stanger_missle said:

bigeyedfish said:

Dusterbd13 said:

Just walked into the diner. They're playing Christmas music. Already.

I want to double up on this one.  What the hell?  On the bright side, my four year old is still singing Spooky Spooky, which is hilarious, and more seasonally appropriate.

The trashy neighbors in my neighborhood put up their Christmas lights last week. The people next to them still have their Halloween decorations out.

I'm not ready for this 

Without knowing your neighbors, at least they put them up instead of just plugging them back in...

In reply to Furious_E :

I was definitely regretting taking the miata on summer tires yesterday instead of the truck... Made it home in one piece though. Somehow. Definitely need to get some blizzacks for miata fitment. Until then, I have to remind myself it's better to drive the truck and suck some fuel rather than take the miata. 

In my defense, when I left the house in the morning there was not a hint of snow out. 

Glad it you made it home!

AWSX1686 said:

In reply to Furious_E :

I was definitely regretting taking the miata on summer tires yesterday instead of the truck... Made it home in one piece though. Somehow. Definitely need to get some blizzacks for miata fitment. Until then, I have to remind myself it's better to drive the truck and suck some fuel rather than take the miata. 

In my defense, when I left the house in the morning there was not a hint of snow out. 

Glad it you made it home!

I know the feeling, zx2 always gets 35mpg and the explorer gets 20mpg. I have a 180 mile trek today and as much as i want to use less gas.....im taking the 4wd with studded tires today.

In reply to Antihero :

My truck normally gets about 16mpg, compared to my miata normally gets 25mpg. Most of the time I don't mind taking the truck occasionally, but I just dumped 2k into it, and I feel like the transmission is going to need rebuilt soon, so I've been babying it. 

All the "fun" cars that attract me are on the wrong side of the country. Shipping them puts them out of budget. Why..... 

Had an appointment with the hospital this morning. Apparently the mass in my lung is a non contagious cousin of tuberculosis. Its still growing, but not as rapidly. 

The symptoms have been coughing, shortness of breath, tired, soreness in the bottom of my right chest. Sometimes legit pain.

The treatment us a cocktail of nasty medication. One i have been on before that (per my wife, i don't remember) caused hallucinations, dimentia like symptoms, and memory issues. The other ones come with stomach issues, vision loss/changes, irritability, weight loss, liver damage, etc.

I have to take this E36 M3 for about 2 years, and HOPEFULLY keep my lung. If i dont, mass will keep growing and probably kill me. 

Thats a berkeleying AWESOME way to start my least favorite time of the year. 

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Had an appointment with the hospital this morning. Apparently the mass in my lung is a non contagious cousin of tuberculosis. Its still growing, but not as rapidly. 

The symptoms have been coughing, shortness of breath, tired, soreness in the bottom of my right chest. Sometimes legit pain.

The treatment us a cocktail of nasty medication. One i have been on before that (per my wife, i don't remember) caused hallucinations, dimentia like symptoms, and memory issues. The other ones come with stomach issues, vision loss/changes, irritability, weight loss, liver damage, etc.

I have to take this E36 M3 for about 2 years, and HOPEFULLY keep my lung. If i dont, mass will keep growing and probably kill me. 

Thats a berkeleying AWESOME way to start my least favorite time of the year. 

Scary stuff. Wishing you the best of luck and more importantly medical science. You’re in my thoughts and prayers

mtn said:

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Had an appointment with the hospital this morning. Apparently the mass in my lung is a non contagious cousin of tuberculosis. Its still growing, but not as rapidly. 

The symptoms have been coughing, shortness of breath, tired, soreness in the bottom of my right chest. Sometimes legit pain.

The treatment us a cocktail of nasty medication. One i have been on before that (per my wife, i don't remember) caused hallucinations, dimentia like symptoms, and memory issues. The other ones come with stomach issues, vision loss/changes, irritability, weight loss, liver damage, etc.

I have to take this E36 M3 for about 2 years, and HOPEFULLY keep my lung. If i dont, mass will keep growing and probably kill me. 

Thats a berkeleying AWESOME way to start my least favorite time of the year. 

Scary stuff. Wishing you the best of luck and more importantly medical science. You’re in my thoughts and prayers

Praying for ya. My wife has Aspergillosis, fungus in the lung. Some of the anti-fungals she's been on have had not fun affects. Not sure if yours is fungal at all, but she's been nebulizing colloidal silver as a home remedy that might be helping. Not sure if that's something that would help you at all, but it might be worth checking into. 

Also, not to pry too much, but is it confined to a certain section/lobe of lung? 

AWSX1686 said:

Not sure if yours is fungal at all, but she's been nebulizing colloidal silver as a home remedy that might be helping.

Probably not helping (if it did, it would be called medication rather than a home remedy) and I know that ingesting the stuff has at least one bad side effect:

https://www.wired.com/story/does-colloidal-silver-work/

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Lower right lung is where the mass is. Between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball at the moment. 

Ill find the exact name after work and the drug names.

May ne time to start a learn me thread.....

Im willing to try anything. I need to survive long enough to see my grandkids, my daughter is 9 and she better not have any before 30.....

Ill take prayer. Ive been keeping the whole medical thing as under wraps as i could. Don't want people to worry. But its not cancer!

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

Damn, really hope you are able to battle that. My daughter is about to turn 10, I cant imagine what your going thru right now.

So my advertising spend has increased enough to attract the attention of Google's reps who called me yesterday to find out why I wasn't using the Display network.

I explained that when I ran them previously, the ads were essentially ending up on click farms or websites intended for the owner or minions to click on the ads to generate revenue. Since Google doesn't offer a whitelist for advertisers (or didn't last time I looked at it), I was getting tired of blacklisting the random bullE36 M3 popup site of the day. The internet is too big to deal with that.

The rep assures me that there's a whitelist now, so I figured I'd give it another shot since he offered to show me how to set it up. Turns out there actually is now a whitelist. Okay that works.

So I came in this morning and the display campaign had eaten it's low budget cap (I'm ignorant, not stupid) in about two hours. Morbid curiosity lead to looking at where the ad was displayed to figure out why the spend went so quickly. 80% of them are flashlight apps. That caused me to remember that I had blacklisted Googles app advertisement domain (Admob) last time I ran one of these due to the same problem.

Naturally the next step was to try to blacklist the Admob domain like I had last time, essentially only advertise on websites, no Youtube or Apps, which lead me to find out that Google Ads has changed the settings so that's now apparently impossible. I sell ERP software, the demographic cross over for in app ads and my software is pretty much non-existant or miniscule enough that it the juice isn't worth the squeeze. If I can't just blacklist Youtube interstitial ads, in video ads, and in app ads, I don't have any interest.

Look I know that 90% of Google's revenue is driven through Ads but this isn't like advertising in a magazine where they can provide me with demographic information so I can assess if the readership would be a good fit for my product offerings (GRM is really the only one on my list to call whenever I can convince the owners print would be a good idea.) Keywords basically provide that control, the negative keyword list is okay once you build it up enough. The Display Network ads do not. It seems like every time I deal with Google they're changing things to be worse for the people that drive the core profitability in the hopes that no one will notice where the advertising spend is going.

Again ignorant, not an idiot. I can parse data.

GameboyRMH said:

AWSX1686 said:

Not sure if yours is fungal at all, but she's been nebulizing colloidal silver as a home remedy that might be helping.

Probably not helping (if it did, it would be called medication rather than a home remedy) and I know that ingesting the stuff has at least one bad side effect:

https://www.wired.com/story/does-colloidal-silver-work/

 

Not trying to start a whole debate on this. Home remedy vs. medication, what works vs. what makes money. Not gonna get into it.  

Silver has anti-fungal properties, I believe also anti-bacterial. I do know that when we were looking into her nebulizing it, the general consensus was that you should not use it every day long term. Maybe a month of daily use, and then take a break and use is once a week or something. Too much of a good thing... Not always good. Proper amount of a good thing, may be useful. Your mileage may vary, obviously you'll want to do your own research and make your own conclusions on what to try. 

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

Hoping all goes well for you.  The treatment may suck but hopefully it is a lot better than the alternative.

Flight delays blow. Apparently EWR can’t catch up once the weather gets better. 

Good that it just one flight and no reservations. 

And it helps more that my wife gets us into the sky club 

alfadriver said:

Flight delays blow. Apparently EWR can’t catch up once the weather gets better. 

Good that it just one flight and no reservations. 

And it helps more that my wife gets us into the sky club 

Delay pt2. Add 45 more min....

In reply to AWSX1686 :

I don't blame you for not wanting to take your truck in this weather, that has to be one of the cleanest 1st gen Rams I've seen around here. Plus, there's nothing more fun in the winter than a rwd sports car on snows 

After talking to some people at work today, I really shouldn't complain - multiple people reported 4+ hour drives to York!

In reply to alfadriver :

I feel for ya, ended up delayed 4.5 hours in Atlanta last week, then got stuck another 30 min at the gate in Baltimore when the jet bridge broke down. Thank the FSM for airport bars!

In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :

Best of luck and medical science. Sounds like a rough recovery ahead, but beats the E36 M3 out of lung cancer.

I'm a fixer. I fix broken things. Cars, appliances, an occasional broken heart. SWMBO's dad had Alzhiemers. I can't fix that. 

James Dewberry passed at 11:15 this morning.  

Godspeed, Jim.