I don’t want you to call, text, email, or so much as send me smoke signals. The only time I want to hear from you is when I get up, walk over to you, and slap the snot out of you. And when I do, all I want to hear is you begging for mercy and the sound of your tears.

For those that don’t get the joke: .//////// (or am I?)

There is a surprising amount of “ancient” hardware out there still chugging along doing very useful work.

3.5 floppy disks. They still exist and still get used. I used them regularly up through the 2010s.

Be gone! Foul Spirit! Take your Co-Pilot and leave this innocent place.

LibreOffice is the good stuff if you need an office suite. It can do everything you might actually need and the price is right. But I’m old and retired and no longer have a need for a full office suite. I find AbiWord and Gnumeric all I need anymore. It kind of makes me sad to do so, but I uninstall LibreOffice these days.

Yeah like most actors, she’s never struck me as the brightest bulb in the box.

I can ask. I think she has presented them at a symposium this month. I think they might be in print next month.

Oh my. My one daughter just published 2 research papers on household thermostats. And according to her long term testing, Nest is one to definitely avoid.

No 20 year old belt. But I do have a set of 20 year old suspenders or galluses if you prefer. I wear suspenders because I have a very large surgical scar from a ruptured appendix years ago. Belt are very irritating to wear.

His attitude about teaching me the language was strange. He refused to teach even my mother. He was all “Your 'Murican, so you speak 'Murican.” And not Norwegian.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I discovered that the Norge my grandfather spoke was essentially a dead language from the early 1800s. Soon after my family showed up here, the Norwegian language changed. It changed a couple of times. Not that he knew that.

But on the German side, my Great Grandmother was all about teaching me German as a little kid. She always kept a bowl of the cheap cheap pressed pastel sugar mints that little old ladies are fond of. It was a decorative milk glass hen and nest covered bowl. I could have a candy anytime I wanted as long as I asked in German. And it had better be in Low German! Or I got a light whack with a little bamboo cane every time I mispronounced a word. I learned quickly!

Not simpler, just a lot more concerned about family dirty laundry. There were a general attitude about the “old country” that they didn’t talk about. It was strong enough that my one Grandfather refused to teach me to speak Norwegian even though he and all the older community spoke it everyday. And you would go to church on Christmas or Easter day and the service was done all in Norwegian and you sang Norwegian hymns.

My family immigrants went farther west. The western prairies and northern forests of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Canada. We bounced around a lot before the 1900s.

I love geese. Roasted, smoked, grilled…

This is why I drink gin and tonic. A proven prophylactic against malaria. The worst killer disease the world has ever known. So I can’t be an alcoholic.

One can’t be too careful you know.

My ancestors were criminals. One was a horse thief in Norway and the other was a counterfeiter in Germany in the early 1800s. Both skipping their homelands around the 1850s, just ahead of the law. At least that’s what the family histories say that we can actually trace with reasonable accuracy.

I suppose we brought the lutefisk and lefsa from the Norwegian side and beer and sausages on the German side.

Perhaps they grew tired of the Brits starving and killing them?

Good on you as a parent. The majority of parents can’t be arsed to teach their children anything.

Teachers can only teach so much without mommy and daddy help. I spent 4 years teaching math at my very small local school. I taught kids from 4th grade to 7th grade. Class size was as small as 4 and as large as 16. I learned very quickly that I needed to be part Grandpa, part child psychologist, part special ed and a teacher. There is no way I could teach every student everyday in the best manor that each of them them needed.

One kid had parents that didn’t care. One came from a dirt poor home and I mean dirt poor. Another was ADHD, another autistic, another was very smart and had to either help the other kids or be bored. Others had broken homes and couldn’t even live with either parent. Aunts and Grandmothers were raising them.

Tell me, how am I supposed to teach all the math that is needed to all of those kids every day and at a level that meets your exceptions? You should try standing in front of a classroom sometime.

The best thing you can do for your children is to take and active hand in their education at all levels. Whether is reading, math, science, or history. Be involved!

Again: How good does good enough need to be?

I remember a cartoon I saw in a magazine decades ago. It was 2 people, both obviously gods. The one that was larger and bearded was looking down on a smaller child like person. The child was showing the adult a planet he had created, (earth) in his cupped hands. The adult sized god looks down at it simply says, “And now that you have had your little joke…”

Volume is good enough. People lose sight of “just how good does good enough really need to be?” What you are talking about is a discussion of tolerances. I used to be a toolmaker. Perfection in accuracy and tolerances was part of my stock in trade. So many wasted hours spent telling customers that no, the tolerances do not need to be +.0005"/-.0000" or +.001mm/-.000mm for this or that it needs to be this accurate to function correctly. if you insist, I can do it your way, but you will be very unhappy.

When I bake my 2 loaves of bread at home, I use either cups and spoons or a digital scale depending on my mood. I honestly cannot tell you the difference in bread quality. Perhaps I’m just a bad baker and a worse connoisseur of bread - after all, I’m not Paul Hollywood. But I do know it’s still far, far better than store bought bread.

I have known 2 different people that owned and operated very successful family bakeries. They didn’t much care about weights of ingredients in the kitchen much beyond accounting costs per loaf to determine pricing. At 3AM ain’t nobody got time or the mood to scale everything. But yes, they did understand the dough itself allowing them to worry less about the exact measurement. We tend to get good at what we do.

Is baking as loosie goosie as cooking? Oh hell no! The tolerances must be respected. But you got more leeway than you, the home gamer, think you have. So worry less, and bake more!

I would argue that even measuring by weight isn’t all that important. Baking recipes are built as ratios. And as we all know, because we were awake in math class on that day, a ratio is simply a unit less form of measurement. And as long as we maintain the ratio we are good to go.

This is why you can bake a great loaf of bread with a scale, measuring cups and spoons, or the palm of your hand. Do you think Cavie Cave had a digital scale or a beautiful set of heavy stainless steel measuring cups in his cave 20,000 years ago?