Actually, successful and miserable.

I had an interesting conversation with my ex-wife last night. We both do (and always have) suffered from some crippling bouts with depression for months on end, up to a year or two. She's finally getting back out of the latest round, whereas I'm deep at the bottom. But the thing I've noticed is that I'm many times more productive and creative when I'm depressed and fucked up than when I'm happy. My output when I'm at the bottom is amazing both to me and those around me, because I literally work myself into the ground in an effort to avoid

When I'm happy I don't get shit done. It backs up, it gets put off, it gets ignored, because I'm off relaxing or doing things that keep me happy. I'm out with friends or relaxing, not sitting in my house working on project X, Y, or Z for the whole weekend.

When I'm worm-food, I want to have made a difference. That's the one and only thing I want out of life. I want to have contributed to the things I care about in a meaningful way that will make the future better. It's that one overriding goal in my life that makes me accept miserable as the price to be paid.

I still drive my 1932 Chevrolet, and it's still perfectly road legal. So, 82 years and counting. I just rebuilt the engine again, and she's probably good for another 15-20k before more major work. The car has far outlived its original owner (my great grandfather, who passed away before I was born), and very well may outlive me provided I find someone to care for her like my grandfather, father, and I have. Sure, I don't drive it more than once a month or so, but my daily car will be 20 this year and has 250k miles on it. Body's good, drivetrain is fine, engine isn't showing any problems, and I have a mountain of spare parts in the shed. It's not going anywhere anytime soon unless I grow tired of it.

The biggest threat is a significant shift in fuel sources, such as we suddenly embrace E85 as a primary fuel, or something like CNG or electric.

And even warranty - under Magnuson–Moss, you can typically mess with anything you want and they can't void your warranty unless what you did caused the problem. So shunting the seat heater wire straight into the +12V rail won't cause you a problem unless you blow up the seats (or burn the car down from failing to use a fuse, etc.)

Then again, I haven't had a car with a warranty in years, and even when I did, usually the first mods went in within days of buying it.

I agree - I read that part about a 100 foot cliff at the end of the bunny hill and immediately thought "design fail..."

Honestly these little telco coops just don't have the clout and size to do this sort of thing efficiently, and they typically have a lot of very rural customers on very long loops (read: no DSL no matter how you slice it). My hometown is 1000 people in eastern Iowa, but it's served by Qwest/Centurylink. As much as I love to hate on 'em, they drug fiber to town and rebuilt the CO in the 1990s. My dad pays much less for internet access than I do living in Colorado Springs, and until a few years ago got better bandwidth.

I'd suspect that they have - at most - a few thousand DSL subscribers scattered across the county. Doesn't make for any great efficiencies there. Honestly I'd be surprised if somebody isn't putting radios on top a couple elevators in the county within a year to compete. Grain elevators make awesome towers, and we Iowans have lots of them.

Personally I don't know why we mess around with all these expensive drugs and such. Shooting condemned prisoners has worked quite well for centuries. Sure, ammo is more expensive than it used to be, but it's not *that* expensive. And if you mount said criminal to a fixed mount, and have a fixed weapon trained on his head, that's pretty damned fast and reliable. I used to hunt quite a bit in my youth, and from a good clean shot to the head, there's not a lot going on a few seconds later.

Then again, if we did it my way, we'd bring back the public hanging. The other side of the "purpose of criminal justice" is to act as a deterrant to others. Modern execution is too clean and too far removed from the average human being to act as a deterrant. But if you string 'em up in the town square, that makes an impression.

I can't imagine this actually working, particularly once the drones exit dense urban spaces for the suburbs. The first kid with a BB gun is going to figure out he can get a free drone and a surprise present. Unless the drones are sending back continuous 360 degree spherical video so the perps can be caught, this scheme is just ready for a stealin'.

To me, it's all about the price, otherwise I'd own one by now.

My three cars, together, barely cost me $30k. $17k for my Ridgeline, $16k for my S2000, and $3k for my del Sol that actually sucks up most of the miles. So, for $36k I have three cars, each appropriate for different things, and not one range-limited electric that's only really any good at being a commuter car. Since 700 miles in a day isn't uncommon for me due to work and hobbies, an electric can't be my only car.

I did think about converting the last del Sol over to electric when the engine gave out at 310k, but it just wasn't worth the investment in time and materials. Electrification would have never paid for itself over another 15 year old car that I'll put 150-200k miles on and bought for $3k.

Much like I really wish they'd play a World Series sometime during my lifetime. But in my world, it's only a World Series if the Cubs are in it. Otherwise it's like it doesn't even exist.

Right behind a decent handheld DMM, a scope is about the second piece of bench gear I recommend to anyone. Old used digital scopes are so darn cheap anymore (my TDS340A that I've had for 18 years can now be had for $250-400 on eBay), and they really help you visualize what's going on in the circuit. I'd give up just about every other piece of real lab gear I own to keep my scope, because the rest is either for specific past projects, or is just nicer to work with, but could be substituted with lesser quality gear. There's no substitute for a decent scope in my opinion, but I do a lot of pure analog or serial stuff where being able to capture and stare at a waveform can go a long way towards finding a problem. Plus, all that digital eventually gets down to the real world, where ugly analog problems eventually rear their head again (slew rate, parasitics, transmission line uglies, etc.)

I'd bet I have my scope fired up 80% of the time that I'm not strictly working on firmware, and probably 20-30% of the time that I'm just working on code.

My main bench gear:
  - Tektronix TDS340A scope
  - HP 33401 bench DMM
  - A couple various portable DMMs - one Fluke 87V, a couple cheapo Chinese, and a couple super cheapo Harbor Freight
  - Saleae Logic16 logic analyzer (awesome tool, by the way...)
  - Four old Lambda LLS lab power supplies
  - Old HP 3310B function generator
  - For soldering, a Hakko 936 iron, modified toaster oven for reflowing, and a hot air rework station
  - a pile of other strippers, crimpers, pliers, screwdrivers, tweezers, magnifiers, and assorted hand tools including my favorite Xcelite MS-545-J cutters
  - USBtinyISP for programming AVRs, Picstart 2 for programming PICs
  - Mendelmax 3d printer for printing out parts and prototypes
  - And a pile of other stuff to make the work more pleasant - my dev PC, a beer fridge, a TV, a Blu-ray player, a mythtv frontend box, a laser printer, bins of electrical and mechanical parts, datasheets I use frequently, etc.

I like all of the stuff, and wouldn't trade any of it, though I keep thinking about one of those new Agilent DSOX2024 scopes. I probably won't, though - my old Tek does well enough, and it has a great deal of sentimental value for all the years and projects we've done together. The only thing I'd really like is waveform capture on something that wasn't a 3.5" floppy...

Woohoo! I've always wanted somebody to notice my exceptional dullness and weirdness, and finally someone has. Now I'm somebody again!

I agree with your comment about pigs. It's really too bad they're so tasty, because they really are damn smart creatures.

That said, butchered many, many things over the years. Grew up on a farm. Doesn't bother me a bit that I'm still a carnivore.

As far as the death penalty, if we want to make it a deterrant, then it needs to be public. I'm all for public hangings. I think if the public wasn't so disconnected from the actual punishment, it a) would act as a deterrant, and b) would provide a catalyst for a discussion about our use of the death penalty. Then again I have a rather interesting view of what punishments are appropriate for what crimes. I'd like to add arson to the list of crimes you can be put to death for (particularly arson against homes, historic structures or artifacts), and I'd like to see prisons turned into work camps rather than just crappy apartments. They have a debt to society for their crimes - I say they should be put to work doing anything they can to provide services back to the general public.

I'll take fusion any day over "renewables" - fusion should be able to pack a few GWe into a few hundred or thousand acres of space. Renewables, because of their inherent low energy density, will force us either to conserve or use most of our available open land for energy production. The promise of fusion is really low cost energy without limits. Given that everything we do and everything we aspire to requires more and more energy, I'd much prefer a pure fusion-driven future where conserving energy was a quaint notion.

Also, which fossil fuels exactly have we stolen from third world countries? Most of our power generation in the US comes from coal, which we produce almost exclusively domestically. Most of our natural gas comes from Canada, which isn't exactly a third world country. The only thing we import in scads in oil, and I guarantee, those who control the oil aren't getting stolen from. They're being paid very well. The wealth may not be very evenly distributed in the destination country, but that's hardly because the West "stole it".

Yeah, no sympathy here. I sit on the board of a local historic preservation society, and we're 501c3. We pay our accountant something like $1000/year (some of her rate is counted as an in-kind donation, but nothing we do is really that complicated) and she keeps the paperwork current and straightened out. I'm relatively sure that X.org runs with a bigger budget than we do and could find accounting services, so this is just gross incompetence on their part.

An Aussie friend from college routinely told us: "Fosters - Australian for crappy Yank beer."

And I agree. Godawful stuff.