Misc annoyances

[mindstalk]

A while back my building's super replaced two of my ceiling fans (that were getting loud and wobbly) with new fans that... are also kind of loud and wobbly. Anyway, these come with light fixture, and the bulbs were burning out, which led me to discover that they take some tiny tiny screw base. "Candelabra" base, apparently. No CFLs for that size, though there are some LEDs, for considerably more.

I had minimal fruit flies this summer. Now, despite it being much colder, I have some again. The difference? I've been buying and eating bananas again. I think it is the fruit fly fruit. Oddly, they refuse to follow banana peels into traps.

Soviet apologists. Okay, I guess I should be annoyed with myself for trying to engage them.

For years I've tracked my finances with a bunch of ad hoc files and shell scripts. I thought maybe I should try the world of spreadsheets and databases, and wrote a python script to convert all the data into a CSV file. That wasn't annoying at all! (Apart from the usual debugging, plus data cleanup, but it wasn't that bad, really.) But then I tried loading the file into LibreOffice, and LO was having bizarre display problems. "rent" was rendered as "rdnt" for example, in the main sheet, though it had the correct value in the cell inspector. And dialog boxes came up totally unreadable.

Well, I upgraded and restarted it, and it was better the second time. But still, weird.

Comments

[mtbc]

Yeah, I have a years-old collection of little command-line Haskell programs for single-entry book-keeping that work with naively stored Haskell data structures in files and can make them presentable with the help of import HTML.

LibreOffice had weirdness for me which was something like, I couldn't type semicolons into new formulas, they'd turn to some syntax error thing; it basically became unusable, I had a standard distribution version and nobody else seemed to be reporting the bug. With a later version on another system it's now fine.

[mtbc]

I too find Russian apologists annoying; it would be interesting to be able to discuss life under the current regime with those who know it first-hand. But, then I figure that maybe they might at least not believe it all, they may just figure that the FSS might be routinely scraping such content for their files on people.

[mindstalk]

AFAIK these aren't Russians, but general reddit socialists. Collectively they're rather incoherent: "the USSR was state capitalism, not socialism! Also it did all these great things and the people wanted to keep it!" though I haven't tracked individual opinions closely.

bananas

[mtbc]

mst3kmoxie confirms that your suspicion about bananas in particular causing fruit flies tallies with our experience.

Re: bananas

[mindstalk]

Huh, thanks.