Things that suck

So wife and kids are now relocated. Being separated do suck.

Another thing that do suck is that the car $wife is using, is starting to act up.

Baaaaah.

Both guys I work with had their car batteries die; one today, one yesterday. I better order a Battery Tender. Our car is only 1.5 years old, but trips out these days are very short and the battery doesn’t have much chance to recharge because everything is always on.

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Need to do IT risk assessment and management for company.

My manager have absolutely No Clue, and neither do I. And it sucks.

Anybody who can point us to good online resources?

Here’s a tip about dying batteries. If you have a power lift on the back door or tailgate, try to use it only when the engine is running. If you’re going back to your vehicle and you need to use it, such as loading in groceries, start it first. Oh, and make sure your wiper blades are turned off when you shut off the engine. I’ve had those immediately start running when I turned the engine on again.

I weakened the battery enough on my car by using the power lift when the car was off that it wouldn’t start a couple of times. I replaced the battery 2.5 years after I bought the car. I’m pretty sure I complained about this before, where this manufacturer has decided that “make lots of clicking noises and flash every light on the instrument panel so it looks like the car is having a meltdown” is the appropriate way to indicate “your battery is too weak to start the car”. The annoying thing is they’ve used this method for over a decade and it took me about 5 minutes to come up with a circuit that would know how to turn on a "low battery’ light.

I can’t be 100% sure yet, but I’m getting the feeling that Civilization VI sucks. Runs slow, even on the new M1 Mac mini. (Maybe tweaking the graphics settings could help.) But six hours into my first game, I’m not finding any of the major changes from Civ V to be an improvement and, so far, there seems to be a complete lack of fun.

It’s a game. Challenging is fine. But if I don’t enjoy it, what’s the point?

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I played a few rounds on my switch. Haven’t played on my PC yet. Definitely wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be. Luckily I got it on sale for $10 each time or I’d be very sad. Not sure I’ll spend much more time on it. :woman_shrugging:t3:

The most recent one I’ve played is Civ IV. What’s changed?

See if you can put a “battery protector” device in between your battery and other ancilliaries except the starter.

This way should your battery dips, it’ll cut the offending ancilliary off, allowing you to still start your engine.

Or am I talking silly poo now?

I think I played Civ V and found it bounced from ‘incredibly boring’ to ‘OMG WTF’ with a single difficulty notch and that turned me off. I didn’t feel like it added much and the graphics were nice but added little.

The biggest change from IV to V was moving from square based maps to a hex grid. That, I appreciated.

The second largest change was changing the stacking rules. No more ‘stacks of doom’ to take enemy cities in one massive attack. You have to be a little better organized in V.

They changed religion pretty drastically. Instead of founding religions based on discovered techs, a nation can found one religion max and then makes of it what it can. Different, but not annoying. (I always go for ‘tithe’ when I can. The extra income is more useful with my style of play.). I think the introduction of tourism in the second expansion was a net negative as it makes a cultural victory far easier than the other options when playing on the larger maps.

Then we get to VI. The biggest thing, so far, is how cities are handled. Instead of building your citiy and putting whatever you want in it, you have to build ‘districts’ of different types that allow you to build whatever buildings of that type you want. If you want to build a shrine, you have to build a Holy Site first. Which takes up map space (as do World Wonders) that in V you’d use for other purposes. While you can use gold to buy a building, you can’t buy a district that way. Which is annoying considering how long it takes to build districts.

The other major beef I have is that if there is a way to pull up a unit list like in V, I haven’t found it yet. (At least it will tel you when you can upgrade a unit, but tracking down that calvary unit you sent out to explore is harder than you think.)

The way city-states work changed, but I’m still figuring out if I like them or not.

There’s other stuff, but those are the highlights.

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That’s because hexagons are the bestagons.

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I found the unit list function. :neutral_face: One of those ‘click things at random and see what happens’ things

Well, crud. When I migrated my data from the Linux computer over to Windows, there were a group of files I decided to leave on it.

Guess which hard drive decided to croak after 7 years?
Guess which hard drive isn’t responding to the “put it in the refrigerator for four hours” trick?
Guess who hadn’t made a backup of the data in about a year?
Guess who just lost a lot of notes they had recorded with a voice recorder and a lot of revisions of what they were working on?
Guess who is saying, “If you’ll just work for five minutes, the data can be copied”?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Fleetwood Mac

Cold start issues on my Corolla.

Symptoms feel like a definite loose electrical connection, but then again it may also be fuel-related, as a loose electrical connection will just cut out, whilst fuel starvation will means less and less power. So basically a combination of the two.

Checked out the distributor (yes, it’s that old) and found no loose wires or funky stuff except for the condensor which looked definitely iffy. Distributor does not have points at all. One of the newer models.

Chucked it out (the condensor) and problem still persists. Then the car started. (The issue may be cold-start related).

Somebody who’s in the trade informed me that with points you definitely need a condensor otherwise you’ll burn your points out. So we can only assume that that specific condensor was to suppress electrical noise. Tough for the guy whose radio/mp3 player will whine when I’m next to him with my car… hehehehe

Drove to the autoshop, got some brand new tools (my current tools is with the SO) and decided to tackle the throttle body.

Got some throttle body spray cleaner, went home and started to clean the patient.

The throttle body… it was dirty. It was filthy. It was black on the inside.

Like black sludge. Ewww.

Cleaned it to the best of what I can do, then while I was still busy spraying it, the little plastic pipe which you push into the nozzle of the spray can to get at hard-to-reach places, shot off and vanished into the throttle body innards.

Well, f***. That was the last thing I wanted. Pondered whether to leave it, then decided, nah, if it ends up cockblocking a valve, then I’ll have a major issue.

So… decided to take the throttle body off. It was when I found that there is a vacuum pipe missing. Looked all over inside the engine bay, could not find any trace of it. WTF???

But I also noticed a nipple of the same size a bit behind the engine block - also without a pipe.

Did the hillbilly thing and applied a small blob of silicone sealant to both open nipples. (hurr durr). Put everything back together (after cleaning the inside part of the throttle body), and put it all together.

It may be my inagination, but the car definitely start easier now.

The acid test will be tomorrow.

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If you had a YouTube channel, and filmed your troubleshooting/repair antics, I’d probably watch it.

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Im not going to say your wrong but, you are very wrong.

Okay, I was trying to be a bit funny. I don’t actually hate Fleetwood Mac.

However, Kate Bush can go to hell.
My GF asked me to get all of the Kate Bush I could find and now she wants to listen to it all the time. I had to violently switch it off in the car the other day because it just sounded like tiny Korean girls screaming.
I know it isn’t all like that, but one song after the other … it kind of piled up in my head.

Kaputtes coil. Need to go to the autodealer and get a new one. I’m going to take my multimeter with and measure the new one just to make sure I measured correct.

DNS

'nuff said.

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