Big Dog

You put Basil in the ratatouille?

I did a thing in the early '90s that seemed like it was a bullshit scam but turned out to be legitimate. This company mailed you boxes of colored brochures advertising boxes of tupperware (actually Anchor Hocking stuff) for $19.95 plus a $7 delivery fee. There was also a big stack of small sheets of paper with an 800 number to call and a special ID identifying me, and I would staple one of these to each brochure. In the mornings, I would drive around and leave a few copies of these brochures at the front desk of businesses, hospitals, wherever I thought people might see them. People who were interested would call the 800 number and order a box or two. In the evenings I would get a fax with all my orders on it, and in the afternoons I would go to a warehouse with a cashier's check for $19.95 X however many orders I had and then deliver the stuff. Customers would usually pay with a personal check for $26.95 per box.

The fact that I had to show up at the warehouse each afternoon with a big check for the product before I even delivered it was what made it seem scammy. But the whole thing was totally legitimate -- prepaying for the product protected the company from getting scammed by their own employees. Every order was real and the customers always paid. Even though it was always personal checks, in a whole summer of doing this only two checks ever bounced, and both times I went back to the customer and they wrote a new valid check (people were really ashamed of bouncing checks in front of their coworkers).

At the peak of me doing this, I was getting in the neighborhood of 120 orders per day, which means I was making over $4000 a week (and effectively tax-free at that, since this company didn't report anything to the IRS; in fact they never even had my social security number). Which is fucking CRAZY money for a 23-year-old to be making in 1991 dollars. People were just so happy to be able to shop while at work. This shit really was a precursor to Amazon. I stopped doing it to go be a dirt-poor graduate student, which was possibly the biggest mistake of my life.

I wish I had an aux jack. 2001 just predates that, I guess.

My car is a 2001 and has a CD player. Normally, this would preclude playing phone music (without that FM transmitter bullshit, at least), but this CD player was built to accommodate a 6-CD changer in the trunk, and you can buy a little gadget that plugs into the port for this and allows an aux jack to feed audio into the player. This worked great for me until my latest phone which has no audio port. My USB-C to 1/8" jack technically works, but the volume is way too low. So I'm back to burning CDs for my car.

adaptive cruise control

My car originally had that, but one day it came back from the service appointment at the dealership and that was no longer available. Software update removed that, probably because too many people were falling asleep thanks to that and the lane assist shit.

"What do you want to do when you grow up, Ricky?"
"React to the Danny Carey live Pneuma drumming video."

My personal rage at the moment is this square time format with the two digit hour over the two digit minute. Obviously designed for a smart watch but Android decided it needs to be on the phones as well. I keep turning it off but every few updates it comes back -- because the designers know better than me what I actually want.

I bought a cheap electric heater from Lowe's a few years ago. It surprised me greatly because it would occasionally rewire itself. It had a rotating switch with Off, Fan, Low Heat and High Heat settings, but once in a while these switch settings would change. Like, Low Heat would actually by the Fan setting, Off would actually be the High Heat setting etc. It turns out the rotating switch just travelled over some printed solder lines and occasionally these would melt and re-form into new positions.

How there was not an epidemic of homes burning down because of these things is a mystery. But there's just no way engineers could have ever guessed something like this would happen.

Fun Eiffel Tower fact: for the 1893 Chicago world's fair, Eiffel pitched building his tower again only twice as tall. The Chicago organizers passed and went with the Ferris Wheel instead, sparing us Eiffel Bueller's Day Off.

"Nuclear waste disposal is not a significant problem." Glad you said that, Mr. CEO.

Plants don't need grounded receptacles, apparently. I'll bet that one doesn't even have the polarity wired up correctly.