I kinda think it blows. I hope you see the humour in that.
If you’re anywhere near San Diego, you’re welcome to hop down to TJ if you have a sleeping bag. Plus, my water heater uses LP gas instead of electricity. Weather’s been a bit weird here, too, but I’ll always have hot water.
Bonus: Cats!
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That’s super sweet- thank you.
Sadly I live outside Boston. So. Yeah.
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Senator Tim Kaine and Senator Mark Warner require more information before your messages can be delivered.
Phone
They don’t even pretend to try to represent the rest of us…
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I finally gave up and gave McTurtle’s contact web page a totally fake persona to tell him he’s an asshole. It wouldn’t accept anything from any other state than Kentucky – even though he’s Senate majority leader and thus much more responsible (supposedly) to everyone in the U.S.
I suppose you can pay for a direct phone number. But it probably costs a whole lot.
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The point is, they won’t accept email from those of us who can’t use phones.
On another grinder:
Stabby stabby pain!
Like someone’s driving a knife into each ear!!!
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Ah, I didn’t get the point of your comment. Even on the email contact page they require a phone number, which of course may be deliberate, to filter out folks who don’t have a phone and therefore don’t count, right? 
I have a conservative friend who says all these new voting restrictions are good because “people who can’t be bothered to go through all the hoops to vote probably shouldn’t be voting anyway.”
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I don’t think they intend to filter out people who can’t use phones-- they may intend to filter out spam, or to collect numbers for gotv campaigns-- but the effect is to filter out those of us who can’t use phones.
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I guess I was thinking of the Literary Digest Poll.
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Sound level meter only registers 50 dB inside. But pain with 30 nrr quick protection is far worse than getting hit by a car at low speed-- 65 dB. Maybe because it’s stabby pain rather than dull pain.
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I ordered something online from a Singapore merchant a few weeks ago. The next day, I checked the order again and realised that the tchotchke didn’t come with the cable I needed to connect it, so I bought the right cable from a seller in China, thinking it would arrive a couple of days later but that neither of the items are particularly urgent, so it didn’t really matter if I had the tchotchke for a few days but couldn’t use it.
The cable from China arrived five days later. Three weeks later (yesterday), I got a notification saying that SingPost had received the package at their Depot and would despatch it ASAP.
At 9:20am today, they sent me a notification saying that the parcel had been loaded into their courier’s van and would be with me by the end of the day.
Fortunately, Mrs. Cynical works from home and I didn’t have to take time off to sign for the ($20, could totally fit in my mailbox) package so I looked forward to it being there when I got home. Long story short, I phoned them at 9:20pm to try to find out where my delivery was.
“Sorry sir, we stop deliveries at 6pm.”
“So it’s not coming today…?”
“We will do our utmost to deliver it to you tomorrow.”
“Right. And if it doesn’t arrive tomorrow, what happens?”
“Sorry sir, we will do our utmost to deliver it to you tomorrow.”
“Ok. Couldn’t you have told me three hours ago, using the same notification system you used this morning, that today’s delivery was cancelled and you will deliver it tomorrow? Why do I have to phone you to find out that it’s not going to arrive today?”
“Sorry sir, we will do our utmost to deliver it to you tomorrow.”
It’s a truly first-world whine and I understand that but Jesus Singapore customer service is fucking terrible. The worst part of it all is that there was a singpost courier outside my apartment at 8:30 but he was delivering to my neighbours.
They have a notification system in place for packages, 24/7 customer service, but not enough control over their distribution to put my parcel together with another one that is going to exactly the same postal address or basic politeness to tell me that my delivery has been postponed while I wait for three hours?
I hate myself for complaining about this but I run into this brick wall every single time I use a public service in Singapore.
Water heater blew up? Cold showers for a month while we get spare parts is unavoidable, lah. Paying $300 for a new internet connection? Sorry, wrong plugs on the socket, have to wait 6 weeks, lah. Giant rat in the elevator? We can spray perfume to cover the smell of sewers for the month it takes to get an exterminator, lah. And on, and on and on…
/First-world-whining
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“lah” is also the response in Malaysia.
Seems like every country’s potential is brought down by the same weak link: humans.
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Is it possible you’re failing to bribe the right people? I don’t know anything about Singapore, but it sounds like the sort of situations where people end up getting a little ‘consideration’ for a little ‘expediting’.
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Not that kind of place, thankfully. Singapore takes bribery very seriously indeed and frequently hands out prosecutions (and severe penalties, including public corporal punishment) to people caught attempting to bribe or be bribed.
I’m sharing this link purely for informational purposes but any sort of corruption is very frowned upon here:
I might have more to add once I no longer live here and have had some time to reflect but for now (isolated examples of utterly shit customer service aside) it’s a great place to live… 
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Mandatory software updates.
Mandatory software updates that are buggy.
Mandatory software updates that are buggy and cause you to lose a carefully-prepared lab specimen.
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Software True Up.
I mean, I really don’t have to add much here. My gears are ground down very finely at this point. Especially as I’ve just realized one of my queries doesn’t account for a nomenclature change that happened a few years back, so now I need to go and double check that we don’t still have this old version of the software out there.
Who am I kidding? Of course it is still out there. Installed on someone’s machine. Because it does that one thing that the new version does in a different way and I don’t want to change.
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Also in the software realm, but only one machine. For the second time now, Windows 10 Explorer was using 20% of my four CPUs, and Firefox 58.0.2 was using the other 80%. Anti-virus found a trojan and got rid of it; then SuperAntiMalware got rid of about 7 “deprecated.cookies” (but only one at a time! I had to keep rerunning it), whatever the heck they are, and the two programs were still hogging 100% of the processors. I did a Windows update and that fixed it. ???
I’m set for automatic updates (I think) so why didn’t it, I wonder, after using up my entire fund of curse words for the day.
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I’m trying to find a way to convert pdfs so they:
-
Do not rasterize text.
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Preferably compress images so pages are 800 pixels wide by 1180 pixels high.
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Definitely convert jpeg-2000 to jpeg, or to something faster and Kindle-readable.
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Definitely retain text layers, regardless of script.
Willus’s k2pdfopt is good, but it rasterizes text and converts all colors to grayscale. So it isn’t always ideal.
from here: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/
Ghostscript gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=sample.pdf sample.pdf rasterizes text and loses text layers on some pages. Not good.
from here: https://projects.artefactual.com/issues/852
Mutool mutool clean -d emblackens jpeg-2000 images and screws with compression tools. Not good.
Automator on MacOS doesn’t have an option to print to pdf. I think I can print to cups, if I can debug cups. I hope I can get appropriate pixel count, if I can get a set page size using cups.
But cups-pdf hasn’t been updated since 2014 and has required more an more hacks. Now someone’s saying there’s an easy fix with a simple wrapper. What on friggin’ earth is a wrapper, how do I create one, and where do I put it? This sort of thing isn’t explained:
from here: https://bitbucket.org/codepoet/cups-pdf-for-mac-os-x/issues/55/file-doesnt-print
Also, I need to kill jpeg-2000.
P.S. Making a lot of progress, and much less frustrated. Couldn’t get cups-pdf working, but had no trouble getting rwts-pdfwriter working. Set up automator app to print to pdfwriter. Automator scales source pdfs down to the stated page size, but not up, so a smaller size is helpful. Set up suitable pdf sizes at 8 x 11.8 without margins and 4x 5.9 without margins. Should be able to sample these at 100 ppi and 200 ppi respectively. Haven’t been able to clear out jpeg-2000 at least not yet.
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And another stabby-stabby. Must be the 6th today.
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How many people do you typically get around to stabbing in a day?
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0, I keep getting hit with backup stabbers. Like backup beaters, but with sharper incapacitating pain in each ear, instead of the usual blunt incapacitating pain. I hate getting hit with backup stabbers or backup beaters or strobe lights or any of these things.
If you kept getting hit with sharp stabby pain in each ear, several times each day, wouldn’t it grind your gears?
If you had been incapacitated by similar pain in each ear, knocking you to the ground while you were crossing the street, wouldn’t you wonder about whether these safety signals are safe enough to use around people?
If you kept having drop falls after rapid-fire beeping, wouldn’t you worry about the rest of the beeping?
I wear heavy ear protection whenever I run errands, rated 52 to 63 nrr depending on the setup, providing 12 to 15 dB of attenuation, but it’s not enough to protect against backup beaters or backup stabbers, and it’s too uncomfortable to wear the rest of the time.
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