Tuesday, March 21, 2023
God gives His word to Adam and Eve, the first command; do not eat of that tree. The serpent asked, did God really say that? What's he doing? He is putting doubt and attacking the word. The woman goes on what she sees. The woman said, God told us not to eat of the tree or to touch it. He didn't say not to touch it, but the enemy says, you surely shall not die. He is taking away from the word of God. Notice that one adds to the word and one takes away from the word. Do you know what happens? When you change the word of God, when you alter it or dilute it, you end up with death. It's the old nature that bends the word of God, takes away from or adds to it. You might feel good for a moment, but it will take you to death. Do you want to live a life of fullness? Then believe God's word. Believe it beyond what you desire or want and it will always keep you in the ways of life and blessing, and far away from the serpent.
From Message #1269 - Old Fashioned Baal Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:2
Today's Mission - The Bible is the dearest treasure in this world; the most precious of all books. Every verse, every line, every word in God's Word came from the mouth of God. It cannot be changed!
Credit: Hope of the World Ministries

I started selling at markets during the Christmas season and that was like guaranteed traffic. I knew I'd at least make back the money I spent on the stall fee/uber there. I've applied to a few spring markets expecting the stall fees to be much lower, but they're not terribly different. I know some of these areas really well, but I've got a few markets that are in places I've never been, so I'm trying to do my research before confirming my spot. I wasn't expecting to get accepted into more than one, so I want to make sure I plan wisely.
I'm curious to hear how spring markets compare to Xmas markets, what you all tend to pay in stall fees this time of year, and how you gauge foot traffic and other factors?

Hi all, it's my first time applying for a credit card and I've been doing a lot of research. However I also wanted to ask this subreddit to see if anyone had recommendations! My preferences are:

• Little to no annual fee
• Points related to travel and airlines
• Cashbacks, if possible
• Monthly salary is less than 500k annually

Not sure if this is important to note but I'm not really a heavy spender in terms of bills as I still live with my parents
Thank you!

So I decided to finally check out Audible and tried the Plus membership first, but sadly most books I was interested in were not part of the subscription and it pushed me to upgrade to premium plus. So I did, but the only difference was one credit that I could use for those books I wanted - but otherwise all of them were sill not available - wtf?
I don’t get it… how does this work? :/

Basically the title.
I know that AOE2 is just perfect the way it is and does not need to be changed much at all.
But, what if we have a game(maybe in Aoe2 or a future Aoe or a whole new RTS game) that has in-game map events that can change the course and flow of the game?
I'm just listing some examples I had in mind (Its all OPEN-ENDED and has LOOPHOLES so just keep that in mind)

• DAY/ NIGHT cycle -
  • DAY - normal stuff (regular AOE2)
  • NIGHT - slight decrease in LOS and an increase in the number of wild animals which sometimes attack vills that are far away from the TC during the night - (This could incentivize the necessity for Outposts and Towers - which prevents such attacks and grants vision)
• DROUGHT/RAINS -
  • DROUGHT-Reduction in Food income received from Farms. Drought also results in more cracked terrain formation across the map. Market prices go up for Buying Food, Wood, and the Selling price of Food is also high. Mining resources are slightly Faster
  • MONSOON- More food from Farms, Fish, and Berries, additionally Slightly reduced LOS and Movement speed of units and villagers.
• SEASONS - SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN, WINTER -
  • SPRING - More Food in farms & Berries & Fish, More wood in Trees, RAINS frequently.
  • SUMMER - DROUGHT more likely to occur, Otherwise Normal
  • AUTUMN - Faster Wood Collection from Trees
  • WINTER - Snowfall may occur(Decrease in movement speed for all units), and reduced food gathering rate from Farms
• NATURAL DISASTERS - Similar effects to that of God powers in Age of Mythology
  • HURRICANES (Maps with Coastlines like Islands, Coastal, etc.) - Low LOS in regions where the Hurricane is Passing, Lower Movement speed for Units in the Storm, and slight damage to ships in the area of the storm.
  • EARTHQUAKES (Land Maps) - Occurs throughout the Map - Many Trees Fall (Mild loss of Woodlines), and Small Damage to all Buildings based on Building armor. Creates New Cliffs, Elevations in the Map.
  • TORNADOS (Hybrid Maps) - Damage path causes damage to Buildings and removes Trees and causes Significant damage to units.
  • FLOODS - Water extends a little into the Land area from their existing region. Buildings Near River Areas, Coastlines cannot produce until the Flood recedes. Previously Shallow and Traversable waters will now be deep and non-traversable until the Flood recedes. Has a 25% chance of occurring during the RAINS event.

Though we already have enough to think about while playing a game like AOE2 DE online. I wanted the genre to evolve to attract other people who don't just play the game to win but want to feel the immersion while playing. (Like RPGs)
This would make campaigns become more interesting to play and also be quite fun in multiplayer games.
Looking forward to interesting things the rest of you all come up with. With AOE2 DE getting more attention day by day I believe we can make this Genre develop in a more interesting way in the future.

I am in Missouri, & bought a car in 2020 from a used car lot. We got the title to it that day, and still owe around $10K on it.
Almost 3 months ago, something went wrong with the car & it will not travel very far without messing up. It has been sitting in the street, not been driven & I have called the credit union (In South Dakota) to come pick up this car. I haven’t made any payments on the car since. They haven’t sent late notices, charged fees, nothing. Since I have the title in our names, can we legally sell the car without any legal trouble? I was recently told that car lots usually don’t give the title out until the loan is fully paid off, but we have everything. I really don’t know what to do about the car but I honestly don’t want it & don’t want to spend money fixing it.

Can I use standard international ink cartridges in my swipe? Did anyone tried it yet? I'm afraid it will spill all over. But I have a lot of international ink cartridges that I can use. With TWSBI swipe I did recive a metal spring. It is meant only for TWSBI cartridges?

credit: https://dormando.livejournal.com/484577.html

The Technical Element

Design for change

- The old google mantra is right. Design for change. Change is having to deploy new software, upgrade existing software, scaling, equipment breaking, and people shifting around. - Everything in this mantra is about finding balance. You might think it's a good idea to tightly marry your system to a particular OS or Linux distro. It's just as bad of an idea to separately them entirely. Use layers and a _little_ indirection if you must. - This does not mean complete and total platform agnostics. It's about making one system two, two systems twenty. Dealing if a sysadmin gets hit by a bus, if that dangling harddrive dies, if someone runs rm -rf /. It's for the incremental changes. Security updates, pushing new corporate content.

Use automatic, repeatable builds

- Don't build anything by hand. If you do, do it twice, and grab every single command the second time around. - I cannot stress how important this is. It should take no more than 15 minutes from bare metal to production for new hardware. There does not need to be a human element to screw it up, or get punished when a server goes down and no one knows how to replace it. - This is true for anything. There is _no_ such thing as a "one off" server build. If you've built it once, and it only needs to exist once, it will exist twice. The second time around is when it breaks, or if you need to do a major upgrade or consolidation two years down the road and have no frickin' clue how it was put together. - Test, vet new builds. This should be easy because your builds are all automatic, correct? - Scripted builds means that upgrade from Linux Distro Version 3 to Version 4 is absolutely clear cut. Install Version 4 and test the scripts. Read documentation and fix until it works again. This should be a week's worth of work at most, not a yearlong project. (to finish just in time for Version 5 to come out!).

Use redundancy

- Just beacuse something might be easy to rebuild, doesn't mean you can ignore redundancy. Jump boxes, mail servers, billing gateways, whatever. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier if you could swap out one half of the equation without causing downtime for your customers? - ... and along those lines, you get to "deal with it later!" when a box goes down at 3am, and the redundant machine kicks in. - Even if it's not ideal, go for it anyway. Rsync'ing configs to a second box is a step above nothing. DRBD might not be perfect but it can provide an amazing service.

Use backups

- We shouldn't even joke about this. Use harddrives, burn the tapes. Compress them, move them, run them in parallel. Backup EVERYTHING! - If your builds are automatic, the entire process can be backed up. If you're following along past this point a *real* Disaster Recovery plan might not seem so far fetched.

Keep monitoring specific

- Monitor every damn thing you can, but do it right. Don't get a thousand alerts if your NFS server craps its pants. Don't alert on timeouts if it doesn't make sense for your system. Test for success at the most specific level; sure the service might allow a new TCP connection, and it might even say hello, but does it remember how to do its job? - If you have 500 webservers, you probably don't need to know immediately if one goes down. You _should_ know if the load balancer decided to not take it out of rotation and real human people are seeing its uglyriffic error messages.

Graph data, keep exact historical data

- Graphs are for visualizing trends. Historical data is for crunching numbers. Don't mix the two! It's too easy to get wrong numbers from eyeballing graphs. Many sites use rrd's or other aggregating data systems which will average and smooth out data over time to save on storage space. This means it's not only hard to read, it's wrong. - Don't get trapped having to skim through hundreds of graphs just to pinpoint an issue. If you're trying to find outliers in the graphs, you can pull those out via scripts as well. - If you must use graphs for troubleshooting, try to aggregate high level concepts into a single page, which link into drill-down pages from there. If you can see a spike in the database load, you'll know to click to the page overviewing the databases, then you'd see the one or two iffy machines in question. The idea is to narrow something down fast. Remove as much guesswork as possible.

Log useful information, use multiple streams of data

- Work on your own, and with development, to log as much useful information as you can. Doesn't matter if you live analyze it and store the data somewhere, or lump it into a database and run reports. Information is useful. - Useful examples: Page rendering time (what page, what box, etc), user-facing errors, database and internal service errors, bandwidth usage, etc. - Establish graphs, reports, and do historical comparisons from generalized data. - Reports are really important. Get digested data week-to-week or day-to-day about changes in your infrastructure.

Understand your data storage, databases

- There's an entirely separate set of undrestanding about operating databases, but sometimes you can't leave all of this up to your DBA. - Having multiple, redundant databases affords you many luxuries. Operations that were once many hours of downtime can be done "online" without shelling out for a huge Oracle instance. MySQL and replication is a fantastic thing. - Work with the DBAs to get the best possible hardware for the database in question. RAID10, gobs of RAM, many fast spindles, and potentially RAM disks and SSD's. Ops has access to the vendors, DBA's can beat the pants off the hardware. Find out what works best and save tons of cash in the long run. - Database configurations are changing. Software like HiveDB, MySQL Proxy, DPM exist now. We're absolutely doing partitioned data for huge datasets. We're also thinking outside of the box with software like starling and Gearman. Learn what these are, and understand that not everything will be in a database. - Get a good grip on your filers! If the data's important, back it up! Snapshots on monolithic NFS servers are fantastic, wonderful, and NOT a backup! - Consider alternatives. MogileFS gets better year after year. There're likely other projects for freely and cheaply maintaining massive stores of files. Similar systems were developed for youtube.com, archive.org, etc. We're finally free of expensive NFS filers being the standard!

Scale out a lot, up a little

- You've seen all of the papers. Scale out is really the way to go. Get commodity (read: available, affordable, standard, NOT super cheap) hardware and work with everyone to ensure all aspects possible can scale out. - Scaling out starts at two, work from there. This also happens to encompass redundancy. - Scale out as far as you can without being idiotic about it. The example of MySQL replication with single master, many slaves, is a fantastic example of one form of scale-out sucking. All slaves must do all writes, so as the number of writes scale up with the reads (if they do for your app, which I bet they certainly do), you get less capacity per slave you add. - Keep alternatives in mind. User or range partitioning onto many databases, avoiding production slaves where possible, etc. Good ideas, many ways of implement. - Everything can scale if you give it a chance! Routers, switches, load balancers, webservers, databases. - Remember scale up? Big evil machines with many slow cores, lots of IO boards, and very expensive storage equipment? They're coming back. Well, the CPU part is. - RAM is cheap. - Combine the two, and you just may end up combining services again. A load balancer here, a webserver there... If an application can use many CPUs (apache) this is perfect. If it can't (memcached doesn't get much benefit from it, usually) you can end up wasting tons of available resources by segregating services too much. - Job systems could potentially fill in gaps here. Where there're extra cores, slap up more workers.

Cache

- Caching is good. Developers, sysops, etc. Get on this! Yes, it's weird. It's different. Sometimes you may even need to, gasp, make a tradeoff for it. Effective use of caching can have as much as a ten times increase in overall system performance. That's a giant magnifying glass over the systems you have already and a fraction of the overall cost. - Memcached. Service cache, denormalize DB structures (where it makes performance sense!), squid cache, or even make better usage of OS caches. - Test it, toy with it, and break it. There will be new and different problems with caching. Be prepared for it.

Asyncronous jobs

- Starling, Gearman, The Schwartz, whatever. Job systems allow much more application flexibility. Workers can be spawned one-off, be persistent (load cached data, prepare data, etc), be on different hardware, different locations, and be syncronous or asyncronous. - Maintaining these things is an ops issue. Using them is both a developer and an ops issue. - User clicks "send all my friends an e-mail". Schedule a job, immediately say "okay done! Your friends will receive your spam shortly!" - let the job service multiplex and deal with the issue. - Job systems are great places to bridge services. Blog post -> IM notification, billing cron -> billing services, authentication gateways, etc. - Easy to scale. There will be choke points for where requests come in, and all the workers need to do is pull. This is in contrast with the largely push/pull state of HTTP.

Security and patrols

- Install security updates! Seriously! There's a whole crazy network of people who are dedicated to giving these to you in the shortest period of time possible. Don't let them sit for _years_ because you're afraid of change. - Security is in layers. Accept what you can and cannot secure. Just because mysql has password access doesn't mean it gets to be directly accessable by the internet. - Disable passwords over ssh. Use passphrase encrypted key auth. Remote users _cannot_ guess your private key. They _have_ to get it from you. Keep it safe, and there's no point in firewalling off your ssh port. - Understand how the application works, exactly what it needs to do, and work that to your advantage. If the only part of your application which needs outbound internet access _at all_ are the billing pages and some twitter-posting service, those can easily become job workers. Put the job workers on specific boxes and allow those access to specific hosts. Keep the rest of your network in the dark. - The above is especially important for php sites, but probably works great elsewhere. If someone breaks in, it's most likely going to be through your application. When someone gets in through the front gate, they'll need to haul in their toolbox to get into the safe. Don't let them pull in data and get what they need, or upload the contents of your database somewhere! - These specific suggestions aside, read a lot. Use your best judgement, and test. If you have no understanding of how a security model works, that might not immediately make it worthless, but you certainly don't know where its limits are or even if it works. - Secure based on testing, theory, attack trees, don't stab in the dark. I love it when people dream up obscure security models and ordinary folks like me can smush it to crumbles. - Patrol what you can! Audit logins, logouts, commands used. All accesses to external facing services, including all arguments given in the request. Find outliers, outright ban input outside of the scope of your application, and do what you can actively and have the data to work retroactively. - If you suspect something's been cracked, *take proper precaution* and understand a little computer forensics (or get a company that does). Respond by removing network access, checking the system through serial console or direct terminal, and avoiding using any service, config file, or data on the compromised machine. Too many people "clean up a trojan' and never understand how it got there, or if they've _actually cleaned it up_. - If you do have a security team, forensics expert, or anyone else onhand, you must touch the machine as little as possible and isolate it. This means not rebooting it to "clear out some funky running processes". They need to be able to get at those. If you need to half ass it, go ahead, but remember to wipe the system completely clean, apply any security updates, and do your best to figure out if they've compromised any important data. Do what you can. - Security is an incredible balancing act. If you do it wrong, developers, users, etc, will revolt and find ways around it. If they _can_ get around it, you're not doing your job right. If they _can't_ get around it, they might just give up and leave. - Keep an iron grip on access control. This means ops must absolutely provide windows for what doors have been locked. Kicking development off of production entirely means they get to stab in the dark on fixing hard problems. Providing logging, debugging tools, etc, without allowing them to directly change the service, will be a win for all aspects of production.

The Human Element

Learn from many sources

- Fill up some RSS feeds, and read at least a few good articles per week. LWN, kerneltrap, undeadly.org, whatever's relevant, or even loosely related, to what you do. - Read blogs from smart people. Sometimes they post interesting topics, and comment streams give us the unique ability to directly converse with the masters. - Read a few blogs from not so smart people. Get a feel for what stumps them, or what they do that doesn't work so well. - Get to know people who can kick your ass, at anything. Stay humble. - Help find your own strengths by taking in from many sources, and gobbling up what envigorates you. - Read up on success and failure stories from other companies. Ring up their CTO's and get them to divulge advise over free lunch.

Try many things

- You'll be amazed at what you can do if you keep trying. Never seen something before? Give it a shot. - Try to not be a dangerous newbie. Play in the sandbox until you're comfortable enough to not burn down the house.

Understand redundancy

- Really understand how redundancy affects things. How it works, how it doesn't work. - Break redundant systems in a test lab, sometimes in production. Learn what you can while you're in control. Unplug the power, yank cards out, kill processes, run the box out of memory, yank a harddrive, yank ethernet. - Test replacing and upgrading systems in a redundant setup. Maybe you can toss in that brand new hal-o-tron 8000 without taking downtime.

Understand scalability

- There're tons of papers on making scalable systems. Even if you can't write one yourself, try to understand the theory. - Learn with virtualization. Set up a few virtual machines and try tossing up applications to multiple machines. Run multiple instances locally on different ports. - It's usually the job of operations to do proper capacity planning. You won't know what to do add unless you truely understand where resources should be added.

Become a troubleshooting superstar

- The moment something breaks the clock is ticking. You must be able to pull out your arsenal and use them effectively. - Practice troubleshooting. Pick a perfectly good, working page, and try to track down how it works. - strace, ltrace, lsof, logs. - Understand that load != load. Look at all available information as to how a host is performing or behaving. - Be very familiar with the tools for your IO system. Often "mysterious" performance problems happen beacuse your RAID or SAN setup isn't happy for some reason. - Leave documentation. Checklists, troubleshooting tips, build tools. - Build more tools. For yourself, for other people, or add features to existing ones.

Work with IT

- Believe it or not, there is overlap. - Ops has to maintain high bandwidth network access for servers. IT has to do the same for people, and is often the bridge ops has *into* the datacenter. It may make sense to work together on this one. - Draw the right line. IT should manage mail, but ops should manage development servers. Don't offload things you don't need to, and offer to do what you do best if necessary. - Don't alienate people. Macs are popular, linux is (slowly) gaining share. Believe it or not, forcing everyone to use microsoft productivity software can bite you. There are plenty of alternatives, try one. Odds are more people in your company are familiar with google apps than they are with outlook. - Don't make it more difficult than you have to do for people to run a unix system natively. Unless your backend is a windows shop, wouldn't you want people to have more familiarity with the OS they're supposed to support?

Work with developers

- You both work on the same product, for the same purpose. Try working together a little more. - Having strategy meetings is not working together. - Development understands the code resources the best, and operations understands the hardware and deployment the best. You can design something more efficient by taking all of this into mind. - Cross training. Disseminating information can show how tools and designs on both sides can be improved to be more manageable and resilient. - Be careful of being too demanding on either side. It's not an Us vs Them. Everyone's human. Everyone should be doing as much as they can for the company, not for themselves. - It's more pleasent to handle crunch times and emergencies when everyone gets along.

Work with ops

- Ops folks have their specialties. Networking, databases, OS. Don't forget to talk to each other! - Getting stuck in a rut is demotivating, boring, and a good way to lose people. Even if your systems ops guy has the ability to look over the shoulder of the network guy, they have the opportunity to learn. - Always give people an opportunity to try, learn, and grow. - Be careful of rewarding your best with too much work. If there're people who can pick up slack, you use them. - Bad eggs. It happens. Be tough enough to deal with them. Most people can be turned around with a little help, but they need to be able to be independent.

The Practice

Fix it now, not later

- If a webserver goes offline, don't care about it. You have ten spare, right? - Pick a day during the week to sweep up broken crap. Replace any broken hardware, ensure everything's 100% before swinging into the weekend. - If small, annoying problems crop up, fix them permanently first thing in the morning. Logs fill up the disk twice last week? Come in fresh the next day, and fix it for good. These stack up, and suck. - If you have automated builds, use this to your advantage to fix what you can right away, or in bulk.

Automate everything

- Humans can't screw up scripted tasks (as easily). - Do it twice. Once by hand if you must, then roll up what you did into a script. - Commented scripts make fantastic documentation. Instead of writing twenty pages detailing how to install something (which is up to interpretation of the reader!), write a script which explains what it does. - Scripts can be rolled up into automated builds. The more often something is done, the closer it should get to becoming a zero time task.

Change what's necessary

- Make small, isolated changes. - If you don't have to change it, leave it. - This also means you must understand _when_ to change. Find what's necessary and upgrade it, switch it out, make it standard.

Design for change

- If you can't do it right immediately, get on the road to it being right. - This means if you don't have time to do something right, get the basics going with a clear migration roadmap to the right thing. While your new mail system might not be the crazy cool redundant bounce-processing spam monster you dream of, installing postfix and setting up two hosts with a clean configuration gets you closer than you might think. - This does have a tendency to leave unfinished projects everywhere, but you were going to do that anyway. :)

Practice updating content, fast

- It's usually the job of operations to push out code. Don't suck at it. Push in parallel, apply rolling restarts, be an efficient machine. - This includes software updates, security patches, and configuration changes. - Use puppet, cfengine, whatever you need to control the configuration. Keep it clean, simple, and easy. - The fewer files one must change to make a necessary adjustment the better. If you're adding one line to 20 files just to push out a new database, you're doing it wrong. Build simple templates, build outward, and don't repeat data which needs to be edited by hand.

Standardize, stick to the standard

- Pick one or two standard OS's, httpd's, databases, package systems. - Stick with them. Adjust and upgrade methods as it makes sense. - Don't stick with that major version forever. Unless your product is going to be feature frozen forever, you'll need to keep the standard rolling forward, and everthing behind it. - The _more_ is standard, the more places your tools will work. The more packages for other parts of the operation will "just work" everywhere else too.

Document well

- Document process - Document product - Categorize into shallow trees. - Don't redundantly document. If a script has a long help, ask the reader to refer to that. The closer the documentation is to the program being discussed, the more likely it is to stay accurate. - Marry documentation into code. perldoc, pydoc, etc. - Out of date documentation is poisonous. Reserve time to keep things up to date. Sit down with new employees and update documentation as they run into problems. - Use ticketing systems, with moderation. Documentation of history is important as well. Forcing people to create detailed process tickets for a DNS is just pissing in other people's cheerios.

Use source control

- Use git, or mercurial. Avoid SVN like the black plague. - Put all of your configurations, scripts hacks, whatever, into source control. - Keep checkouts everywhere... - Keep strict, clean, master checkouts. No one should be able to push changes that aren't comitted, but it should also be easy to test changes (in a VM, directly on a single test machine) without having to wrestle with the source control.

Hire well

- Discern between stubborn and smart - Don't avoid hiring senior. Some people really know their shit. Some _seem_ like they do. Others are "senior" in a particular area and will fall behind as technology changes. While you might want to avoid some, there are definitely rockstars out there. - Don't avoid hiring junior. I know so many people who've started really junior (including myself! I still view myself as junior), who've shot up through the ranks and are now have firm established careers. I'd believe most of us have. Except there are ones who don't learn, don't have the motivation, or are in the wrong field.

Avoid vendor lock in, and keep a good relationship with the vendors you do use

- Buying propreitary hardward has the major downside of potentially locking you into always using it. It might be a particular SAN, NAS, special-case direct attached storage, backup systems, etc. Avoid getting sucked in. If you follow all of the above design advise, one should be able to build test environments on different platforms quickly. You're then able to keep on top of hardware evaluations and keep choices open. - If everything's deep, dark, gnarled, undocumented, and directly dependent on your fancy proprietary load balancer, you'll never wriggle free of it. - Be nice to the vendors you do end up using. If you "push them _hard_ on price!" for every single purchase, expect some shit hardware to show up. - Datacenters these days have a lot of potentially useful resources. Try to throw some free remote hands service into your contract and abusing that to get harddrives replaced, vendor items shipped/RMA'ed, and some basic hardware installs. I've had entire racks of equipment delivered and installed with barely a visit from an employee... and damn, it's nice.

Give Open Source a serious try

- nginx, mongrel, lighttpd, apache, perlbal, mogilefs, memcached, squid, OpenBGPD, PF, IPTables, LVS, MySQL, Postgres, blah, blah, blah. Before you hop back on that trusty, reliable, expensive proprietary setup, give open source a shot. You might find yourself adding plugins, extensions, code fixes or contracting help to bring features you'd never be able to do otherwise. In my own experience OSS is just as reliable, often moreso, than big expensive hardware when put under significant load. - The idea of "you get what you pay for" is a complete lie. If you can't make OSS work for you and need the hand holding, you _can_ still go with a vendor. If you have a smart, motivated team, who really want to learn and understand how their infrastructure runs, you just can't beat some hardy GPL'ed or BSD'ed systems. - MySQL and Postgres are fine. Call them tradeoffs if you will; nothing's going to crawl out of your closet and night and eat your data. Sure, it does happen, but you're much more likely to be screwed over with monolithic oracle instances going offline (it happens!) than you are with a well tested and stable MySQL instance, in a redundant master<->master cluster pair. - I'd say 'cite references' - but go look around. Check out any number of articles on the LAMP stack. Most major dot coms, ISP's, and even corporations now are adopting. Give it a shot. The worst you'll have is some lost time, and another product to scare your vendor into dropping price with.

Great breakdown by Gary Morgan as spring training winds down:
https://insidethebucsbasement.com/2023/03/20/five-pirates-thoughts-at-five-last-full-week-of-spring-training/
Suwinski and Castro are working out about as I expected. Suwinski fell prey to Andy Haines’ approach to ‘damage zones’ and became and all-or-nothing hitter without enough talent to make that work. And Castro’s middling skillset and propensity for distraction has played out this spring.
In the outfield, I’d much rather see Swaggerty and CSN be given a shot in the outfield in 2023. In 2024, I think an outfield of Reynolds, Swaggerty and Smith-Njigba could be really strong both defensively and offensively.
That Nick Gonzalez has looked best at 2B this spring is both a positive and negative. It was concerning that he had been lapped by players with less pedigree, but it’s a bummer no one seems to want the job for 2023. I was hopeful Bae would take over for Castro, but he hasn’t stepped up. A real bummer.
If Suwinski and Castro get the nod, I hope they are both on a short leash as there are other, better players waiting in the wings.

Hello, everyone, this is N+ Studio!
We are back! thanks for your support and love all the time, in the past several years, we have launched Atom68 and Duo 82 Alu suite in succession and got a lot of good reviews, many folks often asked us for them and gave some valuable feeback, thanks so much to all of you!
we have kept them in our hearts and worked hard for these in the past, finally, after waiting for more than one year, today we will bring a new metal Eelectrostatic Capacity suite N87 to all of you!
N87 suite is just for NIZ X87 series keyboards not including waterproof version, it contains top/bottom case, inner parts and QMK PCB, this time they will be sold in stock and can be shipped quickly.
1,About Design:
(1)Appearance design
A simple and durable design. Base on supporting the sandwich structure, minor adjustments to the frame ratio are made, and repeated modifications to the four round corners to achieve the most satisfactory appearance.
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/JF1xZlC)
(2)Switch design
For the bluetooth switch design, in order to be better compatible with NIZ EC keyboard, the same press switch design next to ESC is used, and this switch can also be used as an ornament on the front of the keyboard.
At the same time, in order to ensure the stability of Bluetooth signal, a PC signal block on the bottom base was add.
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/rTW87PK)
(3)Bottom weight design
A overall introversion design on the bottom, a transparent electrophoretic brass is studded wtih the bottom case, the word N+ is revealed, that’s why named N87.
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/VenIE4K)
2,About spec:
Alu Top/Bottom case:
Material: Aluminum
Size: Length*Width*Height( 36.4cm*14.4cm*34cm)
Brass weight: 2300-2450g
Color options:
Anodized-Burgundy red
Anodized-Space grey blue
Anodized-Matte silver
Anodized-Classic black
Typing angle: 7 °
What's in the box
· Aluminum top case*1pc
· Aluminum bottom case*1pc
· Brass weight*1pc
· PC signal block*1
· Light guide for indicator light*2pcs
· Poron pad*1pc
· Silicone pad*1set
· Foot pad*4pcs
· Screws and screwdriver*1set
· Type-C daughterboard
Inner parts(35g/45g):
· EC switches
· Conical springs
· Costar stabilizers
· Aluminum plate
· EC silicone domes(35g/45g)
QMK PCB(wired):
N87 QMK PCB(wired),Type-C daughterboard
3,About Sales page:
Alu top and bottom case ：https://www.nizkeyboard.com/collections/n87/products/in-stock-niz-x87-top-bottom-case?variant=43680051429619
Inner parts and QMK PCB:https://www.nizkeyboard.com/collections/n87/products/n87-inner-part-qmk-pcb?variant=43680506773747
4,About Price:
Alu Top/Bottom case: 198USD/set
Inner parts(35g/45g): 55USD/set
QMK PCB(wired): 70USD/set
In stock sale time:8:00 am, Mar. ,24th,2023( GMT +8:00)
Qty: 100sets
Delivery time: within one week after order received
More information, you can join our discord/email/message us:
https://discord.gg/yj2SfMMHa6
Note: we also have some EPBT keycaps for sale:
https://www.nizkeyboard.com/collections/ornaments/products/in-stock-epbt-keycaps?variant=43690992140531
If you like them, come on!
Pictures
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/JfM6aq5)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/hpQ3Spq)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/VFLbBfr)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/VPp0yKF)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/fiLlFLG)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/Wc8R24N)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/thktZbB)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/foKZkdU)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/yn7vkm5)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/H4g88NN)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/7fTKp8F)
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/KfLB8bX)

IDK how to tell a stylist to NOT cut a short layer in my hair that makes it look like I have a tiny wig on top of my long hair! I have told stylist after stylist after stylist: *Long layers (my hair is past my collarbone) *Don't cut any hair shorter than my collarbone *Don't place the layers more than about 2" apart from each other *Don't thin out my hair
I went to yet another new stylist recently and I walked out nearly crying. I have wavy/curly hair and he acknowledged that - but then he cut a blunt, short layer in front that doesn't blend with the rest of my hair in any way. Of course he straightened it when he dried it - I normally air dry to keep the curl, so this layer now springs up to almost my cheekbone and looks incredibly dumb. There is about 4" between this layer and the bottom edge of the hair. It seriously looks like a blunt wig on top of my head with longer hair coming out underneath & I have to jam it behind my ears until it grows out again so it doesn't look stupid.
Am I telling stylists the wrong thing? Why do they keep doing this when I feel like I'm being very clear to not do it? With the last stylist I was seeing it took 4 bad cuts before she understood what I meant, then she raised her prices past what I could afford & I had to find someone else. Now I apparently have to start all over again, explaining it over and over to this new person.

I got the game recently on the Steam Spring Sale and I've been trying to get the 80% required on the autumn seasonal playlist to get the hard to find car. However, I'm stuck on 77% despite completing most of the objectives (the daily challenges that haven't unlocked yet, plus the online adventure thing).
As I understand, the rivals event is bugged and doesn't actually give completion percentage at the moment, so I assume the only way to get >80% is to do the online adventure objective? If so, I'm not sure how to do so. I tried to participate in free-for-all adventures,, but they have been horrendously slow to load, and the game has hung every time I participated.
Most online queries about freezing/hanging issues seem to pertain to nVidia GPU problems, which doesn't help me figure out the issue seeing as I use an AMD GPU.

I'm currently a bsw student working as an unpaid intern as required by my school to receive my degree. Unfortunately, I work 39.5 unpaid hours at my internship to meet hour requirements with a part-time job and my final class (SW 645: field practice).
Today I worked 7.5 hours at my internship then went immediately home for my remote job completing endless work after a PTO spring break vacation that only piled on more work. (Catch up time). After 4 hours of my part-time job, I immediately began working on a rigorous assignment and have been doing so all night without sleep. I still need to complete this assignment before it is due tomorrow at 3:30 PM but I'm supposed to "wake up" in less than 2 hours for my internship once again.
As a Social Work intern in an elementary school with an ongoing caseload of clients, I don't see myself working productively tomorrow without having any sleep. Would you recommend I tell my field instructor (supervisor) I won't be coming in due to lack of sleep, or should I still go in with no sleep and without completing the assignment that is due? How would you suggest I notify my field instructor?

I apologize if this sounds confusing.
One of my roommates hasn't been paying his rent for months and it's a joint lease so I'm responsible for his missed payments. The one thing that confused me was that his security deposit wasn't paid until AFTER the commencement date. The lease agreement clearly states that applicants had to submit a security deposit prior the takeover of the lease (August). His security deposit was then added to our balance after the lease started.
I've practically talked to every leasing agent within the office, and they all confirmed that he didn't pay his security deposit. Even the property manager told me over email that he never paid the security deposit. Then, I sent an email to the parent company, and they confirmed that the roommate has paid his security deposit...through his rent payments. My roommate intended the payment to be rent, but the parent company took that to pay off his security deposit.
When I went to talk to the property manager, he retracted his statement and called it a "misunderstanding". I'm not sure how him sending 2 emails with the context "never paid his rent" could be misunderstood, but ok....I called nearly every leasing specialist within the office, and they confirmed that this roommate did not pay his security deposit. Recently, I called them again and they told me that even the old system confirmed that everyone BUT this roommate paid their security deposit. I asked her to check and she asked the property manager who told her differently.
Then, one of the other roommates came to me and told me that his roommate overpaid his rent and the money disappeared. When emailing the parent company, the company admitted in transferring that money to pay off rent for this property. So, they used the overpaid rent from a different property, to pay off rent at this property. Maybe that's why I'm having this issue?
From my viewpoint, I'm forced to pay off his rent due to an error of the property management as well as the parent company. They've all rejected the idea of exiting him, even though they would literally be losing nothing as we're still responsible for the rent. I proposed a new agreement in which everyone signs, so it's not like we would be excluding anyone. We just need someone else to sublease. I'm a student and this situation is just bringing me more into debt. I'm about to max out my credit card because I don't have the money and I'm not sure what to do anymore.
TL;DR: I have evidence of every leasing agent, including the property manager confirming that a roommate did not pay his security deposit AFTER the commencement date. The agreement states that the security deposit should've been deposited prior to the commencement. Property manager sent two emails a MONTH after the commencement date with "never paid his rent". Now, the property manager is retracting his statements after I sent an email to the parent company. Parent company admitted in using an overpaid rent at one property to temporarily pay off rent Currently, I'm accruing in debt because I'm stuck paying for another roommate.

I don't know about you, but I want my wardrobe to be a thriving ecosystem that supports me and the life I want to live. Of course it is never "done." It can never be done, as life changes and bodies change, and clothes wear out or come in and out of style. But it can work. It can make our lives easier, no matter what our lives contain. Our clothes are really an extension of our bodies. In many ways they are our social body and they say things about us whether we want them to or not.
I am trying to work towards a Unified Theory of Harmonious Dressing. I'm not a stylist, and I'm not selling anything, this is all just my opinion based on working in a creative field and living in central Paris where you see a lot of fashion and a high percentage of good style. And also some bad style, sorry!
The three main style theories I have found to be the most useful in real world application are as follows:

1. The Five Piece French Wardrobe
2. Kibbe Image Identities
3. John Kitchener's Style Essences

(The fruit system, and any other shame-based system, are utterly useless to everyone but advertisers and should die in a fire.)
Step One: The Basics Wardrobe.
Anyone who wants to dress well and feel good in their clothes needs a stellar basics wardrobe. This is the basis of the "Five Piece French Wardrobe" theory, which does not mean you only wear five pieces, but rather that you only buy five new non-basic pieces per season, which means twice a year, once for spring/summer, and once for fall/winter. That's it.
This theory is not really something the French have codified or talk about, but was created by Americans (as far as I can see) to mimic the way that many French women naturally shop and dress. While not specifically French in origin, I would however agree it's a fairly accurate take on French dressing.
But first, before you start buying your five seasonal pieces, you need a solid foundation of basics!
It's easy to find articles online about the basics that every single person must have in their wardrobe. It is a popular genre of article for a reason. But most online articles about what you actually need to have in your basics wardrobe are wrong! Everyone's basics wardrobe will be different. A recent iteration of this perpetual article, in Vogue, states that you need a striped sweater, a beige trench coat, a leather motorcycle jacket, a leather midi skirt, a timeless watch, and other things. But listen, you might not need any of these!
A good basics wardrobe must be crafted based on your individual lifestyle and environment, but also—and this is where it can get complicated—your Kibbe ID and Kitchener essence blend should be factored in, too! Doing this can help ensure that your basics look as good on you as they possibly can.
It is not actually true that trench coats, striped sweaters, and black leather motorcycle jackets look good on everyone or that everyone needs to have one. Everyone does not need to have one. You might benefit from having one, but it may not be an essential part of your transitional dressing, or even the best option. Not every woman needs a little black dress! (Repeat after me: you do not actually "need" a striped marinière top!) It is the category of these items, and the function they serve in your life that matters, not the items themselves.
So what does make a good basics wardrobe?
A good basics wardrobe will usually have some version of the following:
​

1. A variety of foundational tops like tees, tanks, or button-ups in solid, neutral colors.
2. A variety of layering pieces like sweaters, cardigans, or blazers in solid, neutral colors.
3. A variety of bottoms in solid, neutral colors.
4. A variety of outerwear appropriate to your lifestyle, location, and year-round climate, in solid, neutral colors, that can go with most or all of your other clothes.
5. Basic formal wear or dress-up items like a simple dress, suit, or both, in black or another neutral color (this one is highly dependent on lifestyle!).
6. Footwear in basic colors and classic shapes to meet your lifestyle needs.
7. Basic accessories to go with all of the above.
8. All necessary undergarments.

For tops, your basics wardrobe may include pieces in black, gray, white, and sometimes navy or another neutral like ecru. These can, but will not always, include short-sleeve tee shirts, long-sleeve tee shirts, tank tops, camisoles, bodysuits, and collared button-ups. Your layering pieces might include a slim black crew neck sweater, a sweatshirt or marinière style top, a chunky white sweater, a black cardigan, and a black blazer. For bottoms, you might want two pairs of jeans in blue and black, a pair of black slacks, a pair of shorts, and a knee-length black skirt. Your outerwear could include a wool coat, a trench coat, a puffer jacket, a leather moto jacket, and a lightweight utility style jacket. Your basic footwear could be sneakers, black ankle boots, beige flats, loafers, sandals, and a simple pair of black high heels. Your accessories might include a winter scarf and a summer weight scarf, black and brown leather bags or purses, a tote bag, and a basic winter hat. Then you need undergarments to wear with all of these clothes, and you're set.
It's simple, but it's not easy.
What kinds of basics you will want to have in each category will be highly dependent on your lifestyle, your style goals, but also your Kibbe ID and Kitchener essence blend. If you have a wardrobe full of "basic" jeans, trousers, and tee shirts that look terrible on you, or even just not quite right, they will be useless.
To be continued, I guess, if people are interested!
If people are interested, I can try to come up with a basics wardrobe for different Kibbe IDs living different kinds of lives. Let me know.

Okay, so to give background info. My friend (lets call her C) is taken and so our other friends. Friend A (22F) and Friend B (24F) lets call them that to make it easier. We are also college goers/taking breaks from school. We are young and we drink/party/dance, etc. All 4 of us have known each other for a little more over a year now.
To start off, I have endured some recent traumatic events involving consent and being SA. I think this is why all of this is affecting me so much to the point that i have to reach out to reddit for advice as i am not sure who i can speak to about this.
>> I've noticed that whenever Friend C gets drunk she always makes a move towards friend A, always "you're very pretty" and just touch her. Friend A seems to not bothered by this but they are also the type of person to just not say no to things. Friend C has always mentioned how Friend A is attractive. I thought at first this as a friendly gesture and how we love to say that our friends are beautiful. I'm not so sure anymore. I started to notice how she seems to find an opportunity to kiss her while drunk whether on the cheek or on the lips. This has always made me uncomfortable but Friend A seemed to be okay with it because she has stated that her partner doesn't care that she kisses others girls as long as that's all they do. This has been going for a couple of months that I began to notice this behavior as before we used to go out in bigger group outings so I never really paid close attention but now its usually a couple of us that hang out together. Friend C started kinda doing this to Friend B in a similar way but not so much as her main focus is Friend A, because she has stated how attractive Friend A is and how if she could date a girl it be her. Last night, we went out just the 4 of us since its after spring break and we haven't had seen each other due to life responsibilities for some 2 weeks or so. Our alcohol tolerance level is very low but friend C's is very high. So after a few drinks, we were tipsy/buzzed whatever you want to call it. We are at a bar. She starts touching Friend's A face and kinda bites her ear playfully, pinches her cheeks im kinda on my phone but also paying attention of sorts and I am starting to feel uncomfortable. While during this Friend B was in the bathroom and was taking a long way. This is when I get up to check on them and make sure they are okay. I come back to i guess the end of a conversation of Friend A saying "yeah I don't wanna upset your boyfriend if he isn't okay with kissing" to which I assumed is Friend C tried to kiss her or so and the subject changes quickly since Friend C ignored what she said and asked me if Friend B is okay, the subject isn't brought up again and again I am getting more uncomfortable.
We all move to another section of the bar that was less crowded, I was also sobering up and feeling more aware of things, Friend C makes sure she sits next to Friend A. Again, with touching etc. I dont know where it got to the point that they start talking about kissing. But Friend C mentioned throughout the night that she was very sober compared to the rest of us, meaning she is aware of everything a lot more than I was. But she tries to kiss Friend A and she kisses her on the cheek instead. I mentioned that they were being weird and Friend A was kinda in a defensive way asking if I also wanted a kiss I said no but she seemed to not like that I called her weird which I can understand why someone would act defensive fairly quickly in regards to that statement my roommate just laughed about it. Then Friend B said she would like a kiss and then Friend C jumped in saying ill give you a kiss too and they kissed her on the cheeks which I thought well alright then. That was consensual. Then we start talking about sexuality and how we are all bisexual. Friend C then tells Friend A to kiss Friend B as I guess proof of sexuality? As all of their partners are males. Friend A asks "on the lips or cheeks?," Friend C says that's up to you guys while laughing. And I just stayed quiet and I believe I made an expression that made Friend C change the conversation while I went back to my phone feeling uncomfortable (the kiss didn't happen) and Friend B typed something on her phone and showed it to Friend C and Friend A and they all nodded saying yeah and I'm like what was that? And Friend B said its nothing while giggling and changing the subject. This was when I had enough and told them I would be going home neither one of them stopped me nor checked on me if I got home till 30 minutes after I didn't say anything in the groupchat as I was trying to ground myself and distract myself from this whole situation.
--I love my friends and I enjoy their company greatly, sober and not sober. None of this stuff ever happens when I go out with Friend A and Friend B by ourselves without Friend C. I feel like the alcohol while them being manipulated makes them do this stuff. I thought at first Friend A and Friend C are cheating on their partners together but knowing them personally, I don't think they are judging how they act while sober and how strongly they feel about cheating but idk. I feel like this may be some sort of SA but I am not sure.
I rather have my friends be sober and give consent to this stuff. If they wanna fuck around and find out so be it but sober. This has become a pattern it seems with tonight being the most uncomfortable for me and as well that my tolerance for this had reached its limit. I have lost many friends in the past year and a half with my biggest online friend group leaving me a month ago and these are my friends that I have that I wish to keep and I feel they will be long time friends but I don't want things to be weird by them having sexual relations and things that way. (yes I know they are their own people and can do whatever) I am just a bit conflicted and worried about the future. I also have a pet peeve of friends dating each other in the same friend group so maybe all of this are those fears surfacing? I would like thoughts and advice about this as I am not sure how to approach this situation or how to go about it.
<>This is an incredibly long post I apologize but I need other's people inputs. I dont know who else to speak about this. Thank you for your time if you read it this far. I also don't think I can do a TL;DR.

I got a call from the DWP for a 'review' re my ESA benefit. I'm in England.
The lady mentioned I should check out one of the entitled websites as I may be able to claim universal credit. Currently I get ESA(support group)& PIP, my wife is registered as my carer, she works 12ish hours a week.
I went in the one of the sites and was told I would be entitled to £X amount if I applied and was successful. However the site seemed to warn me that once applied my ESA would cease and couldn't be reinstated.
Would this mean I'd have to go through the rigmarole of applying for an equivalent to ESA support group and have interviews/assessments or would it simply be transfered to without all the hassle? I don't think I could face that and as it took an age to get ESA sorted any shortfall would be fiscally tough.

Ciao amici! Ho una domanda che potrebbe non essere correlata al contenuto di questo gruppo e in tal caso me ne scuso. Le informazioni che trovo online sul mio problema sono diverse e risalgono agli anni precedenti. Sono cittadino di un paese dell'Unione Europea e ho la residenza italiana da 1 mese. Sono venuto in Italia con la mia auto privata, che ha targhe straniere (da un paese dell'Unione Europea). Ho le seguenti domande: 1: Devo cambiare la targa della mia auto in italiana? 2: C'è una tassa che può essere pagata per permettermi di viaggiare in Italia con numeri non italiani - in questo caso, da un paese dell'Unione Europea? Se esiste una tale commissione, dove devo pagarla? 3: Se devo cambiare la targa all'auto, quanto costerebbe e dove dovrebbe essere fatto? 4: Quali sono i periodi in cui posso circolare liberamente con la mia auto con targa straniera? Maggiori informazioni: Sono già stato all'ACI e lì mi hanno che obbligatorio cambiare la targa dell'auto entro 60 giorni dall'ottenimento della residenza italiana. La cosa strana è che mia madre è residente in Italia da quasi 20 anni. Ha comprato un'auto 4 mesi fa. La sua auto ha anche una targa straniera (dell'Unione Europea), ma ACI ha spiegato che non ha bisogno di cambiare targa, ma solo di pagare una tassa di circa 55 euro. 15 giorni fa è stata fermata dalla Polizia Stradale per controllo e non ci sono stati problemi.

Hey everyone!
So I am an incoming tax associate for this summefall of 2022. and I was missing some credits to hit the 150 that PwC requires in order to start full-time. Therefore I decided to enroll in grad school and get those missing credits because I wanted to take some tax classes. I want to continue taking classes either one or two per semester; it all will depend on how busy I will be. That being said, will PwC pay for the rest of my classes? Will I have a conflict with my start date for this summer even though I have my 150 credits already? Have any of you experience something similiar?