26 letters.
26 days until Christmas.
26 of you won’t make it.

As usual, apologies to Mr. Gorey.

Archived Tinies here.

@AkioOhtori

@BicycleBuck

@CaptDale-is-secretly-British

@Distraxi

@EngineerWithTools.

@FTTOHG

@gettingoldercarguy

@haveacarortwoorthree

@ItalianJobR53

@Just-Jeepin

@krustywantout

@Long_Voyager94

@monkeepuzzle

@Nauraushaun

@Old-Busted-Hotness

@Poor_sh

@Qaaaaa

@ranwhenparked

@Shop-Teacher

@t0ast

@Urambo-Tauro

@VincentMalamute

@Wrong-Wheel-Drive

@xsnowpig

@your-boy-bjr

@Zaphod-s-Heart-of-Gold

I've been posting here for years about my daughter and out exploits together, building gingerbread houses, learning the flute, going on car the car search that brought home Genie, designing twisted Halloween displays. So much has happened. This year is her first in high school, and she is thriving there. She is a straight A student and never misses a day of class or is even late.

She is now as tall as I am (when standing up), and she is strong. So strong. And so clever. But I have one of those digital photo frames here in my office that she loaded 1000 pics on from her youth, and to my eyes as I watch the images scroll through, she is in my mind's eye still the little girl who sat on my lap wherever we went, just like in those pictures. We would careen downhill in public places while she yelled and waved her arms to see how many people we could make scatter in panic before us.

And she has a temper. The usual teenage sullenness is there on top of her always volatile personality. She is so much like I was as a kid. Too much. Parenting her is an emotional roller coaster, with more shouting and tears than I can ever remember (or want to). She is nothing in personality like my even-keeled wife is used to from her family, and the poor woman has read more books and visited more web sites than she can count trying to cope (and cope she does). For those of you that don't already know, parenting kids together can be a serious test of a marriage. If you're in one of those relationships where both of you say you never fight and always agree, have a child. You'll see.

And yet it's worth it. It's all worth it. I'm 15 years into the adventure today, and I can still see my baby the first day I met her. It's so clear in my mind right now. I'm going to go home early, where we will have the steak dinner and cake she requested, and spend the evening with the wonderful young woman that my baby girl is becoming.

That's it. I just felt like sharing that here.

@Just-Jeepin

Full list from A to today is here.

@Poor_sh

Full list from A to today is here.

Dear Friends,

Below, please find the minutes of the March Curators meeting. After two days, we will move this post to Oppodocs, as usual. Cheers!

Called to order by Zoom on March 5, 2021 at 6:09 CST. In attendance:

ChariotofLove
CarsofFortLangley
davesaddiction
derpwagon
DustyVentures
ITA97
jminer
MM54
Shop-Teacher
Snakesm13
RallyDarkstrike

February financial report

Costs:

Amazon Web Services: $192.50*
Email: $18.00

*increased $53.69 over February, because of 1) an increase in server specs due to heavier load and 2) a planned increase in dev resources for future features and integration.

Donations:

Recurring (after paypal fees): $88.36 from 14 donors (4 more donors than February)

One Time: $74.88 from 6 donors (6 fewer than February)

Best of Oppo category. Curators have been moving qualifying topics to the Best Of category after they drop down the list of the main forum. The Best Of is now accessible through the star icon shortcut in the site header, in addition to being found in the categories list. The Flight Ops subcategory was added to contain all aviation and space flight Best Of posts.

Hyphen’s List update. Swappo member to member sales in the first three full weeks of operation has seen several listings, two completed sales, and a few partial sales. The Shoppo vendor to member sales category has two store fronts so far. Reception has been positive.

The Hyphen Company Store has been cleared for takeoff, and is expected to be opened shortly, as soon as the HTML is finalized and the layout created on this site. Merchandise will include Oppo-branded polo and tee shirts, hoodies, and other clothing items to start. We are also planning for limited special run (e.g: seasonal such as Christmas) designs, with fulfillment on demand. Profits will go entirely toward site operations.

We discussed that Hyphen’s List is somewhat hidden because the main discussion forum is currently the landing page for the site, and we considered ways to improve its visibility. One suggestion would be to put a shopping icon in the header. This led into a more general discussion of layout changes to make all the categories more visible (see below).

Dev team report/site design. Posts to categories other than the main discussion are getting less exposure. There is no straightforward way to share posts to the main forum from categories like Overland to “advertise” them. The devs are working on changes to the site layout to get these sections more exposure, as well as to increase traffic to Hyphen’s List. Among the changes discussed were replacing the header icon links with text names, possibly as a drop down list, or resurrecting the idea of a sidebar menu akin to the “you may also like” sidebar feature tested out earlier (although this is not very mobile friendly, and many of our users are on mobile). No specific design decisions were made, but we agreed on the need to begin testing new options.

We discussed the desirability of having push notifications to desktop and mobile from chat messages through the day. This would especially enable curators to respond to messages in a more timely fashion when going about the work day, but might also be desirable for the membership in general. Node BB appears to have two plug ins for the purpose, but one is no longer actively supported, and the devs tested the other with poor results.

Forum moderation. We discussed the use of the “time out”, a ban of variable length administered when members need a cooling off period (and only after gentler methods have failed). It was agreed that a selective time out from a specific category where an altercation occurs (e.g: Oppolitics) would be preferable to a site-wide time out, if possible. At present, the devs do not see a way to adjust the permissions of registered users to create this kind of selective access to categories. Research continues.

Discussions in the Oppolitics category have become heated in many instances, resulting in an increase in flagged posts. In the hopes of reducing the number of instances requiring intervention, the Curators created a guidelines post, pinned at the top of said category. This post is intended as a reference for the philosophy of crafting political discussions on The Hyphen.

Next meeting was scheduled for Friday, April 2nd at 6:00 pm CDT.

Meeting adjourned at 7:35 CST.

@Long_Voyager94

All entries from A to today are here.

Usually proceeded by "no good", but not this time. In this age full of stealership stories and other crappy business experiences, I like to think about the times when a business made me smile.

Yesterday was one of those times. I was at my neighborhood Albertson's (grocery store), and ran into one of the managers, who stopped what she was doing to talk to me. I told her about how my wife had inputted something like $29 of accumulated points savings into the store app, but it didn't get applied. I told her we figured out that it probably got assigned to a store in Boise by accident, and then expired. I asked her if I could get them back or if I was SOL.

She said no, she could fix that. While I had my wife on the phone to make sure of the amount, so I didn't over-claim, she handed me a $30 gift card. She had rounded up. That was it. Have a nice day. I've been shopping there for 20 years now, and people know me. They've watched my little girl grow up and ask me about her when she's not with me.

This is the same store at which I bought a little table and chair set for my patio several years back. The check out gal asked me how I was getting it home. I drove the RX-8 at the time, but I've always been pretty resourceful with hauling things. I figured I'd manage. She said her shift was just ending, and she had a pickup. In ten minutes, she had pulled her truck to the front, got one of the stock guys to load my new furniture, and then followed me to my house to unload it.

These are the kinds of people that work at my local store, and they are why I have given them my business for 20 years. Three cheers that there is still good cotomer sevis in this world!

I just got notice from the National Institutes of Health that my shared instrument grant got a super high score, as in a most likely fundable score provided you all paid your taxes and there is enough money in the coffers. The 13 is on a 90 point scale where smaller is better and 10 is perfect.

This is for a multi-photon laser scanning confocal microscope. It's worth just shy of $900K, and I have been working on this application for two years. It involved contributions from faculty across the entire College, and if you think herding cats is hard, try professors.

This is a BIG DEAL for us, as it will enable us to do research we could only dabble in before. So, yes, I am doing a happy dance in my office.

@Zaphod-s-Heart-of-Gold

It is finished. Read the entire series here.

Merry Christmas, Hyphen!

@FTTOHG

The entire list from A until today is here.

@shop-teacher The caption for that pic is “perspective”.

This week shall pass, but you will still be blessed.

@mr-ontop said in Play stupid games:

He looked stunned, then turned around and went back inside.

You reminded him to get back to it.

@forsweden said in I have an opportunity.....:

Mods ban him if he doesn't buy the car

We’re already writing it into the bylaws.

@hooker Buy it. Buy it now.

Then sell it to me.

@rallydarkstrike said in Happy Bithday Dad!!!!!:

@chariotoflove Haha! Sounds like I had missed some stuff after I had to leave at the end of the last one!

Not that all of us who were there at that point remember all of it anyway.

@bicyclebuck said in Birthday haul:

@chariotoflove

Seems appropriate given the weather.

Ugh, right? It didn’t even get out of the 60s today!

@ttyymmnn said in Birthday haul:

@chariotoflove

Wait, it's your birthday? Happy birthday!

That makes me smile unreasonably wide.

@studystudystudy said in Your tax dollars at work, or sous vide your troubles away:

@chariotoflove agreed. Got to have backdoor access to find out exactly what was done. Don't even get me started on international publications. Feels like the wild west sometimes.

I’ve started turning down more review requests because I just can’t.

@dipodomysdeserti said in Your tax dollars at work, or sous vide your troubles away:

@chariotoflove Very nice! I was looking up bottle rocket kits for my stem class, and available kits were all $30-$100 plastic pieces of crap. I ended up making a tiny potato gun using 1/2” pvc pipe for $9 and called it a bottle rocket launcher.

Necessity is a mother. Or something.

When you’re on a budget, you adapt to reality.

@snuze said in Your tax dollars at work, or sous vide your troubles away:

@chariotoflove For what it's worth, I built a sous vide years ago, when the commercial units were still expensive, using a PID controller, solid state relay, water heater element, and aquarium pump. It was a champ and pretty cheap, but not $70 cheap.

Ain’t technology amazing? But yeah, coming in on the ground floor is super satisfying.