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.

UPDATE: You guys swarmed the sticker guy and bought all his stock! But not to worry, he’ll make more!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for is here! You can finally buy quality die cut stickers to proudly proclaim your Oppositelock affiliation to the world.

These artisan stickers are lovingly hand crafted in small batches by our own @KITT222 in two sizes and three colors, all available through his online store at this link. Get ‘em while supplies last!

And the best part is that the profits from his sticker sales go to support your forum. So remember to say “thanks” to KITT for bringing these stickers to all of us, and while you’re there, check out his Etsy store, GenVibe for other cool stuff.

Friends, here are the minutes of the latest Curator meeting. After two days, this post will be moved to Oppodocs, as usual. Cheers!

Called to order at 6:06 CDT. In attendance:

Chariotoflove
ClassicDatsunDebate
Davesaddiction
derp
Dustyventures
HammerheadFistpunch
jminer
MM54
nickhasanexocet
RallyDarkstrike
Shop_Teacher
Snakesm13

April financial report

Donations
Recurring: $103.96 from 17 donors

One time: $279.18 from 8 donors

Costs
Amazon Web Services: $235.87
Email hosting: $18

Merch store update

In the first month of operation, we took 35 orders for a total profit of $287.91 (USD).

Neverstanced will shortly be adding hats to the current t-shirt, polo, and hoodie offerings. Sourcing for die cut Oppo stickers is underway.

New Front Page Development

Considerable progress was made in creating a functional Oppo landing page in Word Press, with active links back to The Hyphen forums, Oppo DriveTribe, Oppo Discord, and Oppo Facebook. Our eventual goal will be to have this be our own “FP” that features a selection of member-created articles. Comments sections will link back to their original topics on The Hyphen.

The FP is external to the Node BB-based forums, so a procedure was created for Curators to begin copying articles from both Hyphen and DriveTribe posts to test this system and iron out bugs. For now, this will all be kept in a test environment (so not viewable to the forum) while we get comfortable with it.

It was discussed and agreed upon that authors should be allowed to opt-in to FP promotion of their posts as part of their terms of service (TOS), rather than opt-out. This will be a one-time choice (not required for every submission) and can be changed any time the author wishes. We also resolved to double check as to whether there would be any copyright issues involved with reposting from DT.

Oppo TOS Policy

The Hyphen currently uses a generic boilerplate TOS agreement, which is easily accessible, if one knows where to look for it (any user can access it at opposite-lock.com/user/[your user name here]/consent. We discussed researching and crafting a more comprehensive TOS that includes a formal DMCA takedown policy and explicit protections of copyright for members, as appropriate. We also discussed making the policy more visible to members to increase transparency. We decided to work on an “About” link as a menu item in the site header which contains information about the site and a conspicuous link to the TOS.

Dev team report

We have been using Node BB v1.16.1. Version 1.17 was just released and contains new features such as post scheduling. These features are not all ready for prime time, and we are not migrating/upgrading yet. However, the devs are in contact with the Node BB development team to determine which features will be mature and robust enough for implementation. Hyphen members should continue to give feedback on what features are most important to them to help guide our dev team’s priorities, remembering that it can only work with what the software platform gives them.

Summer logo “contest”

As the Christmas logo “contest” was such a success, we decided to implement a solicitation for summer themed Oppo logos to go into rotation on our masthead. Submitted logos might possibly be used in limited run merch items. Members are encouraged to fire up their design programs and look for an announcement post soon. “Contest” is in quotes because all contributors will win is the ability to see their artwork at the top of the forum and possibly on some swag.

Adjourned at 7:09 CDT.

@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.

My Ph.D. student today came to the end of a very long road. He passed his oral defense of his thesis.

When he came to my lab six years ago from India, I started him on a project that I’d already published on and seemed fairly straightforward and achievable. Actually, a couple of related projects, because you want to have backup.

What followed after was several years of blind corners, false starts, dead ends, and the occasional disaster sprinkled in just for fun. First he had to get accustomed to thinking like a scientist, trained from the ground up. Then came several permutations looking at hypotheses based off of previous data. Nothing panned out. Then, finally, something did. From that point, it was a painful slog through creating and characterizing multiple knockout mouse lines. We were both at wit’s end several times. But he stuck with it while his family and support system were very far away.

Well it paid off today. He gave his talk, fielded a bunch of questions, including the obligatory interrogation from the committee, and passed unanimously.

We still have to do the final revision of the written dissertation, and we have a paper in revision that needs to be finished, but it should be all wrapping up now. I told him to worry about that later. Tonight is to go out with his friends, find some good food, get drunk, and sleep in.

An Indian car for your time:

And I’m glad I did. The car had a CEL from a mass air flow sensor code, but that turned out to not be a big deal. This, however, was.

Oil all over the undercarriage from leaks. The tech told me a very expensive fix. He didn’t charge me for the inspection. All I lost was $20 to the dealer and half an afternoon. I’m calling it lucky.

@jawzx2
At least they haven't come up with something really dumb, like alcantara steering wheels. Oh wait...

@kingt
Based on what everyone complained about when they came out, I scanned first to see if the Mazda 3 was there.

@ramblinrover said in My son will be attending the University of North Texas in the fall:

@houstonrunner and yet, the pedagogy for the advanced math required for those degrees often focuses on the abstract and focuses poorly on applicability, making it so that all too often ME/CE etc. have to learn the applicability in other courses while struggling in the actual math course because it's "math for math majors". Derp.

I took Calculus for engineers my first semester in college because I thought I'd get better applicability. It was taught by someone from the Math Department though. The first two lectures he spent showing the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational. Two hundred engineering students were ready to form a lynch mob by the end.

@ttyymmnn
The school green looks really good, and their bookstore is basically a huge swag shop.

@ita97 Wow. That's an impressive commitment.

@ita97 Honestly, at this point, your parts cannon is more like a parts battery firing multiple warheads. I'm a little jealous that I don't even have a parts derringer myself.

@ita97 said in CL Find of the Day: 5-Door Focus SVT:

@Chariotoflove @HUGZ

This could be a great first car for someone.

It would. But it's manual, and I have been told that is out as a daily driver.

@exage03040 said in Athletics in the Era Of Inclusiveness?:

@davesaddiction

Fair enough, I just won't be engaging in them while on main.

And note that just as @davesaddiction just did for you, anyone can create a new thread to branch off an aspect of the discussion at hand and link to it from the current thread. It’s a common forum technique people use to avoid threadjacking.

You shouldn’t have to feel stifled from talking about something because of where it’s classified.

@mastermario Yes, but it’s an even smaller subclass. But perhaps that just comes with the territory. I don’t know, I was trying to think it through how inclusiveness could paradoxically lead to segregation.

@dipodomysdeserti
That reminds me, I use this video as part of my neuroscience lectures each year.