Oh my gosh, this blog post: chezerbey.com/2012/01/08/the-sad-basement-a-look-back

@BMitch I love that sign

@Aarthi Strangely, and possibly sadly, I think I know those people from the motorcycle community in the pacific northwest.

@SteveJackson Was my question too localized? So why you told me to take photos and post it?

@Gigili I can't find your question, even looking through the deleted/closed list, so I'm not sure of the reference. However, I think @SteveJackson was saying to post your photos here in the chat so we could help you make a question that wouldn't be closed.

@Gigili @Bmitch, exactly right. We'll help you define a question that can be answered by the community, rather than a broad one.

Aarthi was pointing out that design questions are usually off-topic, but once you have a design (which we can help you define here in the chat, where NOTHING is off-topic) then you should have questions that can be asked on the site, like how to build a particular kind of shelving system or the like.

@Gigili, I'm sorry if I appeared rude, certainly not my intention. I'd like to help if I can.

@Aarthi any possibility of offering pencils, or other prizes to folks who contribute to the blog? We could really use more contributors, and we're not having much luck recruiting. HELP!

@Tester101 @Aarthi a contest prize might be interesting. Maybe make it part of some achievements to get a contest entry? Ask/answer 5 upvoted questions, contribute a blog post, do a tag wiki, do a couple edits.

@Tester101 @SteveJackson yeah we could do that. :D It could be more than pencils, even. We could do a Theme Week, like what philosophy does.

@KarlKatzke wait, really? :O

@Aarthi That's an amazing post. I'm tired and I haven't even finished it yet.

@SteveJackson I know exactly how you feel.

@Aarthi we could use a blog post for next Tuesday ;)

@Tester101 keep bugging me :P i'll try and write up my MS Paint Adventures comic by the end of the week

\o/

d'awwww

dogs in hats are funny:

Poor dog

STOP ANIMAL CRUELTY - BURN ANIMAL CLOTHING

adorable dog

it's a human hat on a dog!

and the dog doesn't seem too terribly upset

Do you want me to repeat myself?

Bah, someone's been editing old questions again.

Not me.

diy.stackexchange.com/questions/214/what-is-a-pocket-door asked a year ago, edited an hour ago, answered by me not realizing it

@TheEvilGreebo I thought a pocket door was the flap of fabric that covers your shirt pocket.

It no embed. I give up. Cool though.

@Aarthi I used to live in Portland, OR, and toured on motorcycles throughout the PNW. Had a lot of friends in Seattle in the Ducati club up there. There was one of the pics where Kyle was wearing a Ducati shirt, and it occurred to me that I'd seen him before somewhere.

@SteveJackson How does he get to page 4?

@TheEvilGreebo I had the same question!

Howdy @Karl. What's new?

@SteveJackson Back from holidays. Haven't touched my house in three months. Work is still murdering me. Other than that ... not much.

How about y'all?

Aww, murder is bad.

Yeah, I wasn't taking care of myself and got sick for the entire. month. of. november.

@KarlKatzke Well, I'm now working on two teams at the company, I have a lot more responsibility and power, and all my DIY plans and things have had to be put on hold :(

@KarlKatzke that's the pits.

@Aarthi ... hey, power is good. :) Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm on my normal 40 hour+ a week job, and then I'm expected to figure out where the company is going with it's cloud computing initiative after that. It's a neat project and a neat task, but sheesh.

Clouds not so good for holding computers. Use ground.

Much easier for vendors to blow smoke up your posterior in cloud computing. Must use well-grounded sysadmins to control clouds.

trudat.

And actually, all my problems have been hardware based. It turns out that vendors lie about performance and report theoretical performance in their marketing materials, not actual tests.

:O

And sorry for the derail. ;)

At least you benchmarked first! I have lots of customers that believe marketing numbers over hard data :(

I've been through four RAID cards now and each one has a problem. We have four more on order from different manufacturers. And yeah, my careful documentation of this on our internal blog/wiki has led to a LOT of other benchmarking as we buy new equipment.

We canceled a $500k server order and said "Give us one machine to use for a little while first and then we'll buy the rest."

(I rolled my eyes and said "What a concept!")

(Thank god I work from home.)

@KarlKatzke Cloud computing basically is smoke, so yeah...

@TheEvilGreebo Yeah, actually, what we're going with for our 'cloud' solution is basically just switching to a management system for a large cluster of virtualization nodes. We're 99% sold on using Ganeti. We tried all of the other free and paid solutions, and they either required us to run Windows management nodes (we're a linux shop, so, um, no.) or sucked.

I've managed to avoid the whole "cloud" thing for the most part. If it lasts more than a solid year I'll take note. :)

Heh. Amazon EC2 has been around for more than a year. ;)

@TheEvilGreebo I managed to avoid those "web app" and "security" fads for almost a decade. Now I'm the lead on both - strange how things work out.

Well, sure, you learn from everyone else's mistakes, and you're the last one left standing. Ask me how I know. ;)

So are there schools or other things I can donate surplus tools to? I somehow ended up with 3 wire strippers and they're all the same sort, not like they're different sizes, and I'd like to clean out the storage area a bit and was wondering what to do with a pair of thm

@Aaron What about Habitat?

@KarlKatzke I'm ignoring them outright so... ;)

@KarlKatzke ditto

Habitat or Habitat ReStore

Yeah that might be an option too

I guess I would like to help out schools, teach young minds, etc

but that works

Most schools don't have a program that teaches practical skills anymore, sadly... no shop classes or anything else. The schools that do 'outsource' -- generally to Habitat for Humanity or another extremely localized community project.

For example, there's an alternative school (school for troubled yoots) in NH that sends their kids to work with a company that builds barns with traditional joinery.

There's a sushi place near work that I've ordered carryout from a couple of times, and I call to place the order, and they say 'ok, bye'

it's like, they don't bother saying how long it will take, or getting my name to verify the order, or anything else. it's odd. (but good)

That's a lack of communication skills, not a lack of education. ;)

well, no

I suppose that comment was a complete tangent from my question about wire strippers

It was more on my mind, as I just hung up, and my fingers started typing it

OK, Bye