Things I don't understand

The word "hammer" (and the tools and actions it describes) predates the invention of the nail, while - I assume - the screw and the screwdriver came about concurrently.

Today, there are some devices called nail drivers, which were invented long after the nail.

If you have power tools, it changes. They are called nail guns and screw guns.

On the other hand, a nut (especially a large nut) is screwed on or off with a hand tool called a wrench (or a spanner), but a power tool for the same purpose is not called a nut "gun" (as with nails and screws), but rather a nut driver. Special types of heavy duty nut drivers are normally called impact wrenches.

(Go ahead, NoCo, call me a pendant.)

Nah. I like having you hanging around.

Jenni wrote:

To me it's the ultimate in bad character. Something has served you well, been at your side, been your companion for so long and then at the end when it may be hard you just walk away. TO me that person is trash. It's physical proof that they are the lowest of the low.

Jenni,

I remembered this thread when my wife came home with a cat who is 8+ years old.

She picked her up at the local animal shelter. Her previous owner had died and there was no one else to take care of her; that's how she wound up in the shelter.

The woman running the place was very happy that my wife had picked out this cat, saying that she did not get along with the other cats, but loved people and was one of the sweetest cats she had ever seen.

The little cat had been in the shelter for about seven months. Most people coming in there want kittens, so this poor old girl was just left to her misery. I wasn't in the mood for having another cat around the house, but this little critter is welcome.

Seven months, yikes. That would be enough to make a cat lose hope.

At our local PAWS you can adopt a senior cat for free. Kittens and dogs have adoption fees to cover shots and spaying and housing and building maintenance, but it's so hard to get adult cats adopted out that they waive the fees.

If it wasn't true that existing cats have an easier time accepting a new dog in the home than a new cat, I'd consider it.

When my sister died she had two cats. My other sister already had two cats. Three of these four cats were related. Didn't make any difference -- they still couldn't get along at my sister's and she had to find new homes for the orphans.

NoCoPilot wrote:

At our local PAWS you can adopt a senior cat for free.  Kittens and dogs have adoption fees to cover shots and spaying and housing and building maintenance, but it's so hard to get adult cats adopted out that they waive the fees.

Wish they did that here. Annie was spayed before she was put in the shelter, but they did all the shots, atc., when she got there. Charged us ninety bucks for her. Now we need to take her to the vet for an exam. There's another buck and a half.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Seven months, yikes.  That would be enough to make a cat lose hope.

You would think so, but this little cat just seems fine. She craves attention, of course, but otherwise seems just fine.

Today the house cleaners were here; the first visitors since the cat arrived. She just walked right up to them and meowed. They gave her some pets and she was just fine. Friendly as she could be. Even the vacuum cleaner didn't bother her. The little fiend tried to coerce Jackie into feeding her - meowed at her and led her over to the food dish (which she had emptied just a few hours before). Jackie fell for it; she came downstairs and told me, "Annie is really hungry. You should feed her."

She does have one irritating trait. When she jumps up on the bed in the middle of the night, she finds it necessary to announce her arrival with much loud, people-waking meowing. Gotta talk to her about that.

Mrs. NoCo is going nuts without a dog. Even *I* feel the intense emptiness of the home.

I made a deal with her tonight. She can get another dog before I retire on the condition that it's an older rescue dog who needs a home and is good with cats. If she only lives another 2-5 years that's perfect, because we'll get another young dog when I'm home full time in 18 months hopefully.

Betsy's problem was boredom. It sucks having grandparents for a mom & dad.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Mrs. NoCo is going nuts without a dog.  Even *I* feel the intense emptiness of the home.

I made a deal with her tonight.  She can get another dog before I retire on the condition that it's an older rescue dog who needs a home and is good with cats.  If she only lives another 2-5 years that's perfect, because we'll get another young dog when I'm home full time in 18 months hopefully.

Betsy's problem was boredom.  It sucks having grandparents for a mom & dad.

I think that's a wise idea.

NoCo wrote:

Seven months, yikes. That would be enough to make a cat lose hope.

Walter, the little poodle Ben brought home had lived at the vet's office for two years. He's 11. He's so fucking adorable it's almost painful. We thought he'd be perfect for mom, I may have told ya'll about him- but anyway, I felt like two years was just crazy.

There's a great dane up there who is 8, quite old for a dane, and her people supposedly are building a house and she's been up there for like a year now. It's breaking our hearts. But I have no clue how to introduce a dane into our mix. Ben says sometimes she just looks out the window like she's not sure if she'll ever get to leave. I fear she'll die there, and I hope I never meet her people.

"NO MORE DOGS!!"  "NEVER".  "EVER!".  

I rescued Boone last month.

He is a 10 year old 'surrender', which means the cops had to go pick him up.
It also means we don't know what kind of life he came from.
I do know he'd never been bathed which was made even worse because the vet said he was probably never brought inside (by the looks of him).
His canines aren't pointed anymore.  (Probably from gnawing on fencing.)
You could count his ribs from across the room.

Boonie looks like a sweetheart. I like to watch "Pitbulls and Paroles" because the dogs they rescue come from horrible circumstances of abuse or neglect, and yet the dogs almost always turn out to be loving gentle souls.

Dogs are not like us.

They're much, much better.

They really are.

I cried for Betsy.
And you.
And the Mrs.

And the misses.

Do they still call it "gas mileage" in countries that measure distance by the kilometer?

Or is it "petrol kilometerage"?

If they called it petrol, then they never did call it "gas mileage". Duh.

Looks like the units for fuel economy are Liters per 100 KM (or I guess, to compare to MPG, it would be KM/L)

What was the best thing -- before sliced bread?

Who was the worst man -- before Hitler?

NoCoPilot wrote:

What was the best thing -- before sliced bread?

Sliced enemy.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Who was the worst man -- before Hitler?

Ronald Reagan.

Nice try but no cigar

I'd go with Attila the Hun.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Nice try but no cigar

Sliced cigars?

richard09 wrote:

I'd go with Attila the Hun.

Nah, he was a pussycat. Hence the nickname.

Now Vlad The Impaler, *he* was a serious dude.

Hitler was already 22 when Reagan was born. Reagan was 13 when Mein Kampf was written.

NoCoPilot wrote:

What was the best thing -- before sliced bread?

Beer (before and since).

NoCoPilot wrote:

Who was the worst man -- before Hitler?

Christ or Mohammed - take your pick.

You know I get the feeling these terrorist attacks could be cut down 90% if the Imams would just put out messages condemning them. Instead this morning we were told that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who were killed "brought it on themselves."

Shameful.

Incidentally our own Imam shares that view.

Considering that Pat Buchanan is one of the most idiotic people in the world, I am not surprised at his remarks.

I wish that the media and the government would quit referring to the people who perpetrate these actions as terrorists or jihadists or extremists, etc. Why can't they just be called what they are: psychopaths and sociopaths. Are they any different from Sam Berkowitz, who everyone agrees is insane? He said that a black dog spoke to him and ordered him to kill. These guys say their friend in the sky spoke to them and told them to kill. Every bit as insane as old Sam (maybe more; at least the black dog was real).

There was a scene, a flashback scene late in the Madam Secretary series, where Sec't Elizabeth McCord remembers interrogating a detainee during her CIA career and tries to get him to reveal the whereabouts of a suitcase bomb. The detainee refuses. When she asks him why he's okay with killing innocent women and children, he says something like, "They get to Heaven a little sooner."

THERE is the real evil in Islam.

Something else I don't understand -- help manuals written by fucking idiots.  I've been trying to troubleshoot some problems with my new security cameras, and a problem with my TV where I can stream Pandora to it from my iPad, and it receives the video but not the audio -- WTF?  The online owner's manuals for both products -- online, so there's no real space limitations -- say shit like this (and this is a direct fucking quote):  "use the channel up and down buttons go up and down the channels" and "use add or delete to add or delete channels."  Thank you Samsung, you fucking miserable morons.  What a goddamn waste of bandwidth.  Get somebody to write the stuff who actually knows something about troubleshooting.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Thank you Samsung, you fucking miserable morons.  What a goddamn waste of bandwidth.  Get somebody to write the stuff who actually knows something about troubleshooting.

I used to work in software quality assurance (mostly testing and test management, in my case). Changing my specialization to this was strategically a bad move, because (as I soon discovered), corporate management (and actually, much of the development world also) simply had no appreciation of how much the specialization was needed and valuable. Whenever projects were being set up, testing strategy and resources were an afterthought, and whenever the budget got tight (typically, about halfway through the project, just when QA is about to kick in its maximum return on investment), QA was the first thing to get cut.

Writing documentation, especially help documentation, is part of the same specialty (the people who know what documentation is needed aren't the developers, they're the testers, who've had to figure out how to use the stupid system). And the bad news is, writing the documentation is given even a lower priority than the testing.

Should it be this way? No, of course not. QA has been a recognized, valuable specialty in the software world for the past 40 years (at least). But "management" doesn't require understanding process, at least when it's being taught by by American "business schools".