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I smell like freshly mixed fiberglass mmmmmmmm mmm.

Had a tire blowout by an exit. Lucky for me I needed to take a dump. I walk to a nearby McDonald's that's absolutely buzzing with business.

When I walk in I'm met with mostly elders and cold dead stares that I've come to understand as the polite middle finger. I look up the demographics and this town, Vienna, IL, has a 0.08% black population 97.89% white.

The reason I tend to look this stuff up is an attempt to make sure I'm not misinterpreting the messages being sent. But I rarely get that feeling, and it seems like when I get it I'm always right.

I don't stay where I'm overwhelmingly unwelcome. Guess I'll head straight back.

Yeah, things change once you get south of I-80... and beyond I-72/74 you might as well be in the Deep South.

Lol i don't take offense at it. If i was born with their genes, meaning temperament and so on not particularly race, and was raised by their parents and grew up in their environment, then i would have no choice but to be the same way.

At any rate i had to send in a picture of the blown up tire to prove it was damaged. I made sure that the tire got it's message across.

There's also a pretty deep distrust of "city folk from up north" down in the rural central/southern parts of the state. Illinois is schizophrenic.

just brew it! wrote:

There's also a pretty deep distrust of "city folk from up north" down in the rural central/southern parts of the state. Illinois is schizophrenic.

I recently spent some time about 30 miles from where Heiwashin mentioned, and can attest to this. Despite being part of the majority demographic, I still felt extremely out of place and often slightly uncomfortable.

Ugh, inside tire to boot, so twice the work to replace it.

paulWTAMU wrote:

In the last 3 days I've dealt with every technology vendor we have for different SNAFUs; our client records vanishing from the cloud based software that we use for client interactions, our printer is broken as hell, and somehow our shared drive decided to reformat itself.


I'm hating technology right now. I need to go play Mad Max or Fallout to remind myself that technology can be fun too

I primarily work on only broken technology. After 15 years my enthusiasm is quite a bit dampened. Outside of work I usually only watch videos and casually browse some websites. The vendors we have to deal with for engineering focused software are truly awful. One in particular has "new" software that not only insists you need administrator rights to run it, but also that you need to have UAC completely turned off. Thank god for Microsoft's ACT, but shimming the software was still a non-trivial task.

Heiwashin wrote:

At any rate i had to send in a picture of the blown up tire to prove it was damaged. I made sure that the tire got it's message across.

That one next to it looks pretty rounded off. How often do big rig tires get changed out?

Well most of my drive tires made it 150k+ before the tread got too thin. Blowouts are a little more common than they should be because retreading is more popular than replacement. These are small lowboy tires too and it seems the smaller tires always have more trouble.

just brew it! wrote:

Yeah, things change once you get south of I-80... and beyond I-72/74 you might as well be in the Deep South.

edit: reading comprehension fail. I agree. South of Springfield, east of St. Louis metro east, south of Urbana/Champaign.

Oh Wordpress, how I enjoy your eccentricities.

Function Reference/update_user_meta

Description
Update user meta field based on user ID.

Use the $prev_value parameter to differentiate between meta fields with the same key and user ID.

Wait, what? Why? Why use the value as if it were a key? Why does it let you do that in the first place? I want to believe I'm reading that wrong, but past experience is telling me otherwise. At least it's not requiring me to do something bad and wrong, but just telling me I can do something bad and wrong if I really wanted it that way. Thanks. That's helpful.

/rant

A few weeks ago I bought a Maximus VIII Impact board from Asus which had a whopping $10 MIR. I figured what the hell why not send it in.

I just got an email saying the rebate will be sent as a pre-paid Visa card in the amount of $10 some time within the next 5-7 weeks. Yeah, that's about what I expected.

Redocbew wrote:

A few weeks ago I bought a Maximus VIII Impact board from Asus which had a whopping $10 MIR. I figured what the hell why not send it in.

I just got an email saying the rebate will be sent as a pre-paid Visa card in the amount of $10 some time within the next 5-7 weeks. Yeah, that's about what I expected.

This is why I generally don't consider MIRs when making purchase decisions, unless they're for a pretty hefty amount.

That $10 pre-paid Visa card would probably get lost in the piles of crap on my desk, and with my luck would be the type that has an expiration date (which would come and go before I used the card).

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/arts ... hamas.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fyre-festiv ... lege-hoax/
https://www.fyrefestival.com/

The organizers are idiots. WTF were they thinking?

Guess they should've named it "Dumpster Fyre Festival"...

Says it was founded in half by Ja Rule. See this is what happens when you get successful at one thing and think it'll easily translate. They advertised it and sold it before even seeing if it was remotely feasible? Give me all the money you guys wasted on that disaster and i'll just put it in an index fund.

They were thinking "we're so awesome of course everyone will have fun just by being here". Being left to fend for myself is usually what I expect at a festival, but then I like metal where nobody really gives a sh*t anyway.

Redocbew wrote:

They were thinking "we're so awesome of course everyone will have fun just by being here". Being left to fend for myself is usually what I expect at a festival, but then I like metal where nobody really gives a sh*t anyway.

Yup. The key difference being, metal festivals typically don't cost $1,000s of $, and aren't advertised as featuring luxury accommodations and gourmet food (unless you're booking a metal concert cruise, I guess that's a thing).

If the organizers follow through on their promise to issue full refunds to attendees (I wonder how likely that is...), and pay all the contractors (e.g. the charter airline) involved in this debacle and its aftermath, I wonder if they'll have anything left to put on their purported "make up" concert next year? I can't imagine anyone in their right mind fronting them the money to try again after this.

Even the phrase "epic fail" seems woefully inadequate...

Trump steaks were more successful

Closest I've come to being personally involved in a train wreck like that was a local craft beer festival a few years back. My wife, daughter, and I volunteered to do beer brewing demos as part of the fest. Mother Nature had other ideas; the fest was shut down by a massive summer storm, and I ended the day knee-deep in a swamp, helping to extricate a food truck that took a wrong turn and was up to its axles in muck.

At least we had some good beer.

JBI wrote:

WTF were they thinking?

Fraud.

Refunds are impossible, they were looking for multi-million bridge loan at ridiculous interest for projected vendor receipts. The cash is gone.

I'm not kidding. Something didn't go "wrong", it was a criminal endeavor.

I was thinking about that too after my index fund comment. I'm sure that somewhere along the line someone loaned them the money that they lost lol. I wonder who's responsible for that.

Glorious wrote:

JBI wrote:

WTF were they thinking?

Fraud.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, i.e. they didn't originally set out to commit fraud, but eventually ended up in that ballpark due to their own inexperience/hubris/incompetence, plus a sincere belief that they're "special snowflakes" who can do no wrong.

IOW, kind of like the Theranos saga translated to the world of music festival promotion, and with a timeline that was compressed by roughly an order of magnitude.

Hopefully they had substantial personal funds invested and don't get to just walk away from this unscathed.

just brew it! wrote:

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, i.e. they didn't originally set out to commit fraud, but eventually ended up in that ballpark due to their own inexperience/hubris/incompetence, plus a sincere belief that they're "special snowflakes" who can do no wrong.

Not exactly new. Woodstock was an artistic triumph but a financial disaster (on ticket sales alone), recouped only through the rights sales to the albums and the movie.

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, i.e. they didn't originally set out to commit fraud, but eventually ended up in that ballpark due to their own inexperience/hubris/incompetence, plus a sincere belief that they're "special snowflakes" who can do no wrong.

Not exactly new. Woodstock was an artistic triumph but a financial disaster (on ticket sales alone), recouped only through the rights sales to the albums and the movie.

Well, there won't be any album or movie rights to this, as the entire thing got cancelled after many of the attendees were already on-site but before any of the performances took place...

just brew it! wrote:

Well, there won't be any album or movie rights to this, as the entire thing got cancelled after many of the attendees were already on-site but before any of the performances took place...

The whole thing sounds like the pretentious hipster (BIRM) version of "hold my beer & watch this", with the predictable results.

C'mon, Blink182 was your headliner and you were selling $200K stay/eat packages??

Maybe they could still make a few bucks doing a "how not to run a festival" educational video to be included in college business course curricula.

JBI wrote:

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt

I'm not.

At best, the named individuals involved are honest idiots, but the people who took advantage of their naivety weren't. And that's where all the money went.

Like I said, people aren't going to get refunded unless those named individuals somehow go into their own pocket. I wouldn't count on that occurring outside of the inevitable lawsuits.

a different tree just hit my utility poles. This is the second time this year. Guess I'm looking at another 1200 or so to repair again, plus whatever it cost to remove the two trees in my backyard. Damn this unseasonable snow

just brew it! wrote:

That $10 pre-paid Visa card would probably get lost in the piles of crap on my desk, and with my luck would be the type that has an expiration date (which would come and go before I used the card).

You can turn those pre-paid Visas into an Amazon gift card balance, which does not expire and can be used directly for Amazon purchases (or even purchases that use Amazon logins for payments).

Doesn't solve the 5-7 week wait, but at least you can cut the physical card out of the equation.