I am IT staff and I’ve worked for government in the past.

No matter how easy you make the swap over, no matter how much money it offers to save, there’s gonna be somebody who has sign off level executive authority who will refuse to change anything, because it means changing something, and they won’t like it.

Making a company-wide transition from Microsoft to a free version that does exactly the same is not a simple change.

If you make the change, you’re going to see a huge upswing in the number of support calls. You’re going to see a huge upswing in the number of complaints. You’re going to see downturns in efficiency and productivity as people make the changes, not to mention the fact that administering libreoffice from an organizational standpoint is a completely different beast from administering office.

I’m not saying that it can’t be done, by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m saying that the human element is the largest factor in whether or not it would be done, and unless you are already the city administrator or a big to-do inside of the fish pond you find yourself in, you likely do not have the human capital needed to make the transition, regardless of every other benefit.

If you want to get this done, I would suggest preemptively installing libre office on every single computer in the entire organization and then slowly telling people to use it as the opportunity arises so that three to five years from now there will be enough people who have used it that the transition would not be a huge ordeal.

Short of that you need to have an executive mandate from on high come in and say, we are not using Microsoft Office anymore, we will use LibreOffice, here are your training hours, go.

https://github.com/modem7/docker-rickroll

There are also variations on this that play ASCII Star wars and modified versions of the song that are terrible on purpose.

I set this as the admin login link to my docker system just in case somebody manages to infiltrate my network.

I’ve had the whole life flashing before your eyes thing.

The night I lost my virginity. Got high with this girl and watched a movie that was terrible and then we ended up hooking up and I’d put so much expectation into what sex was going to be like that when it actually came to it it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Couldn’t cum. So after doing everything I could possibly think of to do for about an hour I gave up and really shittily faked my orgasm and then I took the girl home.

Got back home and I blue balled myself so I took care of it and right after I came I had an epiphany. Being a kid and hyper sexualized I had messed around with my brother and sister, never going so far is actually having penetrative sex or anything but yeah. All of that shit flashed before my eyes and it hit me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

The stress was so much that every single bone in my rib cage right down my sternum cracked. It sounded like a gunshot had gone off. And it set my heart on fire with pain and misery and shame and guilt and an absolute detestation of my very existence that I that that I just I can’t express it it’s the only thing I understand in this universe to be “ineffable” is what I felt at that moment.

And I don’t know if it was a blessing or a curse.

I spoke to my siblings after I had recuperated some and apologized for my wrongdoing in our childhood and for the most part we worked all of that out but God damn. Like, I was not mentally prepared to get drop kicked in the soul on the same night that I lost my virginity.

There were other things going on at that time too. I had been writing poetry and sometimes when I would write poetry I would feel like this flash of fiery warmth and it’s like I would automatically know what the poem is going to be and it would flow out of me in this beautiful golden Rush.

I had books and books and books of poems I had written like this.

And I was attempting to write a poem when all of this happened and instead almost like I was possessed like it was automatic writing I wrote out all of my sins on several sheets of paper. My heart burned like someone had dropped an ember of burning hot coal on it as all of my sins were ripped out of me against my will.

It left me so shook that in all of the years since then I have only been able to kind of sort of cry a single time.

It felt like being abandoned by God, or rather it felt like suddenly getting caught by him and immediately thrown into hell for 5 minutes, only to be dragged back out with the fires still licking my skin from the inside and then being left to think about what I had done.

I’m talking about the bad side of it but there was a good side too because it opened my eyes to how I was living and what I was doing and even though I’m still horribly imperfect and terrified of being imperfect but helpless to not be imperfect, I am not as bad as I was I think.

And there were other times too where that same golden warmth would come up to me in the middle of a conversation and I would be talking to someone and all of a sudden I would know exactly what to say and in those moments where this would happen it’s like pleasure and joy and fire would rise up out of my heart and reach out to the other person and touch them and in those moments I know the words that I have said have made a positive impact on someone else’s life, but they weren’t my words, they were the words of this fire and spirit inside of me.

All these years later that fire still burns. It never stops. It cannot be forgotten for me. And no matter how many times I explain it, people just generally do not believe that this actually happened to me. They think that it is a mental break or a bit of psychosis or some self delusion that I have put myself under to deal with the trauma of the incest and unfettered sexual promiscuity of my childhood.

And sometimes I’m afraid that that event was my soul leaving my body. And sometimes I’m afraid that it was the sudden inrush of the inhabitation of God that I had been searching for.

And as far as I know no one else has ever felt the way I feel. I can’t find any literature on it. The closest I can relate to are those Christian iconographies of a heart with a crown on it and barbed wire and fire.

But you would think that if that was the inhabitation of God that the inclination to sin would have been driven away from me and yet I still sin just like everybody else.

So I don’t know. I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else. Just wish I could meet someone who had been through that and knew what it was and could guide me.

My solution for this is if you absolutely cannot bypass the connect Network to set up function, set up a hotspot on your phone. Let it download it’s you know what 150 MB update and then turn off your Wi-Fi hotspot

I had the same experience with the two towers. I can’t watch the movie of the two towers. And I can’t make it more than 60 or 70 pages into the book before my brain gives up and says they’ve been walking through the fucking Hills and talking to the trees for 30 pages this is some bullshit.

Maybe I’m cutting myself short by not pushing through but I just literally cannot build up the energy it takes to push through this wall of infinite text.

Yeah I finished the first book and put it down and said fuck this shit.

I enjoyed the suspense of wanting to see what would happen but then I realized that the author is a sadist who only wants the readers to suffer and that was enough to end the entire series for me. I got roped into watching the first episode of the first season and I was like oh it’s the entire first book in one hour fuck this shit and I’ve not watched anymore of it.

I wonder how long it’ll be before people start getting hit with dmcas for taking pictures of it and showing it off to people

Indeed. When saltheart foamfollower undergoes the lava caamora? Like I don’t cry but that brought a tear to my eye.

There is a final four books out which are of a different caliber than the first six but not a terrible read.

I’d say the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas covenant the unbeliever was a wild trip.

In the story, Thomas covenant has leprosy. Due to the leprosy he is numb from the neck down even though he can still walk. He has no sensation when he touches anything and he cannot engage in his chosen profession which is writing. In a fit of pique he rescues a girl that almost gets hit by a car and gets isekaied.

This was written in the late '70s so it was not a common trope at the time.

He arrives in a world of magic on top of a mountain covered in Giant steps, he crawls his way down the mountain and encounters a girl who uses the magic of the land to heal him of his leprosy.

Believing this is all a dream and trying to prove to himself that this is not real, he rapes the girl.

The girls seems very distraught but pulls herself together and guides him into town and that is when he discovers that the white gold wedding ring on his finger is the source of wild magic.

There is a great evil on the land that plans to destroy everything and he is the chosen person, the only person who can stop it.

He has to fight against his disbelief of the world while reconciling his abhorrent actions with his own internal sense of morality in order to have a chance to go home again.

This book spawned a 10 book series covering hundreds of years of history in the land with Thomas Covenant’s battle with the forces of evil and the lives of the people of the land resting in his leprosy numbed hands.

It’s an amazing work but it is a rough read.

Nearly $400 might be a touch out of the price range, but thank you! At least I know that it exists so it’s worth keeping on searching.

Knowledge can be externally verified by an independent party.

Belief can be corroborated but not verified.

Does anyone know where I could find some 20-in wide charcoal filter cloth sponge material?

I would like to be able to have my filter reduce odor in the home as well but I can’t seem to find anything other than little 4-in strips.

I have one. It’s not that loud. Even when you are standing right next to it it is easy to have a normal volume conversation.

You could also add in an inexpensive wi-fi smart plug and set up a schedule where it would turn on and run for 15 minutes every 2 hours or so.

I got a 20-in box fan and four 20x20x2 air filters.

Tape the air filters together into a square and then tape the box fan on to one of the open sides.

Said it so the box fan is facing upward, plug in and turn on. You have a whole house air filter for like $50 or less that will do as good of a job if not better than pretty much any other device on the market.

When the air filters start to turn a dingy color, replace them for 20ish dollars. Fan should be good for several years.

It’s almost like the legislators are more concerned with swinging their dicks around than with actual safety and best practices.

It’s been a long time since I lived in that area and I don’t even know if the franchise still exist but they tend to be typically in the very Southeast, like Georgia and parts of Alabama stuff like that.

For being a place that calls itself the waffle king, their waffle mix was watery and pretty shitty and I do not recommend it’s not worth the effort.

Yeah there’s a bunch of companies that duplicate The Waffle House model like huddle House and Waffle King and places like that. I’ve worked at a bunch of them but this one was a Waffle King.

Kind of a car accident:

I was on a smoke break on my job as a chef at an imitation Waffle House one day and I saw a police officer take his cruiser into one of those automatic drive-through car washes.

The spinny brush thing ripped the antennas off the top of the car and turned them into a flail rotating at 40 RPM.

His car looked like it had been attacked by an angry jackhammer by the time he jumped the curb and drove it out of the car wash.

It smashed out the back windshield completely, left dents all the way across the hood and trunk, and had sprayed soapy water into the cab of the car.

I heard not too much later that that police officer no longer worked for the city.

He was supposed to take it to that car wash but he was also supposed to use the little jet-powered sprayer to hand wash the car and him choosing to be lazy destroyed a police car with less than 10,000 miles on the odometer.

I am a straight guy and I have used a woman’s restroom.

But only in the context that it was a single restroom and the men’s was occupied. I just unilaterally executed my male privilege and declared that the woman’s restroom was unisex for the time period that I needed it.

There was nobody else in the room and if there had been first the door would have been locked or I would have been absolutely mortified.