scops

Really cements my understanding of the topic.

Yeah, the policy was not only that you had to use the stipend on the gym membership, you had to actually GO at least a couples times per month and show proof of attendance “if asked”.

Not technically AT the work place, but a couple employees decided it would be a good idea to sneak off to a side room during the company Christmas party to fool around. They got caught and nothing happened for a couple weeks. Then, for the first and last time in the company history to my knowledge, both employees were asked to provide proof of gym attendance to justify the stipend they were collecting, then fired when they failed to do so.

What’s fun is the couple were married (to each other) and it didn’t happen on company property or during business hours, so this was totally just a “We’re icked out by this” move by HR. Gotta love working in the South.

When you close a bank account, make sure you print out all of your statements first. They’ll keep your records, but have no obligation to give you those records when you stop holding an account there.

When I had to dispute a debt with a collector, I tried going to the bank and they wanted $8 per monthly statement. I knew I had made the payment but wasn’t sure when because it was years prior, and could easily have spent more on those statements than the debt was for. Luckily the debt originator found proof of payment before it went any further, but lesson learned.

My mother’s my sister!

About 90 seconds of alt rock, then someone will get my attention to ask a question, I’ll take my headphones off, then sit for three hours with them on my neck until I remember to put them on again.

Phone systems that give you the prompt, “Press # for more options” etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don’t enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.

Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.

Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)

For “nicer” restaurants, the universal sweet tea boundary seems to be precisely at the NC/VA border.

Interesting. I’m driving from Raleigh to Northern VA tomorrow with lunch in Farmville, VA. I’ll have to test this theory. Can corroborate that NC “tea” is super sweet iced tea.

Edit: Hmm, so I asked for tea in Farmville, VA and the waitress asked me “sweetened or unsweetened”. We told her what was up and she admitted that she was from further north in Virginia, but she had learned to ask while working there. Where she was from, tea would be unsweetened unless specified.

So … Maybe there is a bit of a DMZ in Virginia before you fully cross into unsweetened territory?

Steam recently updated to make it way easier to switch between accounts. It used to be you had to authenticate every time, which was a pain with Steam Guard. Now there’s a Change Account function which won’t invalidate your authentication token though it does seem to sign you out until you switch back.

I use that to ensure I’m not advertising certain games to the world.

In the Windows client you can right-click and hide games. Is there a way to do that in SteamOS? I only see updates for games that aren’t hidden.

I had a copy of Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet that would cut out and loop back in the middle of the song. I listened to it so much I could sing along without missing a beat. Then whenever I heard the right version, it always felt weird when the song flowed through normally.

Kazaa was my go-to back in the day.

I didn’t care for it because I thought a more faithful adaptation of the book would have been more entertaining. I might have enjoyed it more if I came into it cold.

On a similar note, I was shocked when I saw Push had a 24/42% on RT. I thought it had really fun super power feats outside of an existing comic book IP. Bonus points for pre-Cap Chris Evans.