I try not to pay attention to the constant, never-ending, inexorable stream of adverts being beamed into my face. But this one for yoghurt makes me crazy. It's called Fage. It's clearly called Fage. Only they're insisting it's pronounced 'Faya' (fire). I am sure this is retrofitted and refuse to believe anyone is calling it Faya. Stop lying to us, yoghurt people.
@TheBreadmonkey I’d be thrown enough by whether or not they want me to pronounce it with a soft G and what that’s supposed to make it (“Goddammit, does it rhyme with egg or page or portage? And whatever the answer, why didn’t they make it more obvious?”), but “Faya” is right out.
In a city called The Dalles, in Oregon, USA, local people were worried that Google’s water use was soaring. As is so often the case, the city officials, who had given Google hundreds of millions in tax breaks, had no intention of letting anyone know how much water Google was using. It was up to a local paper, The Oregonian, to try and find out. They were forced to bring a case to court. City officials were ordered by Google to claim that Google’s use of scarce pubic water was a “trade secret”.
@gerrymcgovern@mhoye Wondering if I could get away with that at a job. Just do something totally unexpected and with zero regard for anyone around me and if anyone starts to ask questions, just tell them that no one had been told previously because it was my trade secret.
@mhoye@gerrymcgovern Just reminded that this is almost always the start of people with crazy wealth: First, get some seed money of $1,000,000-$100,000,000 from your family.
Next, be lauded years later by the media as being a self-made billionaire.
My commute to my second job (ahem currently my main) job is unfortunately close to as far as I can get from my house while still being in the same city.
Adding to catching rush hour traffic both ways, the city has started what will be years of bottlenecking repairs on the routes I usually take. So a 27-minute drive on the weekend took me close to hour and a half last night.
I could literally have driven to London, Ontario in the time it took me to drive home from work across Toronto.
Sometimes it’s not terrible, though. One weekday morning will take over an hour and the next day will be 40 minutes.
All of which means that now on weekdays I’m keeping half an eye on the GPS to gauge the time I need to head to work.
Today we’re already having some fun-sounding downpour and wicked wind. Which means I should maybe head to work… now-ish? Give it a good 3.5 hours to get there? 🙄
All of which makes me ask again, with growing despair, why journalists continue -- by actively participating on Musk's site -- to actively support this evil man's business.
Yesterday I learned that vultures are birds of prey. Somehow I’d thought they were scavengers, maybe confusing them with buzzards? (He says, making a mental note to check if buzzards are birds of prey to maybe edit that out.)
So the several turkey vultures I’ve been seeing swooping around the Ontario Science Centre for months — and the wingspan of these things gets up to about my height, so they’re not subtle — are actively hunting, not just looking for carrion, or whatever.
Related: They’ve started hanging out over the Science Centre itself, and a couple of days ago were jostling around with some Canada Geese.
Guess that was them after some lunch.
Which, by the way, gives you some idea of their size. Much like when I heard that Great Horned Owls will take down a Canada Goose to eat?
Listen, Canada Geese are no joke. If they come at you snapping and hissing, even as an adult, you’ve got a problem.
And to know that THAT thing is a meal for a BIGGER bird?
Crazy.
@tk @FirewallDragons
As with so much of this stuff, I wonder why anyone needs a “smart” version anyway. We contentiously don’t have our “smart” fridge or oven connected online, why the hell would a toothbrush need to be?
Whenever I'm embarrassed about something that I said, I remind myself that Kid Rock released an entire song that largely centered around repeating "Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy."
I figured it out, so long as my car stays costing me less than £250 per month in repairs it’s cheaper for me to keep it on the road than trying to buy a new second hand one. And as the engine is a diesel and has done 120,000 miles it should last a while longer yet. The car’s done nearly 230,000 miles, but it got a new engine at 110,000 due to a factory recall
@BethanyBlack We were told recently that we could easily get double, maybe even triple, what we paid for it if we were to sell ours again, rough appearance notwithstanding.
Well… I cleaned it up and took bunch of nice shots and it was for sale on one of the most popular used car sites, and over MONTHS and a number of price reductions there were only half a dozen expressions of interest but only one serious one, and by that point I’d gotten this other work that the car was handy to get to, so… 🤷♂️