I was intrigued by your description but also thought I’d hate it. Gave it a listen and was pleasantly surprised, he’s super talented and his music is totally unique.

I’ve been getting into tech house lately. It’s fun and catchy with really satisfying bass.

Black V Neck - Like Whoa

Chris Lake & Aluna - Beggin’

Central air conditioning all summer long.

But before I had AC, on hot nights I’d put a cold damp rag on my feet to fall asleep easier and that really worked. I’d also put a box fan in one of my windows pointed outside, and I’d also open a window in another room so that outside air would be sucked in through my home.

I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.

I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.

Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.

72 F / 22 C in winter and 68 F / 20 C in summer. We live in a LEED Platinum building and the electric bill for our 2-bedroom apartment never goes above $50, so we set it to whatever is most comfortable.

Mine has trekking poles! (Colorado)

I learned about this from a can of ///Fear.Movie.Lions beer from Stone Brewing:

What 3 words pinpoint where this indelible beast was born? The location is printed on the can. There’s a 3m x 3m square in our Richmond, VA brewery with these three words painted on it. What three words? Exactly! For the uninitiated, that’s What3Words.

Use them in salads!

I worked for a state government agency that had a bunch of Americorps volunteers working in our office and I became friends with most of them. They were in the office with us every day and they made $1000/month IIRC, and they were all on food stamps. Really dumb indeed to cut these people who do important work for a fraction of the cost of a salaried employee.

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Same, I was a DDG user for years and switched to Qwant a month ago. Qwant results are a step up from DDG, and Qwant takes the same approach to privacy as DDG but it’s based in France so it wins in that regard as well. I’m in the US and Qwant still does a great job of providing localized results.

I worked at one of these places in the US, they absolutely do exist. It was a free “market” stocked daily with produce, meat and a huge assortment of food products and our “shoppers” pushed carts around our market and picked whatever they wanted off the shelves.

I agree with your main point though, shit is fucked and things aren’t getting better and our political system is broken beyond repair.

Not really, my car was a mess! At least nothing was missing though.

So this isn’t a VPN service, but having read your comments it might work…

When I was in Sweden recently I needed to do something online with the appearance that I was in the US. First I tried using a couple of VPN services but they were detected by the website I was trying to use and I got an “access denied” message. So my travel partner activated their Verizon TravelPass and let me hotspot off it. TravelPass gave us a regular Verizon wireless address out of California and I was able to complete my task. Unfortunately though it’s $12/day.

I do the exact same thing, except instead of paying monthly for hosting, I pay $12/year for addy.io. Super reliable service and I can easily manage my email aliases with their phone app.

Haha, they just told me in a normal voice, but obviously I had to play along if I wanted to get back into the country. The experience was a bit dramatic, like something from TV, but it wasn’t actually scary because I had nothing to hide. They also asked if I had anything in my car they should know about, so I said I had a stash of liquor and explained that I was moving and wanted to bring my booze – but they didn’t care and didn’t touch my alcohol.

I was moving from Alaska to Boston, so I had to pass through Canada. Everything I owned was crammed into my Honda Element and I was driving it solo across North America.

I re-entered the US at a border crossing in North Dakota. I pulled up to the window and without saying anything else the officer pointed at a detached garage and told me to pull into it. As I slowly pulled into the garage, there was only enough light to see the outlines of the walls. When I turned off my car, super bright lights were switched on and I saw 6-8 heavily armed border officers with bulletproof vests on either side of the car. One of them instructed me to get out of the car and give him my keys. He also took my passport and took me into a small room in the garage that had 1-way mirrors (so they could observe me and I couldn’t see out) and then he locked me inside. There was nothing inside the room except a few folding plastic chairs – nothing to read and nothing to look at, nothing aesthetically pleasing at all. I could hear them going through my car, removing my plastic totes full of shit and searching through them. After what was probably 20 minutes, they opened the door, handed me my keys and passport and told me, “You’re free to go, welcome home.”

My older sister showed me the hand-in-blender pic when I was like 12 and I can still picture it in my mind. All these years later I still haven’t stuck my hand in a blender – thanks, sis!

Done! Wouldn’t have bothered voting if I hadn’t read your comment, so thanks for sharing. Voting was really easy, just had to enter my member number and zip code.

Qobuz is French, not Canadian.