If you don’t mind me asking, how many days did you have to wait for an appointment to bring it in to your mechanic?
The vehicle broke down on a mountain pass. A good samaritan in an Isuzu* towed me over the hill, to a gas station.
Then the repair guy arranged a tow of about 60km from there straight to his shop. Then he started work pretty much immediately. It was on a weekend, but he said he needed to be at work to supervise another repair, so he would pull apart the engine while he did this. RSA has some lekker people… and a lot of great Toyota mechanics.
On a postive note, I am getting a free major service alongside the engine rebuild…
* oh the shame I felt…
I was told by my mechanic that the first available appointment was the day after Labor Day.
I was also told that due to limited parking, the soonest that I could drop it off was the night before. The place does good work, but they charge top dollar. They have only two bays. Their selling point is that they are walking distance from my house. 
So is my mechanic…just depends how far you want to walk from my mechanic to your house. 
I didn’t put my toiletries bag in my overnight bag. Luckily, I did at least brush my teef last night before leaving as minty fresh breath this morning was achieved via a starlight peppermint. 
At least I’ll be back home later whence I can conduct a brushing.
Being an old-fashioned fart, I keep track of my umpty-milllion passwords in a notebook. I had taken the notebook with me on a recent trip, and when unpacking I put the notebook on the center table of my sofa, with the intention of taking it to the office along with some other paperwork. Monday I went to go to a website and the notebook wasn’t on my desk. So I figured it was still on the table. I go to get it and it’s nowhere to be found. I clear of the table of all the detritus had been accumulated since I’d gotten home. A friend had been visiting since I got home and we had been sending out for food, so there was a lot of napkins and plasticware left over from the meals. We had been clearing out the dirty dishes as they piled up, and I have a horrible feeling that the notebook somehow got swept up during part of the cleanup. And of course the trash has already been bagged and taken out.
So now I’m looking forward to depending on my semi-reliable memory to be able to log onto various websites, and using the “forgot my password” function to change the ones I can’t remember. There are a lot of places I don’t go to very often, so there’s no rush on those. But it’s going to be fun checking my bank balances and paying bills for the next month.
What is RSA?
What is lekker people?
Please decipher for us USAians.
Easy to figure out from the context. RSA is obviously an auto club that employs lekkers, or as we call them, tow truck drivers.
No idea what an Isuzu is though. Probably some sort of tuxedo.That’s why scudsucker, dressed in his plain conkers, felt shame.
My not-so-mini Rant is about hyper aggressive drivers. I’m sick of people who drive so aggressively they’re endangering the rest of us.
Sometimes there’s no IK, just film of appalling behavior.
I still think it’s always best to have your side of the story backed up by video. IME, a lot of people have only a passing acquaintance with honesty.
Here’s a recent example of one of the road-morons in our fair city.
Driving to a friend’s house, single lane road, entering active school zone, bike lane to my right.
Aggressive Postman’s reaction to being slowed down:
He stopped a mile or so later to deliver something, and I took out my phone to snap plate and truck number pics. He lost his shit, began screaming at me and making violent threats, so I dropped my phone and drove carefully away. He abandoned the delivery and raced after me in his postal van. I headed back out of the neighborhood to avoid leading this violent man to my friend’s house.
Aggressive Postman’s reaction to my photographing his van:
This went on for a while, with constant “lunges” at my truck with his van, screaming, and waving his hands around. When I turned into the police station parking lot, he fled. Pretty sure he has no idea his performance was captured on multiple dash cams.
FTR: I had no direct contact with him, said nothing, never even rolled down my window.
In retrospect, I’m also directing a rant at myself for “getting involved” and trying to get the van numbers for reporting. I should have just driven past and ignored him.
Thanks. I’m feeling a bit better now, and texting with my union steward suggests that if I’m feeling well enough to show up to work tonight, as long as I’m masked up I won’t be sent home. And my sister is going to bring over some N95 masks this afternoon.
Going to bed now.
Wow! Did you report him to the post office?
I’m referring to videos called “Instant Karma ”
Well, at least he has the right employer.
Rest is the best thing you can get.
If there’s one thing Covid always does, it will drain your energy like you ran a fucking marathon.
Agreed. Back in the May Mini-rants, I ranted about the kid who rear-ended my brand new car. He told the cop that I had come to a sudden stop at a green light in front of him. I showed her the dash-cam videos of me stopped behind a line of cars at a light that had just turned green and the one of him accelerating as soon as the light turned green. After watching the videos, she gave me a copy of the accident report and said that she was going to have a conversation with the kid that he was “not going to enjoy.”
For years after you catch it! 
That sounds very distressing, I’m sorry this happened. There’s been a lot of discussion on this board about password management. Most folks seem to favour some modern type of online password manager. My approach is a simple compromise between paper and fancy-pants online stuff, namely, a strictly local very simple password manager with an encrypted database.
The database is routinely backed up along with everything else, and in addition, periodically copied over to other computers. The application itself is so simple that it needs no installation, so the application plus the database is a self-contained package that will run anywhere.
4 years for me so far.
Varies greatly
I had IIRC the omicron varient in summer 2022. 3 days of lazy & zero follow-on effects I can tell. My last three years have been my pre-COVID normal.
I’ve had it twice.
The first time it was really bad, I mean I was constantly coughing, it was miserable for a couple of weeks. It’s not the worst illness I’ve ever dealt with but it’s up there.
The second time wasn’t that bad. It was like a normal cold for a week, with the only thing different being that I had no energy until it was over.
The fatigue, occasional vertigo, and low level brain fog has never completely gone away. I’m guessing it never will.
In South Africa, there are just three cellphone companies. The “top” two are really shit, the third is worse. Unfortunately I have little incentive to change, even though we can port numbers.
I need to buy some airtime and data. Because, the one really obvious way to do this is - instead of allowing buying service in the app, that is clearly not a solved problem… the app redirects you to an actual website.
Problem 1: (I have probably ranted about this before.) For purposes of monitoring traffic, a click from the app first launches a tracking URL that is used to record the action requested (“buy data”) and then “invisibly” redirect to the main website. I mean, this is stupid for a number of reasons, primarily that the tracking URL is under a different domain entirely from the main website.
When you run out of airtime, the main domain is zero-rated, so you do not need to pay for data you use while buying more data.
But the fucking tracking URL is not even an alias or subdomain of the main URL. It is an entirely different domain. Which is blocked because only, ONLY, the main domain (and the “www” alias) is whitelisted.
But not the tracking domain. So I have zero data. I want to access a zero-rated service to give them money to buy more data, but their obsession with tracking (using 3rd party urls, wtf) is preventing me from giving them money.
The app purports to be a one-stop money market where I can buy all sorts of third party shit, but I cannot buy a product from the company whose very existence is based on people buying products from them.
Problem 2: when I do run out of data, there is an exceptionally complicated procedure to bypass problem 1. I can buy “airtime” and then convert that to data. It takes a bunch of irritating and convoluted steps to do so, but hey, I can use my credit card to buy data via this ridiculous route.
But fuckit people, do you look at your stats? Compare, since you like tracking so much, even when mostly incompetent, how about comparing the number of users who are trying and succeeding to buy data via,
A) clicking a link in the app. Choosing an amount. Paying. Get data.
Or
B) clicking on a different link in the app. Choosing a completely different service. Buy that. Find the way to convert it. Click that. Wait a few minutes. Get data.
I mean, I have personally saved a large UK client an estimated GB£ 600 000.00 in loss per anum just from noticing a bunch of repeated, similar errors in logfiles, and simply following up on this. It wasn’t even my job or even my department responsible for the problem! I just happened to scan though some recent logfiles looking for a different problem…
I reported it, it was fixed within a few hours.
So either my cell company is incompetent, arrogant or blind. All three is the most probable.
(And yes, I have tried, and tried to “file a bug report” but all I have access to is first line support who would not understand a complicated multi-url service failure if it was the subject of their master’s thesis on “How to customer support”)
A very different mini-rant, but tangetially related to tbe above…
I am staying with people I barely know for over a week. I was supposed to just overnight after giving a friend a lift to see her parents.
My car broke down in a spectacular way on the way there, it is currently in for repairs. My friend’s car broke down in a less spectacular way on the way back, so we retreated.
I am an avid reader, and I am bored waiting for the powers that fix engines to fix them.
So here is the mini-rant: i do not see a single book in the house! These are old people, cellphones/internet etc have only been around a tiny, tiny percentage of their lives.
Where are all the books???
I’m using expensive data to read crap on the internet in the evenings and down time because I cannot find a book to read. It is a big, rambling house, they have lived here for over 40 years… and not a book to be seen.
I should not be unkind to them as they are hosting me, graciously. But where are all the books???