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Randox

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Randox last won the day on December 11 2020

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About Randox

  • Birthday 06/18/1990

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    Computers, Economics, driving, and design.

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  1. Randox

    Today...

    Reading today about the lawsuit against Canada over how the Huawei CFO was arrested. From what I know about how the CBSA operates, the only part that I see as problematic is not telling her why she was detained. As far as what they did, it all seems fine even if the reasons were a little shady (the RCMP totally took advantage of the fact that the CBSA has way fewer restrictions when it comes to interviews and searches), but not illegal. You have no right to privacy, no right to consul, and no right to silence so far as I know, nor does the CBSA need a reason. But I'm not sure they're allowed to lie about why they are conducting an interview or detaining you. I expect they are. They're definitely allowed to continue searching to build a case even once it becomes clear they will detain you. Not sure if they can lie about the nature of it though or if they can only lie by omission. Anyway, interested to see where that goes. The general rule would be to take nothing across the border that you don't want searched; at least not the Canadian border. I think most countries are similar though. Broad power and narrow scope. Don't mess with border agents or borders.
  2. Randox

    Today...

    A Very Merry Christmas to everyone!
  3. Randox

    Today...

    I never really liked the Michael Scott character. He was amusing, but I often found myself wishing that he would interfere less in some of the other story arcs. I've never been able to watch the first season (because Scott is malicious instead of just clueless), and the last two are probably my favourite overall (though many of my favorite episodes are from earlier seasons). Jim (John Krasinski) was always my favorite (I like Steve Carel too, in other stuff, espeically Get Smart). Really like him in the Jack Ryan show.
  4. Randox

    Today...

    Been making more of an effort to get myself into playable form with the Bass Guitar. My parents got into a beginner band last year (Mom learning the Cello, Dad taking up Piano), and the Band Instructor was kind enough to give them the Bass part too so that I would be able to stop by and practice/learn with them a bit. Really helped me get into it to be sure, and while it's not the normal stuff a bass would play, it got me a lot more comfortable with the instrument and reading bass clef (I've played Saxaphone for years, and if I stop thinking about it I still read bass clef as treble in my head). Right now I'm hammering away at Money (Pink Floyd) and Africa (Toto). Money seems to be a good beginner song, but some of the rhythm work is melting my brain. Africa is harder than it looks (for me at least). Suffice it to say that my dexterity isn't quite there yet.
  5. Randox

    Today...

    Canadian and Irish too (Halloween). Canadian Thanksgiving is a separate holiday though, which takes place this Sunday. I still find it weird that the rest of the world isn't into Halloween. It's literally the eat candy and cosplay holiday. Why does no one else want in on this?
  6. Randox

    Today...

    So far as I know, the different capacities are fine, though the memory speed may need to be manually corrected. The motherboard should have no more issue with mismatched DIMM sizes in the same channel than it does with mismatched channel sizes (I actually have 3 4GB sticks, since the computer they were pulled from had a 3x4GB configuration. 8GB dual channel + 4GB single channel).
  7. Randox

    Today...

    I don't normally use peoples real names (unless that was how I was introduced to them), and generally insist on people using my handle even if they know my real name. I guess it's a compartmentalisation thing. When I am online, I expect to hear my handle; it's what I respond to. When I'm not online, I expect to hear my given name. 16 GB of RAM here too. I can boost that to 24 GB (2x8 + 2x4) if I need more memory at the expense of speed, but it's never come up. I'm still rocking an i5-4670k, which uses relatively cheap DDR3 RAM. I got a lovely pair of sticks with 8ms CAS @ 1600mhz. Also, scandinavian languages having Germanic roots makes sense now that I think about it (that at least one of the languages uses the letter thorn would be a good clue). Had a friend spend a year in Iceland, and she picked up a bit of the language while she was there. English speaker like I am, though with a radically different accent (she spent a few years in Australia growing up, be we don't hold it against her).
  8. Randox

    Today...

    Yeah, Scandinavian languages aren't the easiest to deal with. The...sound profile (?) is very different. Really, anything that doesn't have Germanic or Latin roots is likely to be an issue for mono lingual English speakers (or even multi-lingual people who only speak languages with Germanic or Latin roots). Hawaiian is pretty good though. When I was in Hawaii, the map we had included a pronunciation index. Written Hawaiian is quite strait forward, but the spelling rules are quite different and the words tend to be long. I think the idea of the guide was that if you got lost, you would be able to get close enough to a correct pronunciation for locals to understand where you are trying to go. Come to think of it, there are a few places that should probably have a pronunciation key on local maps...if anyone still used maps.
  9. Randox

    Today...

    I feel like the presumption is, if you thought the request had merit, you would at least make an effort to honour it. I expect that most people understand that mistakes will be made, and if not, that's their problem, not yours. It's sort of like making an effort to learn how to pronounce an unusual name. I'm game to try and learn anyone's name, as long as they understand that their language might contain sounds I can't make*. If it turns out I can't say their name, they can either give me a nickname to use, or put up with me saying their name wrong, but I'll let them choose. Now, I realise this isn't always a fair presumption to make. Just like someone might not want to say a foreign name because they're self conscious about getting it wrong, someone may very well feel uncomfortable honouring a request to use specific pronouns for reasons that don't involve not believing in separate biological and psychological gender. I don't know what that reason would be, exactly, but I'm willing to believe it exists (but that's easy for me to say, because I'm not in a position to care). That said, my observation has been that pretty much everyone would rather you at least try that not make any effort, and will assume that your ignorant or rude if you don't. That is, personal discomfort is trumped by their right/desire to control how they are referred to. *I had a South Korean friend in University who tried to teach me a few words in Korean, and some words I would hear totally different on subsequent repetitions. As best as I can tell, it's my brain trying to make sense of sounds I'm not familiar with, and translating them into a best guess sound I know. Sadly, this means I can't actually hear some of the sounds she made for what they really were, let along duplicate them. I do really well with French, and pretty well with German and Russian, though I need to hear words more slowly than in French. My Parisian housemate complimented me on my French parroting (and it is parroting. If I actually spoke French to her, it would be in my own accent, which is 'east coast English speaker who can't speak Quebecois').
  10. Getting back into Kerbal Space Program with some mods I've not used before, like Interstellar, and MKS/USI (base building/base building logisitics, and life support). I'm also trying out career mode for the first time. There's still stuff I've not done, places I've not visited, but it all uses skills I already have. Same thing, different destination. It struck me as I was getting back into the game that orbital rendezvous isn't a big deal for me anymore. I mean, I've been able to make two ships meet up in orbit for a long time (since the patch before docking ports were added to the game to be specific), but I've always been a bit apprehensive about it; it's something I would tend to avoid if it wasn't necessary. Now it's routine. I built a Mun lander for my career mode the other day, and didn't think twice about making it an orbiter and lander configuration rather than landing the whole ship to make the design easier. I'm not the best at docking, far from it, but there is no longer any doubt in my mind that I can do it, and rendezvous and docking was really the last skill for me where I still had doubts. I can fly to orbit, I can get intercepts with other planets and land on them, and I join ships up in orbit. Anyway, I'm looking forward to this. Colonisation gives my space program new purpose, and the mods give me new stuff to discover and learn. And later on, some ridiculously over powered engines.
  11. Randox

    Today...

    Here's a question. Why do meat products, particularly chicken, get recalled for suspected salmonella contamination? I was taught that salmonella in chicken should just be taken for granted, that it was common enough that you should always just assume it's there, and that's why you just don't eat pink chicken and why you take care to wash your hands and any surface raw chicken (or any other meat) touches. I take it that salmonella is not as common in chicken as I thought (I thought that something like 30% of chicken would contain it)? Obviously non meat products are a different case. Salmonella isn't expected in a salad.
  12. Randox

    Today...

    If you can swing it, and can deal with the possible stress, some people rent out part of their home to help cover the cost. Ideally, you want the tennant to be at least paying say, the interest on your mortgage, turning it into a free loan for you. Having already done the living in a house with other people thing, I'd sooner light my pants on fire than rent out part of a house I actually own myself, because apparently everyone treats anything they don't own like shit. But hey, if you're less disillusioned about renting than I am, it's a possibility. Or maybe the idea of sharing your property with someone who never picked up a sponge during the first 20 years of their life and thinks cleaning out the dryer lint screen is for fancy people excites you in ways you can't explain. Who am I to judge.
  13. Skyrim Special Edition. I walked away from classic Skyrim a while ago when I ran into an issue with the sun shining through solid objects and broke my load order trying to fix it. It happened when I upgraded graphics cards, and I suspect it was a driver issue (as in, I would need to use an ancient driver to play the game now). I filled that hole in my life with Fallout NV and 4 while waiting for the special edition mod scene to get to where I wanted it to be. But Gopher, on youtube, recently started a new Skyrim series in special edition, so I decided to take a look at the mods. It looked good, so I did what I've done in a past which is use Gophers mod list as a template for my own game, and then flesh it out to taste (I use his list to get an idea of what is available, and under the assumption it will point me towards compatible mods). I've got some old favorites returning, and some new mods to fill in holes by other mods that special edition doesn't have, and a lot more in total than I expected. I thought it would be 30-40 mods, not my current 80, with almost 100 plugins. One of the very useful skills I picked up in my time with Fallout 4 is making custom patches. The problem you run into is that mods overrite eachother based on whole records/objects. For example, an NPC is an object. If one mod wants to change that NPC's equipment and another mod wants to change their appearance, only one mod or the other can win because both mods modify records attached to the same object. Some mods come with compatibility patches that solve these kinds of issues for you, but if there isn't one available, the only way to make mods play nice is to make your own patch by manually combining the changes from multiple different mods into a new one. One of the mods I'm using this time around retextures everyone (or close to it), largely because you can't make a female Breton who doesn't look 60 in vanilla: [hide] [/hide] This conflicts with a couple of my other mods with modify NPC equipment, stats, and quests. The quest one is really important. If the texture mod wins I end up with 'dark face' because the lighting or whatever doesn't match the new textures. If the mod adding the quest doesn't win, my game implodes. So I spent longer than I cared to fixing stuff like that. Learning to use TESVEdit to examine, and where necessary, resolve conflicts is probably the biggest skill I picked up for modding Bethesda games. You can head off a lot of bullshit by taking a gander at the conflicts provided you have a solid understanding of what the mods in question are trying to do. Anyway, it took a couple days, but I think I finally got the game about where I want it. It looks pretty good, combat has been made a bit more interesting, I have a whole new perk overhaul I've never used, and some other gameplay is a bit expanded. So far, so good. Oh, and a bunch of quest mods I never tried out in the classic game.
  14. Randox

    Today...

    Consider it a service gift, though not all ex-staff retain that ability (nor do all staff have it to begin with). As long as it's not abused, I see no reason to 'fix' it. I would of course prefer people to edit their posts rather than double post, at least until some time has passed. The flood control is there to keep people from multiposting on accident by hammering the post button when their browser doesn't react fast enough. In other news, there may be a squirrel nesting in a buddies old kayak that is hanging in my carport. On the face of it, I have to applaud the squirrel for such a fine choice of location, since it's pretty much impossible for a cat or predatory bird to get to it there. On the other hand, I highly suspect it to be a pregnant female squirrel, and her accessing the kayak involves jumping from a cupboard to the kayak right above my main door, significantly raising my chances of accidentally picking a fight I want no part of. It/she may have decided the area is too traveled and moved though, or else is only storing some food there and nesting somewhere else. In any event, I've decided to let the situation be for now. It's not my kayak and I like having squirrels around (they're fun to watch). I also saw a pair of ducks walking down the street this morning.I live by the water, but I'm about 70 feet above it, so it always amuses me when they bother to come up to the house (it seems to happen during or following heavy rain). And there are definitely deer traipsing through the yard from time to time. Pooping on the lawn.
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