doors_cannot_stop_me's recent activity

  1. Comment on Embezzlers are nice people in ~finance

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    It's really weirdly placed, but an enjoyable read nonetheless. I'd love to know the story behind the story, how it got there.

    It's really weirdly placed, but an enjoyable read nonetheless. I'd love to know the story behind the story, how it got there.

  2. Comment on Does anyone else have really strange FedEx driver stories? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
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    I once had a... somewhat controlled product being delivered via FedEx, and they attempted to deliver it to a Subway Sandwich location instead of the federally licensed location it was meant to go...

    I once had a... somewhat controlled product being delivered via FedEx, and they attempted to deliver it to a Subway Sandwich location instead of the federally licensed location it was meant to go to. They did this multiple times, in the morning, claiming the delivery location was closed. Finally the recipient told FedEx to stop doing that and that he would drive to the nearby city where the distribution center is to pick it up himself. If they had successfully delivered it to Subway there would have been some very concerned and confused sandwich artists.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on How do you - or, how did you - leverage your hobbies into careers? in ~hobbies

    doors_cannot_stop_me
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    I used to work for a big-box home improvement store (rhymes with 'blows') and picked up lockpicking as a hobby. I ended up getting myself into the hardware department where I learned the absolute...

    I used to work for a big-box home improvement store (rhymes with 'blows') and picked up lockpicking as a hobby. I ended up getting myself into the hardware department where I learned the absolute basics of rekeying locks. I had co-workers saying I should call up this locksmith they knew to ask for a job, but I was planning to be a linguist and had no interest in cold-calling a stranger to ask for a job.

    One day a guy came to the store and had a logo on his shirt that I thought looked like the logo for a local locksmithing school. Since I had an interest (and had been trained from a young age to find common ground with customers through conversation) I asked if he was with the school. This led to me learning that he worked for the locksmith my co-workers thought I should work for and that they were hiring. He told me to come in for an interview and before I knew it I had a job offer.

    I was still attending school to try for a linguistics degree at the time, but I figured locksmithing could be a fun job in the meantime. But over time I came to love the work and found (through another fortuitous conversation with a customer who turned out to be the top professor in my planned educational path) that my school's linguistics department had a 20% success rate for masters degree graduates finding linguistics jobs. So I focused on locksmithing and dropped out of school.

    After nearly 10 years of locksmithing I started pushing the boundaries of what I could learn within the company I work at and applied for a job at that locksmithing school I mentioned earlier. It fell through (fortunately, since things have changed there and I think it would have ended up being a bad career move at the time) and I one again focused on my regular work, knowing that I couldn't stay forever but that I didn't have anything pulling me away yet.

    Then a few weeks ago I received an offer out of the blue from a different school. They'd heard of me and decided that they wanted me to be the next instructor they hire. We're still in talks but it looks very promising.

    All of that to say, sometimes things just fall into place if you're a) very fortunate and b) keeping options open. I've of course had other potential career paths planned out in my head that would have required much more retraining, certification or education. But so far I haven't had to pull that trigger, and I'm lucky enough to be mostly skating by on curiosity leading me down paths that have worked out.

    18 votes

  4. Comment on I'm looking for a specific beer, for meme purposes in ~food

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    That's a good suggestion, thanks! I think his backup plan is to print labels and adhere them to donor bottles, so empties would be at least as good an idea if not better.

    That's a good suggestion, thanks! I think his backup plan is to print labels and adhere them to donor bottles, so empties would be at least as good an idea if not better.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on I'm looking for a specific beer, for meme purposes in ~food

  6. I'm looking for a specific beer, for meme purposes

    ~food Ask (advice)
    TL;DR - I'm trying to find a way to purchase Chilean Cerveza Cristal in the US for a joke that is very important to a friend of mine. So, some of you may be aware of the current memes surrounding...

    TL;DR - I'm trying to find a way to purchase Chilean Cerveza Cristal in the US for a joke that is very important to a friend of mine.

    So, some of you may be aware of the current memes surrounding a series of advertisements from a Chilean beer company that interrupted airings of the Star Wars films in an... unconventional way.

    Well, my friend is both a huge beer aficionado and a huge Star Wars fan, and he occasionally works with the Star Wars folks at conventions. He's planning some interesting stuff for an upcoming event but can't for the life of him find the stuff here in the US. I haven't been able to turn up a retailer for it either. Does anybody know of a good way to get foreign beer into the US?

    19 votes

  7. Comment on What watch do you wear daily? in ~hobbies

  8. Comment on Monday, April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse: where and when in ~space

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    My parents' house is in the totality band, so we're visiting them and staying the day after for traffic avoidance.

    My parents' house is in the totality band, so we're visiting them and staying the day after for traffic avoidance.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on AT&T widespread cell phone outage in US in ~tech

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Since you asked and I'm a tradesperson, Herrera how it went down: Our main business line is VoIP forwarded to our cell phones, so I was going to use my Google Voice over WiFi to handle calls....

    Since you asked and I'm a tradesperson, Herrera how it went down:

    Our main business line is VoIP forwarded to our cell phones, so I was going to use my Google Voice over WiFi to handle calls. Fortunately one of our techs had a working phone (oddly, we're all AT&T users on Android, but his phone worked while an identical phone on the same AT&T account didn't- weird) do he ran dispatch. For the couple of jobs I did before the phone lines came back, I just made sure to update my calendar on WiFi and use land lines at customer sites to check for updates to my scheduled calls.

    If the outage lasted longer and I'd had to travel far from our HQ it could have been more interesting for sure, but everything went smoothly enough for the couple of hours it mattered.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on Natural draft furnace iron smelting in ~hobbies

  11. Comment on Natural draft furnace iron smelting in ~hobbies

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    Sometimes I think you and I have nearly identical YouTube habits, so I feel compelled today to offer a recommendation: AtomicShrimp. He's a British YouTuber with varied subjects including cooking,...

    Sometimes I think you and I have nearly identical YouTube habits, so I feel compelled today to offer a recommendation: AtomicShrimp. He's a British YouTuber with varied subjects including cooking, foraging, scambaiting and crafts. I find him to be calming in much the same way that John's videos are, but with delightful banter and a dry sense of humor. I'm blathering at this point, but if you haven't already I highly recommend you give him a shot.
    Cheers!

    4 votes

  12. Comment on What minor or inane decisions have had the biggest butterfly effect on your life? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I was watching an episode of Elementary and saw Sherlock picking locks that he kept on a rack for practicing on and I thought "Huh. I should try that." A few years later I had gotten pretty good...

    I was watching an episode of Elementary and saw Sherlock picking locks that he kept on a rack for practicing on and I thought "Huh. I should try that." A few years later I had gotten pretty good at it (for a casual) and happened to see a guy shopping at the Lowe's I worked at wearing a shirt with a logo on it that I thought was from the the local locksmithing school. When I struck up a conversation with him about it, he informed me that he actually worked for a local locksmith and asked me what my skills were. Before I knew it I had an interview with his boss and I've been there almost 11 years now.

    Bonus points: two of my coworkers at Lowe's had recommended that I work for this guy when they saw me picking locks, but I refused to cold call a stranger to ask for a job. I had his business card at the desk while I was being handed his business card by his employee. Also, one of my previous landlords was (unbeknownst to me) an old client of the boss, and he asked her about me and she gave me a good reference. Small world.

    12 votes

  13. Comment on Elusive egg-laying mammal named after Sir David Attenborough caught on camera for the first time in ~enviro

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    It looks kinda like someone tacked an extra set of legs onto the back of a kiwi bird. I love it.

    It looks kinda like someone tacked an extra set of legs onto the back of a kiwi bird. I love it.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times (2019) in ~books

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    Fine, I'll read it I guess. This article has finally convinced me to give it a go!

    Fine, I'll read it I guess.

    This article has finally convinced me to give it a go!

    10 votes

  15. Comment on Spotify has added audiobooks to its subscription model – reaching millions of people, it may revolutionise the already booming audiobooks business in ~tech

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    I just checked in Spotify (I'm in the US, if that matters), and one of his recent releases (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter) is $14.99, which lines up with the price point he talked about setting...

    I just checked in Spotify (I'm in the US, if that matters), and one of his recent releases (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter) is $14.99, which lines up with the price point he talked about setting for his Kickstarter works in his announcement that he would not be offering them on Audible. He said he was aiming for that price point since it's what a monthly subscription to Audible costs, and he thinks it's a fair price. Meanwhile The Way of Kings is $38.90, but he didn't get to set that rate from my understanding, since that book wasn't self-published. Not sure what the future will hold with his regular works vis-à-vis Audible, though I bet they'll continue to be available there since I don't see Tor taking a stand against them any time soon.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft twelve billion miles away in ~space

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thank you for that link and the accompanying text! Using Google Lens to try and copy from a TikTok screenshot sucked, so good to know it's out there still.

    Thank you for that link and the accompanying text! Using Google Lens to try and copy from a TikTok screenshot sucked, so good to know it's out there still.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I just read The Sunlit Man, Brandon Sanderson's recent novel. I put it off all month, but as soon as I cracked it I was hooked. Day before yesterday I spent 3 straight hours motionless,...

    I just read The Sunlit Man, Brandon Sanderson's recent novel. I put it off all month, but as soon as I cracked it I was hooked. Day before yesterday I spent 3 straight hours motionless, enraptured, reading it. If you've read the other Cosmere works, it's (for lore-feinds like myself) amazing.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft twelve billion miles away in ~space

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    I saw this comment from a Tumblr post via TikTok (because living in the future is weird and dumb) and I can't find a link to it anywhere (because living in the future is weird and dumb) but it...

    I saw this comment from a Tumblr post via TikTok (because living in the future is weird and dumb) and I can't find a link to it anywhere (because living in the future is weird and dumb) but it made me almost cry and you reminded me of it, so here you go!

    gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars wondering "is there anybody out there" and hoping and guessing and imagining because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

    and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us- we got scared that we were going to blow each other up. we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we'd never get to meet them

    and then

    we built robots?

    and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

    and maybe in a hundred years we won't be around any more, maybe yeah the planet wil be a mess and we'll all be dead. and if other people come from the stars we wan't be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we're people, too! you're not alone any more!, maybe we'll be gone

    but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

    the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery: they called us curiosity, they called us explorer, they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

    and they told us to tell you hello.

    25 votes

  19. Comment on What field do you work? And do you love your work and workplace? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Darn right. Check my bio for more information about my day-to-day life.

    Darn right. Check my bio for more information about my day-to-day life.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on What field do you work? And do you love your work and workplace? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I'm a locksmith. Love is a strong word, but the work is usually fulfilling and stimulating. The workplace is... complicated. I love my coworkers for the most part, a couple are two of my closest...

    I'm a locksmith. Love is a strong word, but the work is usually fulfilling and stimulating. The workplace is... complicated. I love my coworkers for the most part, a couple are two of my closest friends. I'm really close with the owner, as I am the longest-running full time employee and have been with him for a decade. But we bicker like an old married couple, and as the company has grown from two of us to seven now, some of his small-business sole-proprietor go-gettem "wisdom" is showing itself a bit thin. We have near daily sparring matches about policy and procedure, which wears on us both. But I certainly wouldn't trade it for a job where yelling at your boss is a short road to getting fired. I do love that I've been able to make a niche for myself that could only really be rivalled by starting my own business, and this is the only job I've ever had that held my attention, so I'm probably in it for the long haul.

    15 votes