u/Salty_1984

we finished the renovation. well, finished is a strong word - there's still trim missing in the hallway and Im pretty sure the electrician wired the dimmer backwards but whatever. living with it.

one thing I stressed about way more than I expected was the bathroom window. it faces the street. not directly, but enough that I felt weird every time a car passed. blinds felt too bulky for the space, frosted film looked kinda cheap in the samples. I kept going back and forth for like two weeks.

ended up going with that switchable glass option. not gonna pretend I fully understood the technical differences between film and laminated glass at first - I just knew I didn't want another thing to clean or fix in a year. the guys who did it explained it better when they came to measure.

anyway its installed now and it's nice, it works. flip the switch, it's private.

biggest surprise was how much more natural light we get during the day.

anyway just felt like sharing because I spent way too much time overthinking this and I'm kinda glad I didnt cheap out

I literally cannot take it anymore. im looking at a csv file that our head of sales just tried to push through the data import wizard and it is pure fiction

They bought some "premium" lead list off god knows where. thousands of rows. One of the email fields literally just says "N/A - call him". Another one is just a string of emojis. how do you even get emojis in an email column??

Of course he got mad when the import triggered my validation rules and blamed my "overly strict" flow logic instead of his garbage data

Im currently sitting on my couch at 8pm on a tuesday, running this cursed excel sheet through a mail tester just so I can strip out the dead domains before pardot tries to ingest this mess and completely nukes our sending reputation.

They preach "garbage in, garbage out" in all the trailblazer modules but they never warn you that you'll be the one physically digging through the garbage. sf admins are just digital janitors for people making massive commission checks tbh. Giving myself the rest of the week to clean this up, but come monday morning their import rights are completely gone.

Learned most of this the hard way over a few rough projects:

Status updates people actually read are three lines max, not a wall of text. Padding, deadlines don't move because you asked nicely, they move because you built in buffer nobody sees. The person who's quiet in meetings is often the one flagging the real risk two weeks before it hits. And "on track" reported every single week without a single yellow flag is a red flag itself.

been dealing with dermatillomania for years and i thought i had it mostly figured out. i know my triggers, i know my patterns, i have strategies. but lately it's been getting worse and i couldn't figure out why. i was picking so much more than usual. like every time i sat down to work or watch something my hands would just go to my scalp and i wouldn't even notice until my scalp was sore.

finally realized it was because my scalp was itchy and flaky. i thought it was just dry skin from winter. but it was constant. and the itch was the thing triggering the picking. like my brain was like hey there's something wrong here go fix it and my hands interpreted that as pick.

i tried moisturizing and oils but nothing helped. my mom actually gave me this anti dandruff shampoo and conditioner to try and honestly my scalp feels so much better. less itch, less flaking, less redness. which means i'm picking less too.

i know it sounds obvious. of course if your scalp is irritated you'll pick at it. but i honestly didn't make the connection until i fixed the problem and the picking went down.

the thing that frustrates me is how long it took me to figure this out. i spent weeks wondering why i was picking more when the answer was right there. it's like my brain just didn't connect the physical sensation to the behavior. anyway. just wanted to share in case anyone else is dealing with the same thing. sometimes the trigger is something you're not even thinking about.

As the title says I found my dream GMC Canyon AT4X. Wife says that I should get it. But it's 3 hours away

I've been searching for months. A GMC Canyon AT4X in Desert Sand with the Performance package. It's a rare combination. I called every dealer within 200 miles and no one had it

Then I found Simpson in Buena Park and their website showed exactly what I was looking for. I called and the manager confirmed it's sitting on the lot. It's real…

My wife said that I should get it before someone else does and she's right. But I'm second-guessing myself

It's a 3-hour drive. That's a big trip. And I'd need to take out a slightly larger loan than I planned. The numbers still work. But I'm hesitating…

What if I drive down and it's already sold? What if the manager promised it to me but someone else buys it this afternoon? I can't afford to lose this truck

Has anyone put down a deposit remotely to lock in a vehicle? Is that safe? Does Simpson hold cars with a deposit? I've never done this before. I don't want to be that guy who loses his dream truck because he overthought everything

I'm ready to make the move. I'm just nervous…

I bought a house three months ago. I was so excited. It was my first home. I had an inspection. The inspector said everything looked good. Minor issues here and there. Nothing major…

I moved in. The first week was fine. Then I noticed a musty smell in the basement. I called someone to check it out. He found all types of mold behind the drywall, so now I have extensive mold, black mold and toxic mold

I called in an electrician for a simple job but he saw that there were old wirings. Knob and tube. Fire hazard. And the foundation. I saw a crack on the wall. I consulted a structural engineer about it. The foundation is settling. The cost of repairs will be equivalent to half the price of my house

I tried to go after the inspector. He said it wasn't his fault. I talked to a lawyer. He said it would cost more to sue than to fix the problems and now I'm stuck.

I can't live in this house. The mold is making me sick. The wiring is dangerous. But I can't afford to fix it either

I want to sell or maybe just get rid of it. But realtors won't touch it and say it needs too much work. They want me to fix everything before they list it and I can't afford that

Phones go in a basket, no exceptions, parents included. Expected complaints, got the opposite. My teenager actually talks now instead of one-word answers — turns out we were all just defaulting to scrolling instead of sitting with the silence.

Anyone else find a small rule change that mattered way more than expected?

so we just killed a product we've been working on for half a year. and honestly? I'm kinda relieved.

we had this idea seemed great in our heads spent months building it. launched it. crickets. a few signups, but nobody actually used it. we kept telling ourselves "we just need to fix this one thing" or the marketing isn't right but the truth is nobody wanted it.

the funny thing is while we were building that, we were using phone system for our internal calls just worked. and I kept thinking why is this so simple when our product is such a mess. guess we overcomplicated everything.

we're pivoting now. scaling back to something much smaller. focusing on one problem instead of solving everything at once.

I'm curious how you guys decide when to kill something. we waited way too long. sunk cost fallacy is real. we kept throwing time and money at it hoping it would magically work. what's your we need to stop signal

A client asked for three extra backend features right in the middle of a sprint, and they wanted all of it pushed to production by Friday. Our dev was already buried under existing bug fixes, so there was physical zero chance he could take on more without breaking everything.

We ended up asking around in a local chat group and someone sent us a link to CISIN. We brought two of their guys in for a few days just to write the endpoints and clean up the extra Jira tickets so we wouldn't miss the launch.

It got the work done, but scrambling to onboard outside devs with two days left on a deadline was stressful as hell.

How do you guys set things up so you're not caught completely off guard when scope creeps up like this? Do you keep people on standby or just deal with it when it happens?

We had a brief power outage earlier today and ever since the grid came back, my air conditioner refuses to start up. The display panel on the wall lights up normally and lets me change the settings, but there is zero activity from either the indoor blower or the outside compressor.

Left the main breaker off for 20 mins to reset it, but still nothing. No error codes on screen either. I'm dealing with a Hobson AC wall unit, so before calling someone out I wanted to see if anyone knows if these boards have an easy-to-reach fuse that usually blows during a surge, or if a fried board usually acts like this. Got a multimeter ready if there's a specific contact point I should test first.

I never thought I'd be that neighbor you know the one with the overgrown lawn, the boarded-up window, the house everyone whispers about.

Two years ago, due to an urgent need to shift from family reasons, I sold my house. I put up my house for sale, but it was an old one with some foundation problems. Everyone who came to inspect it left as soon as the inspection was over.

At first, I tried to keep up. Paid a lawn service and asked a friend to check on it. But money got tight, and eventually, I stopped. That's when things got ugly…

Kids broke in through the back door. Spray-painted graffiti on the living room wall. Stole the copper pipes. The city sent me violation notices. My neighbors started calling and not to check on me, but to complain. Eyesore. Trash in the yard. Bringing down property values

I got it, but it felt like I was stuck. Paying taxes, insurance, and utilities on something that I cannot even live in, let alone sell and fix and every single month, my money just went down the drain while trying to keep a place standing that everybody hated

I was embarrassed. On my visits, I saw the curtains shut and mail piled up. I knew people thought I was some absent slumlord who owned this property. I was not, though. I just did not know how else I should act

not talking about the obvious "wake up early, meditate, cold shower" advice everyone already recommends. More curious about the small, almost boring changes that quietly ended up mattering more than any of the big dramatic ones ever did.

for me it was something dumb — writing down three things I actually got done at the end of each day, even tiny ones. Didn't expect much from it, but after a couple months it changed how I saw my own effort. Turns out I was way more productive than I gave myself credit for, I just never noticed because nothing felt "big enough" to count.

I swear the tap water here is basically liquid chalk. We moved into this early 90s house a few months ago and every single faucet is already growing stalactites

I tried doing the whole "soak it in a bag of vinegar" trick on the kitchen sink aerator today, and the threading just completely crumbled in my hand when I tried to put it back on. Gotta love that cheap builder-grade metal

We actually had a tech from we care plumbing heating & air out here yesterday anyway doing some routine AC maintenance and I asked him to quickly look at the pipes... he basically looked at me with pity and told me if I don't get a water softener soon I'll be replacing every fixture in the house by 2028

Is anyone else fighting this hard water battle? Do those cheap screw-on shower filters actually help preserve the fixtures at all or do I just need to bite the bullet and get a whole house system before my pipes literally turn to stone?

doing some research for a ground systems project and i gotta say

the gap between what we design in CAD and what actually works in the field is something

like we spend all this time optimizing for weight and performance, which yeah obviously matters, but then you go see some of the stuff that's actually out there doing the job and its just built like a brick. no frills. works every time

been looking at some examples of mobile command and control trailers lately, just out of curiosity. some of them are surprisingly clever with how they handle space and integration. not specifically aerospace but the systems thinking is similar

honestly sometimes i think we overthink things

or maybe i'm just tired

probably both

dont get me wrong i love west palm. but every time i want a really nice dinner i feel like i have to go to miami. and honestly im getting tired of it.

we have some decent spots here but nothing with a michelin star. my gf keeps saying she wants to try one for her birthday. she found Stubborn Seed in miami beach and sent me the link. looks good. a coworker went there last month and said the food was solid and the vibe was chill.

but is it really worth the drive. i hate sitting in traffic on 95. by the time we get there we're already annoyed.

anyone else feel like west palm deserves a michelin spot. or am i just being lazy about driving.

Alright, I'm finally biting the bullet and getting a proper dual battery setup for my 4WD. I've been using a portable power pack, but it's just not cutting it for longer trips. I want a dedicated under-bonnet aux battery to run my fridge and camp lights. I've started looking at kits and the prices are all over the place. What's a realistic budget for a full kit, including the battery, isolator or DC-DC charger, and all the wiring? I see some basic isolator kits that are pretty cheap, but everyone says a DC-DC charger is the way to go . I'm handy enough to install it myself, so I'm just looking at parts costs.

I want to know what a decent, reliable setup actually costs, so I can budget properly and not buy junk that'll let me down on the tracks.

Every single time the AC kicks on, there's this heavy dusty/musty smell that hits the room for the first few minutes. It goes away after a bit, but it's really annoying and makes the whole house feel unclean.

I already swapped out the main air filters, sprayed vinegar around the grill covers, and cleaned out the return vents as much as I could reach with a vacuum attachment, but nothing changed.

A friend suggested calling Hobson AC to look into duct cleaning or mold in the system, but before I schedule a tech visit, I wanted to check here. Is duct cleaning actually effective for this kind of lingering smell, or is there a specific spot inside the unit/drain line I should try cleaning myself first?

bought a house in perth 6 months ago. got a building and pest inspection, both came back clean. pest report specifically said no evidence of termite activity.

last week i noticed mud trails on the garage wall. got a pest guy out who confirmed active termites and said theres damage to main beams in the roof and walls. quoted me 16k to treat and replace the damaged timber.

he showed me where they got in - a crack in the brickwork at ground level behind some plants. said it would have been visible during an inspection if anyone had actually looked.

i checked the report and the pest guy wrote no visible signs of termite damage. clearly wrong. i emailed him and he said we only report what we can see and termites can be hidden. but the entry point was visible.

i found Sure Building Inspection online who do forensic building inspections with thermal imaging. not sure if that would help my case but i need something official.

anyone in WA successfully claimed against a pest inspector. or am i just going to have to pay this myself. feeling pretty gutted

maybe im just cynical idk. but i swear every time i need something done around the house i end up calling a number that claims to be local and its just some call center somewhere

had a plumbing thing last month and the guy who showed up was from like dallas and didn't know the area at all. he kept asking me about streets and neighborhoods like i'm supposed to be his gps or something. and the prices man. i don't even want to talk about it

my neighbor was saying the same thing about his hvac. he's been here way longer than me and he was telling me how it used to be different. you could just call someone and they'd actually show up and it would be reasonable. now it's like every industry got bought out by these corporate chains

i'm just tired of feeling like i'm being scammed every time i need a repair tbh. like is it really too much to ask to find someone reliable in this city

anyone else feel like this or am i just having a bad run