Traditionally I updated on Saturdays, but I had a personal goal to get comics out again in 2024… which became 11:59 on December 31, 2024.
A lot’s happened since 2019 and I’m raising a family now, so comics are not going to be a weekly thing. But I’m going to keep tossing them out there when I’m able, less for a “schedule” than for my personal desire to tell stories again.
No cure for bofa yet.
A study published in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine found that short bursts of movement throughout the day, no matter how small, can help the heart, especially for women. What do you think?
“I’m knitting as intensely as I can, okay?”
Emma Tait, Soap Tester
“Typical hula hoop propaganda.”
Sam Ragsdale, Cheese Curder
“Bet those uppity marathon runners feel pretty dumb now.”
Bret Eckel, List Bulleter
The post Study: Few Bursts Of Vigorous Movement May Cut Women’s Heart Risks appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m on vacation. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.
1. My coworker is wearing jewelry that signifies a dominant/submissive relationship
I recently realized that one of my coworkers wears D/s jewelry every day. (Funny enough, I wouldn’t have recognized it had I not been a devout reader of your blog and read the letter from the person asking about wearing a collar to work!) Now that I’ve noticed the jewelry, I feel like I can’t un-notice it. I’m all for people living their own best lives, but overt sexuality at work makes me incredibly uncomfortable. (Can I blame my Catholic upbringing? Because I’d really like to blame my Catholic upbringing.) I work with this person regularly and am on friendly terms with them. We don’t discuss our personal lives with each other, so I would feel weird bringing up the issue of the jewelry. While we both work for a children-focused nonprofit, my coworker doesn’t interact with the public in any way. I think my concern is too petty and intrusive to bring to HR. Any tips on how to “get over“ the discomfort?
You’re right that it’s definitely not something you should bring up with HR or raise with your coworker.
I don’t know exactly what the piece of jewelry is, but there’s no guarantee that she’s wearing it to signify a dominant/submissive relationship! That stuff isn’t exclusively for D/s relationships, so it’s possible she just saw it and liked it. In fact, there were a bunch of commenters on that previous letter saying they owned similar jewelry with no symbolism attached.
So to get over your discomfort, why not decide that’s likely the case here? There’s a decent chance it really is and that your coworker would be horrified (or just amused) to find out how you’re interpreting it.
– 2019
2. My coworker keeps telling people she’s my boss
I’ve worked on a small team in a large company for about ten years. I have two peers — same pay grade but different functional work — one of whom started after me, who I’ll call Jack, and one of whom has been there about 20 years, who I’ll call Jill. We have together been through a half dozen bosses.
Both Jill and I have been encouraged to take the manager of the team position as our bosses have left, and both of us have repeatedly declined. I like the career I have and have no interest in converting to management. Jill seems to want the authority of being the manager without any of the responsibility. She frequently tries to assign work to Jack and me, repeatedly directly tells people inside and outside the company that we are her employees (in front of our current boss), and scolded our current boss because he “needs to clear changes to team assignments” with her first — which he immediately made clear to her that he does not need to do, as he is the boss.
So far, I have simply ignored this, since I work at a different site and don’t see most of it directly, but I’m starting to run into issues because she’s told this lie to so many people that there is confusion among some vendors and the teams we work with, especially since we do change bosses frequently. Our current boss has called her out when she claims Jack and I are her employees, and she claims she “misspoke” or that our boss or other hearers “misunderstood,” so talking to her directly isn’t terribly productive.
Is this something I should keep mostly ignoring and just correcting with individuals as needed? Given that she won’t own up to the fact she is doing this, I can’t think of any way to say, “Knock it off. If you want to be the boss, then take the job next time it comes up!” What do I say to someone when they have been directly told by Jill that she is my boss, and I have to correct that lie?
It’s bizarre that she’s doing this in front of your boss, who would obviously know the truth.
I think you do need to call it out directly, both on principle and because it’s causing confusion. It doesn’t matter that she’ll deny it; there’s value in calling it out and making it clear to her that you’re not going to tolerate it. You also don’t need to prove that she’s doing it in order to be able to speak up. It’s come up enough that you can safely say this to her: “Jill, why are you continuing to tell people that you’re my manager?” If she says she hasn’t and that people just misunderstood, then say this: “It’s happening frequently enough that if it’s a misunderstanding, it’s being caused by something you said. But to make sure we’re all on the same page, you’re clear that you’re not in fact my boss and that we’re peers, right?” Assuming she says yes, then say, “Okay. I’ll assume there won’t be further misunderstandings, but if there are, I’m going to ask (boss) to intervene.”
Or you could skip that last part and go straight to your boss now, which would be more than reasonable.
When you need to correct the facts with someone who’s been told Jill is your boss, you can just be matter-of-fact about it — “No, that must have been a miscommunication! Jill and I are peers. I report to Fergus.”
– 2017
3. My mentor got fired and now I’m questioning what she taught me
I started a new job in payroll last July and on my first day got paired up with Jane, a current employee. Jane had been handling most of my job for a few months and also had years of experience with payroll even though she was in a different department here. At the time, Jane was presented as an excellent resource for me to find out about the job and the company as a whole. We even were given an office to share, so she would be readily available to answer any questions that I had. We had many long conversations about her experience and opinions of the company and her input really shaped my impression of my job.
Six months after I started, Jane was fired. Since then, I have heard snide remarks about Jane from others in her department that she was not a good employee.
I have not been able to reconcile the first six months of working with Jane with this new information. Even though I didn’t take all of her advice, I did listen to everything she told me and believed much of it because of her experience. For instance, she told me a particular manager was terrible at his job (a position that she had before), yet I have heard positive feedback about him from others now. Should I forget everything that Jane told me? How should I filter out the good from the bad?
Do what you would do if you’d never had those in-depth conversations with Jane: form your own impressions, based on your own experiences with people, and reserve judgment about people you don’t work with yourself.
It’s possible that Jane’s impressions were all pretty right on. It’s also possible that they were way off, or somewhere in between. You’ll probably have a better idea of how you rate her accuracy once you start forming your own impressions and can check how well they line up with what she told you. You might find you come to similar conclusions, or really different ones. Stay open-minded and see what happens.
One thing to think about though: If Jane was very quick to share negative opinions about others when you started, that’s actually a strike against her. People with good judgment usually don’t rush to dump negativity onto a new hire and will be more discreet. So if looking back, that’s what happened, I’d bring some additional skepticism to bear.
– 2019
4. My VP insists on leaving papers in my chair instead of my inbox
I’m the admin for a team of four in a large company. It’s an okay job and I’m an okay admin. It’s a step back for me but I need the money. We have a new VP who insists on leaving paperwork for me on my seat. This is a major pet peeve of mine. I have an inbox on my desk for a reason. I’ve told the new VP this several times but he refuses to use the box. He says he doesn’t want his work to be missed. I put his papers in the box, on the bottom. However I’m tempted to start chucking them out. An I overreacting or is he being rude?
You are overreacting. Yes, ideally he’d comply with your request — but ultimately, as someone higher in the hierarchy than you, he can decide how he wants to do this. And who knows, maybe he works with other people who prefer urgent stuff go on their chair so they see it right away, and it’s not reasonable to expect him to track the inbox vs. chair preferences of everyone he works with. Or maybe it’s not that at all; maybe this is just his preference. It’s just not a big deal either way.
And it’s definitely not a big enough deal for you to expend energy or capital on it. Pick up the papers, put them in your inbox, done. (And frankly, rather than sticking them in the bottom of the box, you should look at them to see how they need to be prioritized. You’ve got to prioritize doing your job well over getting petty payback to him.)
I think you’re choosing to see this as some kind of power play. It’s not; it’s just a thing some people do. Let it go.
– 2019
Hovertext:
God then says he's glad they remain virgins.
A man has sustained serious injuries after rescuing his wife who was ambushed by a polar bear in an early morning attack, leaping on to the animal to prevent an attack after the woman slipped to the ground. What do you think?
“Only an asshole would interrupt a stranger’s meal like that.”
Hamilton Scarola, Kale Lobbyist
“Him getting injured must have been such a turn-off.”
Xavier Renard, Wig Colorist
“God forbid a woman gets to sustain her own serious injuries.”
Clara Hogan, Bleach Bottler
The post Man Injured Protecting Wife From Polar Bear appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
Here are five updates from past letter-writers.
1. Is it weird to incorporate martial arts at my job? (first update)
I’ve got one more update for you.
You know how I mentioned contamination risks? We ended up having a contamination issue (unrelated to the question I asked) that took over a year to recover from. That, combined with a long commute, an average of 45 hour weeks with little notice when I’d have to stay late (including weekend shifts on a lot of the ones that exceeded 45), pressure to cut down on the overtime with no relaxation of deadlines to compensate, and quite a bit of personal stuff made for a really rough time. I was also stuck in the job for the duration due to the golden handcuffs of benefits that perfectly aligned with my needs for dealing with the personal stuff.
I tried to somewhat tone down my martial arts influenced movements, but I was limited in how much I could since many of those movements could actually be adapted to really help my endurance while replacing everything in the building except most of the walls, performing a crazy amount of cleaning, and inspecting everything at the end to ensure the highest contamination risks had been addressed. (We had contractors for the wall replacement and other construction work but we had to do pretty much all the other labor.) I also needed to frequently stim to regulate my emotions during this stressful time (as I said in my update, I’m probably autistic, though I currently see little benefit to seeking a formal evaluation), so that also made it harder to tone it down.
But that’s all leading up to some good news: I’ve left and am now at my first true office job! It’s great, with consistent 40 hour weeks, flexible hours, hybrid wfh, and work that I am passionate about and find interesting. Though I’m still sometimes tempted to do a stance or something at my sit-stand desk when my body is craving something more dynamic than sitting or normal standing, I’ve so far been able to limit it to being unusually smooth when I kneel down to get something from the low drawer in a filing cabinet (maybe happens a couple times a month) and occasionally (<1x/week) spending 5 minutes practicing a stance or other technique that won’t take up much room in the bathroom, as a break. Pretty soon my wfh will start and I’ll have a couple days a week to be as weird as I want when I’m not on a call, so I don’t forsee having any issues with coworkers seeing me the way that first comment section was worried about.
2. Why does my coworker hate me?
Since writing that letter, things seemed to temporarily spiral with my coworker. I ignored her rude behavior and tried to focus on my other relationships, but ultimately, things came to a head when she accidentally sent me a Teams message that was intended for another coworker. The content of the message was gossip about me, which confirmed my suspicions that she disliked me. I stood up for myself by saying her that her message was unprofessional and disrespectful.
I also went to my manager with screenshots of the unintended message, her rude interactions with me, and the job postings she sent. I told her that my colleague’s treatment of me needed to be flagged because she would treat the next person that she disliked this way, and it was interfering with my morale. Unfortunately, my manager seemed to brush it off — she framed it as a personality issue and ignored that it was beginning to interfere with work. That was also disappointing.
Luckily, I got accepted to graduate school around this time. Additionally, my firm underwent some restructuring as several people had resigned. My coworker and I began working on separate teams, so we didn’t have to constantly collaborate anymore. I ended up really enjoying my last few months there!
To this day, I am still unsure why my colleague disliked me. However, based on past interactions with her, I suspect she is an insecure person who had some sort of envy towards me. I don’t know what she would be envious of, but that’s my best guess.
3. Will having two two-year job stints damage my career? (#5 at the link)
I am incredibly grateful for your decision to publish my letter. When I wrote it, I was feeling hopeless. Your advice and the supportive comments from readers have been a tremendous source of comfort.
Many readers asked if a two-year stint is normal in my industry. Initially, I thought it wasn’t. However, after researching the LinkedIn profiles of industry veterans I admire, I discovered that many have had similar short-term positions. Some even had one-year stints and went on to prestigious roles.
This revelation completely changed my perspective on my resume. I no longer feel ashamed or hopeless about my career. I had valid reasons for leaving my previous employer after enduring two years of workplace abuse. Despite the short stint, I still deserve a fulfilling career.
4. I’m the weakest link on my team
Many thanks to you and to the commenters for such an encouraging response. I am still in my current position, but I feel better about it. As several commenters spotted, I have depression, and that was seriously coloring my perception of my place on the team. I’m not the weakest link. Like everyone on my team, I have areas of strength and weaknesses. I never complete the most work, but I don’t always complete the least. I lamented in my letter that a new hire was assigned to redo my work, but in retrospect that was because it was an easy task for her since my mistakes were minor. I’ve had some successful projects in the past few months and that has helped me recognize the value I am bringing. I’m solving my problems more independently and getting more comfortable asking about the things I still need to understand. It turns out other members of my team had many of the same confusions I had!
That said, I’m still not really thriving in this position. My moody manager makes it hard to keep this positive mindset. Also, unusually for people in my field, I spend 20% of my time directly interfacing with customers and I still feel completely unprepared and unsuited for that. My friends echo your advice and urge me to apply to other positions where I’ll be happier. I’m not enthusiastic about the idea, because it was so hard for me to get to this place of confidence and I don’t want to start from scratch again! But I’ve committed to at least getting my resume in shape, so we’ll see.
5. Am I being a brat about not getting promoted?
As the commenters suggested, I did go back to my boss to ask for more feedback and/or a plan for giving me more interesting work, as he had promised. He completely blew me off, which was pretty out of character for him after years of (I thought) supporting me, and only added to my confusion and disillusionment. It eventually came out that the person who was hired was a long-time friend of my boss, who had left a previous position after a high-profile spat with leadership and ended up in a new job she didn’t like. I think he was assuming I would get over it and keep doing my job without complaint, and he hoped the whole thing would just blow over.
I had already started looking for a new job in earnest, and I got an offer one month to the day after I got the news about the promotion. Of course, my boss and grandboss were SHOCKED that I was leaving, especially so soon. After the announcement went out that I was leaving, rumors started to spread about the circumstances of the new person’s hire (which I did NOT start or encourage) and my departure was on kind of a sour note, unfortunately. I don’t think there was much I could have done to change that, but it was a bummer after years of good work.
I’ve now been at my new company for a few months and it’s a breath of fresh air. The work is more interesting, I make more money, I have a much better title, and there’s SO much less drama. I talked to a former coworker recently and it sounds like the person who was hired is not doing great. She has a lot of experience with the general type of work, but not in the specific industry, and she keeps making bad decisions because she doesn’t understand the full context and apparently won’t listen to the people who do. As I’m writing this, I feel like it will seem made up because of the sheer number of AAM tropes involved, but it truly happened in the most stereotypical way possible.
Ultimately, I know I dodged a bullet, and although it was a crappy experience I am grateful to have landed in a good place. Many thanks to you and the commenters for your advice and commiseration!
A previous blog post explored the semi-mysterious yet sometimes highly useful DOS APPEND command. Now it’s time to look at its relatives: ASSIGN, JOIN, and SUBST.
ASSIGN is the oldest of the bunch. It was written by IBM and first appeared in PC DOS 2.0 in March 1983 (it wasn’t part of MS-DOS 2.x). It is very simple and rather limited.
ASSIGN re-routes requests to an existing drive to another drive. If the user runs
ASSIGN A=Cthen requests to drive A: end up addressing drive C: instead.
Note “existing” — the drive letter that is being reassigned must exist. On a machine that has drives A:, B:, C:, and D:, an attempt to run
ASSIGN F=D
will fail with “Invalid parameter”.
Like APPEND, the ASSIGN command is a TSR, and it is one of the earliest DOS TSRs, together with the PRINT command.
ASSIGN works by intercepting INT 25h and 26h vectors (direct disk I/O) and re-routes all accesses according to its internal drive map.
There are no provisions to unload ASSIGN, but running ASSIGN without any arguments will clear its drive mapping table and undo any effects of previous ASSIGN commands.
In later DOS versions,
ASSIGN /STATUS
will show the current drive mappings, if any.
There is a curious interaction between the ASSIGN and APPEND commands (which are both TSRs). For reasons that are not clear, APPEND refuses to install itself if ASSIGN is already installed. However, installing APPEND first and ASSIGN next is not prohibited.
The purpose of the ASSIGN command is very narrow. According to the PC DOS 2.x reference manuals, it was designed to help with applications (presumably written for DOS 1.x) which used hardcoded drive letters. ASSIGN made it possible to make applications that forced the use of floppy drive A: (or perhaps B:) to use the hard disk instead. Hence ASSIGN was a logical addition to PC DOS 2.0.
However, those applications died out a long time ago. In MS-DOS 6.0, ASSIGN was relegated to the “supplemental” tools and was not shipped on the MS-DOS 6.0 floppies.
JOIN and SUBST appeared with DOS 3.1 in April 1985. Unlike APPEND and ASSIGN, these two are not TSRs. The mechanism for JOIN and SUBST is built into the DOS kernel and the external utilities only set up the internal DOS state.
JOIN is the DOS equivalent of UNIX mount. It allows a DOS drive to be “joined” to a sub-directory on another drive. Something like this:
JOIN D: C:\MNT
All references to the C:\MNT directory will now be internally re-routed within the DOS kernel to go to drive D: instead.
While the concept of mounting is very familiar to UNIX users, I don’t believe the JOIN command was ever in widespread use in DOS.
The problem with DOS is that it has a fairly draconian limit on pathname length, around 63 characters. And JOIN makes the problem worse, because it inevitably makes every path on the joined drive longer. And users tend to look for ways to make paths shorter, not longer.
It is possible to “unmount” joined drives by running
JOIN D: /D
which makes JOIN fully dynamic.
Making paths shorter is exactly what SUBST can do. SUBST is the logical opposite of join, and conceptually similar to UNIX chroot.
SUBST creates a new “virtual” drive letter or changes an existing drive letter such that it is internally mapped to a directory on another drive.
In its most basic use, SUBST is a replacement for ASSIGN. The following command
SUBST A: C:\
will re-route requests to drive A: to go to drive C: instead. Unlike ASSIGN, SUBST can create new drive letters. Note that any virtual drive set up by SUBST must be within the LASTDRIVE limit (that is, DOS must have a CDS available for the drive letter).
Of course SUBST can do much more than ASSIGN, because the target of the new virtual drive can be a directory, not just the root of another drive:
SUBST E: C:\SRC\MYPROJ\FOO
This usage can solve a real problem, which is too long path names. In the above example, references to C:\SRC\MYPROJ\FOO\BAR\FILE.C can instead be shortened as E:\BAR\FILE.C. Such approach is more convenient for users (less reading and typing), and this scheme can work around path length limitations when pathnames are passed on the command line or in environment variables. Note that SUBST does not allow the un-substituted path length to grow beyond the usual 64-ish character limit, even if the substituted path would be sufficiently short.
Similarly to JOIN, it is possible to remove substituted drives by using the /D switch:
SUBST E: /D
Just like JOIN, SUBST is fully dynamic and substitutions can be created and removed at runtime.
ASSIGN and APPEND are both TSRs and intercept interrupts 25h/26h (ASSIGN) and 21h (APPEND). ASSIGN was shipped with PC DOS 2.0 and APPEND could theoretically work with DOS 2.x as well. Neither command needs any support from the DOS kernel and both started out as IBM add-ons (with APPEND being initially shipped with the IBM PC Network Program, not DOS).
JOIN and SUBST, on the other hand, are implemented primarily in the DOS kernel. Both appeared in PC DOS 3.1. The external JOIN.EXE and SUBST.EXE utilities are not TSRs and only change internal DOS data. All real work is performed by DOS itself when parsing paths. JOIN and SUBST are conceptually similar to UNIX mount and chroot, respectively.
The OS/2 operating system, starting with version 1.0 (1987), shipped all four utilities: APPEND, ASSIGN, JOIN, and SUBST. The catch is that all were DOS programs and only worked in the DOS box. That is also true of OS/2 2.x where all four commands are available, but only work within a single virtual DOS session.
Windows 9x only provided one of these commands, SUBST.
Interestingly, Windows NT shipped with two of the commands, APPEND and SUBST. But there was a big difference: APPEND was still a DOS command, only worked in a single DOS session, and naturally only had any effect on DOS programs. Obviously x64 editions of Windows do not come with APPEND anymore.
SUBST, on the other hand, is a native NT program. One can for example issue
SUBST U: C:\Users\Myaccount
and all Windows applications will see the new virtual drive U: and access the user’s files and directories within C:\Users\Myaccount.
SUBST is thus the only one of the APPEND, ASSIGN, JOIN, SUBST quartet which survived beyond DOS. SUBST is still available in Windows 11 (now 40 years after it was initially introduced in DOS 3.1) and presumably won’t be going anywhere soon.
CHICAGO—Acknowledging that candy-coated batteries were an iconic part of the brand’s legacy, Duracell announced Thursday that it would be removing frosting and sprinkles from its manufacturing process to discourage children from eating the company’s products. “When parents shared with us their concerns about our practice of selling batteries with delicious, sugary toppings, we listened,” said Duracell spokesperson Nick Miaritis, who added that the battery manufacturer would also be removing the whipped cream and maraschino cherries from atop its AA and AAA varieties effective immediately. “We understand that batteries will inevitably find their way into the hands of kids, some of whom are too young to understand that Duracell’s trademark chocolate, caramel, and nougat center—while very tasty—is not something they are supposed to put in their mouths. Don’t worry, though: Our batteries will continue to power your flashlights and TV remotes. They’ll just be doing it without that irresistibly sweet Duracell taste.” Reached for further comment, Duracell officials confirmed the company had no plans to discontinue its popular 9-volt Cheese-Blasted batteries.
The post Duracell Removes Frosting, Sprinkles To Discourage Kids From Eating Batteries appeared first on The Onion.
With the start of a new year, many Americans will be engaging in new fitness routines, with jogging being among the most popular. Here are tips for finding the selecting running shoes.
Decide the level of cushioning based on if you’re a back runner, side runner, or stomach runner.
Go up a size to leave room for blisters.
Count how many feet you have to determine your optimal number of shoes.
Salespeople will often allow you to test run shoes as long as they can ride along on your back.
Hokas make you appear both taller and wealthier.
Pause during cutscenes so you can figure out what type of sneakers Sonic is wearing.
Choose a colorway that will complement months of dust.
When trying on shoes, wear the same kind of socks and banana costume you usually have on while running.
Reflective designs can help drivers spot your body laying in the street after they run you down.
The post Tips For Picking Out Running Shoes appeared first on The Onion.
Originally published December 31, 2018.
1. Learn to play the pianoforte moderately well. Stick to duets.
2. Stop taking long walks in the rain while underdressed.
3. Throw out the expired smelling salts. Replace promptly.
4. Avoid rakes with jaunty names that start with W. Perfect sideburns are not indicative of mature relationship potential.
5. Love my sisters but be slightly more interesting and intelligent than they are.
6. Forgive my father for mangling the line of inheritance.
7. Ignore my mother’s marriage advice. Especially if it involves a not-so-distant relation or anyone in the clergy.
8. Seriously, stick to that thing about the walks. Consumption’s the worst.
9. Argue less about who’s taking which carriage. We’ll all get there eventually.
10. Prepare witty discourse before the ball. Don’t get caught off guard mid-quadrille while not quite touching the man I hate right now but might marry.
11. Stop moaning about how poor I am in front of the servants.
12. Take the long way home to avoid the rectory. Seriously. That guy’s creepy.
13. Cultivate one distinct but acceptable flaw. Shyness, curiosity, and a strong adherence to societal constraints are all worth considering.
14. De-clutter my bonnet collection. When was the last time I wore that thing?
15. Stop stressing about my love life. The most eligible men in the county always pick the smart girl.
In brief: So far this winter in Houston has been abnormally warm, with December feeling more like late fall than winter. But that’s about to change as an Arctic front arrives in Houston on Sunday, bringing much colder air into the region. However, it’s looking more like the metro area will see a light freeze rather than a hard freeze next week.
There are several definitions of winter, but from a climate standpoint in Houston the three coldest months are December, January, and February. By this definition this winter has, to date, been incredibly warm. December had an average monthly temperature of 61.1 degrees in the city, which is 5.7 degrees above normal. So far the city of Houston has yet to record a freeze at its official monitoring station, at Bush Intercontinental Airport. The lowest temperature so far has been 35 degrees.
Beginning Sunday or Sunday night we will shift into a colder pattern that will stick around. Although there are still some details to be worked out, much of the Houston area is likely to see a light freeze next week. The good news is that, for now at least, most of our modeling guidance has backed off the idea of a hard freeze in Houston. So we are probably not looking at a situation where most of the area falls into the low- or mid-20s. But we will continue to keep an eye on this.
Lows this morning have fallen to about 50 degrees, and with a light easterly wind we’re seeing the development of some clouds. Skies will be mostly cloudy for much of today and tonight, with highs likely only reaching the lower 60s. A few isolated showers will be possible today, but I expect most of us will not see any rainfall. Lows tonight will drop into the mid-50s.
As winds shift to come from the northeast we should see clearer skies on Friday, with highs in the upper 60s to possibly lower 70s. Lows on Friday night will fall into the mid-50s.
The weekend will be mild ahead of a front on Sunday. Skies on Saturday should be partly to mostly cloudy, with highs around 70 degrees, and a warm night with lows only dropping to around 60 in Houston. Sunday will be warmer, in the mid-70s. The front should reach Houston some time during the afternoon hours, possibly with a broken line of showers or thunderstorms (nothing serious, probably), followed by much drier and colder air. This is a slap-you-in-the-face kind of front with gusty winds coming from the northwest almost immediately. Temperatures will likely fall into the upper 30s by Monday morning.
The colder weather will stick around for much of next week, although Tuesday and Wednesday mornings now look to probably be the coldest of the period. For much of Houston that probably means a light freeze, with temperatures in the vicinity of 30 degrees. We could be colder than that, or a bit warmer, as it remains to be seen. Highs are likely to be in the 40s for a few days. There’s a possibility of a wintry mix on Wednesday, Wednesday night, or Thursday morning, but this will depend on whether there’s enough moisture for precipitation, and how cold things get. It’s just not possible to say at this time. Next weekend will probably be a little warmer, but still chilly.
The post ‘Cultivate A Growth Mindset’ And 40 Other Phrases That Give Sad Sacks Like You False Hope appeared first on The Onion.
Hovertext:
We could make it even more informative by adding location and season.
Another year?
Some time ago, I shared the origin story of the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver. Described as the best screen saver of all time, it was nevertheless not without its issues.
A customer complained that they were losing productivity because employees were spending too much time running the 3D Pipes screen saver and waiting for teapots to appear. They requested an option to increase the likelihood of a teapot, so the employees would be placated more quickly and get back to their work.
The teapot was a surprise hidden in the 3D Pipes screen saver. Once in a while, a teapot would appear in the joints of the pipes. This was a tribute to the Utah teapot, a standard reference object in the computer graphics industry.
I can’t find any evidence that this feature request was accepted.
If you set the joint mode to “mixed”, then each joint has a 1/1000 chance of being a teapot. Prior to Windows NT 4.0, any non-teapot “mixed” joint had a 50/50 chance of being a ball or elbow. Starting in Windows NT 4.0, the non-teapot “mixed” joint distribution was changed to 1/3 ball joints and 2/3 elbow joints.
A teapot was also used if you selected “flex” style pipes, and a pipe reached a dead end. Instead of a traditional end pipe cap, the screen saver substituted a teapot.
Despite rumors to the contrary, the rate of teapot appearance does not improve the longer you leave the screen saver running.
Bonus chatter: If you hunt around the Internet, you’ll find many stories of people tracing a performance problem to somebody using 3D Pipes as the screen saver on a server. Servers are not known for having high quality graphics hardware, so the screen saver is forced to run in software mode, which results in high CPU usage. Instead, use the black screen screen saver on your server. It uses no CPU.
The post A design flaw in the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver pointed out by a customer appeared first on The Old New Thing.
WASHINGTON—At long last able to rejoice as its days of wandering in a culinary desert reached an end, the nation’s turkey-weary populace has made a triumphant return to eating shrimp, crustacean-munching sources confirmed Wednesday. “Thanksgiving was tough, Christmas was even tougher, but at last our freezers are free of turkey leftovers and shrimp can return to its rightful place in our mouths, stomachs, and hearts,” said exultant seafood lover Ellen Bates, echoing the sentiments of millions of grinning Americans who clutched multiple shrimp-laden skewers in their hands and cheered as fishing trawlers loaded with shrimp pulled into harbors up and down the nation’s coasts. “No more must we suffer the indignity of boring, reheated turkey. Now we can consume dozens upon dozens of shrimp each day in all of shrimp’s miraculous forms: Popcorn. Scampi. Cocktail. Tempura. Ceviche—yes, God, ceviche! Never again will I take the fisherman’s platter for granted. Our long, dark night of Butterball is over, and a golden time of shrimp has dawned over America once more!” At press time, 340 million Americans were reportedly in the bathroom and not feeling so well.
The post Turkey-Weary Nation Makes Triumphant Return To Eating Shrimp appeared first on The Onion.
Coffee beans are hitting record-high prices not seen in nearly 50 years after difficult growing seasons among some of the world’s top-producing regions. What do you think?
“I knew one day we’d regret dumping all that tea into Boston Harbor.”
Cameron Pruse, Adhesive Developer
“Good thing my coffee comes from the store.”
Gabrielle Fernandes, Courtroom Decorator
“That’s why I switched to $8 matchas.”
Justin White, Box Labeler
The post Coffee Prices Rise To 50-Year Highs appeared first on The Onion.
The passing process once again!
✨🌟✨Happy new year!!✨🌟✨
Best wishes and all the success possible for all of you for 2025!!
You got this!
(and yes 5 look at them so …. backward style haha)
A new Pew Research poll found that 57% of adults said they would prefer to live in a community with larger houses, even if schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away. What do you think?
“And I better not see a bike lane anywhere.”
Blake Kilpatrick, Abstract Roofer
“I walk plenty. Just this morning I was upstairs.”
Tim Sicinski, Alpaca Herder
“Well, my top choice would be a Venetian canal system.”
Roxi Dickinson, Skateboard Carver
The post Majority Of Americans Prefer Sprawl To Walkable Cities appeared first on The Onion.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s the final week of “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager, with updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
Remember the letter-writer who gave notice to their daycare provider and she freaked out? Here’s the update.
I wrote in about two and a half years ago about an issue we were having with our daughter’s daycare provider as we were moving on to a new daycare. You and your readers offered such kind and helpful advice. Here’s an update that includes a few interesting coincidences and plot twists.
We ended up getting to keep our child in Amy’s daycare for the full six weeks that followed our notice, just like Amy’s contract specified. Amy was still pretty cold with me, but she started to communicate with me again whenever there was a need related to my daughter. A few commenters were shocked that I wanted to continue sending my daughter to her after the unhinged text message, but I didn’t have much of a choice. My spouse and I had burned through our vacation time already while trying to cover all of Amy’s time off. I wasn’t really worried about Amy’s ability to continue caring for my daughter well. She’s a really nice person and she cared so deeply for the kids she was entrusted with, I still felt like I could trust her to do her job well. She did nickel and dime us a bit when I wrote her our last check. She counted back the number of days since we gave notice and claimed that because we told her we were ending care after 5 pm that that day didn’t count toward the six weeks notice in her contract. I didn’t argue with her and paid her for an extra day of care we didn’t receive. Oh well.
Here’s where things get a little more interesting. A couple of months later, we found out that the reason we were able to ride out the last six weeks of care was because the other family who was going to take our daughter’s spot backed out. It turns out that that child’s grandmother is a teacher at my daughter’s new daycare center, and she’s been teaching there for 20 years! The other family was just waiting for a spot to open at the center, and when one did they didn’t need Amy anymore. I guess things worked out for them too. In the end, it was actually pretty lucky that we left Amy’s daycare. She retired about a year later, and she gave her remaining families very little notice, so they scrambled to find new care. One parent who I see occasionally at my daughter’s dance class told me she had to split her three kids up at three different daycares in our town. The daycare shortage is awful in our area.
Ultimately, I didn’t end up writing a Google review or reaching out to any other parents at the time. Over the past couple of years, I have been in conversations with other parents where this story has come up and I’ve shared some details, but it’s never been my intention to bash Amy. I’m now very glad that I didn’t start a PR rampage because Amy is in our lives again; she organizes the Sunday school program our daughter is in at our church so we have to talk to her occasionally. She’s really nice to us, and we’ve been able to move past our past issues.
We’ve also added another daughter to our family in the last few months. Luckily, she was able to get a spot at the daycare center we’ve come to love over the last few years. Thanks again for the advice!
The holiday season is here, meaning millions are celebrating by indulging in festive beverages and big meals. The Onion shares tips for avoiding gaining weight over the holidays.
Incorporate physical activity into family gatherings by announcing “I’m gonna do a backflip” as soon as you arrive.
Buy whatever supplement the doctors with podcasts are currently sponsored by.
Observe the recommended 10:12:31:7:2:19:9:10 protein to fat to carbohydrates to zinc to riboflavin to chromium to calcium to thiamin intake ratio.
Practice mindful gorging.
When making your plate, start with healthy holiday greens like Brussels sprouts, holly, and mistletoe.
Slow down your pace of eating by placing your holiday treats in a Kong.
Avoid snacking between meals by putting your mind to something else, like solving a mysterious cold case in your hometown.
You can substitute anything that tastes good with cottage cheese.
Pay attention to feelings of fullness, should you ever get them.
The post Tips For Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain appeared first on The Onion.
