I think possibly the best steak I ever had/made was a cheap chuck steak that I gave a nice long sous vide treatment

There is a whole lot of flavor there, but it can be as tough as shoe leather, but with sous vide it came out as tender as any filet, but way beefier

FYI, a whole lot of “uncured” meats, at least in the US, are just kind of using loopholes. Often there’s a little asterisk next to the word “uncured”

And if you follow that asterisk to the bottom of the back side of the package or wherever they decided to hide it in small print you’ll see it says something like “contains no added nitrites or nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder or other natural ingredients”

And spoiler alert, celery has kind of a lot of nitates and nitrites.

And while there are regulations about how much pure nitrates/nitrites they can add to your food, there’s no regulation on how much celery powder they can add because it’s just considered a “flavoring” ingredient and not a curing agent. “Uncured” bacon or hot dogs or whatever could technically contain far more nitrites than would legally be allowed in their cured counterparts (though in practice I’m sure they’re probably roughly the same amount)

Regardless of if those nitrites are pure or coming from celery powder, it’s the same chemical doing the same thing in your food and body.

Other veggies contain a lot of nitrites/nitrates too, cabbage for example. I’ve occasionally had it happen when I make cabbage rolls in a pressure cooker that despite being totally cooked through the ground beef is still a pretty vibrant red/pink like corned beef because of the nitrites from the cabbage.

I’m not saying this to scare-monger or anything, there are valid health concerns about nitrates and nitrites in general, and of course people like you who have a particular sensitivity to them, and it’s well worth being aware of all of that. That said, I’ve been dabbling in curing my own meats and have a big jar of Prague powder #1 in my pantry which is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so clearly it’s not something that’s particularly high on my own list of concerns. I also intend to try curing my own corned beef at some point with celery juice and other natural sources of nitrites, not because I think it’s any healthier but because it sounds like a fun experiment.

Luckily most people with those sorts of implants I’ve seen are fairly scientifically-minded, and I’d like to think that’s the sort of thing they’d think of and would wear some sort of appropriate medic alert bracelet.

It’s not like there aren’t other sorts of medical implants, piercings, situations like people with shrapnel embedded in their bodies, etc. out in the world that could potentially cause issues with an MRI machine.

I read about people getting magnets implanted so that they can feel magnetic/electrical fields

Not quite ready to commit to implants, but i did try gluing some tiny magnets to my fingernails once.

I suspect that the implants are a bit more sensitive since they can kind of wiggle around under your skin more, but I could definitely feel some things, the two that stuck out to me were a forklift charger and an electric pencil sharpener.

I also got really used to picking up paperclips and other small metal things like that with them. I only had the magnets for maybe about a week, but I caught myself still trying to pick up paperclips with them for probably about a month afterwards.

All 3 of them, but no one’s home

He’s got a few other stupid tattoos. He’s got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can’t really make them out because he’s always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can’t make out because in all his pictures he’s either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don’t recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don’t have a great eye for tattoos.

He’s a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some “Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country” sort of article, but compared to the “bad neighborhoods” in pretty much any major city it’s nothing)

I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they’ve done even though I’ve never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was “if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say ‘no’” and that’s always served me well.

None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he’s locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.

I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.

And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I’m pretty sure says “con man”

I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.

It was the first time I’d heard of him, we’re not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.

I don’t know what actual products are out there, but there are other time signals that could potentially be used, for example GPS.

Off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve seen a gps-synced clock, let alone one with a pendulum, but I’ve also never really looked for one either. It certainly feels like a product that probably exists somewhere to me, I’m sure there’s someone out there who would appreciate a clock that can automatically detect the timezone, whether the region your in observes daylight savings time, etc.

That’s true for mechanical clock movements, but I think OP is looking for a quartz movement that includes a simulated pendulum for aesthetic purposes, which isn’t particularly uncommon, unless your circles include a lot of antique enthusiasts, people who inherited an old grandfather clock, or people who just really dig mechanical clocks (and I won’t knock that, I certainly think they’re neat) odds that a lot of clocks you’ve seen with a pendulum are that type, powered by a AA battery and stuffed into a fancy wooden case

Aside from not needing to adjust the time, is there any particular reason it needs to be WiFi enabled?

Because that kind of feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that was solved decades ago with “atomic” clock movements.

Which aren’t actually atomic in any way on their own, but contain an antenna to pick up the signal from an NIST atomic clock to set the time (and I believe other countries and regions have their own equivalent if you’re not in the US)

As far as finding a pendulum movement, I don’t really know what is out there, but it may be another avenue for you to look into.

Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.

My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I’m less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)

Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There’s kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who’s trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.

And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That’s the hard part.

Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that “I grew it myself” which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.

I’ve had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.

The Shanty Swing Band

One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.

The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.

I feel like it’s also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.

I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn’t going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.

Part of the concept also involved a “gun player” who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.

Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.

There’s a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.

Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.

Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I’ll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.

Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.

Honestly, in that case it’s not even an inventory thing, just plan on ordering a couple days earlier and go for the longer slower shipping method so it ends up arriving on the same day. You don’t have to warehouse it any longer than if you ordered it later with faster shipping, and you save a decent chunk of cash.

I think there’s a lot of nuance that both sides of this are missing. There’s a lot of middle ground between not talking to women out in the world at all, and going up to random girls and saying "nice shoes, wanna fuck?

You absolutely can approach people, strike up a conversation, maybe even hit it off and spin it into a friendship or romantic relationship.

I’m far from the guy to tell someone how to do that and try to pick apart the it’s and outs of what makes some things ok and others not, but it is something that absolutely can be done.

I just built a PC after not having a computer for about 5+ years.

Built it for games, did not feel like I was missing out on anything in particular except games by not having a computer. There’s a lot of things I’d rather use a computer for but these days most of what I used to do on a computer can be done just fine from a phone or tablet.

During those 5 or so years, I maybe needed to use a computer about a dozen times, and if my wife didn’t have a computer I could have just swung by a library for a bit to take care of it.

I used to be the shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, it fell to me to arrange all of our freight pickups, which was annoying because I didn’t really have direct access to any information about pricing, deadlines, etc. so I was constantly going back to the office to show someone quotes to see whether the rates and transit times were acceptable.

Most of our freight was LTL stuff (less than truckload, a couple pallets, not enough to fill a truck by itself) but a few times every month or two we’d get full truckload sized orders.

When it came to them, often “intermodal” shipping had much better rates. Intermodal meaning at least 2 different forms of transportation were going to be used. Truck, train, boat, cargo plane, etc.

As a US-based company with mostly US-based customers, that usually meant rail for us.

However, almost none of our shipments went intermodal because it was too slow for our customers.

It wasn’t usually a drastic difference, we’re talking maybe 1-3 extra days in most cases. Over the Road (OTR) there weren’t many places in the US that we couldn’t get freight to from our location in 5 days or less, and those 5 day locations were mostly real middle-of-nowhere customers on the other side of the country.

It always blew my mind that we didn’t or couldn’t push our customers to just place orders 2 or 3 days earlier to save some pretty significant money on shipping.

I don’t claim to know much about the industry, i was just some kid who needed a job and ended up the shipping guy because I knew how to use a computer and spoke English. But we a textile company that made things like work clothes (chef coats, scrubs, industrial work wear, etc) and restaurant table linens, and we sold mostly to bigger wholesalers, business service companies, etc. who would resell it or provide it to their customers as part some sort of contracted laundry service or something, so not really something I’d think of as being particularly time-sensitive or wildly unpredictable that they couldn’t anticipate their bigger orders a couple days ahead of time

Guess it probably says something about how much we all love instant gratification.

I remember my 4th grade teacher having one of these and showing it off around 2000, it may have been the first digital camera I ever saw.

Blew my mind back then.

He was one of my favorite teachers, really into science, loved gadgets. He was an older guy who retired a few years later and I heard he wasn’t in the best of health, no idea if he’s still around, but I hope he at least lived long enough to appreciate how far digital cameras have come since then.

When they try to leave they just tend to not get very far because they never learned how to pump their own gas.

I’m not looking for troubleshooting

WTH is going on with my phone? Anybody else having new problems?

That sounds a hell of a lot like a troubleshooting question. Otherwise you’re just screaming into the void and I’m not sure what kind of interaction you were looking for by posting here. I suppose we could just say “that’s rough buddy” and “yes/no, I am/am not having that problem” and move on.

His tone could use some work, but so could yours. Those are very relevant pieces of information to ask for when trying to figure out what’s wrong with your phone.

I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we’re counting incidents that we’ve handled as dispatchers, or if we’re only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.

For the former, I’m going to just leave it at- we’ve handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we’ve probably had something similar happen. I’m not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.

Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren’t taking it too seriously, he’s a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.

Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we’re at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It’s not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.

Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he’s going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he’s logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.

Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s’mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s’more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they’ve ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a “no s’mores” rule.

There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There’s been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.