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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 26th, 2023

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  • Listen to this guy. I’ve lived the shift he’s prompting you take.

    It’s incredibly hard to describe. People start to see it on you I think.

    From my experience it seems to be in the way I look at people differently and how my body language has shifted. I’m face-blind so it’s hard for me to say for sure but I think people can see that I’m looking for positivity and a way to compliment them or brighten their day.

    And if you’re trying to get laid… Holy shit. Give a genuine thank you and compliment someone of the same sex on your dates. Show your romance for the world and not just the person across the table. It really really works.



  • Kilnier@lemmy.catoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world...
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    9 months ago

    A templatable OCR app that maps areas or shapes to excel fields.

    If you have a product tag with different serial numbers or product details and a standard layout it would be really useful to be able to scan for a tag shape, apply an overlay with each block of relevant data and then map that block to a cell address.

    Take photo of product tag x100 OCR and edge find on product tag Select/draw areas Assign areas to spreadsheet cell or column. Apply and check with second photo. Confirm function and process next 97 images automatically.

    Thought of it for work but would be great for food labels and nutrition information collation as well. All sorts of paper->digital stuff.




  • Someone like me…sort of.

    Warp is more about the piling and stickering of the packs going into the kiln. Wet you can mitigate at home but once a warp is set you’re pretty much screwed.

    The mill should have some sort of quality control in place to communicate these issues between the kilns and stacker crew. Find a different mill to buy from. Anything warped is pulled out before the planer at my mill and then sold as rough outs or goes to the chipper.

    Ever seen 20 feet high of stacked lumber sway in the wind? Stickering can be a huge safety issue alongside quality.


  • I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.

    Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.

    On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’

    Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.

    Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).

    I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.





  • Gaining weight can be HARD.

    One of the things I’ve personally struggled with is how much these conversations and resources are focused on how to lose weight or not gain weight. But there are some of us who have various disabilities and conditions that make getting up to a healthy weight incredibly difficult. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to increase my calorie intake without resorting to simple sugars and carbs as my job has gotten somewhat out of hand. I may go to 4 meals a day? I kind of hate eating so it probably won’t work.

    I have MCAS and wasn’t diagnosed until my mid thirties. Lowest I weighed myself at was 138lbs at 6’4” tall. You could see when I needed to pee I was so skinny. Mosquitoes stopped biting me. I hit 170lbs at 12 years old, got sick and then hit it again at 32. I weighed myself at 213 last week so I’m officially more than half again what I used to weigh. I look and feel so much better it’s kind of crazy.

    I’d be happy to answer any questions people in similar situations may have. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve tried ask people about this topic and have been simply laughed at. Or put down by comments belittling it as a problem and expressing jealousy. That said, my advice may not be useful to a plurality of people.

    Learn about food on a biochemical level to some degree. Find out what makes a complete protein. Figure out your circadian rhythm and good times of day for you to eat. Pay attention to the amounts of what you’re putting in your body and adjust accordingly.

    Pay attention to your cravings. If you’re craving potato chips try to think about what it is in them that you are actually looking for(salt) and address that specific craving with a healthier option if required. It takes some trial and error but one can train themselves to crave components over foods. Do you want cake or do you want that mouthfeel? Or the fat? Or the sweetness?(a big revelation for me is that I rarely crave sugar, I actually want the comfort food aspect of sweetness which is much easier to address is a healthy way) Also learn when to ignore your body and when it is lying to you. A good place to start on this front is that you are thirsty for water(specifically water) right now. There’s a sort of evolutionary drive to restrict our water intake to the bare minimum because clean water is expensive typically and prepared beverages were often safer. Where one has potable water flowing from taps this efficiency bias becomes a lie and you should really just drink more water.

    Cook from scratch if you have the space. It’s a lot to learn and I was very lucky to grow up in a household that provided this focus. Don’t learn to cook unhealthy things. It’s much easier to not buy a deep frier and never learn to deep fry foods than it is to avoid the temptation of delicious fried goods every day. The crucible for me on this is that I’m terrible at making eggs but amazing at pancakes and I found a lesson in my breakfast. If you learn to make tea biscuits or scones vs cookies then you’ve limited what level of trash you can feed yourself.

    If you can’t cook at home or don’t have the time find good restaurants or how to shop differently. Pad Thai from a takeaway is just as fast and cheap but can be significantly better than a Big Mac or pizza. Bag of greens or head of lettuce, Fresh bread, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cheese and a rotisserie chicken or chunk of salami(pate or Creton is great too) makes a delicious meal that will keep for a day or two without refrigeration and is reasonably healthy. Makes a 5$/meal if you’re careful with the meat and cheese. This is one of my preferred road trip foods because you get to try different bakeries and cheeses and meats along your route.

    People talk a lot of about rice and beans being a healthy cheap staple and I always like to point out peanut butter and jam sandwich’s fall into a similar category. It makes a complete protein, if you’re able to add cows milk it’s a good boost of vitamin d, complex and simple sugars in the jam satisfy cravings and give longer term energy, fat in the peanut oil, etc etc. It’s also very cheap and low entry investment. Under 10$ for starting with big jars of peanut butter and a loaf of bread that gives you 2-3 days of food and another 2$ or so every 2-3 days until the jam runs out. No learning or equipment required. Houseless friendly. Wide cultural acceptance. Good for hanger.


  • Thank you! Like I said in my OP it’s weird to be proud of myself and something I’ve done.

    It’s not bad by any means and I’m pretty lucky. I make the Canadian median wage(54k/yr) with no post-secondary and almost 6 years of disability in 18 years of working. I’m doing fine but it’s frustrating to be able to point to multiples of my income that I’ve pushed personally(in a 200 person operation) and still have to fight for a greater than inflation wage increase.

    I’ve got irons in the fire and plan to be moving on in the next year or so. Need to get a hold of someone that can do patent discovery.


  • By title I run the kilns at a lumber mill. That was the biggest skill and learning. Their previous operator got poached and they had no one cross trained so ‘figure it out’. Had nothing to work with so developed my own inventory and moisture tracking system and a few statistical modeling tools to predict the moisture variability. Part of making that inventory system somehow led to doing project management for a 3 person ios dev team in Turkey. Basically I found a couple of textbooks online, don’t function without computers and just kind of went from there.

    There may be one other person that reads and understands this but fwiw I tested a kiln charge that was for a heat treatment order on Thursday after it was dressed at the planer. Customer requested 12% MC. I hit 12.2% MC average with a standard deviation of 1.2. Cut dates range of 1 week prior to 3.5 months prior. Piled air dry and standard box piled mix. Sales guy had an order to fill for a face size we ran low on and said ‘do your best’.

    I also run the round saw filing cnc machine(I make saws sharp) as another ‘we need someone to figure this out’. It is painfully boring but I eliminated about 12k/week in opportunity cost in my first 60 days of doing it so they won’t let me stop.

    I also fill in driving front loaders on a regular basis. I can run forks, grader blade or bucket. If you ever want to learn about Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor drive a front loader for a bit.

    And occasionally I fill in on the planer if they need help with a set up.

    Hired June of 2021 from 4.5 years of disability and 10 years in Apple retail. I put in my resume because I figured it would be a cool tour and took the job figuring I’d wash out in the 90 day probation period. Just over 2 years later and I’ve learned a few skilled trades and I’ve personally improved the business’ margins in 3 different areas.