We did a little tour on our own into Germany one spring, about 20 years ago. It was only a few days, we didn’t have much money and we absolutely didn’t know what we were doing. We rented a car and just started wandering. It was just at the point of technology where GPS was still new. We didn’t have any so we just started driving with a shitty map and no clue.

We had done some traveling in other countries before and we had met several famously obnoxious German tourists. We had partly expected to meet equally arrogant Germans in their home country.

Instead we met the most open, kind hearted, brilliant people ever. Everywhere we stopped, we’d meet three or four locals who were more than happy to give directions, recommend restaurants, bars, tea shops and sites to see.

At one point we met a truck driver who gave us a ton of information and showed us a driving route on a big format ringed binder map book. When he was done talking, he left the book. We told him he was forgetting his book and he said we could have it as it had detailed updated map info of the entire country. It was an expensive book and I knew it, so I told him not to give it away. He insisted and said he didn’t mind.

I still have that map book on my shelf and whenever I see it, I think of that trip and all those people we met.

Totally loved Germany after that.

Guy in the bathroom stall: … I use Mac!

Guys and gals pissing in the hallway, lobby, parking lot, bushes, behind the building and inside the office: … we use windows 11!

Don’t know … I can’t afford internet credits in order to access a connection.

It sounds like you’ll fit right in … great to have you here … have fun!

I was making light of your question … partly to have a bit of fun … and partly to show that the community enjoys sharing these silly little bits of movie quotes that act like memes. The one I was using is from the movie “The Naked Gun” (the original film from 1988 with Leslie Nielson)

A lot of the meme communities enjoy old slapstick movie content as there is a lot of memeable content there … films like ‘The Naked Gun’ series, Hot Shots, any of the Mel Brooks films and Monty Python.

Don’t be afraid to test your boundaries, comment as you like but with an open mind and kind heart … people will let you know if you’ve said or implied anything negative or positive. Don’t be discouraged if you get no response either … it’s not a popularity contest. The longer you stay, the more you comment, the more you get to know people and the more they get to know you and eventually you become a regular part of the community.

Welcome to Lemmy and welcome to the fediverse.

Then tell them they’re part of the gang and to join everyone else as we go wedgie and noogie the next new guy

“I’m sure we can handle this situation maturely, just like the responsible adults that we are. Isn’t that right, Mr. Poopy Pants?”

Take advice from Detective Frank Drebin

“Like a blindman at an orgy, I was going to have to feel my way through”

We used to do quite a bit of travelling ten years ago and we used booking.com quite often. In those early days of booking online, there was a period when you could call the help line and actually talk to someone from America or Canada. And they were always helpful. We got messed up bookings back then and we always got help and figured things out. At one point, we were booking so often, we got to know one or two of the operators we kept talking to in London, Ontario.

Fast forward ten years later and I would not recommend any of them any more. All of them send you to a call center in either South / Central America, Philippines or India and like your comment said, they do absolutely as minimal as possible to do anything and keep you waiting on the phone as long as possible.

None of them work any more and it is far better to use them to shop around for quality, reviews and recommendations … then book directly with the hotel.

Use the sites and services as a guide, then find a direct phone number to the hotel and book directly with them.

Top 3 are still the same from previous years

1. 12345
2. 123456
3. 12345678

It’s official: “123456” has once again claimed the controversial title of the world’s most common password — and one of the weakest. That marks six out of seven years this password has topped our chart

Local politician … a member of town council but also a character that just hung onto any and all political positions related to local politics. He never did much expect make money for himself. If he didn’t get on council, he would try for mayor, and if he got neither, Financial Controller, Administrator, Manager, whatever, as long as it was with the town. He was in essence a salesman because he could talk circles around most people with political language and a bit of education, especially when he dealt with the uneducated or gullible people. It was basically his entire career and he’s well on his way to retiring after having done nothing for anyone else or the town.

Isaac Newton put it best:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

It’s completely stupid, short sighted and ignorant of us to think that we know everything there is know about the universe and natural world. There is still so much more to learn about and understand and probably far more than we can even comprehend.

But we also have to regulate how much we know and don’t know and how we can understand or not understand … because as Richard Feynman put it …

“Keep an open mind … but not so open that your brain falls out”

We’d all like to think that but what usually happens is that the ultra wealthy lose a quarter or half their wealth, which makes no difference to anyone because they are so massively wealthy … everyone else lose everything

That we are both simultaneously intelligent and absolutely stupid.

We built a modern technological society for all of humanity yet set it up to only benefit a handful of individuals and convinced ourselves that this is acceptable.

The handful of beneficiaries are intelligent enough to lead but dumb enough to think that this is sustainable. The rest of us are intelligent enough to live and work in this society yet dumb enough to never want to do anything about it.

That doesn’t make sense. I watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney on my Ubuntu laptop on Firefox all the time. I have a laptop setup in front of my treadmill just to watch shows while I walk.

I have one large screen dumb TV and I just use a Roku device to watch shows through that. Everything else in the house runs in Linux because I got rid of windows years ago and never had a problem with streaming services.

25 years old

Old enough to be an adult to do adult things … young enough to be able to do everything a human body can do with the most optimal stamina and comfort. Good recovery and trained properly, is the optimum level of development, energy and strength. This age doesn’t get any better after this period.

Capitalism and profit and the need to make more money is like rot, a fungus, a bacterial infection or a viral infection.

Any service product or idea you tie to capitalism will inevitably become infected to the point where you infection of wanting to make money will over ride everything. In the end, it has nothing to do with ideas, development, evolution or making things … it always devolves down to just wanting to make as much money as possible.

That is what destroys and devolves any and all social media today. It has nothing to do with social media … it has everything to do with making money and maximizing profits.

I did the same for a while using TrueNAS … I cobbled together every single spare HDD I had at the time onto my first true desktop PC (450Mhz CPU with a gig of RAM, in a giant box full of HDD that felt like a small heater in my office)… I think it was six or seven drives that added up to about 2TB and I felt like I had become Hackerman … I even set it up with Transmission to download a bunch of Linux distros I wanted to try as well as a ton on movies and TV shows I couldn’t get at the time. Basically the reason why I got back into watching all the Star Trek series after downloading all of TNG, VOY and DS9

I thought that for a while myself … then I started editing things with simple cuts and very few effects. They did build an entire movie industry for most of the 20th century on editing equipment that was no more complex than simple cutting and splicing.

I made the switch to Linux about ten years ago … mainly because I didn’t want to upgrade to the latest Windows 7/8 and I just didn’t have the need to use any Windows software … all I do is write documents, store photos, some light video editing and go online - why do I need any other OS? The only problem I had at the start was video editing … it just meant I didn’t do any. Now there are several options to get that done too.

The fun part was that my old hardware suddenly ran twice as fast with the latest Ubuntu at the time … and I haven’t look back since.