Wasn’t he on some sort of advisory committee during Trump’s first term? My memory is that they disbanded basically because it was a waste of time, for obvious reasons. Let me search…

Yes, he was.

I’m so sorry. I know how hard it is.

The first time I saw it, I laughed for a few minutes. It still cracks me up. I think the woman’s face in the past panel really adds to the punchline.

My 56k modem was internal, so not much to look at.

But the Hayes…

Surely you can’t be serious.

I still have a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 here. Aluminum case and all. It’s a work of art.

A useless work of art. But still…

puts on headphones

Yeah. That’s my favorite movie, so this comic played right into it.

Thanks for rescuing her. We already have 3 cats and a dog, but if I was on a situation like you were, I might have to adopt a fourth. We absolutely don’t need a fourth cat, but I can’t see one abandoned like that.

We have a law in this county that we’d have to turn them into the shelter, but then we’d get first dibs at adopting. I might do a “we’ll give her a good home if no one else steps up in a week” sort of thing.

I remember, before I bought my first car at age 17, I had a bunch of money from working, and nothing really to spend it on. My dad said, “When you buy a car, that will all be gone.” He was definitely right about that.

Yeah, though the kid was like 7 or 8 - old enough to know better. But his parents were divorcing and their mother had had them for months and was letting them get away with everything - the father (who brought them to our house) was trying to get them back in line, but he was overwhelmed.

He and his brother also got into a cabinet where I have the LEGO Simpsons house and Kwik-E-Mart and tore both of them apart. I can kind of understand - LEGO, play - but also…dude, this is someone else’s house. Fortunately it was LEGO and could be rebuilt. They were breaking stuff or letting the cats out every time they visited (one left the door wide open…who does that? I said, with irritation, “You have to close the door!” and the kid got all upset, but when it comes to my pets, I’m not going to mess around).

We tried to be patient and help - it’s difficult to teach kids manners if they haven’t been in the situation where they need them, right? Eventually they did settle down somewhat.

Can confirm. Source: Had a friend’s kid climb one of ours and damage it. Fortunately he didn’t fall and hurt himself, and no cats were hurt either.

Spicey, the man who got fired because SNL mocked him. Melissa McCarthy with that motorized podium was amazing. It was almost too good, because it killed the golden calf that would have given them a ton of material.

I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

One evening our dog ran off into a ravine by our house. It was getting dark, so I grabbed a flash light and headed down to try to find him. A few minutes in, and I’m near the creek, with higher land to the sides and in front of me. I saw something move and played the flashlight around…at least 8 pairs of eyes staring back at me.

Part of the neighborhood’s cat colony (they’ve been TNR’d). It was a little unnerving to see that many eyes watching me like that.

Didn’t find the dog; he showed up at home about an hour later, happy as can be.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I have an old S9 right here on my desk. I cracked the screen, and took it to one of those screen replacement places, and he asked if I had insurance. I told him I didn’t, and he said, wellllllll it’s going to be a lot more expensive than you think to replace this screen.

That wraparound screen they had was basically also the frame of the phone - you’re not so much replacing the screen as you are moving the rest of the components to a new phone body. I wasn’t sold on value of that wraparound screen in the first place; this didn’t improve my opinion of it.

We put a plastic screen protector on it and a new case, and I used it for a few months until we were ready to upgrade phones.

Welcome to the Dull Side.

Yep, we had a cat that would always go for the sink. Eventually I tried putting the water fountain away from the food, and she mostly stopped getting water in the sink.

Before I learned this, I had another cat while I still had a fish tank…I’d get home and find him on top of the fish tank, drinking the water coming out of the filter. The lid on that tank was not very solid, and I was SURE he’d fall in at some point, with disastrous results, so I got him a fountain water dish, and that stopped his fish tank escapades.