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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.

    I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.

    But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.


  • My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

    I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

    Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.


  • My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.

    My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.

    Or so I thought.

    I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.

    Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse

    Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.





  • I’m probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.

    But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn’t just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.

    I’m willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.

    My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything and put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I’m assuming will align with the third book.


  • I ordered a roller blind through a website. I measured the width down to the millimetre based on their instructions and triple-checked checked the measurement before submitting the order. I also selected the option to indicate that the blind was to be mounted outside my window frame (important for later).

    My roller arrived two weeks later and was nearly 3cm shorter than what I had ordered. I only discovered this after I had mounted the brackets on my wall, again using their instructions (which explicitly said to use the measurements I provided in the order).

    Customer service first said that this was a normal deduction made to all orders. When I asked them why they would make a deduction after asking for exact measurements in the order form, they said that they deduction was to make sure the blind fits inside the window frame.

    I then pointed out that I was mounting the blind outside my window frame, as indicated in my order, and didn’t need the deduction. I also pointed out that while their product page did mention a deduction for rollers being mounted inside of a window frame, there was no indication this would apply to rollers being mounted outside of a frame like mine was. I finally pointed out that the installation instructions made no mention of the deduction and explicitly said to use them measurements from the order. They proverbially shrugged and repeated that the deduction was standard on all orders.

    When I asked about a replacement, because I literally had them on record admitting to deliberately sending me a product that was different than what I had paid for, they said they wouldn’t send a replacement until I had donated the first roller to charity and sent them a receipt or thank-you letter.

    I did some research just to humour them, and I could not find a charity that would take a roller blind in any condition, let alone one with no mounting hardware. And I don’t live in a small town, so it’s not like there just weren’t charities around - there were plenty, but none of them would take a roller blind. When I pointed this out to customer service, I was told to just drop the roller in a donation box and take a picture. I’m not 100% sure of the by-laws, but that sure sounds like they wanted me to record myself illegally dumping their product.

    At this point I was fed up, so I left a nasty review on Google and on their product page. They were too craven to actually post my review to their website, but the Google review went up. Within a few hours they reached back and finally offered me an unconditional replacement. I still had to order a roller that was longer than what I actually needed because there was no result l way to stop them from making the deduction.

    My replacement blind finally arrived six weeks after putting in the replacement order, nearly triple the wait time of the initial order.

    Also, they didn’t do it to me, but other people who left bad reviews often got snidely told, “we have a 4.7 star rating on Google,” as part of the company’s public response, as if lots of people being satisfied with their products somehow negated the complaints of those who weren’t.




  • My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.

    I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).

    Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.


  • “Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”

    Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.