One revolution I have realized in baking is the recent trend to start talking about weight and not volume in recipes for certain dry ingredients like flour. Three cups of fluffy sifted flour is a lot less flour than three cups of densely packed flour. Same with brown sugar, or wondering if you need a “flat teaspoon” vs. a “heaping teaspoon” of something.

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

Trying getting out of that in your 50s with arthritis setting in. Oof.

“I was fired from my previous job due to acts of drunken sloth and a little theft. Then I spent time on my couch, doing nothing but watching Starsky and Hutch reruns in my underwear, eating cold spaghetti-os from the can and drinking warm beer. Then when the welfare checks ran dry, I blackmailed a manager at the next job. He hired me, I did nothing, but he was replaced by someone who didn’t have anything I could dig up in his past quick enough. I can’t work with Tom Swift Jr. there, so I am applying here. Here is a list of my demands upon hire, and some background checks I ran on you. When do I start?”

– what these people think about a gap in your employment, possibly.

Well, they may like the attention and validation it brings. I knew someone who was asexual that had a lot of dotcom money. He loved to go to Vegas and gamble. He knew the house was stacked against him. He knew that the girls who sat on his lap only liked him for his money. He still loved the attention he got when he tipped big. I saw him tip a waiter $200 on a $150 meal. He LOVED it. And why?

“I used to be poor. I was a nobody. Now I make people happy with my money, and I feel good about myself.”

Can’t beat that.

Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.

I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.