Important Public Service Annoucement About Time

@Barney
I'm beating your in the ultimate slacker scale. Still on the couch, surfing away. Have avoided accomplishing anything a responsible adult would have done 1st thing. Yeah, me!

@f00l Aww, who wants to be responsible adult? That doesn't sound like any fun.

@Barney
Sounds like my life philosophy.

@Barney If you've got a Staples nearby, they do bulk shredding for a reasonable rate- you bring in your stuff, and they charge you an amount for the total (I think it's by the pound). It's probably cheaper than a new shredder that can handle the size of your shred pile.

@dashcloud @Barney - My credit union has a free shred day once a year. You might check with your bank?

@dashcloud Closest Staples is about 90 miles. I live in such a backwoods town. -sigh- Thanks for the suggestion.

@KDemo I belong to a credit union, too. I'll check with them!

@Barney - Mine will take up to 3 or 4 boxes full of papers, iirc.

@Barney
Lots of commercial mailbox places like Mailboxes Etc will shred. Also other office supply stores might shred. Also your bank mught be able to recommend a shredding service.

@f00l @KDemo @dashcloud I can't begin to describe the number of boxes she has crammed with electric bills, gas, water, and trash receipts to name just a few. She has never thrown away anything. Well, almost nothing. (She has three of those cardboard storage boxes stuffed with "freebie" address labels.) Unfortunately, I still have not found some of her important papers. I'm beginning to think that she might have thrown these away, but I still have many boxes to wade through.

@Barney Would the neighbors mind if you had a firepit in the backyard and just burned everything there? (It'd take a long time unless you built a massive bonfire, but it's an option).

@dashcloud Maybe we could roast the next batch of @DaveinSoCal's ribs over the fire pit?

@Barney I am totally on board with this plan

@Barney My county has a free shred day every month or quarter. Just drive up and unload it all and done!

Does your county pick up recycling from your house every week? Maybe they have this perk too?

@looseneck Our county does nothing for us except take our money. Tomorrow I'm going to an office supply store and buying a new shredder.

@therealjrn It might be too late for this advice, but never start a plumbing project within 5 hours of Home Depot closing - you are going to need more parts, and you will end up with a leak until the 5th run to the store - that's been my experience at least.

@Cerridwyn
Food activities will not lower your slacking score, so long as the food is either stupidly easy or incredibly scrumptious. However, anything that involves serious work or that is an example of planning for the future causes you to risk a lower slackmaster score.

@Cerridwyn Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

@DaveInSoCal I'll bring brownies!

@DaveInSoCal
I will gladly pay you on some Tuesday in the future, if you're really lucky, provided you will deliver some of these to me today.

@f00l @barney

@DaveInSoCal Wow, those look great! Would you like company?

@Barney They're all gone, sorry my purple friend! But I remember "cake-in-a-jar" from woot, so I suppose it might be possible to do "steak-in-a-jar" at some point?

@DaveInSoCal Yeah, I knew they'd be gone.
I saw the cake-in-the-jar, um, I'll think I'll pass on the steak-in-the-jar.

@narfcake i just got this shirt in my last BOC. too bad it was too big for me.

@carl669 Oversized = sleep shirt.

As for ants, boric acid powder in a sugar solution in a small container left outside where you see them. Ants will suck it up and share it with their colony, where the boric acid will kill them.

(Day 2 of my new job; I have to be productive.)

@narfcake
Cant you just pretend? Surely no one expects substance.

Besides, you're new....you must emphasize both your skills and your Wally-entitlement, so they know what to expect.

@f00l Pretend? Entitlement? What, you think I'm a Millennial?!

@narfcake
Oh fuck you have ethics dont you?

My sympathies. I hear that condition is difficult to treat in some patients.

@narfcake

@f00l Yeah, I do give a fuck when I'm paid to do a job. And sometimes even when I'm not paid.

@ACraigL But your legs will be so smooth now.

@ACraigL
Shaving is not required if it's a weekend and esp if you have the flu.

I do like smooth legs tho.

@f00l @therealjrn My legs are naturally smooth, thank you very much.
That flu beard, tho. I was pretty sure the neighbors were ready to call the cops -- they keep seeing a deranged bearded homeless man in dirty sweatpants wandering the house at all hours.

@pooflady i love prime rib!

@goldenthorn
I think the tea drawer work and that lunch drink and the champagne and the dumb movie qualify you for extreme productivity under impossible circumstances. Congrats.

@baqui63
It's ok to get stuff done, so long as it's unproductive. Just make sure the "adults" would sigh and shake their heads if they knew.

@looseneck Is there a noticeable taste difference between home grown and store bought potatoes?

@looseneck I decided to plant only three tomato plants this year. I just don't have much time to garden. Anyway, I planted them on Friday just in time for this wonder rain we've been having the past few days. They are looking wonderful!

@looseneck
You just lost your Slacker badge.

@MrMark No difference except for they seem fresher and I get the smug satisfaction of saying "I grew them myself" :)

@Barney It's too early for Jersey Tomatoes. We have to wait until at least Mother's Day to plant them outside.

@f00l You didn't warn anybody that this was the plan for the weekend!

@looseneck
It wasn't my plan to waste the entire weekend either. I just didn't make myself quit farting around, and hence had a great weekend doing nothing, with a wee dash of guilt. All spontaneous.

Perhaps next weekend we can swap.

@luvche21
I am tired of not watching stuff because i keep forgetting i own it. Also need to claim a few Ultravuilet codes before they expire.

I found a mac/win/ios/android thing called My Movies which is pretty decent. Using an IOS device currently for entry of my boxes of unwatched stuff. The database has most English language stuff, except missing a lot of not little-known documentaries and Bollywood and the like. W a DVD or Blu-Ray you just scan the barcode. For cloud video you search. Really easy.

You can also use it to keep track of what you watched.

I would like to find something better - with a more complete database. Can you use IMDB for this? Anyone got alt suggestions?

The app is sure way better than not having a clue what i bought 4 months ago.

@f00l Ooh, that's a good idea. We don't own too many yet, but I think it would be helpful even for us.

What about things that it can't find? Can I create a record of my own? We have a bunch of Japanese films that are definitely not going to show up in the database or that don't have barcodes.

I had this same situation awhile back with all of my digital music - that's why I've been working really hard to rate each track, find album art, add extra genres, etc. The program I use (Mediamonkey) can create auto playlists off of anything I want. Say I only want to listen to big band music that I've given 3 stars or more to? It will create that playlist for me and update it every time I add music or change a rating or genre. It's awesome.

I was getting tired of forgetting about my favorite albums that I own. Only 8,043 tracks to organize left!

@luvche21
I guess i am hoping to find a better cloud video catalog, and import the data sometime in the future.

Till then i have a list of the items missing from the DB in Google Keep.

I wish IMDB would let users do this -even for a fee - cause they likely have the best DB. Perhaps they do, and i havent found it yet.

I am also working on Calibre (e-books and perhaps another mocked up library for audiobooks, perhaps a third one for hard copies. So i will know what i own.

Re mediamonkey - do you have to download your cloud library? Or can you leave it in the cloud and mediamonkey can still handle it?

@f00l It's a lot of content to keep track of! And nothing has really handled it very well yet. Yes, that would be awesome if IMDb could handle it. Maybe the idea just needs to be pitched to them? A few of these organizers talk about IMDb, but I'm not sure how well they utilize the data: http://www.instantfundas.com/2008/03/5-free-movie-organizers-for-managing.html

As for Mediamonkey, I assume you're talking about clouds like at iTunes/Amazon/Google Play? As far as I know, yes, you do need to download those libraries and store them locally. You can use it to set up media servers for your home though. Maybe that would do it for you?

@f00l @luvche21 My guess is that anyone who's not paying for IMDB's database (or anyone else's for that matter) is using one of two sources: https://www.themoviedb.org/ or http://thetvdb.com/.
Both let you sign up and add in missing stuff. An easy way to tell if your app/site/etc is using one of those DB's is to search on the sites for something specific, and see if the app has matching text entries.
I've contributed stuff to The Movie DB, and it's really cool to see your contributions show up in your media center.

@dashcloud
The My Movies app might use one of those DBs. There is a way to submit missing stuff, but only using a desktop, not a mobile app. I think you can also add "personal" listings, so that you can catalog your home vids. Or you can add something as a personal item even tho it's a commercial product, while you wait for the DB to catch up.

You can also add rentals, so you know what you watched that you will never buy. The app needs a notes section, or it has one i don't know how to use. Besides the normal categories (western, SF, action/adventure, romcom, DVD vs cloud vs Blu-Ray, HD, 4k) you can create you own categories and tags, searchable.

The company is a small Danish startup, but the app works great. Have not yet explored all it can do. Well-reviewed on ios/android appstores. I went ahead and paid. Now that i am going thru my content, am astonished at how much i own.

Now i would like to find similar for music that would spare me the need to download. Sounds unlikely.

Would like to find similar for books, agsin without downloading. Only i own thousands of Kindle books, many BN, a few Google Play, a few Itunes, and 1 from another bookstore (Books A Million?). I have found anything but Calibre so far. There are some academic-targeted footnote and reference apps and packages - those sound like more work than i wanna do.

Ah, the curse of laziness.

@f00l Is there an app that feeds off of Goodreads.com? They have a brilliant service for tracking your books and recommending stuff for you.

@dashcloud
I need to bring my Goodreads account back to life. I created one but never did much with it.

Can i make a catalog of the near 10k books i own there? Is it so much work i'd never bother? What i want is a cloud library.

@f00l The answer is probably, assuming either you bought the vast majority from Amazon and/or you have a list of your collection somewhere.. They allow you to import your Amazon purchase history, text files with your books in them, and importing from a public website with ISBNs on it. If you're a programmer, I'm sure the API lets you do all that and more.

@dashcloud
Thanks re Goodreads info. About the time i created my account, they were into the faction wars. Trying to understand the madness tired me, and i quit messing with it.

95%+ of my ebooks are from amazon.

Will they also auto-import your audible purchases? I have 3k of those.
[Cough, nutcase.]

@f00l @dashcloud I know somebody that swears by LibraryThing.com for their book cataloging, search, recommendation, & blog features. Supposedly it's more independent, and small bookstores & libraries prefer it (?)
You might want to check it out to compare it to Goodreads for your needs

@carl669 Grammy used to tell me that those are scout ants. They show up in spring looking for food and a new place for all of their friends to hang out.

@carl669
My sympathies re ants. Black ants or fire ants?

@f00l brown ants? no issues with fire ants (luckily)

@Barney - did Grammy also tell you how to nuke them without spraying potent chemicals all over the kitchen counter?

@carl669 Well, the best thing is to find out where they are coming in and plug it up. However, if you can't find it, fix up a spray bottle of soapy water and keep spraying them. Eventually, they will give up and go look for another place to invade. Good luck!

@carl669 I put Crazy Glue in a hole by the window where I thought my ants were getting in. They chewed right through it.

One middle of the night trip to the potty, I woke up to find black ants covering the brown bathtub. Good thing I'm blind without my glasses and couldn't really see. I'm glad the husband showers before I do :)

@carl669 More about using soapy water: I keep a bottle of soapy water handy as a bug spray for my garden. It's safe for both plants and humans and is a pretty good bug killer on most insects.

@carl669 A weak solution of orange oil and water kills those little bastards. Smells good and is non-toxic. The residue might keep them out if you spray the perimeter.

@bluebeatpete so, what do you use as the emulsifying agent?

@carl669 Shake it up and it turns cloudy. It stays mostly mixed, just shake before each use and your good. It will gum up the sprayer after a couple years of use. I keep a sprayer filled with it outside for the copious amounts of ants here in Texas. It's fun to watch them squirm

@bluebeatpete thanks! any certain ratio of water to oil you've found to be particularly effective?

@carl669 3-4 oz to a 32oz spray bottle

@TaRDy
Anything re video games gets slacking points. Prob still true if you're getting paid. I mean, gaming, ok? That's cool!

@f00l Paid? I don't get paid, I'm too lazy to setup a donation button because paypal was showing my real name we help others for fun on my stream. I tried helping one of our fellow mehtizens once.

@madamehardy
As long as you did it for joy, not cause it was on your to-do list, you get slacker points. I hear that for the dedicated, gardening is a bit zen.

@madamehardy Pruning roses: a never-ending, thankless, yet somehow satisfying task. I know they'll never grow at the retirement property in CO, so I'll enjoy them as much as I can 'til then.

@madamehardy Interesting; but the flowers shown for Zone 4 seem like pretty weak roses. Besides, I have other things on my retirement agenda