What did you do NICE for someone today?

[Pauly Walnuts]

Traveling home from our granddaughters wedding and stopped at a hotel.

Young lady at the front desk, had an obvious affliction, the nature of which I knew not. She looked like she'd had a stroke. One side of her face drooped, and an arm didn't seem to cooperate well.

I asked her what her super power was. She claimed she didn't have one.

I told her I doubted that. I said, it appears you have some affliction you've been battling, and it appears to me, you're winning. Looks like your head is held high, you obviously take pride in your work, you seem to genuinely enjoy your job and life... Is that not super? Ask me, that's powerful.

I think your super power is your inspiration to others.

And I was happy to get a hug and a few tears on my shoulder.

She then told me she's been battling brain cancer for 30 years and had had 12 operations. She said every time she woke up, she considers it a blessing.

I told her I felt the same every time I woke up and there were no fires around me. She laughed, we laughed, I told her a couple short jokes... And felt good!

 

[Pauly Walnuts]

Where the hell have I been you might ask?

Well, I got this coffee bean roaster, see… Made in China. I’ve seen some poorly written Chinese documents in my very short life, but this one takes the cake.

Watching a couple youtube videos helped me get a couple decent batches, but there’s a manual mode I want to use to get more control of the darkness of the roasts.

Also, beans from around the world require different roasting methods for different flavors and profiles. With this, the manual is totally useless. They “TRY” to explain and they do in fact have a table that describes the concepts well, but the language used to describe its use is less that worthless.

BUT… They use WhatsApp for support. They come on around 8:00 pm. Broken English? Naw, dude. This is some busted ass shit you’ll find in an auto salvation yard. Told the gal to send her chat’s in Chinese.

She did, I used google translate, replied in Chinese, and got it “mostly” figured out. I suggested she send me a copy of the manual in Chinese so I could see if I could translate it. 15 pages. STILL took me 6 full days to understand what the hell they were saying.

They had things in the wrong order in their own manual. Like you should first preheat the machine, cool the beans, drop the beans into a collection pan, then roast them!

This is how they talk to each other in their own language? No wonder they don’t understand fair trade.

I sent my translated manual, and I translated the whole thing in Chinese using google translate as well. Wanna bet they're even more confused?

Told them they owe me a 21-year-old bottle of single malt scotch.

 

[Pauly Walnuts]

Got a Raspberry pi 5 for my genius great grand son for Christmas. 8 years old. Might be 9. Who remembers these things?

We're talking about a kid that's teaching himself programming via visual studio C++. On his computer he built. NO help from Grumpa! Did his own research. Mother board, CPU, RAM, NVME SSD drive and video card...etc. It's even stronger that the one I built for myself! (In my defense, it's a couple years old.)

What's a raspberry pi 5? Well, it's the 5th generation of the Pi. It's about the size of a credit card. Comes with 2 USB ports for, among other things a keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI port for a 4K monitor!

You could use it as a wicked fast web server, writing apps, writing programming code or a controller for a robotic vacuum cleaner. A remote control car. The only limitations are imagination!

This kid is going to flip his lid!