Kitchen stuff

Comments

While cooking dinner tonight I got a surprising electrical shock off of the handle of one of my pots, which was sitting on a burner which was on but was weirdly not getting hot. So, there’s clearly some awful short circuit in my stove. So it’s time to replace that.

As usual I’ve been wanting an induction stove anyway, but I was hoping to hold off until I could properly redo my kitchen. I sort of had the idea that I’d be reconfiguring it to have a built-in oven and a smaller cooktop in order to have more prep space, since my kitchen is pretty tiny. But I guess it isn’t the worst thing to upgrade the stove before everything else, right?

More importantly, I was hoping to hold off until my condo sold and I had, y'know, plenty of money for this. All the induction ranges I’m interested in cost considerably more than I feel comfortable paying right now. Although there’s one Samsung model that I like and is fairly affordable, but also it has about a 6-week wait right now.

It seems like it’s only one burner that’s shorting out, but that’s one too many for my comfort.

I’m sure I could tear the stove down and find where the electrical fault is, but, jeeze, I’m not all that interested in messing with 240V stuff.

Update: Home Depot had the Samsung in stock and ready for delivery/installation August 10, so I just went ahead and ordered it. Ugh.

Update 2: Oh right August 10 is a busy day for me, I should see if I can reschedule it to the 11th

Update 3: It is rescheduled, yay. Home Depot works, sometimes.

An open letter to the .us domain registrar

Comments

I attempted to send this message to the .us registrar’s contact form but they kept on throwing up unreasonable, hidden barriers; it required a full first name that’s at least four letters long (sucks to have a name like “Jay” I guess) and “must only contain alphabets” (i.e. no punctuation or spaces, sucks for anyone with apostrophes) and the text input must be under 500 characters, with no indication of how many characters you’ve written.

So, I’ve submitted a very edited-down version, but am reproducing my letter in full here:

Hi, I have a number of domain names registered under several different TLDs. Most of them allow anonymous proxy registrations, with the sole exception of .us.

The lack of proxy registration causes me to get quite a lot of unsolicited calls, violations to my privacy, and attempted scams from bad actors who are all making use of the WHOIS database.

When will .us allow anonymous/proxy registrations, as is standard for pretty much every other TLD?

The current policy is especially problematic for marginalized people who are subject to protracted abuse, harassment, and threats of violence, and this makes .us unsafe for use for all but the most privileged of people.

I absolutely implore you to revisit this regressive, unfair, and downright dangerous policy that does nothing to actually improve the supposed security of the .us registration database.

Checking in

Comments

Seattle has long been a powder keg, ready to explode. The last few days, I’m pretty sure a fuse has been smoldering.

I am fine, and I am safe. I live right next to where a lot of the action is taking place, and it’s been pretty surreal. Friday night there were riots within a couple blocks from me; I didn’t hear them very much, but the onslaught of sirens and riot-suppressing fire (rubber bullets and tear gas) were quite hard to ignore.

Saturday after the sudden curfew was enacted, things got eerily quiet. Later in the evening I heard more gunfire. Some of my neighbors saw people breaking into and looting the drug store next door, and called the police on them. I haven’t dared to go outside to look myself.

Read more…