That’s very interesting. I learned the history of my name through living descendants of my ancestors in Norway. (Two brothers immigrated to America, while a third brother stayed behind in Norway) They were the ones who told me Norway was conquered and ruled by Denmark for a while.

Perhaps it was a mistranslation between us; I had wondered how Norway was able to preserve their country’s heritage and language while being ruled by their neighbor.

My family is originally from Sauda in Norway. Norwegian tradition used to be that your family name was the name of your home. If you moved to a new farm, you adopted the name of that farm as your new family name. They don’t do this anymore, as it got really hard to track genealogical records with families changing names all the time.

When my ancestors immigrated to America, Norway was under Danish rule, as Denmark had conquered Norway at the time and was forcing Danish pronunciation on the Norwegian language. So my family name’s pronunciation of “saw-duh” became “sov-dae.”

When my ancestors got to America, no one could pronounce my family name correctly, so they changed the spelling to be more phonetic in the English language. And that’s how I got my current family name!

I mean, this is my public username. It takes a very quick Google search to dox me. Most of my name is in my username already.

In my 40+ years alive, I’ve never met anyone with my first name, although I know they exist; a quick Google search shows me at least a handful of people who have it.

My last name is an Americanized spelling of a Danish pronunciation of a Norwegian farm name. There are very few people who have my exact last name, and every one I’ve ever spoken to has been a descendant of my ancestral family who immigrated to America a century and a half ago.

Combine the two, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person on the planet with my specific name. I’ve never had a problem making accounts with my first.last name anywhere.

I read this as “fragrance” at first and thought maybe I had a particular smell that set babies and dogs at ease around me. Kinda like how pheromones can unconsciously draw people to one another.

For the record, this was while I was serving in the US military. I had a military doctor, and we were used to being yelled at when we made mistakes, so his reaction wasn’t too surprising to me. What shocked me was that he was so calm and quiet before that moment. I didn’t see it coming, and it took me a moment to process why I was suddenly being yelled at.

He turned a 1993 Fiat Panda into a 1993 Flat Panda.

A couple decades ago, I got a call from an ex-girlfriend who said she just tested positive for Chlamydia and recommended I get myself tested, just to be safe.

I went to my doctor, who had a bunch of questions about my sexual health before he administered the test. One of the questions he asked was, “do you use condoms?”

Of course, the answer was “yes,” but for some reason, my mouth defaulted to the word, “no.”

I was about to correct myself, but out of nowhere, the doctor screamed in my face, “Are you STUPID?!” I was so stunned by his sudden outburst, I froze on the spot.

He them proceeded to lecture me on proper sexual safety, half shouting at me. It was too late to fix the mistake; I felt like he’d think I was backpedaling to stay out of trouble at that point. I resigned myself to sitting through a lengthy, angry lecture.

By the way, I tested negative. My doctor was genuinely surprised. I was not.

Both. I don’t like bitter foods, and they’re both bitter to me.

Yuck! I hate olives. ;)

I posted this in another thread about a month ago, about why the official Midwest was composed of a bunch of eastern-leaning states:

[…] Our country was originally established on the east coast. Anything off the coastline was considered “west.” But knowing just how massive our country is now, we have the true west (left half of the country) and then the mid-west (anything not on the east coast, but not on the left half of the country).

Our basis for cardinal locations is centered around the concept of our nation slowly expanding “out west” from the east coast.

I grew up on 6 acres of land in the countryside. On one side, I had a neighbor with 5 acres of land and on the other side, a neighbor with 80+ acres. No neighborhood, no other homes, just a quiet road with a few scattered houses and farms. As a kid, I used to hate this place. It was too quiet, too isolated. No kids in the area to play with. I had to beg my parents to drive me into town to do anything.

Then I joined the military and spent 20 years traveling the globe, mostly living in cities the whole time. My life was very busy, very noisy, very crowded.

Now I’m a few years retired and living back in my childhood home. With a lifetime of perspective and experience, I’m so happy to have my chunk of land isolated from the world. If I need anything, I can either drive the 10+ minutes to town, or order a delivery to my house. I can blare music as loud as I want in my home, or I can spend the day in silence. No intrusive noises, and I don’t have to worry about being intrusive on others either. It’s my own personal paradise.

The first two are part of the reason I can’t sleep at nighttime. It’s finally quiet, no distractions, I can finally sit down and focus on that project, and… why’s the sun coming up?!

Fortunately I’m retired so I can sleep whenever I want. I typically sleep through the mornings and am awake all afternoon, evening, and night.

United States of America: We’re made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we’ve hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

Technically, we didn’t call them “states” until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were “colonies” before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

Google Maps is convenient, yes. But I’ve been trying to de-Google my life recently, and finding alternative map programs has been difficult.

I was using OsmAnd~ for a while, then switched to Organic Maps. Just recently, I’ve switched to CoMaps, since Organic Maps started including affiliate links and could potentially be harvesting user data to sell.

It’s always a struggle, trying to find free open-source software (FOSS) that provides a reliable service without collecting your information.

EDIT: As part of my de-Googling, I’ve been trying to find software through F-Droid instead of the Google Play store, since Google can potentially track my apps and their data usage through their store. CoMaps is available on F-Droid.

I don’t want to stop mid-season and have to wait for the conclusion a month or more later, so I just avoid the show until the full season is released.

I guarantee this update didn’t drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn’t turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. “Patching Tuesday” is an unofficial but well recognized “holiday” for IT folks. It’s not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don’t have to work through the weekend.

Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it’ll pop up on Tuesdays.

I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

That’s a young James T. Kirk in the opening of Star Trek (2009), the J.J. Abrams reboot film.