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The Positivity Thread aka "Today was a great day because....."

eizbaer said:
huh, see and I was afraid that was supposed to be an elaborate in-your-end-o! :p
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Well, it was until I changed "do" to "sharpen". ;)

eizbaer said:
IIRC the steel only helps to either straighten (if pushed flat from usage) or break (if freshly sanded) the burr that forms on the blade, it doesn't actually sand away any (meaningful) material.
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That's what I see when I use the steel, hence the question. I take off tiny amounts of material and the sharpening effect is as much to do with straightening the blade as it is with actual sharpening. So thanks for the idea for the brick, I'll probably have to pay the Kölner Kochhaus another visit... oh poor, dear me! :woot:

eizbaer said:
the more-expensive-but-still-aimed-at-amateurs kind of knives (think semi-pricy WMF, zwilling, wüsthof, whatever in the 60-100e range) are often made from rather hard steels (and aggresively marketed as such), which does make the sharpness of the blade last longer than with a softer steel, but also makes sharpening harder.
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They are from the long discontinued "gourmet line". Think "grand gourmet" but with black plastic handles. They've been serving me well for the twenty years since I bought the block with knives and the later additions were no less good. There's some stuff from other manufacturers , too, but the WMF ones do get the most use.
 
There is basically a glorified book report, ~8-10 pages, due today for my history class. It was an assignment we were told about right from the start of the class a couple of months ago and we could have started reading the books at any time. 3 weeks ago, the teacher said that the assignment was getting bumped up from May 7th to today.

Today, 2 hours before class, seemingly most of the class is in panic mode and planning on staging some sort of protest about not being able to finish. 'I didn't get my book in time" "my laptop isn't working", "I couldn't find the book for 10 weeks and never tried picking a different one" etc.

And as I was getting the rapid-fire Discord audio notifications from the panicking group, sounding like a 1980s Atari game, I was clicking "send" on the submission for my completed paper to the teacher. 😅

I had to write half of it from the toilet on my phone in Google Docs since that's where I spend half of my day due to my acute and chronic colitis, and reading a nasty coffee-stained copy of the book from my local library to read along with a bootleg copy of the audiobook played at 150% speed (also mostly done from the toilet), I think it turned out pretty good.
 
NooDle said:
3 months later, same deal.
Now I'm on 150€ and they're proposing 304€ because ... reasons?
Energy prices have gone down, my usage has stayed roughly the same (around1000 kWh/month pretty consistently)
Why are they doing this!
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Well it's happened.

Due to them being late / wrong with suggesting monthly installments, I now have an invoice for 1300€. Because there was a time where my monthly installments were comically low and my mileage / energy use was exceptionally high....

No really a "positivity" thing, but at least I've learned my lesson now and I'll closely monitor my usage and adjust my monthly installment myself and not let some stupid bot / machine do this for me.

I love automation and letting things take care of themselves, but then again this is exactly what this system is supposed to prevent?
 
I just received a reimbursement of 409,20 Euros from my electricity company. That said, that includes 129 Euros of reimbursements for 2022/23 because of the "Strompreisbremse". That was a program from the german government which capped the price per kWh to a certain amount, everything above that had to be reimbursed.

That means for last year I received a reimbursement of 280 Euros while I paid 603 Euros in total. A reimbursement of almost 50% is pretty nice, even though I practically lent 280 Euros to the electricity company within that year. Ah well...

That said, how the fuck did I almost halve my electricity usage (from 988 to 523 kWh)? I haven't really changed much from 2022/23 to 2023/24, all the lights are LED since 2020 I think, I haven't replaced an old fridge or something... :dunno:
 
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Laundry is in a common room in the basement where you have to pay separately, cooking is just on weekends since we have a very good canteen at work and I'm rarely working from home. In the morning and evening I only eat bread or muesli, I drink neither tea nor coffee so I don't boil water at all. The only thing which constantly draws electricity is the fridge, everything else is miniscule (a router and an alarm clock) or is switched on only when I'm home (PC with all the peripherals on a switchable power bar, lights).
 
That's... low. Very low.

My projection for the current invoicing year is at about 1500 kWh. Including four days per week of working from home, washing machine and hot water in the kitchen, but not the bathroom.
 
Eye-Q said:
Laundry is in a common room in the basement where you have to pay separately, cooking is just on weekends since we have a very good canteen at work and I'm rarely working from home. In the morning and evening I only eat bread or muesli, I drink neither tea nor coffee so I don't boil water at all. The only thing which constantly draws electricity is the fridge, everything else is miniscule (a router and an alarm clock) or is switched on only when I'm home (PC with all the peripherals on a switchable power bar, lights).
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That does explain a whole lot. The electricity company must hate you! 😂
 
calvinhobbes said:
That does explain a whole lot. The electricity company must hate you! 😂
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Or they actually love the fact that they have a long term customer with very low ambitions to switch supplier in the form of the building’s amenities 😉
I know we have an entire group of sales/key account people that exclusively target apartment building managers…
 
DanRoM said:
That's... low. Very low.

My projection for the current invoicing year is at about 1500 kWh. Including four days per week of working from home, washing machine and hot water in the kitchen, but not the bathroom.
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No that's ridiculously low. If we're talking yearly I'm almost at 10,000 kwh (yes that's not a typo). About 8,000 of those go to the car, but even then I don't think I can get it much lower.
House (not apartment) though, and 4 people living in it, which means tons of cooking, dishwashing, laundry, etc...
 
Well, If you break your figures down that accounts to about 500 kWh per person per year excluding the car which I flat out don't have...
 
Eye-Q said:
Well, If you break your figures down that accounts to about 500 kWh per person per year excluding the car which I flat out don't have...
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I was gonna say, perspective matters a lot here…
when I was in a similar living situation (full time job mostly without home office, joint washing machine, etc) I also managed ~500 kWh for a year. Actually 490, which was really annoying, because that disqualified me from my suppliers energy efficiency scheme (save 10% YoY and get 100€ bonus - which at 500 kWh yearly is completely ridiculous, so fair play in even setting the cut-off that low).

Nowadays… I actually don’t know yet 😉 we were at 2000 kWh a year in the old flat with two people and including hot water, which I thought was also alright.
 
You made me go look for our energy consumption...
We are at around 300kWh/month, but we don't have gas, so all heating and cooking is electric.
Not bad for 3 people, I guess?
 
So Queens of the Stone Age have a gig in Croatia this summer, and I really wanted to go, but I had nobody to go with, and I couldn't really justify the price of the tickets to myself, so I kinda gave up on the concert.

However, yesterday, I threw a birthday party, and I got the ticket as a present! I'm so stoked, that's the best birthday gift that I could've asked for.
 
I got to sleep in, my apartment is cleaned up and ready for a buddy to visit tomorrow!
 
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