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[Truean]

God damn it Dad, and people in general....

Generally, people want a quick easy answer simple result as a "yes" or "no."

That's not how the world works and they don't like it, so they assume I'm stupid/not understanding the question/they have to ask again.

Specifically, Dad wants to return an auto part he bought. I call the phone number and get "It's all automated now, nobody here can help you, but all you have to do is go on the website...." Translation, "we don't wanna pay somebody to do this right so we're shoving you off on the internet; good luck you poor bastard, because we don't wanna pay for the return and give you your money back."

Dad, just like a lot of people only are interested in the result: "Well can we return it or not?"

This heavily demands a "Yes" or "No" answer. Guess what, I'm aware of what you want and you're not getting it in that form. I don't have a definite answer right now and it doesn't matter how many times you ask the question or how you ask it. You're not currently getting a "Yes" or "No" because there's a roadblock to that, and I'm telling you simply what it is and how to best deal with it. Your wanting a simple answer doesn't make it possible to give one.

Instead of yes or no, the answer is "There's this additional step we need to take."

[Sign] Story of my life. Don't yell at me for the river having rapids, if you want me to get you through them.... I didn't put them there.

[Valid_Dark]

I just got a call from a phisher / scammer.  He said he worked for microsoft, and said there were many viruses on my computer and it was sending an error to his department, and wanted to walk me through fixing it.

-here I was a little suspicious-

So he has me pull up computer manager, and look at event logs,
The event logs is filled with segmentation faults / crashes from Dwarf Fortress and from programs I had made in C++ that had crashed.
He tries to tell me there are all viruses, even when I tell him they aren't.  He says to press delete to try deleting them from the Log, I inform him it didn't work, so he says to right click and read the options.  There isn't a delete option.
"Oh, there isn't a delete option? this is bad, those are strong viruses that aren't letting you delete them"

....yeah, ok buddy, sure they are.

-at this point I didn't believe him at all anymore, but I don't hang up on him, I wanted to see where he was going with this-

"Please pull up internet explorer, and go to TeamViewer.com and install that program"

*click* hung up on him right there.  He was trying to get me to install a remote access program,

sad part is, that probably works on a lot of people.

[DeKaFu]

Hah, we get those all the time.

I usually start by asking which version of Windows the computer sending the error is using.

They usually guess 7 or 8, but all the computers in this house run XP.

"Good guess." *hang up*

[Tellemurius]

I have a Virtual Machine built just for them.

[SealyStar]

Even today I've heard the stereotype of asian folks being "good at math" pretty regularly.

Just saying, foreign orientals: Damn good at maths when they go to school, excluding mainland and south / southeast where besides Singapore it's meh

Yeah, there is some truth to the "Asian math genius" stereotype, though it's obviously far from universal. And it's not an inborn characteristic, just that Asian and Asian-diaspora culture tends to place a greater emphasis on math education compared with the more humanities-driven "traditional Western education".

[Moghjubar]

I have a Virtual Machine built just for them.

Is it... a shock box?  Please tell me it is.

TeamViewer remote in, welcome to pain.

[MagmaMcFry]

So, I've been fucking around with Voronoi diagrams.

One thing I did was fudging with the distance calculations, so points have a multiplier for the distance. So basically some points are "stronger" and have more pixels assigned to them than is usual for the Voronoi diagrams.

What I did not realize before today, is that it makes perfect circles.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have no idea why it does this. I expected some kind of round thing yes, perhaps some oddly shaped ovals, but its a perfect goddamn circle. I feel like circles are haunting me or something. This isn't the first time circles have randomly popped up while screwing around.

They're called Apollonian circles (the ones colored blue on Wikipedia), look them up.

[kaenneth]

They are installing CURVED SLOT HELICAL FLOW DIFFUSER CORE modules at work today.

Not as cool (no pun intended) as they sound. But does make me want to play some Portal/2

[MagmaMcFry]

What's a CURVED SLOT HELICAL FLOW DIFFUSER CORE?

[EnigmaticHat]

Optional addendum to the above: where do you work?

[Sirus]

I've never claimed to be much of an entomologist, but I was always under the impression that most praying mantises were green.

Look what I found today (linked because huge image)
It's definitely a mantis, and a very aggressive one at that.

[Frumple]

Albino, maybe? I think that can happen to bugs. Something similar, anyway.

[BlackFlyme]

The press screwed up again. Nothing new there. Something must have happened to the die, as it stopped cutting the tattoos and trimming the trim.

So we had to do it the normal way, printing full sheets and cutting them at the guillotine instead of having them come out the press pre-cut.

And yet somehow more got done today than in the past week. Maybe this job will get out on time after all.

[DeKaFu]

I've never claimed to be much of an entomologist, but I was always under the impression that most praying mantises were green.

Look what I found today (linked because huge image)
It's definitely a mantis, and a very aggressive one at that.

Well, there's a lot of praying mantises that are flower mimics of various colours. Try googling "flower praying mantis" for some neat pictures.

Eye-searingly neon pink grasshoppers are also a thing that happens in nature. Just regular garden-variety grasshoppers with a rare colour morph. They're like the real-world equivilent of shiny Pokémon.

[Frumple]

... are they worth more or less when sold as food and/or fish bait? Do fish go after streetcorner grasshoppers more readily than normal ones?