According to the write-up the house was built in 1859 but the Egyptian suite was painted by Mike Lewis, who appears to be an artist based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Looking him up I found this story from CBC when it was on the market in 2020 and it seems it was commissioned by the then-owner, a historian and filmmaker.

Good question. That’s for the therapist to decide. With that said it’s never just one thing. It could have been a whole series of factors that let to the diagnosis. If I meet that psychologist again I’ll ask him.

I was really more just curious what lead you to see a psychologist in the first place. My understanding is that’s rare for people with the condition. With the diagnosis helping you, it’s almost like you had a lucky break to be seeing a professional that most people with NPD don’t get.

If you don’t mind me asking why was he in court?

I probably can’t go too much into specifics, but that last time was primarily because he’d stopped paying child support. He was also trying to change the visitation agreement to be larger chunks but less frequent. He hadn’t been making use of the time he already had, though, so that wasn’t going to happen, and the judge actually reduced it while requiring all visitation to be in a public place or using the court’s supervised visitation program.

If he does have NPD, there might be other factors in play as well. Odds are we’ll never really know what’s going on there. We just have to try to make sure whatever happens, things stay as healthy as possible for the kiddo.

Didn’t Netflix try a live event earlier this year that also couldn’t handle the number of viewers?

Broadcasting and the Internet work in fundamentally different ways. With Broadcasting a transmitter sends radio waves out into the world (and beyond). It does not care how many receivers there are; there could be millions or there could be none—literally broadcasting into the void. There is a bit of a disconnect between the transmitter and the receiver. The transmitter doesn’t need to know anything about the receiver; its transmission is ultimately independent of the receiver. The receiver can tune in or not, much like a boat raising its sails to catch a passing wind. One receiver generally will not impact another, just as many boats can sail on the same wind.

This is a really efficient way to get a lot of identical data to many people at once. Especially when we switched to digital television this became easily apparent. ATSC 1.0, the standard the US switched to about 15 years ago, was able to carry about 19.3 mbps of data over a normal TV channel. Because the system was designed in the 1990s this is MPEG-2 video (the same as used on DVDs), but it still works pretty well for 1080i or 720p. In fact as encoders improved we could usually fit two HD streams in there at 6-8 mbps that looked pretty decent and still have room for one or two more SD streams.

At the same time we were able to pretty significantly reduce the power of the transmitters. I think the last station I worked at was something like 125 kilowatts out of the transmitter in the analog days but with the switch to digital we were at 28 or 40 kilowatts (it’s been about a decade since I left television engineering). In the analog days a huge percentage of the power usage was to keep an adequate picture at the very fringes of our broadcast license, which effectively meant an increasingly crummy picture was pushed well beyond our license area (this was factored into how the system was designed). With digital, you either get enough of a signal to produce the picture or you don’t; there’s not really an in-between (other than a picture that keeps freezing up). This means a weaker signal far away from the transmitter that would produce a marginal signal in the analog days can produce a picture that looks just as good as it does much closer to the transmitter with a stronger signal.

All of this means that with just 19.3 mbps of data coming from the transmitter, potentially millions of people can see the same video in real-time. Satellite is basically the same thing except instead of an antenna on top of a tower that’s 3,000 feet tall and can cover an area maybe 150-200 miles in diameter, the antenna is placed 22,000 miles high and can cover an entire continent. Cable works pretty similar except instead of transmitting through the air, the coaxial cable carries the entire spectrum protected from outside interference. It pushes all the signals out of its “transmitter” (called the head end) down a cable and then splits that cable and amplifies the signal (and then splits and amplifies again and again and again) as needed until it reaches all the customers. There can be some complications with digital cable, but that’s the basic concept.

In contrast, the Internet very much designed for one-to-one communication. This works fine for everyday communication, but if you have something where a lot of people want to see the same thing, each of those people have to make their own connection to the server. Even if the video stream is only 5 mbps, if 100 different people want that same stream at the same time, you now need 500 mbps of bandwidth to handle all those connections. You also need a computer that can handle all those connections simultaneously. If you have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to stream the same video at once you can see how much of a problem this becomes. It’s one thing if the video is already recorded, like a movie, you can just distribute it to many servers in advance. But if it’s a live event that’s ultimately coming from one source you have to set up multiple servers to connect to the source and then forward that, perhaps to other servers that will forward to other servers that forward to other servers until you have enough servers and bandwidth for the end customers to connect to. If you have a million people trying to watch your 5 mbps video one might think you need 5 million mbps of bandwidth, but actually you need even more to connect all your servers back to the source, plus many servers. This is a hugely intensive usage of resources. Streaming companies will try to setup in advance for the number of viewers they expect, but if they guess too low they’ll have to scramble to increase capacity. I suspect this is more challenging for companies like Netflix that rarely do live video as opposed to companies that do it every day like YouTube or Twitch.

This isn’t even getting into complexities like TCP vs UDP for the protocol. At the end of the day, the way the Internet is designed each client needs to be sent their own personal stream of data. It just can’t compete with the efficiency of everybody sharing the same stream of data that comes from broadcasting. In that sense, for big, shared experiences, it’s kind of a shame that broadcasting is dwindling away. How many people do you know who still can get a TV signal from an antenna or cable/satellite?

They look very unhappy about it!

Has being diagnosed helped you?

If you don’t mind sharing, what lead to the diagnosis?

For a small background: psychologists who have worked with my stepdaughter have expressed that her bio-dad (my wife’s ex-husband) has displayed some traits that could indicate NPD, but of course he would have to be formally evaluated for a diagnosis and that’s difficult to get someone with the disorder to do. The last time they were in court the judge was flabbergasted by his behavior and during the judgment expressed that he was close to ordering a mental evaluation, which I think is the only way we would ever know for sure. It’s pretty obvious that if he has the disorder then it has caused many negative impacts for him, but it is also hard to feel any sympathy towards him when I see how much harm he has done to two of the people I care about the most. It might be hard to accept if he ever was diagnosed and some treatment actually helped to counter the destructive behaviors simply because of how much damage was already done.

Yes, your OpenStreetMap username. Does not need to be something truly related to you, in fact since most of your edits are likely to be near where you live or work I would strongly recommend they not be something related to you or any usernames you would normally use online.

Fourth grade? I don’t think I really thought about my life 30 years later. Maybe finding out I have ADHD; I’m not hyperactive so not the kind really diagnosed in kids.

That was just cloning

I meant more like cinema-quality, but this is magnificent

I can relate to a lot of this! I’m 41 and just got diagnosed this year. It explains a lot of my life! I started medication this spring with Concerta and it helped but then I built up a tolerance to it and it stopped working. After spending months trying different meds I’m getting help with Focalin XR, but I’m terrified I’ll build up a tolerance to it as well so I’m trying to get as much done on a certification as I can while it’s working. Have meds helped you?

It did help me learn to write my own code once I saw what was happening, though

We need some high quality audio gear recording that; it makes great sound effects!

Any significant reason to make an account with Mastodon vs. Misskey (or I seem to remember the latter having several forks?)?

Saving this to watch later; I love that game!

Wait, just so I’m understanding, the dock works with the LG TV if you connect your laptop or Surface Pro, but not your Steam Deck? If so, it sounds like there’s either a setting on your Steam Deck that needs to be changed or the Deck itself is faulty.

Does the Deck work with other HDMI monitors?

That’s insane! I pay a flat US$0.11/kWh, and if I wanted to go peak/off-peak it would be $0.15/0.06!

My go-to hot tea is Twining’s Irish Breakfast, stronger flavor than your typical English Breakfast. I prefer it with half-and-half and sugar, but can go with full cream or milk depending on what’s available.

As a southerner, I also like sweet iced tea (“sweet tea”) but was shocked to find what they serve at Chipotle is my favorite. It turns out the tea they use (S&D iced tea blend) comes from a provider in Concord, NC (just outside Charlotte) and they used to sell it for people to brew at home as well, but the company was bought out and don’t anymore. After some trial and error I discovered the secret was to put about half as much sugar in as I normally would. The tea blend itself is excellent, though, much better than you find in grocery stores.

It’s really worth playing and often available for a very reasonable price. I don’t think it’s a genre that ever seemed like something that would appeal to me but I’ve found it very enjoyable.

$0.51/kWh?! Where on earth is that?!