That would be a tragedy. There is no Chicago without the L. It’s part of the fabric of our civic identity. Here, you don’t say “downtown.” You say “the Loop,” because the buildings that form our skyline couldn’t have grown so tall without the circle of elevated railways beneath them. A great city doesn’t just deserve a great transit system — it needs one. But getting the L back to being a source of pride will mean tapping into the same ingenuity that made it a triumph of civic engineering in the first place.
The L is what makes visits to Chicago feel so nice for us— we don’t have to worry about how we’ll get somewhere. We just have to allow for enough time for us to get there. But now, in the criminal trump regime, the L stands to become an artifact of the past given politician’s lack of gonads to get it fixed and give it a future for everyone.
Minneapolis looks at Chicago in envy. Minneapolis took the L and strong boy mayor Frey guy means to have it keep taking the L.
No more overtime. For anyone! Corporate is coming down hard on anyone trying to make some of that delicious cash money. It wouldn’t be a problem for me except for the part where people keep dropping shifts and it’s usually our sorry ass that ends up covering for them. Last Wednesday we ended up working open to close (14 hour shift) on one hour’s notice. Then we worked another shift for the same again on one hour’s notice.
They’ve also slashed hours for everyone and now we don’t have a morning dishwasher. I’m sure that’s going to make the morning prep cooks real happy, having to wash their own dishes.
We also migrated from Teamworx to HotSchedules and… fucken’a; HotSchedules is a steaming pile of hot pigshit. The android app is straight out of 2012. But apparently the entire bloody company switched over so we’re kinda fucked.
bartendjerb
These bitches owe me money cos their fucken paychecks keep bouncing and honestly I’m just going to ask for the bar manager position so we can run the place ourselves and instill proper fear into the heart of the bartenders , lazy fuckers that they are.
Personal
Gathering moss
Working doubles at mgbarJerb is hard and we’re going to start exercising if we’re going to keep doing them. With our bike in the shop we’ve been more or less… stationary and sleeping on the couch a lot and it’s got to stop.
Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems but No Money is The Problem
Going out with coworkers is stupid expensive and now we know why they’re always broke and asking me to lend them money. Once we have our bike back we won’t really have a reason to go with them cos… we’ll be riding our bike home, which is healthy enough on its own. So that ought to help with the spending.
We’re also almost done paying down our credit card debt! We consciously elected to have a low credit limit but we were carrying around for a few months. As of right now it’s down to $200 USD!
Bad pictures galore
We’ll be going to a whole bunch of shows in the next few weeks. We picked up a Canon PowerShot S100 and once again are taking pictures since it’s not cold anymore and we can actually use a camera. Sometimes we do forget it at work and a couple of people have used it to take candids. Still trying to figure out how to share them without mixing our IRL/online personas but we think we’ve figured it out. This has meant we’ve fired up digiKam once again since most open source picture management tools out there cannot compare to the quick and polished experience Picasa gave us. digiKam is a fucken panamax-class ship compared to the sloop Picasa was.
Can’t even run Picasa properly anymore on Win10 and a lot of the installers I’ve found are trojanized garbage. One can only hope google open-sources it when they’re broken up.
Right, the camera was $200. It’s from fucken 2016??? I thought of picking up a Sony RX100 M VII and they’re fucken $1500??? Influencers fucking shit up for the rest of us and the fucken tariffs whiplash isn’t going to make it better.
Anyway, we’ll be uploading them to Flickr so that’ll be nice. We’d use Flickr a lot more if the fucken uploader worked— currently fighting their support cos I don’t think they’re human and they keep saying they are.
Politics
My coworkers keep bitching about things but sure get real quiet when we ask “did you vote”.
Bartenders are riled up cos people got their schedules rearranged so we have more people on the busy times and less people on the slow times. Servers are riled up cos their hours got cut consistently cos people are lazy and leaving sidework undone. Hosts are riled up cos they’re told to communicate with bar and floor but refuse to do so. Kitchen is riled up cos executive chef sucks. Management is riled up cos we’re doing really bad on our cocktailing service and corporate is coming down hard on us because of it. I’m not riled up anymore after getting one too many talking-tos from management. We’re just annoyed people don’t want to work as a team, then complain we’re not making enough money for the job to be worth their time.
This job is literally the best-paying job I have ever had in the past ten years, including my technology jobs! I’m just surprised how most everyone treats our guests like trash, then expect those same guests to tip well.
And yeah we’re kinda done with the bad attitude. Now people get the non-committal sardonic version of ourselves.
bartendjerb
We’ve been having some issues with stocking since “floor manager quit” since we have to 1. figure out what it is we need to order then 2. Text bar manager the order that he then 3. Texts to the kitchen manager to go buy at various restaurant supply stores around town but 4. Owner gives only enough money for the kitchen guy to purchase stuff with so it’s often the bar that comes up short.
This was a really sore point over Saint Patrick’s day weekend and this lasts weekend. Bar ran out of pretty much everything and we couldn’t even make more because there was nothing to make it with.
Yesterday, when checking out of raw material stocks, we could tell someone was unhappy as we did have enough citrus juice to actually make everything we needed, for a change. Now if only they actually bought stuff we’ve been asking for months, like demerara sugar.
Between both jobs, there’s plenty of vitriol to go around.
Personal
My liver is kinda happy about it though. Same for my wallet.
One of my preferred watering spots, Iron Door Pub, shut its doors this past Sunday.
I’ve been in Minneapolis service industry for ten years.Tonight is the first time a bartender told me “I got your tab”
Invited all of our coworkers to come hang out. None did. Fuck’em, last time I make an effort to socialise with them. If they want us to hangout with them we’ll just have a drink at the closest bar that’s also on the block, then going home.
Who needs sleep?
Current sleep schedule is all over the place and we’re getting tired of it. We’re thinking of rearranging our bedroom and putting up blackout curtains but we’ll need to figure out how to attach them properly to the wall without risking our rent deposit.
A more insane alternative is to move to another apartment in the same building, which would help with porch pirates.
Weather be crazy yo
In Spanish we say “Febrero loco, Marzo otro poco“. We go from blizzards to late spring warmth back to freezing then some rain and… we know global warming is real cos the weather in these latitudes doesn’t know what it wants to do anymore. This is kicking my ass and making me fall asleep early and waking up in the middle of the night and then we can’t fall back asleep.
I just want to be able to fall asleep in my building’s back courtyard and feel warm.
Government or the lack thereof
There’s just so much. Every day a new chaos. Social Security? Gutted. Department of Education? Not anymore. Secret military ops? Guess again. Meanwhile Democrats are best described by The Onion:
Democrats Huddle To Decide How Best To Let Massive Republican Fuck-Up Slip Through Fingers
In Latin America they say “A disfrutar lo votado” (“Enjoy what you voted for”) but even if the criminal trump regime were to kill all the cruel idiots who voted for the orange cruel idiot we still have to pick up the pieces.
When it happened a third time, I switched into full “research and destroy the problem” mode. One of my Ars colleagues commiserated with me, writing, “This kind of powerful-annoying stuff is just so common. I swear at least once every few months, some shortcut or whatever just stops working, and sometimes, after a week or so, it starts working again. No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives].”
Ugh, it’s been a fucken hell of a month. Literally the first day of February and no one wants anymore of what this year has in store.
Work
mgbarJerb is… Consistent in its chaotic, disorganised, environment. It’s one of the reasons why we’re actively shopping for a car, even though the orange trump is about to start a trade war ( 2025-02-02_02:36 : has started. We started this post six hours ago.) with Mexico and Canada. I need to be there quickly whenever someone calls out which happens at least once a week. We spend way too much on rideshares and that’s money that should go towards a car payment.
Got written up for bad attitude. Some of that is deserved, some isn’t. But co-workers who are lazy fuckers are a-okay so fuck them and fuck the corpos who like it that way.
bartendJerb: The “floor manager” quit. She was the one who made syrups and purchased some stuff. So now we have no one to do those things. They (as in the current bar manager, and the owner) want me to do it but I will need a car to schlep all the things around. Doing it on my bike is too onerous a task, nevermind the time it will take.
Personal
My personal life is basically non-existent outside of having a couple drinks at various bars around town, after work. Work is life these days. The hangovers too but we are making an effort to keep them to a minimum, like Ernie. She’s up for a James Beard award as a professional oyster shucker. We should learn from her.
As I need to buy a car, we are shopping around and we know we want a Toyota RAV4 or a Honda CR-V. The purchase needs to be done before the economy crashes but we’re extremely leery of making a purchase of such magnitude when the economy is most certainly about to be tossed into a latrine. See what the muskrat is doing at the US Treasury department. Fucken piece of shit Nazi. Fuck his dad and his mom too.
Had a spot of seasonal depression but I think we’re past it. We hope. We’re pretty tired as we type this on our phone at the bar. (Still tired at home on the computer).
Alertness
ICE raids all over the country. ICE office in Saint Paul : they want 75 arrests a day, with increases coming down the pike. Fuck ICE and if you have someone working there, fuck you, fuck your mom, fuck your dad, fuck your grandparents, fuck your great-grandparents, and all of their fucken cows.
They don’t care whether you’re a citizen or not. A resident or not. If you en’t Caucasian you en’t staying.
So that’s another reason to not take the bus and opt for personal transportation.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
This post comes via the WP classic editor on mobile. It is 2025 in the year of the Lard and fucken WordPress still doesn’t have a decent mobile editor. Automattic has sucked as stewards of WordPress for a long time and it shows. Also fuck Matt Mullenweg, prissy bitch.
Positions
This here blog post is us being pro-union (even if most of the bosses are fucken idiots), pro-labor, pro-lgbtq. You don’t like it? The ❌ button should be on your top-right window corner, unless you’re using a corpo app in which case you’re fucked, your family is fucked and fuck you too.
The saddest thing we have realized about our drinking habits is… No one will miss us, other than the money. We could happily enslave ourselves to alcohol at home and no one would know.
Restaurant people around me keep talking about hospitality and environments and guests and and and.
We now agree with Boomers that people don’t want to work anymore. We would like to have a day off sometime? Our laundry is piling up something massive.
Personal
We’re shopping for a car. We don’t like it, but the abuse our knees are taking at work makes riding bike year-long unfeasible. Plus… there’s a couple of shows that are out of the Twin Cities we would like to attend. Having a car would make it much easier. In the meantime… we will bus to work, we will ride our bike back home.
Learning
We learned people are lazy and you can’t expect yourself out of them. Also learned we need to be the one training people at mgbarJerb, lest they become lazy like the others, so we can maybe expect something of ourselves within them.
All other learning is more or less at a standstill. We wish it weren’t so.
Intersections
We’ve now learned why bartenders are usually broke. They spend money almost as fast as they make money. This cannot, will not, be our way. We know Hunger and we know she’s always around.
A few months ago due to my own laziness we ended up losing my main ZFS storage array. One of the things lost was my Nextcloud VM, which used a zvol as its main storage space. The files themselves were easily recoverable as we had full copies on three separate machines but we personally use Nextcloud Tasks, and as it turns out there’s no easy way to backup your data from the server itself.
Cue much banging head against keyboard. By sheer chance and an offhand reddit comment leading to a github comment we were able to find a workaround via DAVx and Tasks.org, the software we already were using to sync our calendar and tasks (CalDAV) to our android device.
The issue is that locally the app has a record of the object existing on the server, but when it queries the server the object is no longer there. This indicates that the object was deleted, so Tasks deletes the local copy.
When you restore from a backup you’re restoring the same task that thinks the object exists on the server. When it queries the server again the object is still missing, so the local copy gets deleted again.
What you can do is put your phone in airplane mode, load your backup file, then use long press + multi-select to move all of your data to local lists. Then you can turn off airplane mode, let it sync once (not sure if this is necessary), then move all of your data from the local lists back to the caldav server
edit: tasks doesn’t support exporting to ics, but this is something I would like to support in the future abaker commented on Feb 16
This gave us a path forward in restoring five years worth of tasks, as we wanted to keep eveything including old archived tasks instead of having to start over. The process is somewhat involved.
DAVx
Disable synchronization for all involved accounts. In my case there were two CalDAV accounts, one for the failed NC server and another for the newly provisioned NC server. Then put your phone in airplane mode just to guarantee there is no communication between your device and the server.
If this gets messed up there is a fair chance everything is lost and we don’t want that, now do we.
Tasks.Org
☰ → Settings → Backups → Backup Now. Make sure it’s a folder the OS can access without additional permissions. The default folder is hidden to all apps by default and the only way to get to it is connecting the device to a computer cos Google hates you.
☰ , scroll down to the “Local lists”. Create as many lists as you need to restore to NC.
Open the original task list, tap bottom-right ⋮ → Enable “Show completed”. If you don’t do this you’ll only be backing current uncompleted tasks!
Tap upper-right ⋮ → Select all
Tap the list icon , tap the local list you want to move all of these tasks to.
Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5, for as many lists as you have.
At this point all of your tasks live on your device. Strongly recommend creating another tasks.org backup and immediately copying it to another device just in case your device dies. If you have pets you know how quickly this can happen.
Nextcloud
Create lists to match the local lists on your device (if they haven’t been created already)
DAVx
Disable airplane mode and delete the account for the failed NC server. If you have not added the account for the new NC server, you can do so now (or enable sync for it at this point)
Tasks.Org
Before proceeding, make sure the lists from the new NC server show up in the list manager and your backup is copied off device. Now we basically do the reverse of earlier
☰ , scroll down to the “Local lists”.
Open the a local task list, tap bottom-right ⋮ → Enable “Show completed” (if it isn’t already).
Tap upper-right ⋮ → Select all
Tap the list icon , tap the NC list you want to move all of these tasks to.
Repeat steps 3, 4, 5 as required.
☰ → Settings → Backups → Backup Now.
This backup will contain the tasks as connected to the NC account with its lists and should start synchronizing up to Nextcloud. You can also sync manually in DAVx.
We hope this helps someone in the future other than myself, cos it certainly was a total pain in the ass. We originally tried messing with the raw JSON making up the CalDAV objects but due to the way the protocol works going this route failed. Both Nextcloud and tasks.org have exporting data to ICS on the roadmap but it’ll take a while to get implemented.
Better yet, make sure you have replacement hardware for whatever hardware fails, and attend to those failures promptly.
from Kurt’s diary: “I crossed the border over to Tijuana for the day to eat a cesar salad and buy leche Jersey for Francis Bean and Lourdes chips for Courtney. On my way back I stopped by at FONAPAS to see an exhibition and walked over to Plaza Río to Dorian’s to buy a shirt” - April 1st, 1993
i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter
the result is this garbage
I’m driving myself up the wall because I swear I can hear the vocal line but I don’t know how that could be if it was truly converted to MIDI. Unless you can replicate speech sounds entirely with modulated MIDI notes, in which case I’m actually impressed with this tire fire of an MP3.
the holiday season is almost upon us and I’d like to bring back this absolute fucking monstrosity of an audio file
, tap the local list you want to move all of these tasks to.
, tap the local list you want to move all of these tasks to.
