vacation sightings (again, and mostly positive)

[Mouse]

seriously, take a picture, it will last longer
this is actually a repeated story across all of rural Nevada (and a very few number of times in Reno). Every time we'd stop for gas or to get something to eat and we'd be, for lack of better terms, couple-y, people would stop and stare... seriously, I know rural Nevada is only slightly less isolated than rural Utah, but we surely can't be the first gay couple you've seen... move along... and if we truly are that much of an oddity, please, take a picture, frame it, put it over your mantle for all I care, just please stop staring.

I'd like to apologies even though its been near a decade sense i've been in nevada, I have a horrible reaction filter and whenever i see couples being cute together my reactions is to stop and go 'aawwwww' >.<
I make the exact same noise when i see wee ones, my mom thinks i'm weird and my friends find it hillarious.

[Juggler]

He'd save more electricity if he unplugged the lamps altogether. Anything plugged into a socket is still drawing electricity, whether it's turned on or not.

Please tell me you are being ironic.

[Andara Bledin]

I must be Queen (King?) Lesbian, then! I've not shaved my legs in about 25-30 years! I don't wear make-up, and I prefer wearing men's clothes as they fit better, are cheaper, and last longer than women's.

You, too?

Actually, I don't wear guy's clothes except for button-down shirts. And I've shaved more recently, too.

Please tell me you are being ironic.

Actually, in most cases these days, that's true.

Any device that is more than a simple cord to provide power will draw power on a constant basis.

It's suggested that if you have a bank of rechargers (such as for your cell phone, your DS, and your digital camera, to name a few), that you keep them all on a switchable power strip, and keep it switched off when not in active use, because all of those charging devices will leech power, even when the devices their desgined to charge aren't hooked up to them.

^-.-^

[lobo94]

If there's love there, then that's all that matters. If people have a problem with that, then that's their problem.

When I was a kid, people thought I was gay because I wasn't macho, athletic, and didn't show much interest in girls. To be fair, when I was a kid, I was a painfully shy nerd. No one seemed to notice I didn't show interest in boys. (They could have asked my mother, who would have denied it, and then invited the aforementioned knuckleheads to take a look at some of the literature I had in my closet or under the bed.)

Though I did learn how to own the fools. I basically would ask what proof they had that I was gay. Did they see me with a guy? Did they have pictures? When they said no, then I'd say something like, there's only one other way you could know now, isn't there?

The reactions were priceless.

[mharbourgirl]

The cutest couple I ever knew were the impossibly polite gentlemen I used to deliver pizza to, long, long time ago. I ended up being their personal delivery girl, because the other drivers were all young guys who happened to go to my church and they pretty much refused to deliver to this one house because they were a *horrified whisper* GAY couple!!!

I had hit a point in my life where I was seriously questioning everything I'd ever been told as 'fact', and this piqued my interest mightily. So I took the next order out, and I got to meet Jack and Kerry, who had been hitched for 10 years at that point (and you could tell, they were very married ). They used to argue over my tip... it usually ended up being $20-30, because they kept accusing each other of being cheap. I could hardly complain, could I? Oh, and Jack made absolutely divine Nanaimo bars, and that was my Christmas present 3 years in a row until I moved away. It never bothered me in the slightest that they were gay...they were people, good, warm, funny and for a while like older brothers to me. Generous to a fault, far more tolerant than most people I knew... what's not to like?

Besides, this was the era of painted-on jeans, for men and women, and dayum did those boys look good in pants.

[Nohbody]

Any device that is more than a simple cord to provide power will draw power on a constant basis.

Which is why I believe Juggler asked that, considering that the appliance that BookstoreEscapee mentioned was a regular lamp.

A lot of stuff does draw a trickle, for turning on quickly, but a regular incandescent (assumption on my part) lamp isn't on that list.

[Chromatix]

Idle power draw does vary with the quality of the device.

1) Anything with a plain old power switch wired into the cable, or the primary-side of the transformer, will draw zero when that switch is off. Period.

2) Wall-warts with a plain transformer can draw more waste power at idle than they supply to the device when in use. That's mostly true of the cheap generic ones from Taiwan, but those seem to come with things like DSL modems and (formerly) mobile phones. My DSL-modem power supply eats about 2 watts whether the modem is attached to it or not.

2b) The above also applies to TVs and the like which run the standby circuit from the main PSU or a cheap sub-PSU, and merely switch out the secondary-side circuits to the main unit.

3) Wall-warts with a switched-mode converter (these tend to be smaller and lighter for the same power rating) also tend to be much more efficient at idle. There's usually *some* leakage current, but it's not measured in whole watts any more.

3b) Computers have very large switched-mode PSUs inside which are very inefficient at low powers. Most, however, have a dedicated standby circuit in the PSU for when you turn it off. Don't get a PSU that is grossly overpowered for your machine - instead, spend the money on a good make at the right power rating.

4) Some new power supply designs claim to have zero or microwatt idle draws. This is a good trend, but they are not yet common, let alone ubiquitous. When Taiwan and PRC get hold of the blueprints, though, we might see more of them.