Reeading on Easter Morning

[yogi]

My motherboard from Taiwan was a surprise. I ordered it from a pretty big custom computer house in Ohio (I think). They specialize in building computers to your specifications, but they also will sell individual components. When I was looking for sources of material to build this tower I had a hard time finding anyone who had the motherboard for sale. I didn't realize it at the time but this ASUS motherboard was at it's end of life and nobody was restocking it. When this place in Ohio accepted my order, I was overjoyed. However, it took an exceptionally long time to receive the motherboard. After about a month I contacted the company and asked them what's up. I want my mobo, NOW. They apologized for the delay and told me to wait a few more days. Two weeks later I got the motherboard from a place in Taiwan. Fortunately it was in perfect condition, but apparently the guy I ordered it from had the same problem I did. He could not find any local distributors, but he did find one in Taiwan. I wasn't entirely happy with the way it was handled, but I did get what I asked for and apparently they did go that extra step to get it for me.

From what I understand Shenzhen is part of Hong Kong and does a huge amount of exporting. Personally I think those people do a great job of trying to meet the orders they receive, but they are in China - or next door to it. Getting from there to here is a major hassle. I think I told you the story of my ordering toilet paper way back in the early days of the pandemic. A company in Japan had what I wanted and they sent it to Hong Kong and they sent it to San Francisco where it sat for six weeks in the customs depot. Then, a special carrier had to deliver it because these foreign folks apparently don't have contracts with UPS, FedEx or the USPS. I didn't really need the TP, but I wanted to know how difficult it would be to get it from an alternate source. Easy to order, but horrible delivery times.

[Kellemora]

The few times I dealt with Chinese companies, I was buying items in bulk which might make a difference.
But all they do is get it loaded into a container headed to the U.S. and even they don't care which port the way it seems.
Another company at this end who accepted the containers, would unload them and then send the articles to where they were supposed to go. In my case it was by motor freight to a hub in Nashville, and then my a smaller motor freight carrier to a terminal up in Alcoa, then by a small van to me.
When I order bottles and caps, they are sent by an OTR company from the warehouse to a dock here in Knoxville.
The carrier is almost anybody, sometimes SMA or OFX, that's all they put on the invoice, plus the trailer number.
They also give the originating carrier freight bill number as well.
Then the local express company picks it up and gets it to me a lift-gate box truck with a pallet jack, and they have their own shipping number. I do have to pay for a liftgate service charge, and a non-commercial delivery via pallet jack charge.
The drivers are always so nice from the company I request at this end. They even help get the pallets up to the top of my driveway outside of my storage sheds.
The way my health is now though, I dread getting another order in. I'll have to have someone come help me and I don't know anyone here who would.

When I was shipping product overseas myself, I used a logistics company who handled it all for me, for a huge fee of course.
They even took care of placing my items on a pallet for shipping. They all got there unscathed, so I was happy.

Oh, forgot to say, my shipments from China took about 6 weeks, much of that ocean travel time on a steamship.

[yogi]

After I figured out what all happened, I was awed by the fact that an order from a factory in Taiwan could reach me in just two weeks. The people I gave the order to here in Ohio must have a lot of contacts and experience with this kind of thing given that they will make just about any custom computer you can think of. The price for a non-standard PC is very high, but the fact that they can and would do it impressed me. All I wanted was a motherboard and not a whole computer. The fact that they did that was even more impressive.

I know what you mean about getting local help. We live in a very family oriented community and there must be hundreds of kids within walking distance of my house. I only know a few of the neighbors, and none well enough to ask their kids to do some slave labor for me. Even if I wanted to hire a day worker to do some chores, I'd not know where to find one. Plus, I can't depend on the quality of random hires like that. I guess that's why people go into assisted living. But that is pretty expensive not to mention being a concession to one's lack of personal freedom.

[Kellemora]

I really think the only reason mom wanted to sell her house and move into a seniors apartment complex was because her friends moved into the one she chose. She just stayed in her room most of the time, and usually fixed her own meals, even though she was paying for the dining room meals. The friends she liked all died within her first year and a half there too.
She would have been better off staying in her house!

None of the kids around here ever want to do anything except stare at their cell phones.
Unlike when we were young, stores would give us little odd jobs to do for some change.
Now, most companies won't do that for fear of liability issues, and the normally don't hire anyone under 18, and most not under 21 now either. If you want a decent job, you had better be between 21 and 49, after that, nothing available, except door greeters.

[yogi]

I can see why shops stopped hiring kids to do petty jobs. Most kids don't want to work to begin with and when they do they generally only do a mediocre job. I hired myself out as a car washer and grass mower for most of my teen years. I'd go to your house and use your equipment, but then I didn't charge a whole lot for my services. I don't see any of that kind of kid activity around here, but there was one incident that got me to thinking. On Christmas Day the temperatures here dropped well below freezing. It wasn't as bad as what happens in Chicago, but the folks around here are not familiar with Windy City weather. Around lunch time a young black kid came knocking on my door. I didn't recognize him and could not imagine why he was out and about on Christmas Day. He was offering to walk our dog for us ... because the weather was so bad. And, implicitly, we are too old to deal with cold weather. I didn't ask if this was a one off offer or if he was looking for a more permanent job, but I thanked him profusely and told him it's the only exercise us old people get. So, thank you, but no thank you. He seemed happy with that and disappeared into the shadows of O'Fallon. Never seen him since.

That was not the first kid to offer us help. The others, however, were being motivated by their parents. I think I mentioned the few times we got unsolicited help with the snow. While that was an amazing demonstration of community outreach, these kids were not really looking for work. And, not a one of them ever asked if I wanted help with mowing the lawn. I guess they know better because I'd probably take them up on that offer. LOL So the people here, and their kids, can appear to be very outgoing and community minded. But, I have often wondered about their motivations. It certainly isn't due to a desire to earn some extra pin money.

[Kellemora]

I'm going back 40 years ago here. When it snowed, there was a group of four boys who went through our subdivision to shovel off the driveway and sidewalks, and patio if applicable. They only asked 5 bucks for the driveway and 2 bucks for the sidewalk, which was smart, because most people just gave them a 10 dollar bill and told them to keep the change.

I would be leery of someone wanting to walk the dog, you may never get the dog back.

Each day after school, grade school that is. I would stop by the barber shop, empty their trash cans, go downstairs and haul the hair out of the drop bin to a pile in the back behind the parking lot, and then clean and fill each of their shaving cream dispensers.
Then I would do all the waste cans in the offices next door to him, usually got 25 cents for each one.
At the other end of the shopping strip mall, were a couple of stores I would stop at to break down the cardboard boxes they tossed out back, so they were flat, and stack them in this steel frame they had just for that purpose. I only got paid when the rack was full so they could strap it, but the owner usually gave my around 5 bucks which was great.
From there I would head to the greenhouses to get to work there for a couple of hours before dinner.
I did work for other places on the way home, if they had anything that needed done. About four or five places had this nifty method of letting us kids know if they needed something done we could do. Some of them used this card they stuck in the corner of the front window so we knew to stop in. Others hung a paint stick on a nail by their side door. Most of the time it was just toting things they needed moved like from inside the dock door onto the shelves where they pulled stock from. Other times it was heavy cleaning of items they hated to do, but those jobs paid the best, albeit messy a lot of times.

By the time I was up in 7th and 8th grade, there were no more simple jobs out there to do anymore. But you could get hired as an employee. I worked at an ice cream shop, and at the Drive-In Theater on weekends. I hated the walk home because the cops would always pick on me for being out after curfew. Heck, they could see I was in Uniform, and most knew where I lived. But they kept it up until my dad went up there and gave them the what for a couple of times. Because he would wait for me to get home before going to bed, and they often detained me for at least fifteen minutes, sometimes longer.

[yogi]

The truth is that I don't know what the young people around here are up to. I suppose there are some things all kids do, but this is Missouri, not Illinois. The customs here are not the same nor is the attitude of the denizens. That doesn't mean they are all that different, but I did not grow up around here and don't know what to expect. Curfews, for example, would seem pretty much unnecessary in my particular neighborhood. I'm impressed by the feeling of safety many people demonstrate and I have seen women and children walking the streets well into the night. It could all be different on the other side of town for all I know, but I only see a cop car on our street about twice a year. They cruised by my home up north several times a day on a regular schedule and you would get stopped if you were out at an unexpected time and place. Then, there are the beer cans and junk food wrappers we sometimes find on the street or our own lawn. Some smart assed kids do it, no doubt, but I've not been able to identify who or when. It just happens over night. It's the same with other more criminal activity. I've not read about one murder here in O'Fallon during all the five years of my residence. Not one home was reported broken into, but there have been a few cars stolen or razed. My wife will often tell me about a car-jacking in the news, but that's generally down the road closer to STL. People do get into trouble here, but it's not the same as from whence I come. I do wonder, and often, exactly what the young adults around here do for entertainment. There are a ton of soccer moms driving the streets, but that can't be all the kids do, can it?

So, when you comment about the strange kid at my door possibly wanting to steal my dog, that's not the first thought that comes to my mind. Maybe it should be.

[Kellemora]

There are a lot of good kids out there, but they get everything on a silver platter so have no need to work to earn a few bucks.
Even here where I currently live is considered a poor part of town now.
Yet all the kids have Schmartz-Fonz, electric buggies or bikes which they rarely use.
And most of them spend the entire day up at any mall with an arcade.

If you go down the street to where the projects are, you won't find a single older car in there, everything is brand new and/or less than five years old. The project housing is government funded using our tax dollars.
But if you go in the opposite direction, down where you know Meth labs are operating, all you see around there are luxury cars. Yet nobody down at that end of the road works. It is also where the most shootings take place too.
This area is nothing like it was when my wife was growing up and everyone knew everyone else, and probably related too.

The theft of dogs is really high around here, and throughout the entire city.
But unlike a few other areas, we've never heard of any dog fights going on or being broken up.
There have been a few pet adoption groups that were closed down because the dogs they had up for adoption, many were found to be stolen.

[yogi]

We got a dog from a rescue organization when we live by Chicago. They said she was part of a puppy mill which until that time I had no idea was a thing. Apparently when dogs are stolen they are bred constantly just to produce pups, and Shi Tzu pups are very expensive. Well, she was a docile old gal and suited our life style quite well. But, the thought of there being a market for stolen dogs never crossed my mind. In our part of O'Fallon THE RULES say you can have no more than three (3) dogs in a given household. I do believe at least 90% of the residences around us meet that limit. LOL A few dog-nappings would be greatly appreciated as far as I'm concerned. I read about lost and found dogs all the time in the neighborhood newsletter, but I can't recall reading about any being stolen. Apparently there is more money in stolen cars because I read about those all the time.

My heart goes out to you when you talk about the neighborhood you live in. I'm certain you find some comfort there, but things do change. I think of the neighborhood in Chicago where I grew up and have had several notions to go there and check it out. I was told how dangerous it is now and that I, a white guy, would be well advised to steer clear. The neighborhood was just beginning to change when I lived there and I knew of a few folks who were die hard residents. They weren't going to move ever, no matter who their neighbors are. I had an uncle who thought along those lines and he had a couple Dobermans to prove his point until the day he died. Those dogs were very effective. We never visited him after he got them. LOL

[Kellemora]

Dog napping jumped when the prices of dogs made a major leap.
Pure bred dogs were rarely over 300 bucks, a few special breeds might reach 350 bucks, but then a lot of the dogs in a particular litter were only 150 to 250 bucks too.
The price shot up like a bullet and now it will often cost around 900 bucks or more for a pure bred dog, higher on some breeds.
The select few from a littler that bring less are rarely as low as 600 bucks now.

This may be why there are so many fancy named mixed breeds now, which are not considered pure bred.
Sometimes these come about on purpose, sometimes by accident, hi hi.
Then they give them cute names, like Peekapoo, hi hi.

Because I lived in St. Louis my entire life, and also studied area demographics to some extent.
I could see an area get built up, then those who did so migrate and create even better areas.
In turn, each class lower moves into the original area, and with each migratory move, the area goes downhill further.
In some cases, those areas get reclaimed, but this is fairly rare, and when it is, it is usually done artificially, so when it declines again, it literally crashes and burns.

After WWII, the area where I live was considered the most desirable area for middle class folks. The richer folks migrated further west, and then further west again.
Families often stayed fairly close together as well, both before and after the war.
Most of Debi's relatives, related to both her mom and her dad's side of the family, all lived in this South Knoxville new subdivisions area. On her dad's side, they all lived here in the Plaza Park subdivision, and on her mom's side, in the Southland Park subdivision. There were four subdivisions here that all ended with Park. Far south of the Vestal area at the time.
Plaza Park was the nicer of the two adjoining subdivisions, for the 1940's post-war era were fairly decent homes.
And the area stayed that way for just under 40 years. Then because the homes were older and smaller than the current trend in homes for the '70s and '80s many of the homes here sold for low amounts, that kept declining for a while, until many became rental homes. It was only in the '90s when older homes were razed and newer 20th century style homes built in their place.
But many of the older homes remained and were simply upgraded to match the newer homes in the area. Which is what I did after Debi and I took over her parents home. Because of two additions since that time, it is basically as large as all of our neighbors homes, and newer looking than some too.
But the insides are still the old crooked little floors, ceilings, and walls, hi hi.
Even though I've renovated all the main rooms, expanded some, and modified others, it is still just a crooked little house, hi hi.

[yogi]

I was talking to somebody in Pennsylvania just yesterday. She bought a 300 acre ranch which had a home on the property that dated back to colonial times. I find it nearly unbelievable that a house could stay together for a few hundred years in spite of any remodeling. The frame and foundations back then apparently were made of much more sturdy stuff than goes into houses this century. Even so, 300 years is a long time for a house to still be standing. And, some of those historic buildings are even older.

Yes, some of the population patterns in the big cities can be interesting. I know of an area around downtown Chicago that was originally populated by the super rich who invested in the area. After some time they moved out and the area went downhill quickly. Eventually it became a world class ghetto of public housing. Then, as you say about STL, some yuppies decided to move in and renovate. They tore down the public housing and the buildings which remained were modernized. All the poor people had to move out. As far as I can tell, the area's only draw is being within walking distance of the business district.

Those newly invented dog breeds are a joke. Pikachu is a modern creation just for the purpose of making a lot of money off a unique breed. The last dog we got, and still have, was a Shi Tzsu. We got it from the humane society and are pretty sure it is pedigreed. Since we have no papers we don''t know for sure, but to buy a pup from a breeder would have been an $1800 expense, minimum. Not all breeds go for that much, but I'd be surprised if you can get a pure bred for under a thousand dollars these days.

[Kellemora]

Some of the historical homes I worked in were about that age.
They held up because the framework was solid oak, and the roof was tile.
A stone foundation was usually higher than most termites venture upward, and they don't like oak anyhow, especially seasoned oak.
I think the oldest house I ever worked in was built around 1790, and it was entirely made of stone, including the inner walls.
I don't know what the roof was made from, but it was also the original roof.
It was remodeled on the inside many times since it was built, so the inside looked like a modern house.
The old summer kitchen was enclosed also to make two more bedrooms. The owner said when it was originally enclosed, he thinks it had a huge dining table to seat like 18 to 20 people. He based this on some paintings he found in the house.

My grandparents house on my dad's side had a tile roof and even after two major hailstorms, it still looked like the day it was installed, no damage at all, even though our greenhouses lost all their glass, twice.
Lots of things you would not believe were used on older houses. The gutters were copper and about as thick as a penny.
When dad built his house, although the gutters were copper, they were thinner than a dime by then.
And heck, nowadays gutters are almost as thin as paper, hi hi.

It is amazing how areas change, usually for the worst, until they are razed or the yuppies come in and restore the area.

Debi had a Shi Tzsu when we met, she loved that little guy. More recently she got another one who is now like 8 years old. It is nothing at all like the one she raised from a pup. Me, I prefer Doxies, and other low maintenance dogs.
We have a couple of dogs that cost about 80 bucks each time they are groomed. Boonleigh is a large dog, exactly what nobody knows, hi hi, a rescue, who looks good with a crewcut, hi hi.

[yogi]

I presume by Doxie you mean Dachshund. I have experience with only two of them. While they are cute doggies, I can't say I admire them; at least not the two that I met. Back home up north we would walk our Shi Tzsu around the block. On the other side of the block was a home with a Doxie for a pet. He was fun to watch but would flip its lid each time he saw our dog. He barked, jumped and tried to leap over the fence whenever the two dogs were in sight of each other. The second Dachshund is owned by the neighbor directly across the street from here. It's a laugh and a half to watch that dog play outside with it's masters chasing a tennis ball. Most of the time, however, the dog is in the house. I never see it outside and alone in its yard. One day I was taking our pooch out for a walk and out of nowhere that Doxie came charging and barking targeting our timid little critter. I put a foot between the two and fortunately did not get bitten. That sausage dog, like the one back home, has a mean streak. The good news is that I got to meet the neighbor lady of the house. She moved fast but didn't bark at all.

I love the idea of oak and stone houses. I doubt that any of our modern tools can cut into that stuff, unfortunately.

[Kellemora]

Of all the Doxies we've had in our families over the years, we only had one mean one, and that was a toy variety my mom had.
It got mean because neighborhood kids would tease it to no end. Because of that, she had to keep him in the house. He was just fine around family, with the exception of my first wife who he took a bite out of. She deserved it though, hi hi!

I've had many kinds of dogs over the years, from large to small, to anything in between. All of them have always been good dogs. Some were a little stubborn, but none of them were ever mean. A few were protectors of our family and would come between us and a stranger until told they were OK.

Old seasoned oak is almost impossible to reuse for anything, being hard a rock.
And yes they will destroy saw blades in short order too!
Having to drill new holes for adding wiring in them took its toll on drill bits also.
I've also had to drill through stone foundations several times for plumbing or wiring.
Those stones could even ruin a diamond tipped drill bit.

[yogi]

My neighbor's Doxie is a playful dog, and that is one of the reasons they have it. They have two young children that give the dog a workout. The only other dog I've seen that can't stop being active was my daughter's Pug. That little guy couldn't sit still for more than 30 seconds. At the time they didn't have any children still living at home so that it was a chore keeping the pup out of trouble. They traded him in for a black shepherd.

My first house was more than 50 years old when we bought it and it was build by a farmer who lived in the area. By the time I got there farmland was nowhere to be seen but this house still existed. I tried a little renovation of the girls' bedroom which involved moving a wall. I don't know what kind of wood those 2x4's were made of, but no nails I had would penetrate it easily. Plus, they were really 2x4 and rough cut. I ended up drilling holes where I wanted nails, but I gave up on the idea of using the old wood. I made a storage rack out of the old lumber and kept it in the garage. The new wall was pine studded and easy to work with. Also replaced the lath and plaster with sheet rock. I had no idea how to rebuild the wall like the original.

[Kellemora]

Although we have three dogs, the one I call mine, who follows me everywhere, comes to my office with me in the morning, and sleeps on his pillow up here. He never begs for treats, except at his known bedtime treat time. He's as cute as the dickens too!
He does love to go run up and down the fence with the neighbors dogs, getting them riled up, but this is only for like 30 seconds as I'm walking down to the house from the office. He spends time in the backyard in the afternoon getting his exercise in.

The house I'm in here was built in 1946 with whatever materials they could scrounge up to build with.
From doing renovations, I know some of the wood used for interior framing was junk woods, like poplar, ash, and I think a couple of the studs were even elm. The house was cinder block stucco, and the framing inside the exterior walls was like 1x3s layed flat against the wall and held in place with triangular shaped flat nails. I still use those kinds of nails when working around the cinder blocks.
New walls I added were all today's soft pine and drywall. I can't believe how high studs have gone this past year. Crazy!

[yogi]

I don't know if I'll ever do any work on this new house. If I did, a lot of new tools would need to be purchased. I left a lot back at the old place and got rid of much of my lifetime collection of tools. I'm only operating on the bare essentials now, and frankly that is all I need. The only part of this house that could use some improvement is the unfinished basement. Then, too, there isn't much point in putting a lot of money into a space we only use for storage. I've not tried to buy lumber for many years, and I can only imagine what it costs now. Most of the state of California has burned to the ground and the import taxes on Canadian wood is outrageous. I don't think there is a lot of wood to be had even if we wanted it.


They released an interim version of Ubuntu today, 21.04 and I have it installed inside a virtual box. That's how I am typing this message. They claim to have reinvented the installer but it looks a whole lot like the old one. I can say this, however, it defaults to EFI instead of the old MBR boot system. I'm not brave enough to try and install it in my tower or in the laptop given all the bugs it had previously when competing with Windows. It's encouraging that they got the EFI right in a virtual box, but a lot of that could be due to Oracle's software and nothing to do with Ubuntu. I'll do some reading before I test it out, but given this isn't an LTS distro I may just keep it in a box or on a USB stick.

The other major improvement is supposed to be the KDE desktop. There is something funky going on with that because it takes a minute or two for the desktop to stabilize. I think they boogered up the start-up routine by adding a few processes that didn't exist previously. There are some annoying delays and lagging going on which could be the new and improved software, or the old reliable inferior quality of the product itself. Ubuntu used to be the go-to Linux distro, but it's gone downhill over the past few years. That's why I have changed my focus to Mint which seems to have found patches and workarounds for the Ubuntu mess. Anyway, it's too early to tell if there are really any problems, verses learning how to set up the new OS. If it gets messy, I'm sure to let you know about it. LOL

[Kellemora]

Oh my, I saw the price of some construction materials and nearly had another heart attack.
Good thing I'm not needing to buy anything right now. I think I would go with steel studs like we had to use in commercial buildings.
Except code probably is the opposite for home construction as it is for commercial construction.
Back home we HAD to use steel studs in commercial work, and HAD to use wood studs in residential work.
The reason may sound odd, but they were both because of fire codes.
In other words, the reasons are illogical, hi hi.

Personally, I didn't really care for Ubuntu, even though they are who brought me back to Linux.
I have Linux MInt 19.3 on one machine here, and it gets new updates every day or two, and sometimes more than once per day.
I thought it was the stable version, not the testing or rolling versions.

I just like my computers to work, so don't mess around with the Distro's much.
Hate having to do a major upgrade, but so far they seem to go without a hitch.
One thing I think is strange, when you do a command line request for the version number you are on.SS
Most Distro's give you the whole version number. Debian only says 10 Buster.
I Installed 10.6 on this computer, and 10.7 on the other computer.
Both were done as Net Install, and both have different repository addresses. I thought that strange too.
Some things that upgrade on the 10.7 computer and work, on this computer the upgrade broke some unimportant things.
Like one of the temperature servers that display outdoor temp. I keep two on every computer.
One is always correct, the other is sometimes stuck for days or weeks without changing.
They try to blame this on the place serving up the information. However, why is it right on two computers and wrong on another computer using the same sources? Then it may flip flop and be right on the one computer and wrong on the other two.

As they say, to really louse things up takes a computer, hi hi.

[yogi]

I went for many years thinking that each municipality wrote it's own set of building codes. I was well into my second house before I found out that there are independent organizations writing the building codes and selling them to whoever wants to pay for them. Given that method of generating building codes I can easily see why commercial buildings would have different codes than residential buildings. If everybody used the same code, then those guys writing it would be out of business. That will never do, apparently.

I've tinkered with more than a few Linux based OS's but didn't realize what was going on until I tried to help you out one day solving a Debian problem. Actually you were having a problem staying logged into this site and I could not resolve it. It was at that time I decided to install Debian, the OS that you favor, and see what I could do from there. The problems I ran into trying to create a Debian OS that would boot on my computers were overwhelming. Ultimately I decided I can't do it here, but that was an epiphany of sorts. The great revelation was that many of the Linux distros who claim to be based on Debian failed for the same reasons Debian fails. The reason why is that the Debian code was cloned along with the problems inherent to it. Realizing that the problems originate in Debian explained why many of the tech support forums fall short of solutions. Those forums are focused on their particular bastardization of the OS, which goes under the assumed name of Free and Open Source Software. The forum experts offer advice specific to their distro and seldom recognize that many of the problems reported are actually rooted in Debian. Thus the solutions are often aimed at solving the wrong problem.

Ubuntu took this clone and bastardize philosophy one step further. They solved a lot of the issues inherent to Debian and soon became a standard onto itself. Thus I've discovered a lot of Linux OS's that are "based on Debian and Ubuntu." That means the developer copied the Debian base code, added the Ubuntu desktop environment, and piled on top of that their own free and open sourced software to create a three layer nightmare of coding. That is the point at which Linux Mint entered the arena. All the way up to their 19.x series of distros they were propagating the defects built into Debian and Ubuntu. Now that Mint is up to 20.x the list of nightmares has diminished. This is partly due to the ingenuity of the Mint developers but also an effort on the part of the Debian team to address some fundamental concerns expressed in the tech support forums.

I think that Debian, et. al., is on the right track here in the 2020's. The people at Mint have made great strides to produce an OS that just works. Sadly, the Ubuntu crowd has a mindset of their own. It is totally amazing to me to see so many other Ubuntu based OS's: Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, MATE, Budgie, Studio and Kylin to name a few. MATE and Budgie were tolerable the last time I checked, but the mother of all clones, Ubuntu, is sliding down the rabbit hole.

And FWIW, in addition to the VB version of Ubuntu 21.04, I now also have it installed on 32 GB USB memory stick. It suffers from the same lag and delays I mentioned above, but it is otherwise very responsive and working well. I love the fact that they apparently figured out EFI booting. Now, if we can only get all those other OS's to stop calling themselves Ubuntu, we might be able to multi-boot Linux seamlessly.

[Kellemora]

Well, each city can ADD TO the National Codes as they see fit.
It sorta works like this. All states adopt the National Code, then the State adds a few things for their state. Then each County adds on to what the state added, and finally the local governments whether city or town add theirs.
So in the end, what started as a simple set of codes to follow, can become quite a large tome of rules.
Then we have other special codes we have to follow as well for specific installations.
For example: In a school or hospital, where all wiring is in conduit, there are special colors of wire used for various applications.
Doesn't matter that those applications may change later on down the road.
One school I worked in briefly, we had to buy specially stained copper pipe. All cold water piping was blue, all hot water piping was dull red, all gas piping was green, and all steam pipes had to be this bright silvery red. Later on they added another dark blue for suction lines, like for AC, and another bright red, not silvery red, but a strange orangish red for high pressure AC lines.
Even the electrical conduit had colors on some of them if they were high voltage, normal voltage, or low voltage.
Phone wires all followed the normal phone wire colors established by ma bell, hi hi.

Of all the years I've used Debian, I've rarely hit any problems with it.
Ubuntu, although built on top of Debian, gave me all kinds of fits, which could be how they cut into the Debian base.
Then we have Linux Mint built on top of Ubuntu, built on top of Debian.
Even so, Linux Mint seems to work much better than Ubuntu, at least on my machines. But I still use Debian!

I thought you installed all the Distro's you try in VM? If so, it seems what they call themselves in the loader wouldn't matter.
But then I'm not all that computer savvy myself. I only tried VM a couple of times and it bogged down the computer too much.