I had to do this once. Had car issues due to running over a crowbar that somehow bounced up and hit my car. I heard and felt the impact, saw smoke in my rear view mirror, and immediately pulled off the highway into a parking lot. I got out and a soon as I turned the car off all of the oil poured out. The oil pan got ripped, and later found out the engine got damaged.

Mechanic and insurance both decided it was least expensive to spend $9k parts and labor to replace the engine rather than total the car. I had to pay $3,000 for the deductible. Being young, renting, and making $11/hr, I didn’t have that kind of savings. I did have the money in my 401k.

My 401k allowed me to take a loan out against my 401k. It would get deducted out of my paycheck each week until it was paid off. The advantage to this was there was no interest, but I did have to pay a 10% penalty for early withdrawal, so I ended up having to take out more than $3k to cover the penalty.

Only other catch was if I quit or were fired before repaying the full amount the remainder of the balance was due the next month - and I was close to quitting to change careers. A few months later got a much better job in IT but could not repay the loan amount, so I “defaulted” on it which isn’t as bad as it sounds. The loan amount just gets reported to the IRS as income, and I had to pay taxes on the full amount in addition to the penalty.

Not ideal at all, but being young-ish and only having the option to try and get a loan from a traditional lender at a much higher interest rate would have been worse.

I actually used to attend Prestonwood back when I was in middle and high school before I became an atheist.

It was clearly in the business of making money, and business was good. Back then they were more careful and subtle about mixing politics and religion, but it was definitely there.

Instead of outright endorsing GWB for President they would say things like: we need to make sure we are electing godly men to make sure we bring faith back to the White House and Congress to get this country back on track.

I haven’t been there in over 20 years but have to drive by it often. Still feel disgusted that I was ever a part of that place. I could see the seeds of Christian nationalism being planted in the youth programs and hear it in the sermons.

Found this playlist on Spotify recently called Creative Flow Music and it is now my go-to.

We disable IPv6 often when troubleshooting a network issue. Nothing that I have seen requires IPv6, and turning it off solves more issues than we would expect even today. It’s not the first thing I’m going to try, but I’ll often do it if I have to reboot anyway.

I also uninstall Dell Optimizer and Dell Optimizer Service on sight regardless of the issue because that evil will cause problems eventually. Best to just eradicate it on sight.