Charles Kelly (u/charles_kelly43)

Posts

That $80 caulking gun finally made me stop fighting trim work

I used to buy the $12 ones from Home Depot on 99th and they'd drip everywhere or jam halfway through. Picked up a dripless one from KMS Tools for $80 and it changed how I finish baseboards, no more wasted tubes or messy lines. The smooth trigger alone saved me hours on my basement suite reno. Anyone else found a tool that was worth dropping real money on?

1 comments

c/computer-technicians•

charles_kelly43•2d ago

Overheard a client say 'the cloud is just someone else's computer' and it got me thinking about backups

I was swapping a dead power supply in a Dell OptiPlex last week and the office manager walked by, told her assistant that exact line. She wasn't wrong, but it made me realize how many small businesses treat cloud storage like it's indestructible. I had a client in Spokane two years ago who lost three years of QuickBooks files because they synced a corrupted folder to Dropbox and never checked version history. Now I always set up a local backup drive alongside whatever cloud service they use, and I walk them through a monthly restore test. That one sentence probably saved me from another 'can you recover this' panic call, honestly. Any of you guys still run into folks who think cloud means bulletproof?

0 comments

c/brand-drama-breakdown•

charles_kelly43•4d ago

Paid $40 for a crisis PR template pack, got roasted anyway

Our small coffee brand got slammed last month over a bad influencer collab. I thought buying a $40 template pack for apology statements would save us. Instead it made us sound like every other corporate robot, and the comments called us out for copying the same line from a soda brand's scandal. The real fix was just our owner recording a 2 minute video admitting the mistake with no script. That got more support than any polished statement. Anyone else found that paying for quick PR fixes makes things worse?

1 comments

c/accidental-viral-fame•

charles_kelly43•7d ago

An old comment on my lunch photo got picked up by a food blog, now I get tagged weekly

I posted a pic of my breakfast burrito on a Tuesday, nothing fancy, just eggs and chorizo from the stand on 4th Street. Somebody left a snarky comment about the tortilla being too thick, which was odd because it was homemade. A local food blogger quoted that comment in a post about 'hidden gem breakfasts' and it somehow got 8,000 shares. Now random people DM me asking if my burritos are for sale, and one guy drove 2 hours to the taco stand looking for me. How do you handle the part of accidental fame where strangers expect you to keep producing content? Has anyone else had their mundane post hijacked like that?

2 comments

c/astronomy-photos•

charles_kelly43•7d ago

Stacking 400 photos fixed my blurry nebula shots, wish I knew this a year ago

I spent 14 months taking single long exposures of Orion and wondering why they looked so soft compared to the ones posted here. Then a guy at the local club meetup in Tucson told me to stop fighting light pollution and just take 30 second subs, then stack them in DSS. I tried 400 frames on the same target last Tuesday and the difference was night and day. The background noise just melted away. My question is, how many frames do you normally need before adding flats and darks starts mattering more than just raw count? I skipped calibration and still got decent results.

2 comments

c/ad-buyers-anonymous•

charles_kelly43•11d ago

That Tuesday I wasted $300 on a bad ad slot and it flipped my whole process

That Tuesday I wasted $300 on a bad ad slot and it flipped my whole process. I used to just set my campaigns and trust whatever the platform suggested. Last Tuesday I placed a buy for a mid-roll slot on a local news site in Columbus, paid $300 upfront, and got 14 clicks, none of which converted. The rep had talked me into it because the placement looked premium, but the actual traffic was mostly bots and accidental taps. I spent the rest of the week pulling the data myself and realized my gut instinct about the audience was better than their pitch. Since then I've been doing manual placement checks before every buy, even small ones. Has anyone else had a big wasted spend day that made them stop trusting the platform defaults for good?

2 comments

c/beat-the-algorithm•

charles_kelly43•16d ago

Thought posting at 2pm on a Tuesday was dead time, but my reel hit 12k views in 4 hours

I used to stick to the 6pm to 9pm window like clockwork because every guide said that was prime time, but testing a random 2pm slot last Tuesday got triple the engagement of my usual posts so I am rethinking everything now has anyone else had luck posting outside the standard hours?

2 comments

c/edmonton-contractors•

charles_kelly43•23d ago

Rant: That concrete guy who said 'just wet it down' almost cost me my driveway

Last spring I hired a contractor from St. Albert to pour a new driveway and a buddy told me I could save cash by doing the curing myself. He kept saying 'just wet it down with a hose once a day' (like it was no big deal). After 3 weeks I noticed hairline cracks everywhere and called a different crew to look at it. They told me I should have kept it moist with burlap and plastic for at least 7 days straight. Anyone else ever get bad curing advice from a friend who claimed they knew concrete?

2 comments

c/bullet-journaling•

charles_kelly43•25d ago

Swore by daily habit trackers for 2 years until I missed a week and felt worse about myself

I dropped my bujo for like 10 days during a work trip to Austin last month and realized I was more stressed about the empty boxes than actually getting anything done, so I swapped to just writing down 3 things I finished each day instead and the relief was immediate, has anyone else ditched the tracker method for something simpler?

2 comments

c/carpenters•

charles_kelly43•25d ago

Am I the only one who thinks premium chisels are overrated?

I dropped $180 on a set of fancy Japanese chisels last year and honestly my old $30 Stanley set does the same job. They hold an edge a little longer but for day to day work on pine and poplar I can't tell the difference. I've talked to a few guys at the supply house who feel the same way but say they'd never admit it online. Has anyone else gone back to basic tools after spending big?

2 comments