Sam

Full autopay is set up, that was the first thing I did. Agreed it should be stated every time.

Ordering by fussiness rather than by which card I want most is a genuinely different way to think about it.

Small thing that helped me: keep a personal snippets file. Mine is one text file with about forty entries and I add to it whenever I look something up for the third time. Searching my own file is faster than searching the internet and the act of writing the entry made about half of them stick anyway.

It also gets faster in a very specific way. You will not think faster, you will recognise faster. Around week seven you start reading a statement and thinking, that is an induction, or that smells like contradiction, and the 40 minutes turns into 15 because you skip the flailing stage.

Thicker steaks also give you a real reason to use the circulator. Under an inch, a hot pan and a thermometer does the job.

Both are true and there is no contradiction. det = 0 rules out exactly one thing: a single unique solution. It leaves two possibilities open, no solutions at all, or infinitely many. You found the infinitely many case.

Check your row reduced form. If you have a free variable, your solution set is a line or a plane and every point on it will plug back in correctly. Write the answer parametrically, something like (x, y, z) = (1, 0, 2) + t(2, -1, 1), rather than picking one point and calling it the answer.

Yep. Partial credit at best. Parametric form takes one extra line and it is the actual answer.

The sec³ one is nastier because the leftover piece is ∫ sec(x) dx, which you have to already know. Worth doing once by hand before you trust the formula.

Ping pong balls floating on the surface are the low effort answer to evaporation if you do not have a lid that fits. Looks daft, works well, and they store in a jar.

Do the arithmetic honestly. If the travel credit needs a trip you are not taking, it is worth zero, not its face value, and the fee is 95 real dollars against dining earning that you could partly replicate on a no fee card. I kept a fee card for two years on the theory that I would start using the perks again and never did.

Strain them through a fine sieve first, there is always more coagulated protein in there than you expect and it burns in the pan.

That is exactly what it should look like and it is the reason nobody photographs this stage. Browning needs high heat and a dry surface, neither of which exists in a water bath, so the outside just cooks pale while the inside comes to temperature. The sear is not optional decoration, it is the entire flavour step.

Dry it thoroughly, sear it hard and fast, and it will look completely different in 90 seconds.