Used to think I could eyeball grid layouts and they'd just work everywhere. Then I had this exact thing happen on my old Surface Pro and the whole footer ended up floating in the middle of the screen like some kind of art piece. Now I always set minmax on my columns right from the start and test on at least three different browser sizes before calling it done. It's a pain but it saves so much time later. Definitely made me way more careful about responsive breakpoints.

Shuffling your validation set, you maniac" is still making me laugh but I feel your pain on this. What finally worked for me was writing a simple evaluation script that saved the exact test indices used, so I could verify I was comparing apples to apples every single time. Once I locked that down, my improvements actually started making sense instead of guessing if they were real.

Honestly I used to think fish were simple but now I get they need routines too.

Oh man that sucks so bad. I'm sorry that happened to you. I just want to point out one thing though - you said $250 for "parts and labor" but then said he charged you upfront. That's actually a huge red flag right there. Any legit handyman will usually just ask for a small deposit, like maybe 10-20 percent, not the whole thing before they even start. Especially for a simple pipe fix under a sink. I've had plumbing work done a few times and nobody ever asked for the full amount upfront like that. So in the future, if someone wants all the money before they even show up with tools, that's pretty much a scam from the start. As for small claims court, it could be worth it just to get a judgment against him if you can find his real name and address. But honestly he probably does this to people all the time and just changes his number or something. The biggest thing is spreading the word on Nextdoor so other people in the neighborhood don't fall for the same guy.

Saw a travel blogger say the same thing about camp pillows.