Totally agree that life would be boring without some randomness, but there's a fine line between "interesting flavor" and "ruined batch" (which is basically the story of my sourdough starter last month).

Pulled them at 190 internal instead of 205" ouch. That's a brutal lesson to learn after a decade of practice. A cheap probe cost you 30 pounds of expensive meat.

My buddy convinced me that a "short scramble" up Mount Whitney was no big deal. Turned out to be a 45 minute Class 3 traverse with exposure on both sides and a group of Boy Scouts arguing about which way to go behind me. I used to think you could just trust a friend's description of a route. Now I look at the topo map myself every time.

Dude, you're totally right. I spent like three hours once trying to figure out why a program was running so slow on a repeat job. Finally dug through some old notes on a napkin and it said "material had bad stress relief, slow down to 8 IPM." If I had just put that in the G-code itself I would have saved a whole afternoon. It's such a simple thing but it makes all the difference when you come back to something months later.

Have you ever considered that washing sherds on site might also be contaminating them with your own skin oils or residue from the local water? I'm paranoid about that now after Bob's tip.