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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

    At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.



  • I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

    All I’m saying is that, for Christians, the text of the Bible has been mostly locked down since the Vulgate Bible at around 400 AD. The content is what it is, and is the basis of the faith.

    At this point it doesn’t matter if someone mistranslated the Hebrew, misquoted Jesus, made Jesus up entirely, or forged an epistle. It’s been in there for 1600 years and it’s authenticity or accuracy is moot.

    Arguing about the origin of 1 Timothy is like arguing about the colour of the wings on the fairies that live at the bottom of the garden. It’s all made up rubbish anyways.




  • There’s two kinds of issues: instance and pattern. The first time or two, it’s instance. You deal with those with specificity. Something like, “I would prefer not to talk about this subject with you, please stop”.

    If it persists, then it’s a pattern problem. You deal with the pattern, not the instance. “I’ve asked you not to talk about subjects like this in the pant, but you haven’t stopped. This makes me feel like you don’t respect my boundaries and it’s making it difficult for me to work with you. Why are you doing this to me?”.

    You can escalate from there, and this might involve management involvement but at least you’ll have the clarity of having made the situation clear before it gets there.

    Honestly though, unless the coworker is actually deranged, they’ll be mortified when they find out they are making you uncomfortable and they’ll stop right away.



  • Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

    So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

    We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

    And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

    In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.


  • As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

    The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

    The “Troubles” in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

    Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

    15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

    Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

    24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing “Tiny Talent Time” on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn’t any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn’t traumatize you, nothing will).

    You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

    Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

    F*CK me. “No experience”. Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

    Kids always think that they know more than their parents…until they don’t.




  • To me, as a non-American, the most baffling thing is that everyone in the States just assumes, and accepts, that these appointed justices are going to rule according to some political bias.

    That’s not the way it works in the rest of the free world. Judges are, by definition, trusted to be impartial interpreters of the law/constitution. That’s their role.

    I live in Canada, and I’m vaguely familiar with some of the names of our Supreme Court justices, but I certainly don’t know their political leanings, nor do I care. Nor does any Canadian I know. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

    So as far as I can see, the problem isn’t that SCOTUS is stacked with Republicans, nor that it can be. The problem is that everyone seems to assume that this is the way it should be.



  • Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

    But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

    As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

    Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.




  • I’m not sure that what developers really, really need is faster programming cycles. Most teams could benefit more by controlling the process - from idea to deployed. How much technical debt is incurred because users/customers can’t prioritize features or give accurate requirements, there’s way too much WIP, features are huge, releases are huge and infrequent and the feedback cycles are far too long.

    So yeah, as programmers it’s always cool to look at ways to program faster, but what’s the point in programming stuff nobody needs faster? Or programming the wrong things faster?

    I’d be willing to be that if you asked any team, “What are the biggest impediments to delivering value to your users faster?”, the answer would be that you can’t cut code fast enough.



  • I think that defining “done” as QA tested is way better than “the code compiles”, which is essentially what most teams seem to use.

    Developers need to get into the habit of not writing bugs. That’s technically the answer to all of these problems. “We have issues dealing with bugs found in the QA phase”. So stop writing bugs for QA to find, then the problem goes away.

    If the attitude is “Bugs found in QA kick the feature out of the release”, then the programmers are going to find that they work all week and end up contributing nothing to the release. Maybe the release is completely empty. Hold them responsible for it. Attitudes will change.