Punkie

When I used to run a book store in the 80s, two magazines were the largest (and 99% ads): bridal magazines and Computer Shopper.

Ah yes! My wife uses straws, too.

Having seen these in a demo, they have weight triggers to prevent that. Also in or demo, one got stuck on a power cord, the other on a electrical plate in the floor.

I am dumb. What would cops want with my prescription information? I’ll probably understand if someone gives me examples of how this could be used against me.

Yeah as a kid in the 70s, it was a known trope. Benny Hill and Monty Python even alluded to it.

Nope, came here to post the same.

I got all of that except “shag ye x,” because it sounds like “shag (fuck) you x,” where “x” is the subject that is a bit vague. Like, “I’m trying to shag you, love?” or “Fuck your ex,” as in, the last person you broke up with?

Worked for a company in 1998 that had all the employee data on an excel spreadsheet: everything from emergency contacts to date of last paycheck. All of HR. And “for security” it was stored on a floppy disk. One single disk. Which was put back in the safe every close of business. One day, the disk got corrupted. The “backup” was an end-of-year printout, but any changes since then were gone.

“Field promotions” we used to call them. I have done the management thing, I was “okay” at it, but it wasn’t my passion.

My wife stayed in a rural town near Shichigahama for a week. Nobody spoke English except a few students. But the citizens did speak Japanese louder and slower, showing that’s a universal trait. It actually helped, as my wife knew SOME Japanese.

I am not a gamer so my fans only spin up when the vents clog with dust or I am doing some high end rendering. I’d never do water cooling because a leak could kill everything. I have lived through floods.

Having worked for both, I would say that most government offices are eternal, whereas private companies can vanish quickly. Sometimes without warning. Its really hard to kill a government office.

Makes me wonder, how did a necessary office survive during a junta or an overthrow? For example, how did the office of a postal clerk change from 1925 to 1955 in, say, Berlin? How does the average Salvadoran DMV worker view the changes in El Salvador since 1980?

How was a tax office run in ancient Babylon versus a modern one today?

I bet there’s some weird insights into human civilization to be found in those stories.

The ironic thing is that they because successful because of civilization and pack mentality, but are so conceited, they think all that infrastructure (public roads, doctors, restaurants, etc) exists simply because they exist. It’s weirdly how toddlers see the universe, and why tantrums between the two groups are so similar.

I am not wild about any of them, but center left, bottom left are my least annoying. I’ll just change it to something else when i go to Plasma 6 (which I started testing, and while overall it looks great, and is pretty snappy, the Neon Testing is seriously unstable in other areas – but they warn you about that, so that’s on me).

“They sure don’t make slaves like they used to! Last batch of imports were dead on arrival from UPS. And the ones that we DO have want food. Like EVERY. DAY. I gave them food last Christmas, which I don’t REALLY have to do, mind you, but I’m all Christian Holy and shit, and they still just bitch and whine that they need food daily. Bunch of entitled freeloaders.”

“But Bob, you lost you last batch due to dehydration. You need to give them water every day, too.”

“There is a MOTHERFUCKING OCEAN only a TWO HOUR DRIVE from here. They have EIGHT HOURS A DAY they don’t work for me, but no, they just lie around napping.”

“But they are chained up and can’t drive. Besides, once the flies are living in their wounds, that isn’t napping anymore.”

“You sound like one of them liberals! Always spending brain power on an excuse instead of good, hard work.”

I had a boss who never gave me a raise, didn’t believe in reviews, and had long rambling meetings where he just said whatever he was thinking. Sometimes it seemed he forgot we were there, and he’d start arguing with himself. He was more “the insecure nerd who got the CTO position because he was the only IT guy when the company started.” His management was so incompetent, that they called him “Tallest,” based on the Invader Zim joke.

Similar for me: when my hearing started to go in my 30s, the doctor said “you already know how to lip read.” I didn’t believe him until he showed me “am I saying ‘top’ or ‘cup’?” and if he had his mouth covered, I couldn’t tell which one he was saying.

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

I grew up with pretentiousness like this. Lot of upper middle class twits who wanted to be upper class. I used to get their goat with a kind of backhand kindness.

“You know about ABC?” Where ABC is a question about a topic he claims to be an expert in.

“If you don’t know how to ABC, you aren’t very educated.”

“Ah, I see you don’t know either.”

“I never SAID that! But I have neither the time nor patience to explain it to you.”

“Let me ask around, and we can find the answer together.”

“I KNOW the answer!!!”

“Not well enough to explain it, though. But that’s okay, we can learn that, too. Let’s ask this guy. Hey, my colleague and I were wondering if you could explain ABC…”

Oh my god, this makes their pompousness positively FUME with rage.

I was part of a Reddit gift exchange ages ago, before they separated domestic from international. I had to ship a $30 coffee mug to Brazil and it cost $220. Oof.