Spicey, the man who got fired because SNL mocked him. Melissa McCarthy with that motorized podium was amazing. It was almost too good, because it killed the golden calf that would have given them a ton of material.

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I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.

It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.

I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…

Ah. I could go into a whole rant about the car, but I really dislike driving it. I often say that I now understand why Mazda no longer uses “zoom zoom” in their commercials.

Thanks.

Let me guess, it’s probably also heavier.

We have a 2020 Mazda 3 that probably has that, instead of useful features like a remote start or fog lights. I’ve found that I much prefer driving my car from 1999 or even our pickup from 2014 (which itself has double gaskets on the doors for sound isolation). The Mazda feels like I’m in this isolated chamber with no road feel or anything from outside encroaching. If that’s luxury, count me out.

Why did they switch to laminated in the side and rear windows?

It is, but I’m the guy that originally said it, so you shouldn’t trust me. Here’s an article about it, and another article here.

It’s so crazy how true that is.

If you follow politics, the recent deal between Biden, Democrats, and the Republicans gave Republicans everything they supposedly wanted for border security. They aren’t voting for it because Trump wants to keep hitting Biden on that issue during the election. It’s fucking insane.

LOL My employer wants us to come in at least two days every pay period (every two weeks). But, of course, we’re not all going to go in the same day - we can’t, there’s literally not enough space - so instead of calling in to meetings from home on those days, we’ll be calling into meetings from a cubicle.

WHAT IS THE POINT? They’re having a difficult time convincing us this is a good idea.

A little more backstory: We’ve been fully work-from-home since the pandemic began. They decided to renovate the building, so we all brought our stuff home and archived or destroyed stuff we no longer needed. So we’ve been work from home for almost four years now and things are rolling along nicely. It’s really difficult to argue that we somehow need to be in the office now.

I’ve never used Rust, but this definitely reminds me of my days running Slackware on my computers.

Oh, hey, I’d like to run this new package. Great. I’ll need this dependency…and that one…and the one over there…

I know it now has dependency management, but I just couldn’t do it any more. I was tired of worrying about what was going to break. I started with Slackware in the 3.x days, too.

I switched my server to Debian, and I feel like I never have to worry about it any more. Laptop and desktop are both Kubuntu, but they’re going to go to Debian at some point in the near future.

The first scenario is basically what happened with the convoys in DC a while back. Every day, they’d drive down, drive around a while, and then leave. I live in the DC area, but don’t drive in DC often, but from what I heard, the impact was minimal.

I don’t know how many trucks were involved, but I do know those trucks are expensive to buy and maintain, too expensive to keep running them in non-revenue service like that for long.

The championship trophy in the NHL (National Hockey League, the premier North American hockey league) is “The Stanley Cup”.

The original thinking was the electoral college could stop any truly disastrous votes. But we’ve seen how that goes! Now we’re stuck with it because it helps one party and would require a constitutional amendment to abolish, and too few people in power are interested in doing what’s right for the country - they’re interested in doing what’s right for their party.

(For another example of the “party first” mentality that has taken over: Washington, DC residents have no vote in Congress. This seems like an obvious thing to fix, give them a two members of the House and two Senators…but whoa, we can’t do that, it would change the balance of power in Congress! Seriously. That’s why DC residents have no real voice in Congress. For clarity, their votes do count for the Presidential election.)

Yeah, I might have been unclear, I knew that other telemetry was available and it was just the voice recordings that were wiped due to the time they operated after the incident.

Better yet, upload the info regularly. Remember MH370, where we only know roughly what happened because it occasionally checked in with satellites? So the capability exists.

I’m not sure I want the pilots to leave the cockpit so they can have a conversation they don’t want to have recorded… “If you’re here, who’s flying the plane?”