Zolt

I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.

Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.

Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.

Agreed. I had enough issues with my router yesterday I purchased a different brand router and decommissioned my ASUS. I was not aware of this wide-spread issue until today. Much like HP printers, I will think twice about recommending or purchasing an ASUS.

Three Minute clip with Jason on the Howard Stern show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfIl9JDNUek Very insightful. "I didn't know how to play off of her."

My wife and I have visited Chicago from Ohio about five times over the last ten or fifteen years. We’ve brought in the new year on the Navy Pier a few of those years. We really enjoyed our visits.

We’ve heard enough about the crime in Chicago over the last few years that we’ve agreed to stay away for a while.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to mention this, but without doing a deep dive on the statistics, we hit the tipping point to not return.

I forgot to include this in my original post. I use the Microsoft authenticator application to authenticate my account. My mistake was also including my mobile number as an alternative way to authenticate my account. I don’t know if I was aware of this or if Microsoft prompted me for my phone number at one time and I did not think through all the ramifications.

Agreed. Done. "Thanks for taking the time to contact us. We're currently receiving a high number of requests so we may take longer to respond, but our team is working hard to get to every inquiry quickly."

I have not regained access to my bitcoin account, in part because I have not contacted customer support to do so. I’ve been too busy regaining access and continuing to support my client base.

My account is locked, and I am pretty sure my funds are still there. It will be a significant loss, but not devastating as this was my non-primary investment account.

I still don’t know the full extent of my losses.

So far, my losses are primarily loss of billable time. I am not a litigious person, but I am also going to educate myself as to what ‘pain-and-suffering’ means. Both my personal and business bank accounts are ok. I now understand why banks do not use email addresses as the login id. The thief would not (easily) be able to align my email address with my bank login id.

Once through this, I plan disassociate any portion of my login id with my name.

If I didn’t have SMS-2FA enabled, they would not have been able to take control of my email address without guessing the password.

I had to remove this detail from my original post as it was too long:

Boost mobile is negligent and not following industry standards. Their whole security model is based on a 4-digit pin. At first I thought somebody had a script working its way up through all the combinations at the login screen, but I no longer feel that is the case. The fact that at least nine of us had this same issue within days makes me think there is a wide-spread issue here.

I too had a lot of respect for Cuban regarding this.

Article from Inc:

Mark Cuban Made Shark Tank Change Its Contracts After threatening not to return until an equity clause was removed from contestants' contracts, Mark Cuban finally got his way.

Just for appearing on the show, owners agree to give up 5% of their company or 2% of future royalties.

...

Cuban said the clause was removed retroactively, meaning every contestant who's appeared on the show since Season One will be relieved of the commitment. However, how that will work out logistically remains unclear.

https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/mark-cuban-forces-shark-ta...

Several years back (and things may have changed) Panasonic had a patent on the inverter and was the only microwave that offered it. I purchased a Panasonic for that reason and love it.

This from their website: The Panasonic Microwave Ovens powered with patented Inverter Technology™ deliver evenly cooked meals, from edges to center, every time.

I am really curious why I got a down-vote or two. I was not being facetious.

Outside the classified materials Ed leaked and we all know about, he shares details about hotels he stayed at during training and his trips into what seemed to me as classified information about government building locations.

I was really curious if this is ‘common knowledge’ or if other readers felt he disclosed additional classified information.

As others have recently said, it seems like this site has changed quite a bit in the recent years from the site I once knew.

I am about half way through the book.

Do you feel he revealed additional details in the book that the CIA/NSA does not appreciate?

IE, location and purpose of buildings?

For me, who has also pushed through hundreds of thousands of business dollars, it is all about the rewards program.

It was not uncommon for me to receive several thousand dollars of Home Depot and other gift cards per year.

It’s a sad day: I am starting to realize I am old.

I went to the website, saw it was a card game and thought I would learn more about it as I like card games. I play card games.

I clicked on "How do I play Cards Against Humanity" under the "Your dumb questions" but quickly lost interest when I would have had to click on "Read the fucking rules" to learn more about the game.

I get it... it is probably an edgy game... it probably is not for me. I guess I will never know as I just don’t want to "read the fucking rules".

EDIT: Fixed typo.

Question: is there an agreed upon starting position of the pieces when having these types of competitions? Ie, both the robot and the human had to solve the exact same problem?

Thanks

Since you have done it for four weeks, would you consider trying it for six months or even a year?

It sounds like we have similar work responsibilities. I too am married. Up until June of this year I would drink a few glasses of wine and/or cranberry and vodka each night “to relax”. In June I was asking myself why am I drinking several nights a week. I wondered what it would be like to never drink alcohol again. So I quit. The only exception was during a Caribbean cruise. I don’t regret drinking it then and may consider it for future vacations.

For me, I find myself as a leader at the office, at home and at church. Not having alcohol is also consistent with my new minimalist lifestyle and consistent with my mindset that I don’t need everything I want.

The part I miss drinking the most, I my lack of variety on beverages while eating dinner.

Best of luck to you, hopefully you will find out you are not addicted.

Giraffe Rider,

I have always said “life is not fair” but recently have come to believe and accept it.

A 36 year old friend was an innocent victim of an automobile accident seven weeks ago. He is still unable to communicate and move. A respectable individual with a wife and three young girls.

Another "young" (42) neighbor of mine, father with three kids. Cancer came back of out remission and a recent bone marrow transplant failed.

>The best you can do is get on with life. Agreed. Part of being born is dying. We need to accept our fate, make the best of it and move on. I now have a much deeper appreciation of my good health (and most of my family members around me). I don’t take it for granted any more.

You are correct. I am a very humble business owner (of 12) who recognizes, appreciates and praises my employees’ skills. I find it humbling that out of all the businesses "out there" they choose to work for me.

It comes down to two things. If he went about the questions differently, I would have answered all three sheets with a lot of thought and care (like I did on sheet one). It also was, that he could not read my signals and start wrapping things up. If he could not read my obvious signals, there is no way he could interact well with our clients. I have noticed over the years must clients will not inform you if you are speaking in lingo over their heads.

On a side note... let me share another story... my FAVORITE story...

I come from humble beginnings. My dad was a union work for a city and did his 40 hours per week. I started my business nine years ago on October 30th. My dad asked at our Thanksgiving dinner, "What are you doing again?" in front of our twenty or so guests, knowing darn well what I was doing since I was talking about it for a month or so. I said "Dad, as I already told you, I will be creating websites, assisting companies in database development, helping them install workstations etc... He responded, "I just don’t know" my dad had a business, you have to deal with taxes, lawyers, payroll, finding work etc etc... you are just better off working for somebody else...

My response... and it was without hesitation... "You are exactly the type of person I want to hire!". I don’t think he found it as funny as most of our guests.

It wasn’t until last year that he visited our office space (7,000 sq/ft) that reality sank in that his son has been somewhat successfully and he started to tear up.

I am in a position to interview applicants for development positions. I still chuckle when I think of an interview I had last year...

I knew within the first few minutes of this interview that this guy was not for us. He was coming out of a DOS development background (if my memory serves me correctly it was Clipper or FoxPro). The guy had no recent development skills and was telling us he would ramp up quickly for our .NET / SQL needs. The interview lasted about 20 minutes when I asked the question "Do you have any questions for us?"

He said "as a matter of fact I do". He opened a folder and pulled out a sheet of questions. It was obviously printed from a website. It was questions like "Why would I want to work for here?". "Please describe to me what job I am applying for?", etc. I thought to myself, "fair enough, I will take the time to answer these questions honestly even though most of them were covered in the previous 20 minutes."

When he got to the end of list, he flipped the page to another full page of questions. My head jerked, my eyes opened wide and I shook my head a little. He informed me don’t worry, I don’t plan to ask all of these, which he then proceeded to ask all of them. It was questions like, what do you use for source code control? What do you use to track bugs? Do you practice Agile development? My long winded sheet-1 answers quickly became one and two word answers for sheet two.

It was when he flipped the page to page three I lost it. My elbows hit the table, I let out a big SIGH and asked "there are more questions?" I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask more questions after the sigh I let out, but he did.

I don’t recall exactly how I wrapped it up, and I tried to stay somewhat professional, but more less informed him he was not the right guy for the job.

For our business, development skills are important, but do not account for everything. I would say client interaction and people skills rank right up there.

Rarely do I buy complete sets anymore, I just buy the individual pieces I am looking for from http://www.bricklink.com (no affiliation just a happy customer). (92,700,724 items in 2,814,678 lots in 3,404 stores as of Aug-17-09 1:00:08 PM.)

Looking for old catalogs? Can’t beat this site http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/; scanned in and categorized by theme, name, year etc.

Not many stories actually make me laugh-out-loud, this one was an exception. I think it was the picture of his four daughters smiling in the picture that took me over the top!

I thought I was doing good with creating a square-foot-garden with my kids (http://www.toddalewis.com/square-foot-gardening.aspx)... hard to compete with an "indoor" swimming pool.

I have only used one ebook reader, but have been very pleased with it so far. I purchased the eBookwise 1150 a few years ago for $99 (now $136). I am sure there are bigger, better, faster readers out there, but this may be appropriate for a casual reader like myself.

The eBookwise Librarian software package ($15) converts .DOC, .RTF, .HTML and RB files to the eBookwise Librarian format.

eBookwise Reader: http://www.ebookwise.com/ Librarian Software: http://www.ebookwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book&bi=28181&...

A little off topic... but every time I hear Microsoft Flight Simulator, it reminds me how hardware vendors used to use the game to test the hardware compatibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible "At first, few "compatibles" other than Compaq's models offered compatibility beyond the DOS/BIOS level. Reviewers and users developed suites of programs to test compatibility; the ability to run Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Flight Simulator became one of the most significant "stress tests"."

My favorite part of the story was "However, despite over 700 attempts by local authorities to contact her and obtain payment during that time, she failed to meet any of the charges." Here in the United States they put on tire locks and eventually tow the car, is that not the case in Austria? They said the civil servant racked these up over the course of two years.