codevark

Rick Beato's. If you are not a musician now, you will be one soon. Entertaining, informative, and packed with actual human content.

Dr. Chris Edward's. Guy repairs retro computers mostly for free. Brilliant work, and quite funny. Has a lot of Amiga videos. His wife's name is Mona. ;-)

Speaking of music, check out The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, a Vancouver band that's been together since the early '90s. Most of their stuff is based on H.P. Lovecraft stories. They rock hard. Fun lyrics.

They've been watching us and what we do to each other.

I'm tired of working in tech but fortunately (or not) it's my hobby so even if I retired I would still be doing all the techy things at home on my 17 'puters (loose count). Plus being the IT Guy for several extended families. I'm live. I'm nationwide. But, I do plan to do more art, music, gardening, etc.

Years ago, before Web 3.0, my Mom decided she wanted a computer to do email and genealogy. I bought her one. In one of her first sessions she held the mouse about 8 inches above the mousepad and asked why nothing was happening (shades of Star Trek). When I was showing the family some pictures featuring water on my laptop she said, "It looks so real!", and kept poking the screen with her finger, which produced those colorful (diffraction?) patterns, exclaiming, "It's like water!". I kept saying, "Mom, stop", until my older brother said, "Mom, I think he wants you to stop poking the screen like that."

Even basic computer use is hard for older folks. I can't imaging what they are going through now. I get frustrated every day with the crap we have to deal with, and I'm an IT Guy. Don't even talk to me about AI.

I thought it said "If anyone builds IT, everyone dies". Maybe I take my job too seriously.

Run your own mail server. Or several of them. No more expensive than running your own website(s).

I haven't eaten cottage cheese in decades. It's a thing now?

When I was six my parents got me a 26" Schwinn single-speed bike. It was as tall as I was. I rode it until college, doing things that were heretofore unknown to science. IT WAS GREAT.

Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.

At one point in the nineties, while furiously coding a seminal eCommerce app, my friend/boss walked up behind me and said, "Mr. Zoon, you're typing wildly on the keyboard with nothing happening on the screen." I had lost focus to my editor several minute before and being a non-touch-typist hadn't noticed. A few years later, farther into the eCommerce thing, a stubborn bug had held up things for a couple of weeks, Again, my boss/friend walked up behind me and pointed out that I had misspelled a variable name in a certain section of code. The good old days, heh. The code I wrote resulted in a multiple-award-winning product that outsold our competitor's products so quickly that they removed their products from the market. I bought a truck and a house.

For $49/year, I'd rather vote for Cthulhu.

You're babbling again.

Form vs Function, all over again.

Work the function aspect until it is beyond reproach. Then look at form and tweak things until the neighbors don't complain.

Or move somewhere where there are no neighbors, and skip the second step.

History is still OK, it's already there, we have pictures and drawings, with circles and arrows.

HTML+CSS, as little JS as is possible if any at all. Notepad++

I have a (currently offline) site that uses REBOL+Vanilla for self-modification.

Why complicate your life any more than it needs?

news?

https://www.taigamotors.com/en/snowmobiles/

It's not inflation, it's price gouging.

And they should always respect user focus. Something I got used to on the Amiga, but (Windows) is horrible at this. I'm constantly typing into the wrong window when focus changes in the middle of something. WTF?

I wanted to be an astronaut, or the next Jacques Cousteau, or a rockstar guitarist, or a race car driver. None of these things happened.

But I can play guitar pretty well. I work in software and IT. 63yo.

It's time to end work, mofo. There's no shortage of money, we could all live happily ever after, never working a day in our lives, but bossman has other ideas.

I usually start out with, "Have you ever heard of SCSI?"

Frilliant. You are having the fun so many people miss today. Good luck! I've done great stuff with DPaint and Pagestream. Also PageRender3D controlled by Arexx scripts is fantastic. I did a lot of work in CanDo, Helm, and a bunch of other dev tools as well.

Keep Amigas & Carry On.

"Asking which Amiga I like best is like asking which of your children is your favourite...I love them all."

Right with ya!

Homelessness has causes. Fix those. Most homeless people do NOT want to be homeless. Is it the wages lagging inflation? Fix it. Is it housing rates skyrocketing? Fix it. Is it our broken physical and mental health systems? Fix them. Fix all the homeless people. They will love you.

I do that on a regular basis. Our production file storage is at just under 50% of almost 1 PB capacity. What are you saying?

(The best part is that if someone got in and stole our stuff, they would have no idea what to do with it, it being esoteric scientific data mostly in a proprietary binary format.)

I'm almost 63. I started playing SpaceWar and Chase on my high school's PDP-11 in 1974, never looked back lol. Wrote some games for the Apple II in the early '80s, spent almost a year playing Ultima III. Bought an Amiga 500 in '89 which I still use, as well as several A3000s. I have hundreds of Amiga games, and I actually worked for Psygnosis for about a year. Played Ultima Online through the '90-'00s, as well as PC games like Quake, Death Rally, Diablo I/II, Outforce, Disciples, etc. Today I play several browser games just to fill in time gaps while doing other things (UrbanDead, Pardus, Rogule, NationStates), and when I have a few hours to kill, LotRO (on Arkenstone, fyi). I'm currently designing a massive open-world RPG in Unreal Engine 5. Stay tooned!

(An awful lot of retro games can be played in a browser these days.) (Steam is good, but I don't use it. I really don't need more games in my life at the moment ha)

In the late '90s, we were Amazon before Amazon knew what it was doing.

Now I work in IT for a private college. Pay sucks, benefits are great.

I tell a lot of stories to the young folks.

Many developers have no concept of efficient use of hardware resources (or what hardware resources even are), figuring they can just ask for more of whatever they need and the system will take care of the rest. When your program and anything else including the operating system needs to play nicely in KB or MB of RAM, you're much more careful. Why not be just as careful when you have GB of RAM?

Extensive use of bloated multi-dependancy-level libraries and frameworks when you could just write the code to do what you want to do in 1/100th of the time and space. Copy-paste coders who copy far more code than they actually need.

A lot of developers who grew up coding last century understand, and some later people, but an awful lot of development today is done by people who have no idea what is actually happening when they "read a file". And think that toast requires avocados. (sorry, that was mean). I know some young people who get it, many more who probably should be pursuing a psychology degree. (oops)

Sure, you could argue that the real coders have already done the hard work, and that's why you can just click a few buttons and end up with a working "program". But it really helps to actually understand what's happening under the hood.

Disclaimer: I was apparently so technology-poor that I wrote several quite useful programs in Apple II machine language while in college. Though I had no mouse, it was a far more pleasant experience than working without video, or persistent storage other than punched paper tape, on my high school's PDP-11.

The Village People. Oh, wait..

Quite oddly, none of these explanations comes close to the meaning of the phrase as I have encountered it in my life.

.net, I have it, It will probably outlive me as I have it on auto-renew.

.io, ain't that what it's all about? Never forget a project manager getting all excited about a little drawing I made showing things going in and out of a box. To him it was a revelation. To me it was just how things work.