rcurry

It’s funny, I don’t know anything about the industry but back in around 1999 I was working for a trading firm and we used to love hiring talent out of one of the big game companies - they’d be like “You mean I get paid the same money and I don’t have to sleep in my cubicle?”

I worked for a very successful “dot com” back in the day. EverQuest was like the crack pipe for the tech crowd, people actually got divorced over addictions to it.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck with Hacker News.

For the win.

It was on the thirtieth interview when things went south. While excitedly explaining how they’d just scaled a business to eight million users the candidate casually picked up a shrimp fork and dug into the house salad with it!!

It was right then I realized we’d made a terrible mistake. I feigned gastric distress and headed for the restroom where I immediately called HR.

Months wasted but I feel we dodged a bullet on this one. Now it’s back to the drawing board but I’m sure we will eventually find a qualified junior web developer.

Yikes! If any of my previous CEOs caught me spending “months” making a hiring decision I’d be toast.

That’s great to hear, and thanks for the link to the map.

For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.

Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.

It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.

Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.

Wat? CS is crawling with cheaters. Totally sucks. I can’t wait for the day when we have enough bandwidth that the entire game can be rendered on the server side and you just get a video feed. That would end most of this crap.

This. I used to jump at a DZ in the Midwest that has been in operation for like thirty years and had, I think, only one fatality. But we had great safety people in charge and were really careful with students.

My first jump there was a static line solo and they gave an hour long classroom session followed by time in a hanging harness practicing emergency procedures and malfunction recognition.

The thing that makes tandem jumps potentially more dangerous is that the gear is completely different from a regular sport rig - so it’s important to ask how many tandem jumps your tandem master has. He/she might have 10k jumps, but maybe only 200 on a tandem rig. As a former sport skydiver I wouldn’t go near a tandem jump unless the instructor had at least 500 tandem jumps.

Ah, okay - thanks for the additional detail. Makes a little more sense now.

You sound like one of those guys who can’t figure out why he gets speeding tickets when everyone else gets a warning.

Not trying to be a jerk, believe me, but try it some time. Deer have this mysterious ability to f*cking vanish during hunting season. In one town I lived in 3M had a plant with a little pond that was fenced off. During deer season all the deer would hop the fence and hang out at the factory because they knew nobody was allowed to hunt there. It was hilarious.

Uh, okay. I guess it’s because he was enlisted to try and recover a dead or wounded animal and was not out shooting them that I find this ridiculous. He wasn’t a hunter, and wasn’t hunting - he was asked to help find a downed or injured animal with his drone and I think most people who had such an ability would be happy to help.

Nobody wants an injured animal to run off and die an awful death and so it’s best to find them any way you can.

Me too. I’ve lived in a small town and know how that works. I accidentally shot a deer one time when I was out hunting coyotes but the warden knew me and so I got “taking game out of season” instead of “poaching” - I actually didn’t know there was a difference, but I guess there is. If you call it in and report yourself you get some courtesy.

I did make the local paper, so it was kind funny when all my friends started calling me about why I was listed in the police blotter section of the local gazette.

Good times.

I guess, and give me some rope here because I’m not a deer hunter, it’s that trophy bucks make more trophy bucks.. if you make it easy to cull them then you lose the next generation.

Deer are pretty smart, but they are crepuscular which means they feed at dawn and at dusk, when it’s harder for predators to see them. Using lights gives a hunter a huge advantage.

I’m a predator hunter and do most of my hunting at night. The reason they don’t want you using lights is that deer are mostly crepuscular creatures and so jacklighting them gives you a huge advantage. I see trophy bucks at night every time I’m out after coyotes - the same animals would be really hard to sneak up on during daylight hours, when their senses are more highly attenuated to avoiding threats.

I have to agree with you. This whole thing is bananas - it’s not like you have some good ol’ boys jacklighting deer and shooting them. It just sounds like some guy who was excited to have a little drone business and was happy to help some folks out with his toy.

As a sheriff friend of mine would put it, busting a guy like that really isn’t in the “spirit of the law.” Maybe there was some bad blood or something between this guy and the wardens.

Don’t get me wrong - wardens can be pretty strict and I’ve known a few who have actually ticketed themselves for making a mistake, but this wasn’t a warden just coming up on a scene and issuing a citation, and saying “sorry boys, I wish I didn’t have to write you up but here we are…” this was a calculated setup and seems like a pretty cheap shot.

Salad fingers was good, but nothing tops the Spoilsbury Toast Boy.

Samson makes great mics. I’ve had a CO1U for years and it sounds terrific.

I’m starting to understand just how broken the hiring process in tech has become.

Reminds me of the whole “Artist formerly known as Prince” thing, Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid. Oh well.

Good old RS-232 - my first programming job was working for a company called Digiboard that made RS-232 concentrators for companies that were running hundreds of terminals over that protocol. You’d be astonished at how many terminals some of our clients had networked to a single machine over a serial port.

I kind of dig when things go down, I sort of like sitting around the gas fireplace and listening to my ham radio in a dark house for a few hours. If shit really hits the fan then it’s time for the tabletop gas burner and some beef and shrimp with veggies.

Jira can wait until the power comes back on.

When I was like 12 my teacher was an army reservist and got the idea to teach us how to rappel off the top of the school, lmao. So we all got together with our families and rappelled off a four story building. It was bananas and we all had so much fun. Now days they’d probably charge that teacher with a felony.

It was something about someone getting annoyed over an alarm from a refrigerator and deciding to pull the plug.

Oh lord, I ended up working at a place that had one of those. He would always carry this huge stack of old-school fan folded green and white dot matrix printer paper to prove his bona fides and would spend every meeting furiously scribbling circles and boxes on it and then throwing it away after. His catch phrase (in like 2013) was “I could probably whip together an AI solution for this but I’m too busy, you guys just let me know when you have some regular solution for me to review.”

Oh, you’d be surprised how much damage a janitor can do (me remembering the time the cleaning guy at my dad’s lab accidentally tipped over a whole shelf of mice)

The only cops I meet these days are in the jiu jitsu gym, and they are usually very nice people. It’s interesting to just be playing a sport with someone but also realizing they are actually seriously training for the danger of getting into a life or death struggle with a 260lb guy who has some grappling skills. I can’t imagine having a job like that. My biggest threat in life is a complicated Jira ticket.