rsayers

I used Vuze for a bit back in the day, it was a resource hog on whatever I was running it on. I think I mostly stuck with uTorrent until switching to the open source alternatives.

I actually use all three you mentioned in different contexts.

In 2003 or so, I was really amused by the ORLY owl memes, so I collected them and stuck them in a public directory on my webserver. I have no idea how it was found, but at some point my open directory got indexed by google.

I found out because my host emailed me saying I had hit my bandwidth quota for the month... 2 days into said month. So digging through logs I found the biggest offenders, there were forums where people linked just about every image I had.

A little htaccess magic later, any request that came from a non-allowist referer was instead served a rather crude message I quickly put together in MS paint.

No one contacted me about it, but it was amusing watching these threads where people were getting upset when they thought they were going to see funny owl pics.

I booted this on my 486 back in the day. That machine had a combo soundcard/modem which gave me fits when I upgraded to a 33.6 later on (Plug and Play, haha. At least I learned how to deal with IRQ conflicts). QNX booted and recognized everything and it just worked, and so fast.

Also keep in mind that at this time, getting Linux working was a crapshoot, I had already attempted and failed to get it running on the same machine, making the QNX disk seem even more amazing.

Yup, the infotainment system in 2016+ Fords runs QNX.

This one was one of those weird experiments I tried as a teen and was pretty surprised that it worked. A buddy was staying over and we both had our PCs setup on our dining room table. I don't recall the exact year, but 95-96 probably.

My family had two phone lines (necessitated by my obsession with the Internet), so we started playing Doom in modem mode (one pc connected to the kitchen phone line, and a 50ft cable going to my bedroom). At one point i decide to try the direct connection. ATDT one end, ATA the other (i think the caller init string needed something to tell it to ignore the lack of dialtone) and it worked! At that point we restarted our game in serial mode. I hadn't thought of this in ages.

I got my own apartment while I was still in HS, my apartment become sort of a perpetual lan party. Friends would often just leave their machines setup at my place while they went to work or school.

All machines were initially connected via coax ethernet, all sharing one 28.8 dialup connection.

A house like this was basically the most amazing thing any of us could have imagined back then.

Absolutely. Before I was WFH full time, I tended to buy whatever chair seemed nice enough, but never spent over $200 USD. About a week after our companies WFH order I realized it was really causing discomfort after long work session. I went with a Secretlab gaming chair. Despite the "gaming" part, it's pretty solid and I've been very happy with it. Several friends and coworkers have purchased them on my recommendation and have been happy with them as well.

I let it write the boring stuff. Needed a python class to take an example dict, and generate a class that creates all the properties that map to the keys in said dict (I have a constraint preventing me from using something like json_dataclass or similar). While it's churning that out, I can focus on other things.

Also found its great for regex, I'm pretty good with writing these, but recently came across a pretty complex one in our codebase that wasnt commented. Pasted into GPT4 and asked it to explain it, it broke down each bit in detail, and in the end even generated an example string that would match it.

First initial, last name. I was assigned this as a Unix username in 2000, and just kept using it.

I prefer it. I will go out of my way to go to a store with self checkout vs one without. Probably due to anxiety/autism, but being able to remove the human element makes things much easier for me.

Thanks, that's fantastic. I'm also autistic, and yes, this just looked like a transcript of a normal conversation, so I wasn't sure what the draw was. Your explanation cleared that up for me.

In the Squeak/Pharo world, a built in tool called Iceberg handles VCS integration and is pretty slick. You can also easily load packages from external sources. In practice most packages are installed from their GitHub repo.

Deployments can start with a stock image, load your code and run, without you having to move around an actual binary blob from machine to machine.

Where you are in your career also matters. For my last job, I took a pay cut to work at an interesting startup, and of course went into it knowing it might not last.

I'm more interested in stability now. On my last job hunt i was avoiding some more interesting work in favor of stability. I was in my late 30s at the time and just didnt want to go through all the start up problems I've experienced in the past.

That all said, I'm on a small team now working on an ecommerce site. It seems like a boring job, but I've been surprised at how much I've been able to use "interesting" tech to solve problems. You actually dont know when that boring job might be exactly what you want.

My # was 522621, I registered in the spring of 1998. My password was hacked well over 10 years ago and I've never been able to recover the account. Not that I would ever need it, but it would be nice to have it back.

IM seems like such an established part of the internet now, it's easy to forget how amazing it seemed when I first saw it. Finally I could chat with my friends without us all having to be on IRC at the same time. It was also much easier to use than IRC, which brought in a lot of other friends I had who were less technically inclined.

Oh the memories. My first "lan" party was in my parents garage right after Quake 1 came out. We had two computers connected with a null modem adapter, since neither of us could afford network cards. Everyone took turns playing 1v1 games.

My best friend and I got our first apartment when we were still in High School, which ended up turning into an almost 24/7 lan party. Friends would find space for their PC's and leave them there for weeks, dropping by to play games when they had the time. One weekend we had so many people, there were two PCs setup on the kitchen counter. Internet access? A socks proxy letting everyone share our 33.6 dialup connection.

I just got back from Europe where I used my mag stripe card quite a bit. In the UK I was asked for an ID almost 100% of the time and merchants seemed do a good job of actually matching data, and then matching my photo id to me.

In France it was hit or miss, I'd say maybe 25% of the time I was even asked for an id for a transaction.

I've been fighting with various modes trying to find a usable solution for php/html/js for some time. This is a godsend.

I've used various drugs for various reasons. I no longer use illegal drugs because of my job, but I've used quite a bit in the past.

Cannabis is great for unwinding when you just cant force yourself to stop thinking about work or other worries. It's also just plain fun.

I enjoyed LSD the most. Aside from the hallucinations and euphoria (both of which were good enough reasons to use it) the drug causes a lot of introspection. You wander down some corridors of the mind you would normally never visit. I feel like I know myself better because of it. My first trip alone caused me to make some life changes afterward which have greatly improved my life today.

Much has been said about the therapeutic value of mdma, but that as not been my experience. It's a lot of fun, you do feel closer to those around you, but I don't think I took much away from it. I've mainly done this at clubs, so perhaps it would be different in another setting.

For reference: 29 Male, software developer. More or less successful (married with a house and all that)

My guess is that the correlation is with poverty rather than voting preferences.

As a former Mississippi resident (and one who did not have a passport until the age of 26) I can tell you I personally knew very few people who could afford to travel. The wages in the state may match the low cost of living, but a plane ticket is going to be the same leaving from Jackson Mississippi as it is LAX.

When this was posted on Reddit quite a few people used it as an opportunity to take jabs at how ignorant people in the south are because they did not "want" to see places outside our borders. It's quite difficult to do when a ticket to Europe would equal an entire months salary for many people.

Agreed. When I finally went to college after years of programming, I picked religion as my major. It's a great jack of all trades major in humanities. You get history, language, philosophy, and more. I even got a trip to India out of it.

After years of programming I felt I would gain little by studying CS. Sure I would learn, but only after going though classes that would teach me nothing or little at all in order to get to the good stuff. If I was going to throw down the money for a degree I wanted to learn something new.

I eventually went for the low hanging fruit and switched to IT with a software emphasis at a school where I could graduate much faster, this was more for fiscal reasons though. I feel what I picked up in my brief time as a religion major was extremely valuable and I came out with a lot of knowledge and better understanding of a lot that goes on in the world.

Vim or Emacs, it doesn't really matter. Users of both will tell you that their editor is best, but if one was really better, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion after so many years.

I personally picked emacs for a number of reasons, you seem to already be familiar with Vim so that might be best for you.

Print out the cheat sheets, and get to work. It's terribly frustrating at first, but you'll be off the sheets in no time. After a month of steady emacs use I could not go back to anything else. I have to use Eclipse at work from time to time and I find the experience maddening; having to use keys like Page Up, Page Down, Home, etc. Emacs lets me do all that and more without ever leaving the home row. I'm sure Vim is the same way.

Pick one, learn it, love it... just don't become a zealot :)

I also did this for a year. Not really by choice, but simply because I lived in a developing country (Curacao) and my house didn't have hot water. It really was not that big of a deal after the first week.

The best client to use on a graphical system Firefox with the Overbite extension: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/d?ff3

For console use Lynx is what I prefer and seems to be popular for that.

Shameless Plug: gopher://gopher.robsayers.com

I moved to Curacao. Picked up papiamentu (local creole language), Spanish, and a little dutch (The official state langauge) pretty quick.

That is hardly practical for most people though. Take the classes, but supplement that learning. Watch Spanish language films with and without subtitles. Watch movies you already know very well dubbed in Spanish (I learned lots from that).

Chat up people in Spanish speaking countries and attempt to speak Spanish as much as possible. You might even find an English language student you can assist at the same time.

If you go eat at a Mexican place, order in Spanish. Yes, you will butcher it at first, yes you will feel silly. But you improve quickly by doing this.

Learning the way I did does have its drawbacks. While I can more or less communicate effectively, I know almost know grammar rules. I can conjugate correctly, but have no idea "why" something is correct.

I live in Mississippi, and every time I leave the South I see a very noticeable difference in how people look. It has gotten much worse in the past 10 years. I recall growing up and going to the store, the electric carts were always parked in the front of the store. Now they are always in use by someone too large to walk. It's very sad.

And I believe this article confirms my mental state, I do go running when its 100 degrees outside.

16, Dominos pizza, taking orders and making them at $4.75 per hour.

Quit that job to become an asp developer :(

I will second this. Since I've been commuting by bike, all nighters are much easier on me the next day as I get my second (or third) wind on my way to work.

Another trick I've found is don't hit the coffee or energy drinks until you absolutely need to, you're going to crash anyhow, and drinking stimulants too soon will only make that happen quicker.

I was 12, and it was an Apple II+. Now this was 91 or so, so it was really old even then.

I signed up a few minutes ago, have yet to receive my email with the root passwd.

Looks like it comes with Ubuntu 8.04 and no option to change it.

I have 2 linodes currently, I plan to run some benchmarks vs Chunkhost to see how it stacks up.

Thanks, that was actually extremely helpful.