stirfrykitty

But isn't this the beauty of programming to begin with. Barring certain things like medical devices, cars, etc., where it has to be very orthodox, for stuff like Web back/frontends, and even gaming, this is how people learn, I guess. Sure, that code could be re-factored for speed, cleaner in appearance, etc.

Reminds me of the video driver (forget card) some Linux developers wrote that was ~30k lines of code. OpenBSD wanted to use it because the HW manufacturer wouldn't release the specs, but because the Linux code was GPL, the OpenBSD guys re-wrote it from scratch in less than 1/4 of the code.

That's not bad, actually. It's one reason why I hated leaving Perl for Python. Python is a little too orthodox sometimes.

What I'm seeing is where frameworks are becoming the new "programming languages". People now bicker over what framework to use rather than first master the language they are using for a task. I tend to favor the method of "do the simplest thing that works".

I never said it wasn't useful. Obviously there are people who need it. I just won't pay for it when I already do by paying for house water. Our tap water is clean here in Texas.

The picture in the article shows they still have the very old school Taco Bell sign from way back. I guess if it still works...

My cousin lives up in East Anglia in a house built in the mid 1300s. They have bought box fans for every room otherwise they cannot even sleep. No aircon, obviously. The local council will not allow the house to be retrofitted since it's historical.

I only drink water during/after lawn work. That amounts to maybe 32oz. Other "water" would include the half gallon or so of green tea I drink daily, along with my 4-5 double espressos during working hours.

Yet companies build plants on the Great Lakes, hoover up all the water, filter it, bottle it, and sell it to the unsuspecting, who happily buy it.

I never ever saw bottled water as a kid in Europe. It wasn't until I moved to the US where it appeared to be commonplace. When I went back home to England last year, they've got it in every supermarket I visited. Sad, really. I still just drink out of the tap here in Texas.

Slashdot-esque post:

1. Set up AC company in Europe

2. Wait for panicked calls from sweltering people

3. Profit!!

Not really acclimation, but willingness to suffer through it. I hate it when my children want to play outside because I'm out there for less than five minutes and my shirt is soaked through with sweat, it's unbearably hot, and the insects are legion. When I leave work in the late afternoon, it's so hot my car takes 10 minutes to cool down to where it's comfortable inside. By then my Right Guard has gone left and I'm having cold air blowing on wet skin. It really does suck.

Appreciate the comments. My brother lived in Denver for a few years. It's not really my cup of tea when I visited. Too much sun, and too high in altitude. I could barely breathe when I was there and my nose bled every day for the first three days.

My preferences would be Vermont, Snoqualmie, WA, Bellingham, WA, or the AK peninsula. Me and the sun are not friends.

Good comment. I loathe Texas, but I'm here because of the wife and her family. I would prefer to live someplace where it's overcast 90% of the time, and where it rains at least twice a week. I also prefer snow on the ground for a couple of months. Here in the Houston area, the heat, humidity, insects, and sheer amounts of concrete all contribute to the lack of comfort. Moreover, there are too many people here all shoved into a space that really cannot accommodate them.

And I mentioned same in my statement above. The entire lower half of the US would be largely unlivable without aircon. Even Alaska get 90+ in the summer, albeit for short bursts.

Meanwhile here in Texas, that level of heat is business as usual. I get that most places in the EU don't have aircon, as they rarely need it, barring southern EU, which I have spent considerable amounts of time in. I far prefer the misty moors of England over anything with tons of sun.

Having grown up in Europe, I do prefer their weather when it's normal for them. If only I could convince my wife to move somewhere with a proper 4 seasons rather than this hideous backwater of heat and humidity.

Cats don't have owners, they have staff.

Cats are far more independent than dogs, which is one reason why I like them. Certain cat breeds can be very dog-like, particularly Arabian Mau, Abyssinian, and Norwegian Forest. All are ridiculously intelligent and will happily accompany you like a dog, have dog-like mannerisms, etc.

Does that work in all shells?

Been using vim since 1998 and rarely stray unless I'm typing notes for something unimportant and them I use Nano.

Back in the day when I was a Unix admin, we often worked in full screen terminals and when editing a config file didn't like having to close the vim instance to go look at something, so learned about this little gem:

:sh (go back to shell and do your thing and leave vim running)

Ctrl-d to return to intact and running vim instance.

As an aside, if you decide to use nano to edit config files, make sure you use nano -w (no wrap), otherwise you may find yourself with a non-bootable OS instance.

Let's say they make it mandatory. Would it be possible for a group of people with one having unfettered access because, say, they cross the border all the time to a place that has full Internet, and they use wget to tar/gzip entire sites, places this on a server in a city, and provides access with a self-signed cert that everyone involved with knows about.

Or failing that, some kind of digital dead drop with the files. If this could be updated a few times a week, that's better than not having access to material that you don't want the government to know about. It has to be possible.

Andrew Zimmern would surely eat them and maybe has done. He's eaten everything else. I recall him saying the only things he will not eat are Durian and oatmeal (texture thing).

Editing to say he did eat grubs on one episode and said something along the lines of it feeling like a massive pop of pus in his mouth. I swore then I would never follow suit.

That episode when Bear killed and "ate" the skunk was hilarious. I recall him saying that cooking it "smelled like burning tires". Hilarious.

Or the "portions" that Rey was buying from the trading post in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Back in the early 2000s, our company phased out the huge 21" Sun boat anchor monitors for another smaller unit also with a 21" screen. They were put on the loading dock and we were told they were up for grabs. A colleague and I took several and the following weekend we took them to his private land where we proceeded to ascertain which handgun and rifle calibers were best at destroying them up close and at a distance. Up close .45 ACP was the winner. At a distance .308 was the winner. We also learned that a 6.5x55 Swedish will completely pass through one and lodge itself into a tree so deep we could not retrieve the projectile. Contrary to popular belief, monitors (at least these) did not explode when struck. Interestingly enough, the 6.5x55 will also handily pass through a HDD with no worries. All standard FMJ rounds.

Personally, I think rsync.net is the best if you're in IT, particularly if you're a *nix user. Nothing better yet unless you wanted to roll your own. And the fact they use ZFS makes it great. You can choose where your data resides and it's fairly inexpensive all things considered. And to the best of my knowledge, I don't recall them being involved in anything overtly political. I like tech companies doing what they do best. Tech.

In the olden days you would be right, but today's drives are fair. Everyone takes turns driving and shooting. Everyone in the clubhouse after the hunt. It would be anathema to leave someone out and that would not be my scene.

OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working.

What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic.

It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments.

Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.

My church has tons of social offerings with tons of attendance. Men's groups, women's groups, teen groups. I recently went hunting with some men from my church for an entire weekend. A couple of weekends later, my wife went with the women on their retreat.

The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.

That was a fantastic post. I feel exactly the same way.

My kids sometimes feel too needy. Oftentimes I never get the desired downtime.

My wife got mad at me one day and said "You need to listen to Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle. Then come talk with me." It's a shock to listen to that song, because it's true. It would be easy to end up like that and no one want it.

A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.

I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people.

You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.

Hunting is a very social exercise. My sons are not yet old enough to go without prattling on about this or that, spooking any game worth taking. I'm planning on next season taking one at a time and teaching them the craft and all that goes into it, which is great bonding. My dad was not much of a hunter, but my grandfather was, and because of that, some of my fondest memories are of us hunting doves and rabbits, and the countless fishing trips we did.

My hunting trips are just day trips. I'm not like some guys I know who fly to Colorado and Alaska, leaving the family behind. I want my sons to be involved, but they are not quite ready. My wife will sit in a deer stand with me and like to shoot, but will not shoot at animals. She likes the resulting venison, however.

Our early ancestors hunted in parties of several to dozens of men, often for safety against predators, both two and four legged. I like the idea the British use, several people driving birds, a good hunt, and cigars and gin and tonics afterwards in the game room. Done it. It's great.

When I get home Saturday afternoons, I'm mobbed by my sons who are looking forward to riding on the mower. :) It's one of the things we all look forward to: lawn work. I pay my sons to pick up and rake. I pay them to use the blower and take out the trash. I teaching them that they should be paid for their efforts, but also that if they don't work, they don't get paid. One of my sons is eager beaver and on fire for anything physical involving power tools, riding mowers, tractors, 4-wheelers, etc. The other is very cerebral and prefers computers and gaming. I cater to both, liking both myself. I want, more than anything, for my sons (and daughter) to look back on their childhood and say it was really just one big daddy/son and daddy/daughter project that involved fun and learning. I don't coddle my children in any way, shape, or form. I grew up military and still abide in much of that lifestyle. My children know they are loved beyond measure, but they also know they have serious home expectations.