We need to get Admiral Cloudberg to join!

I can click on the little down arrow there and hit “comment moderation history” and see the removed comment…

This is like the Panama Canal thing again. Which of his handlers thinks this is important, and why?

I have, for some businesses I’ve wondered about. For example, I use the virtual cycling platform Zwift, which charges a monthly or annual fee to use. The biggest competitor, Rouvy, also charges a fee. Makes sense, it takes money to develop these things, buy and maintain servers, etc. The income and expenses are obvious. (Zwift does offer bike frames and wheels from real world brands; I assume the brands paid something to be included.)

Enter MyWhoosh. Free to use, so the income side is unclear. From some searching, they claim they’ll generate revenue via ads - but I doubt that would generate enough to support the platform.

The company is based out of Abu Dhabi, so I assume it’s really sportswashing - they’re just dumping a bunch of money into it and not really caring that it isn’t making money (at least for now).

I’m sticking with Zwift (in part because I have it working under Linux and Wine).

Invested / Endowed Value - Having already spent time and money to improve your status in the game, it’s difficult to throw it away.

Isn’t that every game? I can’t think of a single game, back to old Atari 2600 or arcade games, that doesn’t have this element. Many people are playing to see how far they can get, to beat the game.

Spicey, the man who got fired because SNL mocked him. Melissa McCarthy with that motorized podium was amazing. It was almost too good, because it killed the golden calf that would have given them a ton of material.

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I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.

It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.

I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…

Ah. I could go into a whole rant about the car, but I really dislike driving it. I often say that I now understand why Mazda no longer uses “zoom zoom” in their commercials.

Thanks.

Let me guess, it’s probably also heavier.

We have a 2020 Mazda 3 that probably has that, instead of useful features like a remote start or fog lights. I’ve found that I much prefer driving my car from 1999 or even our pickup from 2014 (which itself has double gaskets on the doors for sound isolation). The Mazda feels like I’m in this isolated chamber with no road feel or anything from outside encroaching. If that’s luxury, count me out.

Why did they switch to laminated in the side and rear windows?

It is, but I’m the guy that originally said it, so you shouldn’t trust me. Here’s an article about it, and another article here.

It’s so crazy how true that is.

If you follow politics, the recent deal between Biden, Democrats, and the Republicans gave Republicans everything they supposedly wanted for border security. They aren’t voting for it because Trump wants to keep hitting Biden on that issue during the election. It’s fucking insane.

LOL My employer wants us to come in at least two days every pay period (every two weeks). But, of course, we’re not all going to go in the same day - we can’t, there’s literally not enough space - so instead of calling in to meetings from home on those days, we’ll be calling into meetings from a cubicle.

WHAT IS THE POINT? They’re having a difficult time convincing us this is a good idea.

A little more backstory: We’ve been fully work-from-home since the pandemic began. They decided to renovate the building, so we all brought our stuff home and archived or destroyed stuff we no longer needed. So we’ve been work from home for almost four years now and things are rolling along nicely. It’s really difficult to argue that we somehow need to be in the office now.

I’ve never used Rust, but this definitely reminds me of my days running Slackware on my computers.

Oh, hey, I’d like to run this new package. Great. I’ll need this dependency…and that one…and the one over there…

I know it now has dependency management, but I just couldn’t do it any more. I was tired of worrying about what was going to break. I started with Slackware in the 3.x days, too.

I switched my server to Debian, and I feel like I never have to worry about it any more. Laptop and desktop are both Kubuntu, but they’re going to go to Debian at some point in the near future.

The first scenario is basically what happened with the convoys in DC a while back. Every day, they’d drive down, drive around a while, and then leave. I live in the DC area, but don’t drive in DC often, but from what I heard, the impact was minimal.

I don’t know how many trucks were involved, but I do know those trucks are expensive to buy and maintain, too expensive to keep running them in non-revenue service like that for long.