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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • The office is 3 day a week onsite, w Mon and Fri remote.

    I have to be on site Tue - Thur to support the users.

    I go in most Mon and Fri because it’s the only time I know I have physical access to the systems.

    My support work is largely “remote”, in that I can manage my systems 99% of the time better from my office than in the room, and I really like my setup.

    Aside from physically rebooting hardware that’s too frozen to reboot remotely, or replacing defective hardware, I can work 100% from anywhere I have internet.

    Thing is, I love the company I work for, the end users and various IT and facilities staff that support my work are all great people.

    The only close friends I have all moved far away decades ago, so the “water cooler” is the only real social interaction I get.

    I do spend a ridiculous amount to live 15 minutes from the office so the commute isn’t a concern.






  • Agreed, I started in electronics repair in the 90s, and began learning to code in 2004. 20 years and over a dozen languages later and I feel I am still learning to code.

    People say that programming jobs are going to go away because of LLMs, but I don’t see it, at least not any time soon.

    They have been trying to eliminate programmers in my primary language since before I started, and I still have steady work.

    The thought that a large number of people from non-tech backgrounds can just become proficient programmers in a reasonable amount of time is of course insane. I’ve known many very talented techs who burned out and gave up trying to learn to program.

    Something has to be done, and I don’t pretend for a moment I have any answers. I have traveled through many small towns all around the US, and the decline in the past 10 years or so is really depressing to see.


  • There are a lot of both dark themes and on screen deaths and violence, many of which are pretty graphic.

    Fallout as a franchise is well known for some pretty horrific elements, often painted over with bright colors and upbeat music, but horrific all the same.

    If Game of Thrones or The Boys were too much for you, then Fallout certianly is.

    That said, it is an absolutely brilliant and faithful adaptation of the source material, and as a long time fan of the games, I loved every minute of it.


  • My cat was 16 or so years old and in good health, though pretty under weight, when we brought in a 6 week old kitten.

    Having been a loner all her life, she wasn’t so happy to have the kitten around, but left her be. My only concern was the kitten was so small she might kill her.

    By 18 months, the kitten was larger than my senior cat, but had been put in her place so many times they mostly left each other alone.

    Occasionally they’d scrap a bit, but that was just the kitten wanting to play and the old one hissing and swatting her away. Honestly, I think it gave her some needed excercise to be chased around a bit and stalked.

    I made sure they each had their own food, water, and litter box, and there never was any real issue.

    They both had their spots, the kitten up top of the cat tree, and the old lady in her bed. I think so long as they have enough room to get away from each other it will be fine. They never became friends, but they learned to live and let live well enough. It even reached the point they could both sit with me on the couch and not fight.

    Had to put the older cat down a few weeks ago, and as sad as that was, it was very nice to have the kitten at home so the house didn’t feel so empty.


  • I use three at the office, and two at home.

    In both setups the laptop is my keyboard and small screen, above it is a 34 inch 21/9 aspect ratio curved display. At the office I also have a standard monitor off to the side.

    The large screen is my primary work space, with various code editors, UI dev tools, web browser, reference docs, and terminal windows.

    The laptop screen has email, all my short cuts, and a virtual version of the UI I’m working on because it is also a touch screen.

    When I have the third screen I use it for teams, a few system monitoring tools, and youtube for music.

    I used dual side by side monitors for years, but found that having the split in the center meant I was always sitting with my neck turned, and this lead to a lot of pain and headaches. Having them top / bottom is a lot more comfortable and my large screen is high enough I now sit up straight.

    A curved screen at the right distance also means a lot less eye strain.









  • Can’t speak to all yoga, and I specifically avoided the woo woo side of things, but it really did help as far as posture, flexibility, and various chronic joint pain.

    The way it was explained to me was that various muscle groups were locked up trying to protect for example, my knee injury, so now my hips, back, shoulder, neck, etc where all out of whack.

    The process involved working backward through the various muscles and joints, loosening them up so that we could work on the next group, until I could finally move and strengthen around the original injury.

    I haven’t gone for about eight years, but keep up with basic stretching and breathing excercises enough to maintain mobility.

    In the end I’m going to require knee surgery to actually fix the root problem.



  • Mine was a Tandy TRS 80 in the early 80s, which had both a cartridge slot and an audio cassette drive. Most all the programs I had were bootleg tapes though I don’t know where they came from, I’m guessing my father through work.

    I can remember a few of the arcade clones, Zaxxon, Pac Man, Donkey Kong with a terrible 8 bit version of in the hall of the mountain king.

    The two that stand out were a painting program I learned to glitch by fluttering the reset button while it was doing fills, and an ascii adventure game call Nahga or something similar that felt like the biggest world ever.

    One day home sick I was using it and vomited an entire strawberry milk shake on it, it was an all in one unit w built in keyboard, and I messed it up good.

    Taking apart and cleaning it was my first experience working on hardware and certianly left an impression in me.