A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
Well, I woke up this morning realizing I don’t have trash service anymore. They took the 96-gallon can and didn’t even leave a note.
From a marketing perspective, you’d think they’d drop a letter in the mail saying “if you want to continue service please update your credit card” or something like that. I guess now we just pile the garage up on the pews until Thanksgiving.
It’s a lot like building a car for someone. You get it working. Spend a bunch of time tuning that engine and just making it purr. You put your heart into painting it perfectly maybe even giving a little extra love. Then the customer takes it and says, “everything is great except the horn doesn’t work at 19mph. Works below 19 mph and above 19 mph but not at 19 mph.” You are left staring at 2 wires and a switch having to figure out how something couldn’t be any more basic has this odd quirk. That’s programming.
An elf came down from the pole
To dance within your walls
Turning tricks in the night
Is it devious? Mischievous? Frightful?
Or a delight?
The elf rules are simple
You can look but you cannot touch
You can tip your elf
But it won’t change your luck
The elf when it comes
Leaves you more frustrated
Than before it came
And once the elf is done and gone
The glitter remains as evidence of your shame.
Thank you Internet! What a glorious time to be alive! OMG you have no idea how much money I would pay to see this as a weekly show. I’m going to watch this on a loop until my eyes bleed.
The wife asked this question so I posed it to claude.ai and this was the amazing answer:
No, there were no children or elderly shown in the 2006 satirical sci-fi movie Idiocracy.
The movie depicts a dystopian future society populated entirely by young and middle-aged adults who behave in crude, anti-intellectual, and hyper-commercialized ways.
In the beginning of Idiocracy, the main character Corporal Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson) takes part in a military hibernation experiment along with a prostitute named Rita (played by Maya Rudolph). They wake up 500 years later to find that society has become incredibly lazy and stupid.
The movie shows Bauers and Rita exploring this world of the future where commercialism and instant gratification reign supreme. All the people they encounter appear to be under age 50 or so. No children or elderly people are ever shown or mentioned.
The underlying message of the film is that higher birth rates among less intelligent people combined with a lack of intellectualism has resulted in this youth-obsessed, crass culture. So the total absence of young kids and senior citizens emphasizes how extreme and monolithic this future society portrayed in Idiocracy has become.
So in short – no, there is no sign or mention of children or the elderly in the over-the-top fictional world depicted in Mike Judge’s movie. Just an overly consumeristic youth culture run amok.
Charlie Munger dies proving even old men with money cannot avoid death
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-28/charles-munger-who-helped-buffett-build-berkshire-dies-at-99
Does it really matter anymore?
I swear for the number of times I’ve had to rent a plumbing auger I could have bought one.
In programming, you do a lot a writing. Probably as much writing as some best selling book authors but your books will never be read per se. Let’s use books as an analogy.
If you write a program from scratch, you are the author much like Stephen King. You plot and plan the story. You define the characters and their backstories. You write biographies of these characters that will never make it into the book but these details are important. In programming you do much of this same detail of work in project planning, database architecting, creating or choosing a programming framework, meetings and discussions with clients (book publishers) as well as your team, deciding what external resources will be used and so forth. You are Stephen King.
If you don’t write a program from scratch but instead work to modify a program that someone else wrote, you have to get into the head of that person. Much like if you were going to modify or edit one of Stephen King’s works, you’d have to get into his head, figure out the back stories, and really analyze the writing. With code, you have to figure out what the other programmer was thinking all without the documentation and backstories that were created during their process. You have to become Stephen King.
The people who use your program or the modified version of someone else’s program do not have to get as intimate with the works. They use it. Or in Stephen King’s case, they read it.
Who in their right mind schedules vet appointments for 7am?!
Woke up this morning thinking, “I need a dedicated fountain pen for red ink.” Now, I have a dedicated fountain pen for red ink. It is a Knox Galileo I bought from Birmingham Pens and is an amazing pen. The nib is great. The weight is perfect. And it writes well. Unfortunately, the ink evaporates from the pen pretty quickly so I basically don’t use it any more.
I recently purchased a TWSBI Eco as a dedicated pen for my invisible ink. I’m a big fan of the TWSBI Diamond 580 ALs so my expectation was higher than the Eco. Don’t get me wrong. The Eco is a great step up from a Pilot Metropolitan or a Lamy Safari…Hmm.. Perhaps the Eco is on par with the Lamy Safari. You know, right up until this moment I’ve always placed the Pilot Metropolitan and Lamy Safari on the same level as starter pens but honestly I have to put the Lamy Safari on a higher bar. Yes, the Lamy Safari and TWSBI Eco are pretty much in the same class. I probably won’t buy another Eco. But I could see buying a TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with an extra fine nib as a dedicated red pen.
Now… what should we do about purple?
