toynbee

Got it - if I ever want to hide a bot I’ll name it “CertainlyADog.”

https://xkcd.com/2347

I’m sure you can guess which one that is.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

Have you read the short story “All Summer in a Day”?

Presented without comment.

I’ve never put stickers on any of my equipment, personal or otherwise … But someone at my work once told me that one could procure plastic shells you can put on Macbooks so you can a. Not damage the device and b. Take your stickers with you when you leave.

“Poor?r?”

Thank you for the validation! I’ve no more stories about the rock, which I hope is the dullest anecdote of them all.

When I first developed a back injury, I expressed to my eldest brother that I was worried my kid would need me and that I would be unable to get to them due to pain.

He subsequently told me about a time shortly after the story I told above in which the rock I mentioned fell on his foot during an attempt at removal.

According to him, my dad was able to lift the rock - which, again, power equipment had previously been unable to move significantly - long enough for my brother to escape.

Apparently adrenaline is a powerful thing. Hopefully that contributes to your enjoyment of the day!

Well before I was born, my parents bought their house and had a chunk of partially buried quartz on the property. They tried to remove it but, for whatever reason, were unable, even with the use of heavy machinery.

Back then they used to smoke, but my eldest brother was asthmatic, so they tried to avoid doing it near him. As a result, they developed a habit of sitting on the rock to smoke, since it was pretty far from the house.

This reminds me of … All of that.

Despite being a pretty ardent Linux user for a lot of years, I’ve never heard of “Omarchy.” I just looked it up; without clicking the resultant link, I already saw it describe itself as “beautiful, modern & opinionated.”

I don’t think I’ll be using it. Or clicking the link.

I better carve a shiv for protection.

The most concerning sensory deprivation I’ve ever encountered was when Katrina happened. I wasn’t in any of the disaster areas, but it still hit hard where I lived.

When I woke up, I literally couldn’t see anything. The power had gone out and I guess the weather was still cloudy enough that no sunlight penetrated my blinds. Also, it was intensely quiet; I was still young at the time so I didn’t have real servers, just always-on towers, but my stuff was on UPS’ so I was accustomed to at least hearing their beeps if it was out long enough for them to notice.

In this situation, I suppose it had been out long enough to drain their batteries and I had slept deeply enough that the beeps didn’t disturb me.

Also, the house had central HVAC and I was used to hearing it run much of the time. Between that, the lack of system fans, the lack of beeping, and not being able to tell whether my eyes were open, it was a disorienting way to wake up.

The biggest issue I have with it is that I have Linux on all my personal systems and OSX on my work laptop and sometimes switch rapidly between them.

My fingers don’t seem to adapt as quickly, though, and I often press the wrong combination between them.

I remember a while ago - when, like in your anecdote, I mostly coded in bash - I had a dream that I found out people were invoking my scripts in a manner that essentially overrode settings that might (or, in my case, might not) have been set at the beginning of the script.

This never (AFAIK) happened in waking hours, but I was very offended in the dream.

A fact that I like to share from my personal history: I took four years to graduate from a two year college because I was taking every computer class they offered … Except that I skipped “intro to Unix” because when was I ever going to use that?

My entire career has been largely based on knowing how to use Linux.

Wow, haven’t seen your thorns in a while.

I liked vimwiki for this, except that it set expandtab and I could never find where.

Pretty much the one and only good thing about work forcing us to switch from Linux laptops to Macbooks.

DNS ad blocking doesn’t work on YouTube.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kwfA1UB2Je0

edit: Yes, I realize the irony of linking YouTube here.