punkwalrus

punkwalrus, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.

But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

My school banned D&D as a form of gambling in the 1980s. They shut down the D&D club and everything. I was VP of the science fiction club, and we were supposed to sign a statement that said we understood that we would not condone gambling or game playing of any sort, and this included board games. I never signed it.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

It used to be blizzards in the DC area, but with global warming, I haven’t seen one since 2016. Hurricanes and tornadoes are rare, but do happen. I suspect hurricanes will become more common. I have rapid “go to bags” and some canned supplies. Generally, with hurricanes you get ample warning. We also have places to go in Appalachia (relatives), so we wouldn’t have to shelter.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

This has been my experience as well with Aliexpress. I know there’s a huge caveat emptor going on, but it’s like you said about batteries and storage, be careful unless you know exactly what you’re buying. Like a 64TB SSD for $15.99 proooobably not the real thing. But I have gotten a lot of SBCs, some stuffed animals, and cheap costume jewelry for my wife (who knows it’s cheap, but doesn’t care). Weirdest “quality” purchase? My “gold colored” tungsten wedding ring was $10, comfort fit, and in 6 years still looks like the real thing. But didn’t dent like my original wedding ring (which is why I needed a replacement, got smashed in a door accident). I’d never buy anything that I knew might cause a fire (like batteries) or possibly poison me (like pills).

Wish and Temu ripped me off in some of my first purchases. I was only out $30, and I know it was possible, so I just deleted my account and the apps.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

I have had three Aliexpress orders go bad, and two of them I was refunded. One of them I was not, despite the fact their own shipping still showed it as on it’s way to New Jersey. They kept insisting I “pick it up at the local post office.” I pointed out Virginia was not near New Jersey. I was denied, but only out $8. As far as Amazon vs. Aliexpress, I will agree with you about Amazon customer service being better. But I have had “AliExpress shipping times” on some Amazon products, which led me to believe that the particular store was outside their local jurisdiction.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

Yeah my childhood sucked, and knowing I’d have another 12 years of abuse with nobody taking me seriously because I’m a kid? No thanks. I could put $10mil to good use right now.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

Having seen these in a demo, they have weight triggers to prevent that. Also in or demo, one got stuck on a power cord, the other on a electrical plate in the floor.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

Ah yes! My wife uses straws, too.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

Yeah as a kid in the 70s, it was a known trope. Benny Hill and Monty Python even alluded to it.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

I’m still alive, though. I used it a lot as a teen to write some of my first works of fiction, school reports, and so on. But yeah, that did occur to me. My mother died from suicide and my mother in law from medical malpractice, so they aren’t related. Still… superstitions are the worst stitions.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

I have my mom’s old Smith Corona electric typewriter, possibly from the 1960s, but I haven’t researched it deeply yet. It comes with a hard suitcase with a 3-digit combination lock, and a novelty dust cover that says “Typewriter!” in a bold font. My mom died in 1987, and I just took it. Last used in 1998 when my mother in law borrowed it, and it caused a fight because she died unexpectedly and her estate executor wanted to sell it, not believing it to be mine. He was under the impression it was an antique he could get good money for, but I stole it back. Last appraisal was mid 2000s, and in new working condition, I could MAYBE sell it for $30. But it’s one of the few scant possessions I have of my moms, so I keep it.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I got all of that except “shag ye x,” because it sounds like “shag (fuck) you x,” where “x” is the subject that is a bit vague. Like, “I’m trying to shag you, love?” or “Fuck your ex,” as in, the last person you broke up with?

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

“Field promotions” we used to call them. I have done the management thing, I was “okay” at it, but it wasn’t my passion.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

My wife stayed in a rural town near Shichigahama for a week. Nobody spoke English except a few students. But the citizens did speak Japanese louder and slower, showing that’s a universal trait. It actually helped, as my wife knew SOME Japanese.

punkwalrus, 1 year ago

I am not a gamer so my fans only spin up when the vents clog with dust or I am doing some high end rendering. I’d never do water cooling because a leak could kill everything. I have lived through floods.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

Having worked for both, I would say that most government offices are eternal, whereas private companies can vanish quickly. Sometimes without warning. Its really hard to kill a government office.

Makes me wonder, how did a necessary office survive during a junta or an overthrow? For example, how did the office of a postal clerk change from 1925 to 1955 in, say, Berlin? How does the average Salvadoran DMV worker view the changes in El Salvador since 1980?

How was a tax office run in ancient Babylon versus a modern one today?

I bet there’s some weird insights into human civilization to be found in those stories.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

The ironic thing is that they because successful because of civilization and pack mentality, but are so conceited, they think all that infrastructure (public roads, doctors, restaurants, etc) exists simply because they exist. It’s weirdly how toddlers see the universe, and why tantrums between the two groups are so similar.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

Moe (萌え, Japanese pronunciation: [mo.e] ⓘ), sometimes romanized as moé, is a Japanese word that refers to feelings of strong affection mainly towards characters in anime, manga, video games, and other media directed at the otaku market. Moe, however, has also gained usage to refer to feelings of affection towards any subject.

Moe is related to neoteny and the feeling of “cuteness” a character can evoke. The word moe originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Japan and is of uncertain origin, although there are several theories on how it came into use. Moe characters have expanded through Japanese media, and the concept has been commercialised. Contests, both online and in the real world, exist for moe-styled things, including one run by one of the Japanese game rating boards. Various notable commentators such as Tamaki Saitō, Hiroki Azuma, and Kazuya Tsurumaki have also given their take on moe and its meaning.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_(slang)

punkwalrus, 2 years ago (edited 1 year ago)

Bank of America. I have dealt with them on a corporate level, multimillion dollar assets, mind you, and seen gross incompetence and negligence that scared me. I’m talking about constant insecure data practices, inconsistent rules, terrible record keeping, and asset mismanagement.

The biggest weakness appeared to be how they treated their employees. Our “local branch” went through multiple managers in less than a year, and when we did business with the “employees du jour” in our quarterly meetings, they all acted like scared college students. Unprepared, inexperienced, and some cocksure with blatantly wrong information. And some downright unprofessional. For example, we had a meeting where they kept pronouncing our company name wrong, spelled our name wrong a different way, and kept adding parts to it. Like:

“Okay, as president of Reginald Incorporated–”

“Remington. Like the gun.”

"Regingun international - -

“No no. REM MING TON. Remington.”

"Right. Remington International - -

“Incorporated. There is no ‘international’ in our name.”

“But you’re a Japanese company?”

“No. We’re American. We do business with the Japanese.”

“Oh. Huh. Okay, as president of Remington Incorporated of Japan - -”

“NO. Just ‘Remington Incorporated.’ That’s it.”

“Oh wow. Sorry. I’m going to have to fix that on this paperwork, then.”

“Yes. That’s why we’re here.”

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

I had a boss who never gave me a raise, didn’t believe in reviews, and had long rambling meetings where he just said whatever he was thinking. Sometimes it seemed he forgot we were there, and he’d start arguing with himself. He was more “the insecure nerd who got the CTO position because he was the only IT guy when the company started.” His management was so incompetent, that they called him “Tallest,” based on the Invader Zim joke.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

Depends on “how dumb?” I had a Motorola RZR before my first iPhone(2), then before that, some camera flip phone (Motorola E815), and before that, an SCH-3500 flip phone. Before that, land lines only.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

While I never had it happen, it could give you wrong command line switches that do damage. For example, when I asked how I could list volumes attached to an AWS instance, it gave me a “modify-volume” command instead of “describe-volume” command. Thankfully, I caught that before I cut and paste it.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

I lack that enzyme genetically. I am allergic to alcohol, and so when my stomach can’t digest beans corn, or even eggs, they sit in my intestines, start to ferment, and I am in a world of hurt.

punkwalrus, 2 years ago

Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.

I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.