dvtv75

At the beige box retailer I worked for, about a decade ago, we got a couple of the local high school's computers in for repairs. They told us the systems just wouldn't boot, and they "smelled funny."

Took the case off, and behold! The Intel fan had seized, melted, and caught fire. It wasn't a particularly old system so I'm not sure how the thermal protection didn't kick in, but that had happened on two near-identical systems. No saving those boards.

> I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen.

I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it.

I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time.

Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do.

On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."

My father's the same. He'll walk along through town minding his own business, and then see someone he thinks is a Muslim. That's when the shouting begins.

> He traded to get a 5-cent raise.

A five cent raise in today's currency or back then? Per hour or week?

Assuming it's hourly, if it's from "then" could you convert it to modern currency, or present it as an percentage increase so we can understand what kind of relative increase that was?

Five cents sounds like nothing today, but 70 years ago it would have been significant.

Mine does exactly the same thing. If she's on the couch watching a movie, she's a goner, but the moment she moves to bed, "it's too loud! Turn it down!" even when it's at 1/10th of the volume when she was drooling on the couch.

Definitely.

I just wish I had space to set them up permanently. I've had a brief play with the Microdrive, it's a lot faster than the old tape deck. I don't know much about the longevity of the media, though.

Now I want to get the Spectrum out for a play, but I expect I'll lie down until the urge passes!

Thinking I might do a re-cap on each of the machines, two of the capacitors on the Commodore are a little bulgy. It is a 30something year old machine, though!

Sandy Bridge i7 with 16 gigs and (as Kliment mentioned) Firefox, although I do occasionally have slight slowdowns. Those could be related to my six BOINC threads as the slowdowns are in YouTube.

Much the same here. I have six windows open, while only a few of the tabs are Hacker News, one of them has more than 100 tabs in it and the others have about 40 tabs. That's just on this computer. My laptop has another dozen tabs open. Eventually, Firefox will crash and I will lose all my open tabs when "Restore Last Session" fails on me. Hundreds of PDF documents, about 25 on my reader, dozens of songs in sheet music some as much as half-learned.

I have a Commodore 64C, monitor, floppy drive, and a pile of disks, I've used that once. I've two ZX Spectrum machines (one in a dk'tronics keyboard, nonfunctional) and a Spectrum 128, with 50 or so tapes and one of those Microdrives plus some cartridges.

My father is the same with DVDs, he has a couple of thousand. The dad of one of my friends has double that. His lounge has a wooden shelf hacked together, that thing stands floor-to-ceiling along one side of the room, wraps around a corner, and is packed solid with DVDs. Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, Monkey, the Goodies, Paint Your Wagon ("Gonna paint that wagon, gonna paint it good, we ain't braggin', we're gonna coat that wood"), the list goes on.

To me, my collecting and never doing anything with the items seems almost like a sickness. I still have all my University texts - I justify it to myself by quoting a friend of mine who said "I don't believe in selling textbooks, they might come in handy some day." They won't, most of them are more than a decade old, but I still can't bring myself to get rid of these books that cost me hundreds. It was hard enough dumping those ISA cards that were no use to anybody - and I still have a stack of 500 megabyte IDE drives somewhere.

I find myself hoping that there's one person in every hierarchy who loves his (or her, for that matter) country and the world more than the leader, and is willing to execute the leader to prevent a nuclear war.

With the cults-of-personality in place throughout Russia, China, North Korea, and the US, I'm nowhere near believing that such a person is in the right place, but I suppose that's the difference between hope and fact.

A friend of mine had been contracted to record a webcast with a few fairly important and wealthy businessmen. The company that contracted him provided him with some equipment, they set up some slides to appear in the background, and then their Windows 10 laptop suddenly rebooted on my friend.

They delayed the webcast for about two hours, hoping it would come back, but the laptop didn't finish in that time so they just had to go without. "Funny" thing is that it was his reputation that took the hit, not Microsoft's nor the contracting company's.

If I ever get a time machine and meet George Hudson, I will punch him squarely in the face. He wanted some time after work to look at insects, and because of that we have DST.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hudson_(entomologist)

About a decade ago, I worked at a beige box store. Someone brought in just his hard drive, and asked me to recover all his files, as his thesis was on it. So, I ran our recovery software (can't recall what it was) and found the drive was completely blank. No system files, no data, no temp files, absolutely nothing. The customer didn't seem upset or irritated at all, and thanked me, paid his bill and left.

At the time, that puzzled me a bit, but now it occurs to me that he may just have been making sure his data was destroyed.

You will get negative responses, accept that before you post. Perhaps there is some value to be gained from the negative responses, but you will also get people who care enough trying to help. Some of those will look negative, but read everything and sit on them for a few days.

I'm sure you've figured out that it's really hard to offer helpful advice to someone when you don't know their situation, which is something that keeps coming up here.

Post away, I'm looking forward to reading it in the hope that I may be able to offer some help.

I had a very similar problem with an abusive ex-. She tried to bully me into starting a business in an area I was (am) totally unsuited for (when I was too young to be doing anything like that anyway), as well as studying for a career that she felt would earn "enough" money, all while helping herself to my bank account. She also spent up big on several occasions, and then came crying to me when the debt collectors came knocking. I was young and naive, so I think you can see how that ended up.

She eventually left me because I wasn't trying hard enough to please her; I was studying from 8am to 5pm, then working until 9pm, and she wanted me to stop eating lunch for several months so I could smother her with roses. I suggested that she should go fk herself because I was working 13 hours a day plus catching up on study at weekends while she did four hours on a Sunday if she felt like it, so she wandered off with .. well, a pile of my furniture and equipment, plus a few grand from my bank account and my one (emergencies only) credit card, as well as my overdraft, all of which took me a few years to pay back.

I sure that not all women are like this, and I wonder if the masculine version of this is the trophy wife. Most of the women I've known have been the opposite. Maybe you could adjust your profile in some way to discourage that sort of approach?

My ex- told me that I had to stop believing in gravity because it's just (her) God pushing down on us. That's why mountains don't pull you towards them. (She cried when I told her about the experiment where just this thing was tested and it was found to be untrue, said something about Satan.)

A friend once told me that meditation allows demons to take over your mind and make you crazy. This guy has a physics PhD, and not only believes this but also that global warming is an evil communist conspiracy designed to steal our freedoms. Not precisely his words, but close enough.

A good friend was told by his girlfriend that she couldn't marry him unless he converted and joined her church. Another of my friends was a member of that church, and won't talk about his time there (he's really messed up, and if you touch him accidentally he almost loses it) but tells me that it's all about control and power.

> My fear is that I'm unknowingly harboring some wildly irrational beliefs.

I have very much the same fear. I know I have held stupid beliefs ("depression isn't real, harden up!" was particularly ironic, as I was depressed, didn't know it, and that attitude was a result).

If someone reading this is going to use resistance training to "fix" their weaknesses, it's important to have a trainer assist as they can pick poor technique when you think you're doing it perfectly.

For example, I used to be a fencer, and as a result my left leg was much stronger than my right. I thought I was doing squats correctly, but a trainer spotted that I was tilting my hips as I was doing the exercise.

Something to consider:

On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.

Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.

This leaves me conflicted.

I've noted here (quite) a number of times that I have a disability that impacts my ability to absorb chunks of written material. I've had an occupational therapist tell me that I shouldn't work in CS or IT (I have a CS degree in spite of that), and several doctors have told me I should stay away from the field, while others have told me that just go with whatever works and don't tell employers I have this disability.

I prefer to be honest, but at the same time I also like to eat most days.

I have an interview for a job in a few days, and no clue what I should do. If they don't ask, do I bring it up? What do I tell them? Most employers in the city are highly discriminatory against people with a disability, even if it means they're not hiring the most qualified one.

(I'm not actually seeking advice here, just musing online.)

Yet communicating in a clear, consistent, and accurate fashion is crucial.

Many years ago, I worked in a photographic store. We developed film and printed photos, primarily. One of the women took in a film for development, wrote the customer's surname in the name box, then wrote "Matt" over the name.

It's fortunate that we would hand out the top slip so we would match the packet numbers, because when the customer came back into the shop we couldn't find her package. We did find one for a Matt Sullivan (or whatever the surname was). It turned out she was quite annoyed with us for not printing it in matte as they asked, so we reprinted it at no charge and she got to keep both sets.

The staff member argued that she had written matte ("See? It says Matt right there." "That's the name, not the paper type. The paper type has an -e at the end.") on it, it's just that language changes and we had to accept and adapt to it. Didn't matter what her argument was, though, because she screwed up and it cost the business money.

Mine did. It has existed for about 90 years, maybe even longer. Without going into specifics, I can imagine that it could be automated as is right now, as it's not particularly complicated, and the whole role could be designed around so that it's not required anyway.

(I believe I'll be out-of-work within a few months because of implications from the latter statement.)

I recall reading that about the F-117, many years ago. Can't remember the source, either, and I've no idea if it's accurate.

My favorite sentence was this:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/11/cleveland_w...

Both of my paternal uncles had paranoid schizophrenia. In the 50s, the police were called and confiscated their rifles, after they went on a (bloodless) rampage around the neighborhood.

One was convinced that the other had control of cosmic rays, and was bombarding him with them. Sadly, he was so out of touch with reality that even when he did have actual problems, nobody believed him.

These days, my father's showing many of the paranoias they had - mostly fueled by external sources, such as Trump's incoherent rantings and the utter bull from Infowars.

A note to anybody who takes exception to this: I don't care. I'm not interested in a political debate. I'm much more concerned about my father's ranting about gangsters ('banksters') behind the scenes orchestrating a move to a one world government, conspiracies to hide alien governmental contacts (including the recent bout of pneumonia that Buzz Aldrin contracted while visiting the aliens in Antarctica, the same ones he'd met when he landed on the Moon), the secret Muslim army that's building up in Australia to wrest control of the nation, and how someone showed on YouTube that he'd managed to build a perpetual motion machine that the evil "oil companies" had bought and were keeping secret so that they could deny free energy from the people of the planet. Also, global warming is a conspiracy by the evil socialist liberal neo-socialist left commie neo-commie elites who control the universities, the media, and weather forecasting groups and the only ones who can set us free from this conspiracy are the oil companies and Trump, who are the only good guys left.

(Not in the US.) My partner worked a factory job for many years. They used to have a "specials" group (unofficial name for them), who would be taken on and they would be trained to do just one job, but they would learn it and perform it to a very high standard, day in and day out for many years. They would become very fast at it, and were paid quite well with regard to the average wage in the area.

Unfortunately, they were also the first laid off when automation was installed, and afterwards they were competing for few jobs at the same (regional) low wages with "normal" people.

I live in a house by a road. A particularly busy road. Every time I go outside, whenever I sit inside, any time I'm digging the garden, all I can hear is traffic.

Those few occasions that I'm outside and hear nothing, not even distant traffic only birds, are almost a religious experience for me. It's just so calming, and almost everything in my life seems better for just that short time.

Then the cars come by.

Yup, I have an Odroid X running Ubuntu (I couldn't find a Debian that was set up to run on it). It's my mail server, apache server, has an outward facing SSH server, and acts as a sensor data logger. It's pushed pretty much as far as it will go, for a little system like that, with a fairly high load average at times.

Recently had a power cut that killed the system, but rather than reinstall I poked around for a few hours until I discovered the bootloader's zImage had been corrupted. Copied another over from the original install image, and away it went.

When I find myself a decent job, I'll dedicate a more powerful system to the task, maybe virtualize a few of the servers.

Fun projects, although there are many head-hit-keyboard moments in setting it up.

I went on a tour through a slaughterhouse when I was a teen, as part of a school trip. Didn't want to go, but my stepfather decided that it would be "good for" me. I made it clear I didn't want to go and he laughed. He loved the power trip of forcing me to watch animals be killed.

It really messed me up. I won't eat red meat mostly as a result of this, but also because my family were also ridiculously poor cooks. (They were so bad that you wouldn't believe it.)

The smell of the animal fat has stuck with me for nearly thirty years, I can even smell it overpowering the fragrance of perfumed soap. Hand sanitizer, pump soap, and vegetable based soap are fine, but if I have to use ordinary animal soaps, the smell reminds me of what I saw.

I watched a cow be electrocuted, "stunned" they called it. The guide told me that it didn't feel anything because it was in a deep state of shock.

Ever been shocked by a cattle electric fence? When I was 9, I was. You can't move immediately afterward because of the shock of the event, and when the second blast hits you it hits really hard. I felt three of those, it was only when the third struck that I could move, and have no doubt that they were agonizing.

Shocking an animal to stun it, so you can slit its throat and let it die painfully while you dismember it, is no happy little picnic for the beast. This is no easy, painless death. I'm sure it would be agonizing and drawn out over several minutes, and by the time the animal recovers from the shock enough to express its suffering, it's already in pieces and can't.

Roll on lab-grown meat.

Side note: not completely relevant, but I have been attacked by a dog, and I was in shock through that as well. The worst injuries really hurt, but the adrenaline from the attack made me able to get away from the dog. The minor skin injuries I couldn't feel, because the pain centers were being overwhelmed by the worse ones. Between this, and the cattle electric fence, I'm sure they suffer.

I know this isn't exactly what you were saying, but I recently bought myself the (ancient) Star Wars Empire at War games, and they run better under WINE than they did under Windows 10. There's some problem that makes it drop frames and become unplayable in Windows.

Moreso on topic, I actually do much of my gaming in Linux, I only have a couple of AAA titles that I use Windows for (Elite: Dangerous and AC:Origins), everything else is Linux (KSP, X-Com, X-Com 2, RimWorld).

I often try and make a point of emailing a "Thanks for supporting Linux!" to the companies who release the ones I want to play, just so they know we are out there.

When I was doing Algorithms and Data Structures at the University of Otago, the required textbook was Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms first edition. More than $NZ130 at the time, and we got a few weeks into the course before they told us we didn't actually need it for coursework, they just wanted to make sure we had a copy.

I see it's available for $US6.61 used on Amazon now...

edit: had the price about $50 too high.