megaman22

I'd guess the simplest explanation is that pushing a stroller isn't an activity already categorized in one of the standard calories per hour exercise charts that everybody uses.

Never attribute something to maliciousness when laziness can explain the phenomenon equally well.

In some ways, I do think corporal punishment is more humane. Given the option of twenty lashes or a year in jail, sign me up for the cat-o-nines. Time is precious, and pain is fleeting.

I generally like Microsoft, but their official support channels are pretty terrible. Just go looking for something in the MSDN forums - a large percentage of the posts from "Microsoft" people are telling the customers/developers that they posted in the wrong forum (often incorrectly), or suggesting some inane thing that the original post already specified and then closing the thread. GitHub issues are slightly better, although if you get off the beaten path of the new hotness, responses get very thin.

You're much better off trying to find some backchannels via MVPs on Twitter or through blogs, or figure out the developers or evangelists that give talks on this kind of stuff and contact them directly.

Like most things, trends in those states can juice the absolute numbers enough to move the entire country statistically.

From what I understand, they are making a big shift towards a more devops-y process, so I can believe that a lot of the more traditional IT roles are not emphasized as much. I can't say I've noticed an increase in the number of job postings, but there's always been a ton of open positions at Liberty, at least for the last six or seven years I've been around the area.

The Portsmouth area is really booming the last few years. It's starting to get a little bit of a Bay Area style housing/infrastructure crisis brewing as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. But house prices are up significantly over just the past three years, and rents are worse. So many offices have gone into the former Pease Air Force that traffic is starting to be a real problem, compounded by the the never-ending construction on the Spaulding Turnpike bridges north out of Portsmouth.

It's not the sexiest tech company, but Liberty Mutual has a huge presence in the area and employs a significant number of people in IT.

You can't go bankrupt on student loans, so there's your young people with crushing debt that they can't discharge, much less take on other debts that could be discharged in a bankruptcy.

Interesting. I know that my state and the neighboring one only count the reading, writing and mathematics portions of whatever standardized testing they require. Although I believe that the state legislature just eliminated the whole very expensive set of standards that they had just put into place.

Alex Jones is a fruitcake, but I don't like this as a general trend. Effectively, once things aren't available on the main marketplace, they don't exist anymore for most people. RSS is still kind of a thing for podcasts, but everything wants to use either iTunes or Soundcloud etc. iTunes is so bad on Windows that I want to rip my hair out...

The thing is, the winners have the money to put up with any amount of onerous hoop-jumping that the EU tries to put in place. For the non-established players, the cost and liability of all this shit is too high to break in.

So far as I am aware, standardized testing does not apply to history and other non-core subjects. Like science also, unfortunately. Everything outside the three Rs (reading, writing, 'rithmetic) is slashed, because that's what the tests target.

I can't help trying to ruthlessly optimize repetitive tasks. It's sort of like the rule of three in real life. Quick example:

Yesterday, I was building a set of shelves in my garage. These are pretty beefy to hold hardware and tools and stuff, so I was building them with a 2x4 frame and plywood on top. Three levels, and I wanted them to be 10 feet by 2 feet, so I had ten foot front and back rails, with shorter stringers every two feet. So I had six rails, and six stringers per level, total of 18.

For the rails, I measured one, marking center lines for each stringer. Then I lined up all six, and drew the lines across all of them with my square. Probably saved fifteen minutes compared to marking and measuring each one individually.

For the stringers, each one needed to be 21 inches, and you really want them to all be as close to exactly the same as you can get, or else your the frame gets all out of true. If you try to measure each one and cut them one at a time, you never get them just right, and it takes forever. So I figured the first one, and screwed down a stop block to my miter saw bench, to make a jig. Now I don't have to measure, I just slide the 2x4 down to the stop, hold it against the fence, and zip zip zip, I cut the whole batch in a couple minutes, all just the same length.

Going onto the assembly, I've got my rails all marked out, and my stringers all cut, so I can start screwing things together. The hard part is lining things up, holding it all together, and trying to get the screws started and driven without anything shifting. So I went down my rails and started all 24 screws on each rail where I had the center lines started. Works best if you drive them just through, so there's like a sixteenth of the point sticking out. Now I've just got to line up the stringer square and hit the already started screw with my driver. It also helps keep everything square and reduce walking around if you do them in a snake pattern, so start on one end, screw to one rail, go to the other rail and screw the other end, stay on that rail and start the next stringer, then go to the other side.

Last, getting to the installation, the really fiddly part is trying to get everything lined up and level, while you're trying to hold the assembled shelf up and then screw it all in. Real PITA if you're working alone. I was screwing them into the wall studs against the back wall of the garage, with a few posts on the unsupported front. So I cut some cheater blocks out of scrap 2x4, that would span two studs, and that the shelf could sit on as I'm installing it. Measure where the shelf should fall on one stud, and screw one side of the cheater there. Then take a small level to level it up before screwing the other side. Then use a four foot level to mark where the other cheater should go, and level that up. Even better, I was in a corner on one side, so I had another stud I put a third cheater on, leveled up kitty-corner with the others. Now when I pick up the whole heavy shelf, I just set it on my blocks, and I've only got to worry about supporting one corner as I'm getting it leveled and attached to my outside post. When that corner is level, everything else is level. Repeat three times for the three shelves.

I do this kind of decomposition and optimization in everything, and always have, way before I even saw a computer...

A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full.

I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.

I guess I can write down a list of wild-ass guesses of potential things that might happen if you use my software on the readme.md.

At least the Powershell doesn't have the incomprehensible argument soup, but that's more the fault of ancient Unix utilities that arose in the days when characters were precious.

I don't do much actual Powershell scripting, but I can tell pretty easily what this should be doing without going to man files.

If you've got the shotgun in hand, some #2 game loads will smarten up coyotes a lot more effectively. At least the survivors anyway.

The article isn't consistent, either - some of these are mentioned as having been jacked up and moved several times, whereas other claim to be the oldest building in the state on the same foundation, some are heavily reconstructed.

Most of the people I know that did construction worked like dogs for six months of the year on the road, then took most of the rest of the year off. These were mostly workers for largish construction contractors, so they would go into a plant during the biannual shut downs, tear the thing apart and put it back together over the course of three weeks or a month, then move onto the next job. They tended to work a lot of hours, since it's a very tight schedule with deadlines - it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars every day these kinds of plants aren't operating - so they'd rack up a ton of overtime, plus living on the road with housing taken care of or a per diem. It's not really that bad a gig, especially if you can live somewhere cheap the rest of the time. In a lot of ways it's very similar to people I know who are merchant marine.

After a few years they tended to have specialized into something, so they'd get a more regular job or go into business for themselves.

This looks real fun, I'll have to play with it when I get a free minute. The graphics and sound apis remind me a lot of QBasic, where I first learned to program

I just missed the dawn of smartphones, so my boredom remedy all throughout school was tossing a cheap paperback in my backpack. It was downright comical to get yelled at for pulling out a book and reading when you'd finished your work early though.

Sometimes it is a network error, or a hardware error, but at the end of the day, you can't just point at that and blame it, you've got to try to work around it, or at least fail in a way that looks like you tried and point out what the source of the issue is. It feels like playing whackamole sometimes though.

Usb-C is not mainstream outside the macbook pro market. Everybody else is quite happy with HDMI or even VGA still, and moreover, there's so much old hardware that's perfectly usable that uses those ports.

People do do this... I'm astounded sometimes at the workflows I see, but I've worked with people that wrote all their HTML in dev tools and copied it back to their editor, and wrote huge chunks of JS in the console. The latter tends to not work well, because everything is constantly dirty and state is corrupted.

I hope you are not suggesting that that is in any way reasonable.

Is PyGame flaky these days? I haven't much played with it in quite some time; it used to be pretty solid, although as I recall it wasn't much more than a wrapper for SDL 1.2 at the time.

Schleswig-Holstein? Part of Denmark before the Iron Chancellor took them in the 1860s.

Scientific reasoning is a rare skill. I'm regularly met with bafflement and blank stares when I suggest that we measure something to determine performance, then perform the same workload, on the same hardware, after making a change.

I've literally had people try to make conclusions on comparisons of test runs with completely different parameters, different data sets, different resources, different versions of code, absolutely everything varying.

My head just explodes... I wamt to scream that this isn't how this works, it's not how any of this works.

I'd settle for text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren. Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.

It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially dead.

That being said, I'm not clear on what the real difference between Lubuntu and Kubuntu will be now.

What? Do you actually believe this?

I grew up in the northern end of Appalachia, with a lot of people that had less than an acre their doublewide sat on. Nothing stopped them using the ponds and lakes, the trail systems, or the technically private but defacto public access swathes of paper company land.