nonamenoslogan

Great advice--I found out I had astigmatism nearly 20 years ago when going to the Eye Dr. for my first pair of computer glasses. I've been having them add #1 rose tint and Crizal ever since!

A tear rolls down John Terry's cheek.

Collect something. Rocks, coins, watches, baseball cards, matchbooks, bottle caps.

We have a TON of this kind of catch-22 in the US. Capitalism and all; you can choose the free complicated way or the not-free easy way. You’re still free to complain about either. If I had my way, we’d do a progressive flat-tax; going as high as 75% for anyone making more than 1 million a year with NO returns or deductions whatsoever—-I’m sure you’d happily call me a socialist dunce if I proposed that though.

Hey, you’re free to file freely via mail all you want—I get Intuit is a problem, but I choose $40 as an easy way to double check my work and that’s it. Its the US, freedom above sense sometimes, whatever.

My wife and I file pretty standard forms every year--no complicated deductions, only 2-3 W2s, maybe a couple 1099s and a 1098-E. For the first few years of our marriage, I did taxes by hand as a point of pride and enjoyed it (yeah, I know--most say yuck). Around 2006ish, I got a copy of TurboTax in a bundle with my first MacBook Pro and I've never looked back. It's absolutely worth it to me for $40 to me for the ease of e-filing, standardized output with all worksheets and forms, and speed of return via direct deposit. I get $40 is a lot to some people and tbh, I fully support a sliding percentage tax system with NO returns, but the vast majority of people get a return anyway, why not count the $40 out of it to be sure your returns were done right?

Oh, and yea, I still quite enjoy tax-night when I get to sit down with my reciepts and 109x's and file, though I will say I always mail my state returns in to avoid the additional $20 fee for e-file.

As someone who tested positive last Friday after being vaccinated back in March--I can say the symptoms I'm experiencing vs. some of my co-workers who just got full-on COVID are MUCH more mild. I've had a little congestion, some stuffiness, a head/neck ache, and a little upset-tummy. Some of my co-workers were out for weeks with the heavy flu-like symptoms and I'm sitting here wishing I could just clear my throat and go back to work.

The Photoshop 7 Educational version I bought in college still works on Windows 11.

Compile it yourself on MacOS, problem solved. Or install it with Homebrew?

Buy some, cold wallet it, forget about it.

Realistically, how will this be enforced?

This kind of article is why HN stays at the top of my bookmarks.

What’ll ya give me for an unopened copy of Win 3.1 on 5.25s?

Sun gear has REALLY jumped in price, especially the early 32bit SPARC stuff. I had a BUNCH of them in the mid 2000's, an IPX, SS10, SS20, Ultra1, and a beautiful full stack LX with CD-ROM and two external hard drives. Sold them all on over the years--now ONE machine is worth more than all I sold combined. I recently had a hankering for another Sparc and settled on a SunFire V100 because it was reasonably priced and I wanted to avoid buying a 13w3 monitor and Sun-Keyboard at the upper price range they are going for. Still a very capable server and it scratched my big-endian itch for the time being.

I've got a 2004 14" iBook G4 I was thinking the exact same thing about. Diablo II and Simcity 4 ran just peachy on it last time I got it out during COVID lockdown.

I was going to mention this--I'm in County IT and we support it in the Public Defender's office routinely.

Seems to me El Salvador will say anything they can to make the price rise.

I use the triple click to make my screen greyscale and take the brightness to 5% for reading in bed.

Agreed, this is Taco Bell's crowning achievement of the last decade.

I host my .org on Github Pages.

Almost identical to mine--with a SuperVGA 12" CRT to boot!

I still have my first CPU, a 12MHz AMD 80286--which I realize is pretty 'new' but I'm only 43.

Thanks for your insight. I'm at a similar crossroads currently and leaning toward staying in my current role. Basically about 14 years ago, I left a Fortune 500 company where I was a Network Administrator for a decade to go to a University and took a large pay cut to become an IT Analyst. Primary reason was wanting to get another degree, cheaply. After 7 years as an Analyst, I was promoted to manager of the team. After 3 years of that, I realized I wasn't good at managing people and I was a "do-er," and left from managing (with a HUGE paycut, again) to go back to Analyst in county government.

Fast forward 3 years and here I am, being asked to be an Interim-Director as the director here is now retiring and I'm the only one with management experience. They are then in turn 'encouraging' me to apply for the full time director position, saying how I'm the most qualified and despite the "promote from within" policy, they want me to go up against external candidates to "earn" the job they asked me to interim.

I've wracked my brain for a week now--I'm an engineer level do-er, I'm not a manager, but 22K a year is a NICE increase and I want to buy a home. Part of me says "thanks but no thanks, I'm not going to apply for a promotion to a job you obviously think I'm qualified for but won't offer out-right if its going to be a massive paradigm shift AGAIN for me," and another part says, "Dude, you're so dumb if you don't apply for a job that pays 30% more than you're currently making!"

I've got a couple weeks to decide--money isn't my driving factor, the ability to "turn off" at the end of the day is.

Geeesh I get 40-70 fps on a $250 GPU in a $100ish PC from the recycle pile.

This is the same drivel people who consider themselves "purists" in the watercolour scene spew whenever a new person expresses interest in painting. "You MUST spend $10 a tube minimum to REALLY be painting." "If you don't use 400lb cold press linen paper, you're really wasting paint." Blah.

As someone who started out painting with a $10 set of Daler-Rowney on a $4 block of paper from Walmart, I can say wholeheartedly, one can experiment at the cheap end and then be pleasantly surprised at the top end while learning and enjoying themselves. $200 worth of colours you never use because you don't enjoy painting that much is a waste of money. $20 worth of paint you fill every notebook and sketchpad up with doodles is worth every penny. As you progress (and decide if the hobby is even worth doing), you pick up some of those $10 a tube paints and realize the purists weren't wrong, they DO paint better, but they won't make you a better painter.

Personally I have a $99 AKAI MPC-Mini with only one octave worth of keys and have only dabbled a bit with it connected to my PC, but its infinitely better than Smule on the iPad and eventually with an app or through lessons on Youtube, one could absolutely learn the skills needed to play a composition an actual piano--all as the GP said, from the comfort of your own home, at your own pace.

Interesting, I too worked in tech support at that University in 2007--though I left 3 years ago. We could know each other, what a small world.

I've spent the last three years translating COBOL programs off of an HP3000 in to to SQL-backended web-apps and can say as a non-Programmer who was given a pile of COBOL source to decompile, I like its simplicity and ease of readability. Most of the code is from the 80's or 90's but is well commented and easy to work with and understand. Speaking of, most of this code still works or was in use until 2-3 years ago--on the HP3000. Its a testament to how long this stuff can be kept useful. Also, the COBOL team here wasn't astoundingly well paid, but good stable and low-stress jobs in the middle-range of local income is something that is becoming harder and harder to find.

Agreed. The touchpas on Macbooks are extremely well built and functional--and they have been for years and years.

I'm in the same boat here, keeping an XP-VM with NetCobol from 95 running to support COBOL reports that were ported from an HP3000 in the mid 90s. The NetCobol activation no longer works so I did a P2V conversion to make sure it doesn't die before we're COBOL free (if ever?).

Awesome, a reason for me to leave PayPal completely.