ohjeez

An amusing aside regarding software responding to certain keywords...

There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.

A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.

Your question is unclear. Can you provide a context?

I confess that I wanted that Panasonic egg, at the time.

It's more than 10 years old.

I don't care. It's so wonderful that I WANT this to show up on my feed every so often.

Do you think that's what it was? I was in the Boston area during that time (I consulted at Lotus, Wang, and Prime) and mostly it seemed as though the business location was a matter of "where did the founders go to school" (MIT vs Stanford).

I'm sure it would. If nothing else, the underlying premise of most SF/F is "What if...?" and presumably the practice of thinking about consequences makes you nicer, or at least slightly more compassionate.

I don't know if it's still true, but as of about a decade ago the answer was: banks and other financial institutions. For the same reason that COBOL programmers can still find work: legacy systems.

Howdy.

I had thoughts about it too, but in a way it makes sense. These are characters whose actions you rarely can influence directly.

Agreed. I had no idea what that scam was -- and I immediately rushed to make sure my more vulnerable (read: clueless) relatives learned about it.

I'm thinking less about "the deep dive into..." than "the things everyone using FooBar should know."

What are the phrases you're apt to try?

Do you ever give up and type in "best practices"?

How is that odd?

I want justice. Protect the weak, help those who are in trouble, prevent violence against the innocent.

That means helping government agencies do their job, when I can. It also means ensuring that the people who we ask to protect us actually DO protect us.

I see no conflict.

I'm hoping for more than "it kind of works." <grin> Ideally, I'm looking for cool things that organizers have done.

For instance, my editor told me about attending an online event run by a winemaker... who spoke from the vineyard. Meanwhile Tom was in his own kitchen with a glass of wine. That would be a better experience than he'd have had in any hotel conference room.

And another friend wrote about a conference he attended: > I think anything online is almost by definition ‘short attention span theater’ and the organizers took note of that with shorter panel sessions. Instead of a half hour to 45 minutes, these ran 10-15 minutes with four panelists. Extremely brief introductions, right to the point, on-topic questions, and so it went. Pretty effective even for fairly weighty topics like impact of AI on business.

Also Arkansas is getting into the swing of things. https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/northwest-arkan...

If you were to search job boards for a new position, is that what you'd type in? (I'm contemplating how testers see themselves.)

Ouch times two.

Whom do they expect to test the software? The developers themselves?

What title would you prefer people use?

The most common response (or at least gentle complaint) I've gotten was, "Why did you leave out...?" From DECUS (one of the oldest groups) to Melbourne PC User Group (one of the largest), people have been sad that their favorite wasn't included.

But the story isn't about the groups' size or age. It was about the experience and what they meant. The whole point is that these were worldwide, in tiny towns (like my own Deer Isle Maine) and in huge cities.

Where are you geographically?

Not to mention that with so many people laid off, Management easily can think, "We'll just hire new people. It's a buyer's market." ...Though I'm not sure it actually _is_.

At the time I thought it was superseded by Digg.com, at least in the sense of helping other people discover cool stuff. I had a few articles go viral on delicious... well viral for the time.

Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)

Because there ARE good reasons to ask job candidates about the skills they put on their resumes. Some people add the keywords to be buzzword-compliant. Others include a tool or technology in passing, as a summary of 5 years of work with it... and if it's important in your shop, it'e reasonable to ask about it. Find out whether "experienced with ToolName" means "I once started up the app" or "I can make it dance."

My resume barely mentions OS/2 anymore, because I'm unlikely to get a job that requires the knowledge. But if I happened to interview at a company where it mattered (perhaps for legacy tech) or where the interviewer shared an interest ("oh! something we can chat about!") then it's a reasonable topic of discussion.

Also, interviewees expect those questions. They can be a kind of throat clearing. That is... get 'em out of the way.

It says up front: Get the obvious questions out of the way (such as "what methodologies do you use") so you can put your attention on the ones that matter.

Personally I think the cats will love it.

Not all that well, personally. I try to hunker down and concentrate, but it's hard to remind myself that my work matters.

It doesn't help that both my husband and I clearly have a light case of the virus. It's a mild fever and a cough, and it appears to be getting better. (Certainly we are taking no chances! And have been in the house for 8 days already.) But feeling crappy only adds to the difficulties.

And yet I know we're the lucky ones. We both have worked at home for decades, so the "lifestyle" is nothing new; we aren't in danger of losing our incomes; we have health insurance; and we have cash in the bank.

One thing that has helped is setting up regular Zoom meetings to get together with friends. No agenda, no "let's try to concentrate on work" chat, just... hanging out together.

As Spider Robinson wrote so eloquently: Shared joy increases, shared pain decreases.

Here’s the list that came out of this query — and it’s somewhat different than you might expect. https://www.functionize.com/blog/5-surprising-books-that-qa-...

I'm not looking for a list of user groups. I'm looking for people's experiences with them.

What made you decide to do so? How did you go about it... posting flyers in computer stores, or what?

That's one reason I want to write this story!

The shortest answer I can give you is that meetups are usually for a niche interest, such as programming. Most of the original user groups were far more general -- anything about microcomputers (my first group, on an island off the coast of Maine, was run by a guy with an Epson QX10 and another guy with an Amiga), or anything about IBM PC or Mac or whatever. So the demos were pretty wide ranging and had more variety. You'd have someone showing a graphics application one month (Arts & Letters) and a software utility the next (Norton Computing).