rcurry

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur likes to say the trick to starting a successful project is to “find someone who is bleeding and has their wallet out.”

I used to be an avid fisherman and thirty years ago I’d routinely eat every decent fish that I caught. Now days I’m strictly catch and release - I just get a bad feeling about water quality no matter what lake I’m fishing in. I don’t follow eco stuff as much as I should, but I think it’s sad we can’t trust our lakes anymore.

“Worth the cringe”, ha ha. That sounds like a slogan Don Draper would save the day with in an episode of Mad Men.

Heh. Reminds me of this time a startup I worked for got acquired by a big financial firm in New York City - we roll into work the first day and at like 10:00 AM this woman starts ringing an actual cowbell and shouting “Standup! Standup Everybody!” They would literally call the developers into the daily standup like they were a herd of cattle.

Someday the bayou might get ‘em but the law never will.

I worked for a computer security company once, it was my first real programming job and I had no experience with the kind of crazy stuff that goes on with hiring, I was really naive and had no clue that certain kinds of people existed in the workforce.

So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.

Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”

So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!

Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.

Shush, you’re going to ruin everything.

Covid is old and busted. Now all you have is OMG Omicron that’s just basically an annoying flu, you go ahead and lose your mind over it - it’s a free country. I’m still freaking out about dioxin so I don’t have time for this shit.

If only modern medicine was reserved for the Master Race, it would be so much simpler, and cost effective!

But before you seek medical treatment we’ll just need you to fill out this questionnaire:

1. Have you ever had an alcoholic beverage?

2. Do you have a BMI greater than 18.5?

3. Have you ever eaten at The Cheesecake Factory?

4. Do you ride, run, or swim less than 40 miles per day?

Please understand that your answers may disqualify you from eligibility for healthcare. Thank you, Acme Excellence Health Partners.

Heh, so I installed a new faucet in our kitchen sink and thought I’d done a good job, I had hoses snaking all over the place and my wife was like “I can’t even use the pull-out sprayer because it won’t go back in once I pull it out.” So a few months later I call my plumber and ask if he can replace the valves under my kitchen sink because they’re old and the tolerances are outside my skill level for trying to saw them off and replace them. He comes out, spends an hour replacing the valves and then he’s like “oh yeah, I fixed all the hoses under the sink for no charge, the last guy did a horrible job, you can’t even use the sprayer!” I look under the sink and it’s like NASA came in and rerouted everything, tons of room, no crazy hoses hanging down, and the sprayer works!

I once took a tour of the Mabel Tainter theater in Menomonie Wisconsin. The original light fixtures had been built to work off of both gas and electricity, just in case the whole newfangled electricity thing didn’t work out.

I guess I flushed out the two FBI agents who read HN. Hey guys, while you’re here - Wouldn’t it have been cool if you could have busted the guy who sexually molested Olympic gymnasts for the last ten years instead of picking up after a bounty Hunter dressed up as a sun bleached dream catcher?

Only the real ones.

FBI Agent: “Who wants to be a firetruck?”

Mentally Impaired Guy: “Oh! Me! Me! Me!”

FBI Agent: (into secret wristwatch radio) “Get HQ on the line, I’ve got another major terror plot candidate on the hook!”

Facebook said they are working hard to “get things back to normal”. But so far things seem more normal without them.

I’d argue against you here. I’d say that HN represents quite a diverse cross section of people, and to our mutual credit we all manage to keep it fairly cordial and fun. We all come from different backgrounds and experiences and yet find it fun and enjoyable to come here and talk about technology and have a good time. I may disagree with folks here from time to time, but I have no doubt that HN is a home for people from all walks of life and the last thing that comes to my mind, when thinking about HN, is that it’s an echo chamber. Quite the contrary, some of the folks here help me learn to think about things from a different perspective and I enjoy it.

Covid is the next Afghanistan.

One of the things I enjoy about HN is the fact that we try to steer away from personal attacks. It’s one of the last places on the net where I enjoy taking part in conversations, because even people who disagree completely with me make an effort to keep their arguments civil. Please help us keep it that way.

What was really strange about the whole Opiod Crisis thing was this weird narrative that was being pushed for a while with all sorts of people claiming that Ibuprofen was just as good as Hydrocodone. I’ve gotten pretty badly messed up a few times, whether a bad landing skydiving or some guy ripping my knee up in jiu jitsu, and I’m sorry but no - Ibuprofen is nowhere near as good for pain relief as opioids are.

You should submit this to the next license plate slogan contest. “San Francisco - Don’t like needles, just watch your step!”

I dunno, I guess because he was my Dad, and that’s good enough for me.

This.

If you’re going to melt my face when we are talking you should at least bring me a sandwich too. I’d hire that guy for sure. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll still hold out hope.

One thing that always blows me away (literally) is candidates that will eat like a tunafish sandwich with onions five minutes before they come in for an interview.

I'm genuinely curious here - does anyone agree with me that being on foot seems to make it a hell of a lot easier to avoid cars than being out driving with them? I've had three drunk drivers hit me while I've been in a car, and yet have never been run over while just out walking around. When I'm on foot I just look around for the damn things and stay the hell away from them, in my car it's no such luck.

Because Edward Snowden is the Miley Cyrus of SIGINT. Or maybe a Kardashian, I don’t know, it’s kind of a toss up.

Yeah he was a scientist and a total madman. He thought TV was unhealthy and made us read books instead. I ended up working at an investment bank.

He did teach me to how to brew beer though, so his Phd wasn’t a total loss for us kids.

Nothing like a good cheese soup, especially if it has a dragon in it - they really add to the flavor.

My parents never let us have a television except for around Christmas. My dad would buy a cheap TV set and we’d watch holiday movies but after Christmas it went in the trash. We amused ourselves by playing Star Wars in the yard with hockey sticks for light sabers. I’ve fought Darth Vader (my brother) more times than I care to remember and sure got a lot of bruises in the process.

Whatever. We have all these online sites where we can do battle over politics. Can’t we keep HN as a fun place to talk about tech stuff?