If you’re the same age as me you might have watched the Roots miniseries. I recommend not rewatching that one. It had a huge impact on me as a kid as far as awakening me to some of the horrors of my country’s past. I tried rewatching it and couldn’t make it past OJ Simpson wearing some sort of pseudo-African clown costume.

I’m immune to all the new Star Wars stuff

I was 10 when the original Star Wars came out. I remember being emotionally crushed when I learned that Lucas intended to make nine movies altogether and realizing how long it would take for all of them to come out. Fortunately I stopped giving a fuck entirely after Empire Strikes Back. I only watched Return of the Jedi on rented VHS and the cackling muppet made me shut it off. I’m pretty sure I returned it without rewinding.

My childhood shows were The Incredible Hulk, Emergency, Hill Street Blues, Dallas, M*A*S*H, Cheers, The Dukes of Hazzard etc. I guess M*A*S*H was sort of OK but it’s not especially hilarious in retrospect (the movie still holds up, at least). The rest are all not that great.

“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”

This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.

I wish to god Visual Basic was still around so Copilot et. al. could get infected with ON ERROR RESUME NEXT statements. Or its under-appreciated but vastly more horrific cousin ON ERROR RESUME.

My favorite thing about the “all comments are bad” crowd is that their first example is almost always something like this:

// Add 1 to x
x = x + 1

Like, nobody that thinks comments are good and important would ever add a useless comment like that. The point of commenting is to add documentation (usually the only form of documentation that a future developer is ever going to read) only to code that would otherwise be inscrutable.

That long-ass horizontal scroll bar reminds me of how I used to put unfindable easter eggs into my Visual Basic apps. I would have amusing little messages pop up from time to time in message boxes. To prevent anyone from just searching for the exact text in the message box, I would reduce it to a series of concatenated Chr() statements and then I would put like 200 characters of whitespace in front of the message box call. The only way anybody would spot it would be if they noticed the horizontal scroll bar this produced and nobody ever did.

At least that’s my theory. It’s also possible that nobody ever used the software that I produced.

When I was in graduate school I got snared into evaluating potential new professor hires. One guy had like a couple of thousand publications, but they were all in journals that he had founded and was the editor of and nobody but himself and his friends ever got published in them. Amazingly, his CV included the publications and also all the journals that he founded and was the editor of. I pointed this out in a meeting and somehow this did not disqualify him from consideration. I was like, is this what everybody in academia does?

Et al phone home!

I used to make this joke in graduate school all the time and nobody ever knew what the fuck I was saying. Maybe on Lemmy it will finally hit home!

A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.

It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.

What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.

It’s funny, I also own a used school bus and that gets barely worse mileage than the roadster.

At least your getting good gas mileage.

Lol I get about 16-18 mpg. 6-cylinder engines ain’t fuel efficient even when they’re jammed into a go-kart. For bonus points, the damned thing takes 93 octane.

I wish I could do that but I drive a roadster. Absolutely no fucking way to stretch out comfortably.

I would love for the Japanese capsule hotels to become a thing here in the US. I’ve always hated paying $150 or whatever for a full room (or suite) during a road trip late at night when all I do is crash out on the bed and then get up and drive first thing the next morning.

I stayed at one AirBnB where the owner had replaced all the kitchen counters with untreated butcher block. The instructions basically said “don’t use the kitchen”. For bonus points, my parents got the one bedroom and I had to sleep in the kids’ room … on the bottom bunk with the actual kid’s sheets because there weren’t any other sheets in the house. I just felt sorry for the kid.

I had a friend in the '90s who moved into a duplex and found that the previous tenant had cut into the separating wall and tied a splitter into the neighbor’s cable line. So he had free cable until the day the cable went out and he called the cable company to complain.

Those fucking cord tangles GOD DAMN IT!!!

Tantrum at 58: I need a nap.

Ironically, one of the universal things I’ve noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking “why am I writing SQL? I’ll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!” resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague’s code base and found two classes named “OR.cs” and “AND.cs”. All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of “OR” and “AND” were ever to change in future versions of SQL.

I always use wine when cooking anything with tomatoes in it. Tomatoes (and other vegetables) have a lot of flavor compounds that are alcohol-soluble and the wine brings them out.