The best my local wing place can do is to deep fry the wings, refrigerate the ones that don’t get sold and eaten, and deep fry them again the next day. Not literally the best way to have wings.

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case “Notepad” was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely – hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn’t fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people’s computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named “Notepad” would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to “NotepadX” fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

another major tool in a designer’s workflow is testing with target users before release

Lol you should have seen this UX dude’s face when I suggested doing exactly this. It’s hard to imagine an actual live human being saying “users don’t know what they want” but that is exactly what he said. It should be no surprise that this company routinely produced one-star apps, and also no surprise that the company was a routine winner of the Worst Company of the Year contest.

follows design and accessibility standards

Ah, this reminded me of another reason this dude hated me. One of my responsibilities with this gig was ensuring that the client’s mobile apps passed accessibility testing. Making an app accessible is tedious work and every time we released an update the accessibility would be broken again. I tried to get this dude to bake the accessibility requirements into the design documents themselves on the off chance that the other developers would actually read the documents (lol as if) and make accessibility work from the get-go. He wasn’t having it and couldn’t be convinced that it mattered if blind people could use the apps or not. I had to sic the client (who faced enormous fines for failed accessibility tests) on him to get him to do it.

I’ve only worked once with a UX person and all they did was order other people to produce design documents before any software was written. Like, he didn’t design anything himself and didn’t even critique others’ designs. He made over $300K and eventually left for a job on the west coast making twice as much. He stopped talking to me entirely after the client had me write a prototype TV guide-type app for Blackberry. I created it entirely myself and the client loved it and wanted it released to the public exactly as it was. UX guy insisted (client didn’t care at all) that all software needed a design document before any coding could take place, so he was forced to order somebody else to produce a design document for my app which already existed. He wouldn’t even look at me when we passed in the hall after this.

I assume that this is not actually what a UX person is supposed to be doing, but I have no idea what their real job is.

It’s funny, I’ve watched Honnold rip on that guy. He (Honnold) considered climbing buildings to be way easier than cliff climbing because it’s basically the same move over and over again. But now Honnold is doing the same shit.

The shared open office thing is pretty much why I quit the profession. I don’t know what’s wrong with most people, but I need peace and fucking quiet in order to code effectively.

I used to work at the Comcast Center in Philly and I randomly ended up working on one of the higher floors where about three-quarters of all the offices were empty. I spent my days alone in a huge corner office that had a perfect view of a battleship. Somehow during this run Comcast was building a second office tower two blocks away because the Comcast Center was supposedly stuffed to the gills. The reality was that it was stuffed to the gills with Indian contractors down on the lower floors and the corporate leadership wanted them out.

At my first job as a programmer I had a full old-fashioned desk. Unfortunately it was in the server room which was kept at 58°F. The servers didn’t actually need to be at that temperature any more and I sure as fuck didn’t need to be at that temperature since I was writing desktop apps, but that was how that company had been doing things for literally decades. I had to wear a hat and motherfucking Oliver Twist fingerless gloves all day.

Free speech!

[with purchase of regular-priced speech]

I got banned for racism … for making fun of a non-existent race. And the whole point of my comment was to mock racism itself.

I’m scared as fuck of heights but once in a while I torment myself watching videos of Alex Honnold, a freak of a human being who likes to do shit like free soloing El Cap. Watching him do crazy shit is actually kind of soothing, except for one time when he finished a climb on a slope like what these goats are on. It was basically like steps about 1" deep and a foot high; nothing to grab onto, he just had to stay leaned slightly in to the wall to keep from falling off. And I guess hope no wind sprung up. Just terrifying.

any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator

One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.

I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.

I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.

He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.

It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.

I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).

Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.

I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the movie Groundhog Day in which the main character relives Groundhog Day over and over again? I don’t think anybody used “groundhog day” as a synonym for “personal time loop” before the movie.

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.