cyberferret

I can totally relate. I started programming at around 18, writing games and utilities for DOS and other OSs at the time. I am 56 now and still actively writing code for my own SaaS.

I expect that when I eventually retire, I will end up writing code for Arduino devices and other things because it is what I truly love to do, and I never want to stop learning something new.

I don't know if it is guys like me skewing the numbers here, but I have a not insignificant LP collection that I've had for over 30 years now. I got rid of my record player decades ago when moving house but carted my LPs around, with the intent to buy a decent home stereo setup once I got established again and had the disposable income to buy something decent.

I am at that stage now, so will invest in a decent HiFi kit sometime this year. I guess I am also a bit old school in that I don't really listen to music while working etc., so things like Spotify and Apple Music etc. are not my thing. I treat listening to music as a bit of an event, that harkens back to my younger days of having album 'listening parties', so I expect I will still consume my music that way again once I get my record player.

SET BLASTER=RIP SIM WONG 1955 2023

Interesting - I was just having a discussion with my son the other day about the term "horsepower". Quick research showed that the average human can generate 1.2 HP in a burst, or 0.1 HP sustained. Is 0.5 HP the accepted measure for sustained output while riding a bike?

Wow, this is an honour indeed to interact with you! I've actually gone back on Youtube and watched a few episodes again - ah the memories.

Loved re-listening to Rendoosian again - wonderful language that has enough of a hint of actual English that you understand what was being said or implied. Also loved the intro Rendoosian glyph fonts.

Thank you for bringing such a wonderful and different cartoon to the world!

EDIT (Translation): Binti Boo mit ur magnificibifici Cartoon grandi-max

Wow. I have a 6 letter Instagram account handle that actually matches a popular (Western) name and initial out there. So far I get about one fairly polite request per month via DM to sell my handle to them, which I always decline, but lately I am seeing a rise in the number of 'password reset' emails I am getting from Instagram. It's gone from about one per week to sometimes 2 or 3 per day.

That fact, plus the stories in this article is making think of really closing off my social media visibility a lot more than it currently is.

I concur with this. Whenever I recommend Blackadder to friends or family, I encourage them to start with 2, then move forward, then go back to watch 1 if they become a fan. This was the exact path I took when I became familiar with the series.

In every instance where I know of people who watched 1 first, they are almost always put off by the silliness and don't continue.

I think BA2 will always be my absolute favourite of all as it was the first one I watched, and it also endeared me to the delightful characters that Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry and Tony Robinson brought to the show. Only Hugh Lawrie in BA3 came close.

You are so right about how the seriousness was always there and revealed itself at the end. I too was fairly young when I first watched it, and I think it really framed my propensity for adding humour to otherwise serious situations as a coping mechanism.

Someone once told me - "British comedy is about making fun of yourself, whereas American comedy is about making fun of other people", and I have found it to be true in a lot of shows I've witnessed. Probably why I personally tend to prefer British comedies over American ones. I have a thing against people having a laugh at the expense of others.

Pingu was a favourite to watch with the kids when they were younger - so much going on with no words. Also loved "The Flying Adrenallini Brothers" which was an animation with a made up language but so many visual gag laughs.

I am a long time fan of Rowan Atkinson - though I must say, not of his 'visual comedy' characters like Mr. Bean or Man vs Bee etc. I lean more towards his 'Blackadder' characters (specifically Blackadder 2, 3 and 4. Series 1 was more a 'visual comedy' lead character than the latter, which relied more on a dour character with a sharp verbal wit).

Blackadder 4 in particular added in a darkness to the humour that was really compelling - that last scene in the last episode (when they charge out of the trenches into no mans land) was absolutely haunting and moving. As were the final lines given by the secondary characters (especially Capt. Darling)

EDIT: For those who want to see what I am talking about, here is the final scene (4 minute footage), though I'd highly recommend watching the whole series to really understand the interplay between the characters (especially the pathos of Cpt. Darling vs Cpt. Blackadder) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgyB6lwE8E0

Memories! One of the things I had to do in my first ever job was swap the backup discs in a Vax PDP-11 that ran a big pharmaceutical inventory system. All that time waiting for those huge discs to dismount and re-mount...

Anders was one of my early heroes too - way before people like Gates or Ellison were on the scene. I too graduated from BASIC to Turbo Pascal, and couldn't believe the speed differential, and learning about things like recursion etc.

I never met Anders, but I did meet someone who used to work with him at one point and who marvelled at how he use to write blocks or Assembly code off the top of his head when everyone else had to plot the instructions and registers on paper first.

Re: Your point (1), I read somewhere that the match took longer than watching the entire "Queen's Gambit" NetFlix series start to finish. (To put it in perspective for readers who may not realise how much time is spent at the board during these sorts of games).

A friend gave me a copy of Brian Shul's book (where this story came from) decades ago, and it is pretty much my most favourite coffee table book I've ever owned. I believe it went out of print, and I remember seeing copies on eBay for around $3000 at one stage, but I believe they were talking about doing a reprint, so there goes my retirement plan! :)

Expensive? Not really. I was an early purchaser of DevUtils, and in the intervening time, the author has released a steady plethora of improvements and enhancements. Not to mention develop a bunch of other unrelated useful utilities.

He kind of reminds me of myself 25 years ago, when I used to write utility app after utility app for DOS, early Windows systems, Unix systems etc. Hundreds of long forgotten tools that were used by either just myself, or large corporations and government departments for a modest fee. Had there been a Stripe or easy way of monetising decades ago, I could have made some serious coin. But eventually I burnt out and started a 'boring' consulting business to pay the bills.

I just loved creating, and I wish that someone had paid me enough to just keep experimenting and creating them because who knows where it could have gone. I paid for a DevUtils licence because I wanted Tony to continue to be encouraged to create more without feeling unappreciated, and I don't want him to end up an old, jaded programmer like me. ;) I can either pay $25 over the next week to buy coffees that I will pee down the drain, or I can help a young indie programmer create something new...

Nice work! Reminds me of the old days of the 'Boss Key' in most games of the 80's. +1 on the suggestion to actually make this a VSCode extension so you can have it running in a tab in your actual workspace and check it from time to time.

I'm a 54 year old too, who has been cutting code since I was 18. Currently running my own startup which is doing well, but I find that the long years of long hours have sapped my energy levels quite drastically.

I deliberately only work about 4 to 6 hours per day max, and delegate everything else to my team. I also take Wednesdays off entirely to spend as a 'date day' with my wife who also has doesn't have a work shift on Wednesdays, and I don't work on weekends any more.

My working hours are broken up - I may do 2 or 3 hours in the morning when I wake up, but then I go off an indulge in my other passions such as music production etc. Then I may do a couple more hours in the afternoon when the rest of my remote team are coming online on the other side of the world, then I will take a break to cook dinner etc. and check in quickly before going to bed to ensure all tasks are on track. Like the comment poster above I also take regular naps in the afternoon to recharge my batteries.

I also don't have more than 2 to 3 meetings per week, and I am VERY selective about who I meet with and for how long. I am totally focused on maximising every ounce of energy towards only things that will move my startup forward.

Conversely, some of those meetings are actually spent mentoring other startup founders - I find that it really motivates me to 'give back' to the community a little after decades of receiving help and advice.

An yes, I have been through actual burnout 4 times in my career. Each time gets worse, but I also now know to look for the signs - plus my family and colleagues also keep watch for early signs, which helps me mitigate the onset of bad habits and work patterns that may trigger it.

I believe the cheaper blended olive oils cause a lot of problems. I now use only pure, high quality olive oil (from Kalamata, Greece, where I visited a couple of years back and saw them make (and drink) the stuff) and have experienced far less oil burning issues in all my pans.

I bought a couple of cast iron skillets last year after decades of cooking on traditional non stick pans, and I must say I love them and regret not doing so much earlier.

It is amazing how, when well cared for they actually work better than most non stick pans I've used over the years. Sure there is a tiny bit more 'maintenance' required after use, but I actually enjoy the process (even if it was hard for me to deliberately NOT use soap during the cleaning process - a simple scrub out with a hot water & a stiff brush is all I do now before re-heating and re-coating with oil).

(The big secret for me was using high quality olive or flaxseed oils).

Revolut is a UK based firm (also here in Australia now) that can set up virtual cards for you under your debit account.

I've set out on a similar journey in the past couple of years, but been very much doing it 'in the dark' by focusing on learning and watching a lot of tactical videos on Youtube (mainly agadmator's and GothamChess's channels) which have given me a new insight into various chess theories.

I have a paid Chess.com account (same username as my HN handle), but still lack the confidence to really engage a human opponent 1 on 1. Maybe next year, once I have really got opening books and endgame theory down pat. I still make too many blunders in those parts.

I've been blogging on and off for the past few years now (not going to publish the link here in case it is seen as self promotion). Mainly as a way of leaving my life story and thoughts for my family to have something to remember my life when I am no longer around (My dad had some incredible life stories, and I wish we had recorded them in some form before he passed).

I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.

I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.

Been using Carbon for quite a while now when illustrating code in my blog posts or on Twitter etc. It is even on my Chrome shortcuts bar.

Copy and paste aside, it is ideal for showcasing important bits of code such as variable or function names that you want to stand out for illustrative purposes. It is a wonderful teaching tool.

In any case - who wants to be a copy and paste programmer?? </wink>

AFAIK, Medium does support embedded Gists from GitHub etc. At least it did when I last wrote a programming guide in it.

Update: Still seems that it does (scroll down) [0]

Edit: Oops, I just remembered that HackerNoon moved off Medium to their own CMS, but those Gists did used to work on Medium too, complete with code formatting.

[0] - https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-i...

Noticed that too. We just upgraded all our servers from M3 to M5 instances, but all in the us-east-1 region, so looks like we won't save a lot by purchasing more reserved instances.

Noticed a huge 20% reduction in some other areas though...

In Europe, the "." and "," characters in a number have the complete opposite meaning to when used in US/UK/Australian etc. numbers.

A friend of mine was a ferry pilot for the airlines. But essentially, a crew flies the plane out to its storage destination, and there is usually transport arranged out for them - either a bus, or a smaller corporate jet or even a piston engine a/c would be flown out with them to carry them back home or to their next deployment location.

As for them returning to service, yes, you guessed right - they have to be checked while still on the ground by a maintenance team, then if they have been there for a while, they have to be flown to a maintenance base for fairly extensive servicing before they can be declared airworthy enough to carry passengers again.

With luck, this airport probably has a service hangar capable of handling these aircraft types and make them airworthy again, so I expect that the airline might find it more economical to ship an entire maintenance team with spare parts to be based out of here for a month or so while they get their planes back in the air.

Qantas had originally scheduled to retire their last 747's over the coming year, but the pandemic shutdown pretty much made them re-schedule their plans for immediate retirement.

Qantas now no longer operate the 747. Which is a strange feeling when you consider that at one point in the 80's, they were exclusively an ALL 747 fleet operator!

Interesting. A good family friend of ours is a maintenance supervisor in the RAAF. Last time he invited me down to the hangar to let me see the F/A-18s up close, he was lamenting how the first batch that the RAAF purchased (which I assume are among the ones this guy bought) were getting really fatigued and increasingly difficult to maintain. He mentioned that instead of the routine 4 hours maintenance required for each hour of flying time, they were requiring upwards of 10+ hours maintenance per flying hour.

Sounds like these beasts will be expensive money pits to operate nowadays.