d_runs_far

Had I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...

I spent the first half of my life in Alberta; had never seen a rat nor a cockroach. I moved further east in the country, cockroaches in my first apartment the first week there... and then discovered rats near the waterfront within the month.

My dad and uncles lived near the southern border as kids, would hunt rats by the train station/grain elevator with a .22 back in the 50's & 60's.

As a public service employee within the GOC, I feel the pain expressed by the author. I sat through a meeting today where somebody with no domain knowledge puffed up their chest to show off their gpt created master lesson plan for a four year long internal training plan that is being re-worked.

I could feel the heads of those around the table that had been teaching this material for a decade starting to explode as this was exactly what others in the thread have described: it looked good until vetted by experts, then it was easy to poke holes as it was just not right

The problem in the public service is that the experts who can review the output are leaving or being nudged out.

two searches gave me absolute ridiculous results: chair, laptop. Back to re-learning fusion for me :-)

Although it has been a couple decades since I've worked on construction sites, the underlying factor is that of the culture - this was northern Alberta - you had to be 'tough' and that meant eating steak, drinking hard and ignoring basic safety protocols like dust protection masks, eye guards, etc.

I was in my early 20's and worked with guys only a few years older than me that were already bordering on obese. The physical nature was typically repetitive and while sometimes requiring raw strength, had very little cardio/endurance aspects.

Of course there were exceptions, like the wiry 'old guy' who could take two bundles of shingles up a ladder over his shoulder and slam three beers for lunch.

They were being paid crazy amounts (for their age and the rest of their peers) and it was spent on rye and weed.

That exporting an svg from Illustrator and dropping into Fusion as a sketch is not a very wise approach - the scale is completely off! DXF is the way to go, keep your units in mm across the workflow.

I've not used any CAD tools in a significant way in nearly three decades - all very familiar and yet not at the same time. Form-Z and ArchiCAD were my bread and butter back then, despised AutoCAD but here I am back in the Autodesk realm again with Fusion :-(

Maybe I'm old skool... but for the last 30+ years I've been using a combination of photoshop, illustrator, FCP, after effects (back when it was CoSA...), some audio editing and mixing in quite a bit of code as well. While others on my team specialize in one or two domains, I've managed to keep my skills in many.

Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.

I would suggest Loonshots - fascinating dive into both the technology and the conditions that allowed people to really make stuff happen (or not) https://www.bahcall.com/book/

I live in the Canadian Prairies, run outdoors year round. One thing I've experienced a few times is my contact lenses feeling much more rigid, which I've attributed to them starting to freeze up in extreme situations. Typically near the end of longer, 3+ hour runs where I'd be facing the wind and moving slower. Temps lower than -25 celsius and a 10 km/h wind cools things down fast.

While we're ranting about the 'infotainment' systems on cars, how about the apps? The Kia Connect enrages me every time I have to use it for my wife's car. It makes the in-car system seem snappy and awesome. The fact that they want to start charging for it after the 'trial' period is un-believable.

My nine year old has been using Minecraft education edition, Swift Playgrounds and Lego Boost to figure out programming. In Swift, he figures out structure and concepts, in Boost it is the interactions with the sensors and in Minecraft he puts it all together to make traps, contraptions and just experiment.

Here's my realm: We have a react based "framework" that in the end is zipped up and delivered as a SCORM package to be embedded in a Learning Management System. We use React Router to manage navigation.

After a quick scan of the Next docs, all references to routing seem to tie back to server side which is a non starter, as the SCORM is standalone HTML/CSS/JS/Media - that we happen to embellish at run time with some api calls.

This is a case where the pure SPA with no server side is the only way to go; seems like a real pain to go against the default state of Next. Am I wrong and am just missing something? Again, been occasionally looking at next and the like over the past while, but never had time to really dig into into it.

These guys seem to have a niche: hauling logs off of mountains. Regenerative braking on the way down when heavy; using a Diesel engine as a generator in the truck's engine bay. https://www.edisonmotors.ca/trucks

First winter with a Kia Soul EV here - and at -20° C this past week, after about 10 minutes with just heated seats/steering wheel on and no fan/forced air heating, it starts fogging up and my feet (even in decent winter boots) start getting chilly.

Turn on the heater and crank the fan, and watch the range drop about 3-5km per increment on the fan dial.

Our other vehicle is an old Jeep Liberty with a V6; gas mileage drops on it as well in winter - combination of some pre-warming and using full time 4WD more. I've always planned for 20-40% less range since I started driving well over 30 years ago, it is just something you do living in a truly cold winter climate.

Or a standard feature if you're living on the Canadian prairies.

In the mid 70's my uncle left Edmonton to do his doctorate in the Bay Area, and had his classmates at Berkeley convinced that his big Dodge Charger was electric because of the block heater cord on the front of it :-)

As I am preparing to update a 10 year old project done in backbone/coffeescript this whole thread hits hard. Likewise a react prototype done in 2018 that is all class based that is going to be next to revive.

Maybe I should just write my own framework... quick, to the name generator sites!

As others have mentioned, the absolute nonsense of needing two or three streaming subscriptions to watch all 82 games of a team's season is infuriating. Particular with the garbage streams on TSN - some games were a full 20% of pixelated smear - on a wired connection getting well over 900 Mb/s, and surprise, never any dropped streams on other services.

The kicker of course, was the influx of gambling ads on TSN this season, thankfully, at least on the NHL app for the other games the ads are replaced by the gentle ice making video :-)

Yes, the VPN will work in some instances, but despite being savvy, my spouse will never fart around with the hoops to get the VPN on the Apple TV which is where most games get streamed.

The whole thing needs to burnt down and re-built with a model that doesn't suck so bad.

All this and more. I'm fortunate enough that while I could afford to hire trades to do all the things I've done in and outside of our house in the last couple years (gutted/rebuilt kitchen & bathrooms, built phase one of a three phase deck/backyard oasis) I have to keep telling my spouse, yes, we could hire someone, but I really LIKE doing this stuff. Like really like.

It's now got to a point that the requests, and "He can build that" comments to friends are not accompanied with the trademark eye roll.

All the points the author hit ring true - planning, design, tool choice, etc have similar parallels to code and systems I work with during the day. But, I can cook meals for my family knowing that I built that space, then sit on the deck watching the wind in the trees knowing how many pieces of pressure treated lumber are holding me up and how it felt putting them all together. I never get that visceral connection using a web app.

Two within 1200 metres of another on Fermor too :-) Lagmodiere and Westmount.

My perspective on this is a bit different. I used to be a race director for ultra-marathons. I ended up having a serial cheater show up to a couple of my events, and end up winning.

The biggest scam was that I comped him a free entry for winning to come back, which happened twice. So that means the legit winner lost out on that, a token amount, maybe $150, but it still, 6+ years on, pisses me off that I was duped.

For me it was a huge "Why??" we were a small, regional race, didn't have any status as a qualifier or anything. By all accounts and the subsequent magazine article about the cheater revealed what in hindsight would be some serious mental health issues on his part.

Rapid Viz by Kurt Hanks is a great book. It was a textbook when I was doing industrial design courses a long time ago. I think I have the first edition, but it looks like the third is available on Amazon.

Lots of chatter about the tech side, my experience is quite vintage that came back to be relevant over two decades later. In the mid 1990's, while a grad student, I was approached by a fellow student to help build 'secure image library' (the details never discussed because I didn't sign his NDA) server that could be pretty locked down. At the time, that was quite out of my league and I passed. I also passed on the project and didn't try to use it to learn more, because the guy gave my now ex-wife the creeps.

Fast forward 25+ years, his name popped up in the news as being arrested for some rather fucked up child-sex exploitation.

It did make me think how I could have contributed to potentially aiding this guy in his journey down the exploitation road so I'm quite content that I passed. I'd hate to know anything I built was used in that realm.

I run and then mix it up with TRX, kettlebells and a pull up bar. We have a pretty decent home gym from about 10 years worth of slowly adding to it, but those are the three most common bits I use, although I have started doing more on the rower with the apple fitness rowing workouts.

Our home gym is between my office and the rest of the house, so I do things like 3 pull ups on my way to make espresso in the morning, or 10 kb swings after a boring meeting.

I lucked out, in a completely arbitrary move, I did a quick renovation project in December 2019 that gave me a decently set up office space in our house. Fast forward to March when we were sent to work from home for 'two weeks'.

Since then I've been to the office maybe 15 times, never for more than a couple hours at once.

I do not have any desire to be back working in the office. Couple big reasons: - the commute, while nothing compared to some of you, 30-45 min in the car each way is a mental drain, not to mention my current vehicle with the price of gas would be a killer on the bank account. - Family - I love that I am home to pick up my son off the school bus, get a few minutes to chill with him before I go back to wrap up some end of day business. Then I start making dinner for the family. Pre-pandemic was the rush to the after-school program, rush to get dinner made before any evening activities. - Structure of my day: I was always subjected to the 'drive by chats' at the office. Now, I put some blocks on my Teams channel in the calendar, and just get shit done when I know my brain is more likely to engage in deep work. If people try to schedule meetings, I point them at the calendar to look for a slot. And for many days, I know that from 12-2pm I can never really seem to focus, I just take a long lunch, and if the weather is good, go for a run. I do a bit more follow up on things in the evening and feel less rushed about the whole day.

I have no real desire to be back in the office full time and will resist as hard as I can.

Your shock assumes there is leadership at the top that sees the big picture with respect to enabling technology. While not in the US, I have seen the inner workings of other nations armed forces, and there is an overwhelming urge to farm everything out to contractors - so there are going to be at least two competing microkernel designs (proprietary of course) for each the army, navy and air forces under the current leadership structures.

Tips on how to enforce those boundaries with kids? I have been WFH since March 2020 (and occasional remote work prior), my wife a part of that too. We both have home offices. But in any instances where the school is closed, or they are doing remote learning, there is inevitably at least once a day where he (8 year old son) barges in to tell us some random story; kids have not a fucking care about if you're on a call/zoom or up to your elbows in code/config.

Just now, he came to show me the latest iteration of his lego boost project (highly recommended kit BTW) using the sensor to only shoot the missile at mini figures in red shirts... which this interruption took me out of my first pomodoro block, and brought me here.

It is a semi-chaotic existence, lines between work/home are hard to define and my biggest win is defining a daily schedule around our mutual 'must attend meetings' and running interference for the other during those times.

In my experience, the kid interruptions are usually more entertaining than when I used to get the random co-workers 'drop by' to chat and would have 20 minutes of nothing to get to one 30 second question...

Once they are below the frost line, and levelled, there should not be any need to re-level them. For a small structure, lay in 4x4 beams, then build a simple frame over top of that and you'll be golden.

As many have already commented, I am part of the crowd that likes to have a direct, tangible end result compared to on going code projects that never seem to end with scope creep and changing priorities. Some of my work projects are still seeing commits 8-9 years in, and they never feel 'done'.

My deck was 'done' when I sat on it one evening and had a beer while my son jumped on the trampoline :-)

My wife comes from a family where they would hire someone, and her mother is amazed that someone 'geeky' like me can actually do work with my hands - In the past year I've done a full kitchen, bathroom reno and build phase one of a large backyard deck.

Even mindless hauling of a few yards of gravel is easy - load the wheelbarrow, push it, dump it, repeat and the progress is quite visible, you start to anticipate when it is about to be done. I don't get that feeling, not like you're watching the line count in the editor to know that when you hit a magical LOC number you're done!

I'm in the middle of Canada, these hand twist in screw piles are awesome. Used them for phase one of a 900 sq. foot deck this past year. Pylex Adjustable 50 Inch Foundation Screw - my seven year old kid helped me twist them in with a 2x4.

That's almost FSWEP money :-)