douche

That seems like some serious overkill, unless you are relying on your translators to produce production assets.

We have used json, xml, ini-style files, or csvs, which, as i8n goes, has been pretty easy

Yup, you're already on the wrong side of the water-tight door at that point.

It's not like you can't sudo rm -rf / on unix. Once you pull out your He-Man sword and shout, "I have the power!!!" you need to know what you're doing.

I miss phones that had micro SD card slots. Space doesn't matter so much when you can just plug more in.

I've rarely been so happy that my employer has an MSDN subscription.

I've often wondered that about most tech support avenues. At times, I wouldn't have been surprised if Microsoft had an entire staff whose only purpose was to tell people in the MSDN forums that they asked their question in the wrong place (whether they did or not).

I've had this happen to me as well. Comcast technician came out to hook up one of the other tenants in the building, and went through the Comcast hookup box (there's only one for the building) and disconnected all the splitters that went out to the other units in the building - it's an old building with some almost certainly not-up-to-code coax running all over the place along the outside to hit all the rooms where drops have been put in...

Meanwhile, the video conference I was on at the time suddenly dropped. Started to make me think about whether the other tenants were also getting the higher speeds I was paying extra for...

A lot of schools don't have the budget for gym class.

Also, the AP CS program, unless it has gotten markedly better since the mid 2000s, is just a basic Java course. I got a 5 on it, and I don't remember anything more complicated than how to implement a singly-linked list.

Special education students are more expensive to educate than bright students.

You give a gifted student a $100 book and let them get after it.

You give a troubled behavior student with multiple LDs a full-time ed tech at $30k per year salary minimum, or whatever else is required, by federal law, to fulfill their IEPs.

Considering the vast numbers of prisoners, the rate of literary production is not that great, especially when you take out the political prisoners.

There's also a lot of stupid shit that you need to have a prescription for that you ought to just be able to go out and buy. Case in point, my dad has a CPAP machine for sleep apnea, and it stopped working a few months ago. You'd think something that is conceptually similar to a vacuum cleaner operating in reverse with a mask on the end would be something that you could just go find on Amazon and have shipped to you in two days, but no, you have to do the dance of the different doctors first, then wait more weeks for it to be shipped, then wait even longer for them to schedule an appointment to pick up the damned thing. It's completely absurd.

When people have skin in the game, they make different decisions than when they are spending other people's money.

Sounds like a plain-old ASP.NET site with Razor partials.

Python feels to me like a nifty little language that's been asked to do to much and had too much cobbled onto it, bending it all out of whack.

I have some fond memories of hacking around with it, about 10 years ago - although for some context, I was coming out of the wastelands of Visual Basic, pre-modern C++, and AWT/Swing era Java. I'm not sure there's anything easier for quick and dirty 2D game development than the PyGame SDL bindings were.

But I'd cringe at the thought of building anything serious with it today. It feels too loose and sloppy, like trying to build a castle made of sand, although I might have some Stockholm syndrome from years of more static, more strongly typed languages. But I have to do enough grepping around through the code base now to make sure tweaking something isn't going to break some snippet of JS code on the front-end now; I really don't need to be worried about that on the back-end too.

It's bullshit. I'm half tempted to go back to make and just cat'ing JS files together. It was so much faster, easier, and it wasn't always constantly broken.

Vir was possibly my favorite character on B5. I'm going to have to go watch the whole thing again.

I try to, but to paraphrase Von Moltke, no plan survives contact with the email inbox or the bosses whims.

Perhaps once or twice a month, I can actually execute a day planned the afternoon before, so I have largely given up and reverted to a slightly demoralizing reactive mode.

Maybe not the most popular, but the Microsoft UCWA documentation is atrocious. Really, anything surrounding Lync/Skype for Business - so much of it is undocumented, and what is documented is often incorrect.

In a world where Postgres exists, and Microsoft SQL Server Express is supported on Linux, what's the advantage of using MySQL?

I won't argue that when feeding is legal/winked at, the deer show up. My finance's mother has them eating out of her hand when she goes out with the bucket of corn.

There's virtually no way for a 20-something to amass a 20% down-payment in a reasonable area, without postponing home ownership into the mid-30s.

Yup, the shit wood gets put into pulp, the good stuff gets sawn out for lumber or veneer logs.

Hardwood pulp is just barely worth more than the stumpage fees that the loggers must pay to the landowners. Depending on the market, softwood pulp can be even less profitable.

Give me 10k, and I'll refinance my mortgage, to remove the PMI I'm currently paying, and then spend an additional $150 per month on Amazon.

The dirty secret is that most of the people that can grind away for more than 8 hours in a day are producing shit that needs to be re-done by somebody that isn't grinding themselves so hard.

This is maybe one of the greatest advantages I have gained in my years of experience at one company. When I started, I was inheriting the code of other people, with all the baggage of trying to understand it and keep the mental model intact when I needed to make changes. Over time, I've largely rewritten all of the products that are still current, as requirements and dependencies have changed. I'm reminded of the probably apocryphal story of Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford[1]

[1] http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

It is difficult to survive contact with reality without becoming cynical.

The best stretch of my career, I was going into the office on Mondays, and working from home the rest of the week. Mondays, I would go to meetings and collaborate, and plan the rest of the week, and Tuesday through Friday I was working through the pre-planned work. I've never been so productive - I've since gone back to being in the office Mon-Thursday, and my production is a shell of what it was. There's so much more distraction, and I'm wildly less happy about being there than I was when I was at home all the time.

Yeah, that's a couple of F-35s...

BTW, the original paper is about Cervus Elpaphus, which in the US we call Red Deer. This is different from American Elk, and also from Scandanavian Elk (which we Americans call Moose).

Moose are terrifying, since they are often upwards of 1000 pounds, and are tall enough that when you hit them with anything smaller than a full-size pickup or tractor trailer, they tend to fall on the roof and windscreen of the vehicle, crushing them and killing the passengers.

In order to be impeached, you have to actually have committed a crime, no?

So far as I know, tweeting dumb shit is not yet a criminal offense.

I've suspected from the outset that four years of Trump would effectively amount to four years of stasis, with perhaps a chance of getting a conservative majority in the supreme court for the foreseeable future.

It's pretty common, reading memoirs of very proficient soldiers, who have killed dozens or hundreds in battle, that they are respectful and even admiring of their foes.