702 karma · joined October 27, 2011
Just be aware, a slice of the deep dish is pretty much a meal by itself.
Someone will pick up the rights to show the games, or the league will offer their own service, or the games won't be played on Mondays/Thursdays and will go back to just being a Sunday sport.
Regarding losing their audience and destroying their value:
I stopped following the NFL not because of politics (the kneeling thing hadn't yet started), but because their product was no longer worth my time. Thirty+ years as a fan, watching nearly every single game the local team played and I turned it off a couple years ago. It should not take 3+ hours for 60 minutes of "play", the bulk of which involves no action. It became so overloaded with commercials that it hit the point I was no longer interested. For a short while there was hope, they had the "game in 60" replays on the NFL network. That could have been amazing. Unfortunately, they screwed that up too, showing "all the action" in the first half (good!), then a shortened version of the halftime show (why?), then "all the action" in the third quarter (good!), and then they'd jump to the end of the fourth quarter (wtf?). Why did we need a halftime show when the whole thing a) is being condensed down to an hour, b) is a replay, and c) they sacrifice showing comebacks in order to bring us talking heads?
I think they've been losing their audience for a while; the politics is just the latest (and possibly biggest) factor in their decline. If they turn things around, great. If not, I won't feel sorry for them.
I, perhaps oddly, do not know how my relatives feel about the war or the Ken Burns documentary. Most flat out refuse to talk about those years. Perhaps that's not so odd, given the times and situations they faced both abroad and on coming home.
The folks I worked with, on the other hand, were pretty uniformly proud of the job they and their men did. They did not all agree with the politics surrounding the war, both in recent years as well as at the time, but being professionals, they did as they were ordered. Several of them, now professors of U.S. History, thought the Ken Burns' documentary was very well done, and reflected reality in a way that Hollywood never did or desired to. A couple of those professors include the Burns' documentary as part of their courses' curriculum.
I don't know if any of that helps with your curiosity.
I'm open to trying new things, and regularly do when I'm traveling, but at the end of the day I'm a midwestern, meat and potatoes type of person.
I've yet to see one of these services that would work for me without feeling like I'm wasting my money more often than not.
I'd LOVE to have a paint-by-number, better than hamburger helper, set of options I can pick up from the grocery store on the way home. Give me a rotating choice of two or three meal kits as a regularly stocked, non-subscription item, and I'd be thrilled. I'm sure there would be some I'd really enjoy, some I'd like to try, and others I'd avoid.
The same holds for teams and tribes, and fans of those teams or tribes. Look at nearly any sporting event. You'll commonly see the losing side, or fans of the losing side, blaming anything and everything they can - biased officials, cheating on the opposing side, the weather, etc.
The US media, even though they may not like the current administration, is reluctant to start saying "the navy screwed itself". It may very well be the truth. From what I've been around in the other services, I can state that the thinking and approach to training and education isn't unique to the navy. If you're the the US media, calling them out on it risks being yourself labeled as anti-american, or adding more "evidence" to someone's already existing opinion. That can cost viewer eyeballs, and in turn, advertising dollars.
There's a hell of a lot of people doing a hell of a lot of things for hobbies that aren't motivated by popularity at all.
For example, reading for fun wasn't a way to be popular growing up - your peers expected you to be involved in sports, or be doing the garage band thing. Being a bookworm was like hanging a "bully me" sign on your back. But I'd wager that many on HN did (and still do) read for fun.
I've learned to play a few instruments, although I was never successful with the guitar (no one wants to teach what I want to learn - they all assume I want to play rock or gospel and are incapable of teaching anything else, and I want to learn flamenco guitar). The only people who have ever heard me play anything are my teachers, and my immediate family.
I suppose, if I decide to give the bagpipes a try, that the neighbors might have to hear me as well. I expect that won't improve my popularity, but I don't, and never have cared about that.
They're not cheap, but they're also not all that expensive.
I welcome these. $8 each hits a price point where I won't even think twice about it as it's a convenience I'm happy to pay for.
If I might make a request -- a USB-miniUSB would be handy, especially for older but otherwise useful devices.
Someone says "oh, white oaks grow alright across the entire state, and their acorns are a good food source for the local wildlife" and they send out a few thousand of them for arbor day via elementary schools.
Some of them even survive. 30+ years later, those trees have dropped millions of acorns, most of which feed squirrels and deer or rot away, but some turn into trees.
Rinse and repeat every year. Seems like you could, over the course of nearly 40 years, unintentionally shift the population of a tree species.
With all your branding changes over the years, what's considered a Microsoft account today? My old Hotmail account, that existed from the days before Microsoft bought Hotmail? I think it's still alive, but I haven't logged in in the better part of a decade to find out. The accounts created over the years for various Xbox machines? I think those are still around, but I doubt I could get into them at this point. The "Live" account I had to create for MSDN many years ago? Once that job and associated need for MSDN ended I've not logged in to see if it's still around.
Which one(s) should I try to find login information for to use?
Furthermore, why must I sign in in the first place for the free version? I can understand signing in to associate the install with a paid version with extra features, but I see no reason to require it for free versions without any paid features.
A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else.
He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.
What I want to find is my old TI-30X Solar. Basic, bulletproof, and does everything I want a calculator to do without getting in it's own way. Anything more complicated than what it will do I'm likely to use other tools anyway.
That's much smaller than a suitcase. Heavy, sure, but quite a bit smaller than the carry-on suitcase I was lugging around last week, and I've got a small one compared to the monstrosities that are considered to be carry-on sized now.
I studied computer science because it was interesting. Period. Not because I wanted to change the world, or make a pile of money.
I wrote code, as a contractor, for the army, as a way of serving my country. I know that's not a popular stance to take now that pride in one's country is not politically correct, but pride in and service to my country is something that is important to me. Don't mistake pride for blind unwavering support in everything we do like the "USA-USA" chanting folks often have. I'm more than happy to point out where we, as a country, have fucked up. We've done it quite a lot.
I have medical conditions that preclude active service. I also have a family tradition of service, both in and out of uniform. Since I could not serve in uniform like my great grandfather did in WWI, my grandfather and his brother did in WWII, or like my uncles did in Korea and Vietnam, I did as my father did and served my country by providing my skills in a time, place, and manner the DoD needed.
I'll have no decorations, no glory, no rifle salute at my funeral.
I most certainly could have made a boatload more money working elsewhere.
Yet, I don't regret it one bit.
It was something I felt I needed to do - some will understand, others, I suspect including you, won't ever comprehend
War moves humanity forward, but at a terrible price. Since humanity will never eliminate war, when someone has to pay that price, I'd simply rather it not be my countrymen (and now countrywomen).
I'm happy you've got values you're willing to stand by and not compromise.
I'm happier that I live in a country where you're allowed to call those that serve "immoral" and "spineless piece[s] of shit" with no governmental repercussions or retaliation.
I'm happiest that despite my conditions, I found a way to contribute, even if in a minor (and now most likely obsolete) way, to the defense of that nation.
For fun, though, there's QB64's implementation of QuickBasic. I also have my old 8088 up and running again, and GW-Basic and ASM there. I started with GW-Basic when I was about 4 years old on that old 8088. Two 5.25" drives, no HD, 640k RAM and a "Turbo" button. What's not to like?
Co-worker introduced me to Lazarus / FreePascal a few weeks ago, and I decided to dust off my old pascal book from jr. high school and see what I can remember.
If I can find a use for it, I'd like to dust off and freshen up my Fortran77 memory. I know there have been updates, but Fortran77 has a little special place in my memory since that was the first language I got paid to know.
Then there's COBOL. No idea why, but I want to revisit it and see if it is as bad as I remember.
As a result, I arrived at college in a little better shape than most of my peers, who could barely work a microwave. Driven partially by necessity, they watched a lot of food network back when it was mostly how-to shows and the only "competition" they aired was late-night translations of the Japanese iron chef show.
A decade later, food network was nearly all competition and food-tour shows. They stood up a sister network -- cooking channel or something similar, which seemed to be mostly re-runs of their old how-to shows, some of which are surprisingly good. Unfortunately, it too is falling to the competition tv genre, and if you want actual cooking instruction you have to catch it early morning or late night, when the remaining non-competition shows are still on.
It would be nice if, along with cookbooks, some of those shows were available in complete collections that I could purchase.
I was fortunate to grow up with parents that played various instruments. Mom played the piano. Dad played the guitar and clarinet. Grandparents played the piano and the pipe organ at church. We kids were encouraged to pick an instrument we liked, and even though we didn't have much money, lessons were always something my parents figured out how to pay for. In return, we were expected to take it seriously, and learn both the instrument and the meaning of a commitment to something difficult. I took piano lessons from age 5 until 12, when they agreed that I could stop piano lessons if I took up another instrument, so I played the violin for 5 years with the public school's music & orchestra program. I quit playing altogether about the time I started driving, because having a car meant having a job, and that took the time I was using to practice.
Fast forward many years, through college, and a decade afterwards. I don't have the room for a real piano; keyboards & digital pianos just aren't the same for me. The violin is something I don't really enjoy any longer, especially without an orchestra to play in, and I do not have the time for such an endeavor.
In college, I fell in love with classical and flamenco guitar. Figuring that another instrument wouldn't be terrible to learn, since I already knew how to read music, I picked up a $200-ish classical guitar, some books of chords, and attempted to teach myself. After that miserable failure, I then attempted to find someone who could teach the style of guitar I wanted to learn, and teach it to someone who wasn't a little kid.
That turned out to be a nearly impossible task, and I think that's a big point of failure. The teaching methods out there have a focus on "kid music" to the exclusion of nearly everything else. On top of that, there is the assumption by most teachers that wanting to play guitar means you want to play rock 'n roll or pop-country. Those that don't assume that fall into the trap of thinking that you want to play in a gospel band. None of them were willing to sit down and teach the fundamentals without pushing me into playing extremely simplified versions of music I hate.
So my guitar sits in its case, in the back of the closet, unused. I gave up. Not because it was too much work. Because no one wants to teach what I want to know.
I know I wasn't good with my statistics classes (I managed low to mid "A"s, but I never really understood the steps I was reproducing, or the why behind the process), but how do you correct for that type of uncertainty?
Is there a good, basic statistics reference that HN would recommend? We used Devore's "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences", and it didn't "click" with me. I'd love to find a good textbook on the subject.
Decided to wait around for a few minutes, was rewarded by seeing a brand-new, not-operational-yet Osprey flying up the valley. Guessing it was going to stop and refuel, I drove down the hill to the airport and watched it touch down and taxi in. A fairly steady stream of people, adults and kids, started showing up shortly thereafter, and the flight crew was nice enough to get permission to let us all out onto the tarmac and give us a short tour. A few of us stuck around while they refueled it, and watched it take off. Very impressive piece of engineering, that machine.
That aircraft proved to me that as cynical and jaded as I might have become, some things still have the ability to reach my inner kid, and convinced me that I should pursue my childhood dream of getting my pilot's license.
Now -- money, time and weather permitting -- I fly an equally magical carpet in the form of a 1968 Cessna 172. That first solo was equal parts wonder that they thought I was ready and terror that I was about to show them why I wasn't. Currently building hours and practicing for my check ride, hopefully will have my ticket by the end of the year.
I've mostly switched to a self-hosted, local-to-my-dev-laptop-only jira instance, since I also use jira for regular job work. I've found that kan-ban type boards are fine for the tech side of a project, but I do like the other project management stuff that jira brings; and being the only user of it, I don't have to worry about the way I use it negatively affecting anyone else.
Like most things concerning security in general and airport security in particular, it's a sham, meant for appearances only.
In 2004, our ballots had the presidential candidates as the first item. I personally witnessed ballots being sorted at the polling location and placed in different boxes based on that first item. The boxes were identifiable as to which was which ("GWB","JK" and "AO" - all others), placed into the back of a sheriff's car, and driven to the election board's office. The "GWB" box remained in the back seat of the car while the "JK" and "AO" boxes were taken in to the office to be counted. Since I wasn't blessed as an "official" observer, I was not allowed inside. The "GWB" box was never counted, driven back to the Sheriff's office, and was discarded in their dumpster, locked and unopened. Anyone in that particular batch who voted for GWB had their votes, not just for president, but for congressional office and local issues, thrown out. Every single official -- county, state, and fed -- I tried to report the issue to responded with some variation of "mistakes happen, it's not an issue we're going to look into". Party officials didn't care -- D's votes got counted, R's didn't care because the D's had solidly carried that county for decades and more-or-less written the county off, and no one else had the manpower to do anything about it. My vote (in the AO category that time around) was counted, or at least made it inside to be counted, but it still bothers me that things are so corrupt that there isn't even an attempt to hide the corruption.
Fix the absolutely blatant corruption, and I might, possibly, be motivated to vote. I don't mean charging people with little misdemeanors and letting them plead out to fines. I want to see felony charges and jail time for those participating, furthering, and knowingly benefiting from the systemic abuse of our election processes.
I wish I had the time or talent to turn this into an actual shell.
Now, those have been mostly replaced by similarly named folders and I just use wget to save pages & their files into the appropriate category.
The text files still hang around though for little chunks of interesting code, part names/numbers, references, and similar tidbits that do not need any media to go with them.
Occasionally I start new ones, as interests change. When I do, the old files get renamed or deleted. I've got various "notes" text files going back 20+ years, and because they're in plain text files (or html + images), I don't have to worry about services shutting down, proprietary formats changing, etc. It's a system that has been working very well for me, and I don't see any need to change it.
However, I do recognize that this works for me because I do not use a bunch of different devices, so I don't care about syncing, or using my method from mobile devices, etc. If you have those use cases, you'll very likely be happier with something else.
Whistler: I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
Bernard Abbott: Oh, this is ridiculous.
Martin Bishop: He's serious.
Whistler: I want peace on earth and goodwill toward men.
Bernard Abbott: We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I never gave them a second look to see if that requirement changed.