If you do good engineering work on a project that never manages product-market fit, does it make a sound?

If Henry VI's Dick the Butcher were alive today, he'd be saying "The first thing we do, let's kill all the venture capitalists."


Nothing really new here, but it's shit like this that makes me ashamed to be any part of the software industry.

I see the fringe sites are already making the transition from "new coronoavirus, 3 dead" to "GLOBAL PANDEMIC. STOCK UP ON AMMO. HIDE YER WIMMIN AND CHILDREN".

Unplug HDMI cable from monitor.
Plug HDMI cable back into monitor.
MacBook Pro kernel panics.

It's times like these that I wish I had decided to live a simpler lifestyle far, far away from computers.

PiVPN setup went fine, except for the teeny-weeny problem that I can't actually connect to it. Pondering my next move.

Also playing with bootable USB sticks. So far everything (Tails, ElementaryOS, Ubuntu 19.10) works fine on my crappy Chromebook. On the MacBook things are different: Tails won't boot, ElementaryOS boots but the keyboard doesn't work. Ubuntu appears to be fine.

There's a lesson in there somewhere I'm sure.

Youngest child just got officially accepted to the local charter high school for the fall. So, our 15 years of homeschooling is just about over. What will I do with all the extra time?

I currently have 81,537 emails stored in my GMail account. Of those, about 7 are probably worth saving.

I should probably just nuke the whole sorry thing.

Taking another look at Thunderbird. I'd switched over to Airmail a couple years back when Thunderbird was going through some hard times, but it looks like those are safely past. And it'd be nice to not have my email client tied to Apple's increasingly-shitty ecosystem.

Not sure I have the necessary pain tolerance to try to set up Lightning for calendars, though. It's not that Lightning is bad, it's that calendering is one of the biggest shitstorms in all of software.

I'm really at the age where my daily to-do list ought to be getting shorter, rather than longer. But that's not the case. Though it may be that it's getting more trivial. Increasingly I find the only way to remember things is to write them down.

TFW you look at Activity Monitor and happen to notice 500+ instances of cron running...no wonder things are a bit slow on this box.

I would especially like to take Siri out behind the shed and shoot it.

Is there really no way to get rid of the default MacOS applications these days? I have zero use for Voice Memos, RV, Stocks, etc etc.

As soon as I registered a new Kindle, Amazon started offering me $1 digital book credit with every order if I took slower shipping. This has incented me to do a lot of smal single-item orders. Not sure that was what they intended.

Thinking about all the skills that I have that are not currently being used, and will probably never be used again, makes me a bit sad. Then I remind myself that I shouldn't be defining myself by my career, especially at my age.

No idea how else to define myself, though.

Converting 50 pages of survey results and percentiles to database rows. By hand, because this shitty external vendor thinks that the actual database is too precious to share, so all you can get is a printout. Great way to guarantee bitrot in companies using your data.

Shout-out to JollysFastVNC (jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html) - a new install just accepted the license that I purchased in 2010. It's so rare for "lifetime" licenses to last even five years that I'm always happily surprised when they're still valid.

It's 2020 and I'm writing onclick= JavaScript code directly on a <span> element. Shoot me now.

Show more

A Mastodon instance for Rubyists & friends