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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I was a manager, and another guy was a more senior manager in another division. We both did IT. For some reason he didn’t like me and/or was trying to get our services moved to him, so he went to our director every week for over a year to tell him made-up stories about me.

    He eventually left after a lot of people realized he was a highly manipulative, but I still hear things that he told people as part of an explanation about why I was passed up “for this” or why I wasn’t right “for that.” It cost me a lot of raises, especially in cases where things were gossiped to other people and the source was lost. Now I’m only a manager in title, but my management responsibilities were taken away.

    Unfortunately, I’m caught in a ticking trap – another 1.5 years and I retire with a full pension for the rest of my life. Losing that by leaving isn’t worth it (assuming I live long enough afterwards).






  • I had this too, but mine went further. Eventually became burning, terrible pain down my arm – worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I spent six weeks on steroids, oxycodone, and gabapentin until I could finally get steroid injections directly into my spine.

    Be careful, and get checked out for cervical spinal stenosis. You might be able to do some proactive stuff at this point.

    Now my neck always hurts, I can’t feel my fingertips (especially on the right hand), and my right forearm sometimes feels like it’s on fire.








  • My favorite exchange on ChatGPT (back in March):

    **You**
    Tell me a dad joke.
    
    **ChatGPT**
    Why did the tomato turn red?
    
    Because it saw the salad dressing!
    
    **You**
    Can you explain to me why that joke is funny?
    
    **ChatGPT**
    Sure, I'd be happy to explain why that joke is considered funny!
    
    The humor in this joke comes from a play on words and a bit of misdirection. The first part of the joke sets up an expectation that there will be a serious or logical explanation for why the tomato turned red. However, the punchline delivers a silly and unexpected answer that has nothing to do with the actual reason for the tomato's color change.
    
    The play on words is in the phrase "saw the salad dressing." The word "saw" can be interpreted in two ways: as the past tense of "see" (as in, the tomato observed the dressing) or as a cutting tool (as in, the tomato was physically sliced by the dressing). This creates a bit of confusion and a humorous mental image, which is why the joke is often considered amusing. Additionally, the idea of a tomato being aware of salad dressing is absurd and adds to the silliness of the joke.
    

    We went on a bit further with me pointing out that their murder take was distasteful, and it responded that humor is subjective.



  • Battlefield Earth was my favorite book as a young teenager. Ignoring everything else about the author (which I didn’t know at the time), I thought the book was brilliant (especially the first half). It touched my imagination in a way no other book had before, and I must have read it about a dozen times.

    I seem to recall the book cover saying that a major motion picture was coming out soon, but I guess time is relative. For me it was about eighteen years (which was more than half my life at the time) before the movie actually came out, and that seemed like an eternity.

    I wish I could say it was worth the wait. The movie was horrible – it had bad acting, a bad script, and couldn’t carry the book in only two hours.

    It currently has a 3% tomatometer score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5/10 at IMDB. The movie also won Worst Picture of the Decade at the 2010 Razzie Awards.


  • We had fiber at our previous house for about six years, and it was great. The prices were lower, the speeds were greater, there were no limits… It’s kind of funny, because it was a college town of about 200K people in the middle of nothing else.

    Now I’m up in the suburbs of Chicago where a single town can have a 200K population, but fiber is nowhere on the horizon. Instead we get terrible service that’s constantly showing packet loss with slow transfer rates. We do still have unlimited, but with these transfer rates it doesn’t really matter. :)

    As far as monitoring traffic goes, I guess it depends on how you’re doing things. If your DNS requests are still hitting your ISP or aren’t encrypted, then yeah, they might know. I don’t know if they’ll care, but of course not all illegal content is treated the same.

    So basically a non-answer to your question, along with me saying I liked having fiber.