Parents:why is my iPad so slow?

Me: It's old (1st gen that came out in 2010)

P:well just clean it up and make it go faster

M:Theres nothing to clean... Theres only a browser app and solitaire....

P: well just fix it so it's faster

M:....... *turns it off and on again*

M: All fixed

I just found out that Microsoft created solitaire to teach users to click and drag with the mouse, and minesweeper to teach users to use the right button of their mouse.

Amazing!

I was an intern - as a high school student. They had no idea what to do with an intern, let alone a high school student that was only there around three hours a day.

They tried to saddle me with a massive "how to use Perforce" manual, but I flat refused and told them to give me some real work.

In the end I wound up writing a text parser in Python to get some specific info from some files. They decided it wasn't actually needed after I finished it (I don't think they expected me to), on my last week there. I just played solitaire the rest of the time. I learned a few things:

1. I never want to work at Adtran.
2. Perforce should die in a fire.
3. Experience != Expertise.
4. Don't be afraid to put yourself on the line if it means potentially accomplishing something.

Its not a bug, it's a feature.

! Rant
& Galaxy Alpha
& Android 5.0.2
& Dosbox Turbo
& Windows 3.1
& Sentimental Feelings

It's time to play Solitaire !!!

100% focused, balls-deep in the zone, not sure I could have recalled my own name if you'd asked me...
Suddenly out of nowhere, someone's asking me about a job I worked on over a week ago. I'm mostly answering in just a few syllables, struggling to surface from 20 layers of Call Stack.
This goes on for a full 5 minutes before they say, "sorry were you busy?"
No, I was just about to beat Solitaire.
Of course I was fucking busy jesus fucking christ, did you not see all that code and shit on my fucking screen when you suddenly and urgently had to disturb me?

I keep a little box with decks of cards in it on my desk. Shuffling is a good way to keep my hands busy while thinking and solitaire with actual cards is a great way to unpick the knots in my head.

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

Why even show the possibility to uninstall Microsoft Solitaire Collection when it just keeps on reinstalling itself?

My father had a PC with Win3.11 where young me was allowed to play solitaire and an educational programs for kids, later on, followed Win98. I was fascinated with this big grey boxes which could do so many things, especially connect you to the Internet where you could find knowledge about EVERYTHING. (Someone remember the "Blinde Kuh" search engine?)

I remember my father connecting the modem with a long cable all the way through several rooms to the TAE-outlet and the weird sounds the device made.

I often heard "Get away from the PC or your eyes will become rectangular!" when I was sitting there for hours over hours reading and playing.

When I was ten, I got my first own computer, a trusty 486er (386 with logical coprocessor! 8MB RAM if I remember correctly. Weeee! :D) which was my uncle's old PC with Win95.
I started writing on the PC and got into several online communities ... it went downhill from there. :D

My first memories of the very first computer i got?

Not sure exactly when that was but all the first memories are of me playing games:

Some paper plane game on the really old macs (giant screens i think it was highlighter orange)

My auntie also had a computer when i was little i'd visit her for the holidays and j played some kid game about dogs.

When we got our first computer i remember some 2d metroid like game but it was where you play as some lady with a whip.

Also duke nukem 1, one of the games me and my dad played together.

Then later on we got a win98 computer i played age of empires and solitaire!

(i used to ride around on my bike with a sword pretending i was a cataphract LOL, i was never very good at RTS games when i was little so i'd build things and not have room for units to move, i kept building houses thinking you need a lot lol, me and the AI were at a stalemate, most because the buildings were in the way)

I remember my teacher giving me tips about age of empires when i was in primary, one of my favourite teachers too.

Good times

I just want things to do on my phone that are intellectually going to be stimulating

and not brainwashing

is that so hard to ask for

I can't keep playing sudokus all the time. the other day I wanted to go read a coding answer I asked an AI in my browser on my laptop but I was in bed on a voice chat with a sleeping person and didn't wanna get up out of bed to go fetch the laptop. my browser lets me see tabs I have open on other machines and this AI website makes a url with a unique id so you can browse to the chat you had, but it seems to not always work

earlier in the day I had asked the AI a theoretical coding question and it answered, but I got distracted and needed to go do something before I finished reading it (it was long). but when I was in bed on my phone playing sudokus for intellectual stimulation, annoyed and bored it was the only thing I could do, I had the bright idea of opening the tab on my laptop through my phone. Vivaldi is great and this always works. unfortunately the AI website's unique id thing doesn't. it loaded the website by URL correctly but the AI website just took me to the home page and I had no chat history to read =[

phones are literally computers but you can't do anything on them. can't watch videos without ads or bugs, if you load a lot of websites the tab management system sucks and performance is shit, controls for games suck even if you could find something not ad infested

hell you can't even do a pedometer that's not trying to get you to "log in". bruh

you can't even browse GitHub code! at least last I checked. it's just awkward, their app

I feel like I'm in a straitjacket in terms of technology and I wanna scream. I don't even know how to adequately describe my frustration or what I keep wishing for. it's been prominent in my head a couple years now. it's like we're regressing in terms of compatibility. went from card games provided by Microsoft like solitaire and spider, paint... to Jesus fuck you can't even get paint in a browser now without someone trying to fleece you

remember when things were inventive, nice, and not shit?
I don't even like playing mindustry on a phone to be fair. fighting the controls is most of the experience. so maybe phones are only good for reading things

I just noticed my brain over time doing sudokus learns so I wanted to practice engaging in something and learning as exercise, cuz I think it would be good for the brain damage. bah

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

Hey there! I'm going ti school (😐), I'm going programming (😎).
I had to do a program that simulate a solitaire! 😂 #wtf

Ugh, no.. You got yourself from dirty dental-dams of “Jif” believers, all the way to passed bass-ackwards. That PR is raw sewage and your demoted back to entry-level if not intern. Oh and while you’re crying with Morty’s dad; consider a career change. Most importantly, just forget WAN ever existed and go back to your parents first PAN device to play solitaire.

-

Sincerely,
All engineers, reviewers and testers who clean up your leaking dirty diarrhea lines.

!Rant
I'm helping a customer who calls in all the time for support. At the end of a call this exchange happens.

Customer: So I have this game...

*Points at a solitaire icon on his desktop*

Customer: If we open that up, there's this little thing here...

*Game opens and there's an ad in the bottom right corner*

Customer: Can you get rid of that?

Me: I can't, not in applications like this. This is the free version of the software and add are how they make their money. If you did want to play without ads, Microsoft has the Solitaire Collection for free

*Makes shortcut to Solitaire Collection on desktop*

Me: There you go

Solitaire on windows 98 then got windows millenium toshiba laptop, installed diablo 2 and my dad gone nuts because of 8gb hard drive so he havent got any more space for porn xD, then i installed some dialer malware and got fcked up for about 400 bucks meh

Well my first exposure to computer was in my first grade. I was taught how to type and how to use MS Paint. However, my main interest in computers began when my dad took me to his work and showed me how to browse websites and play games like Solitaire and Pac Man. For me computer was like a television but with "magic" that allowed you to interact with it..