Have a good network of professional contacts

Failing that, blind luck.

For the sake of all you hold dear, please PLEASE stop aliasing cp, mv and rm with -i.

In other words, don't do this:

alias cp='cp -i'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

Two reasons:

First, if you can't be focused enough to not add the -i when you need it maybe you shouldn't play around with files.

Second, it royally fucks those of us who came along and have to use your profile, or root's, to move multiple files with a script like:

for f in "${files[@]}"; do
mv -fv $f newloc/ &
done

What this does is, in the background, fire up a mv process for each file and then waits for a Y or N to the overwrite prompt.

mv -i -fv = I'll force this but only after you approve it

I have a long running script on my mac which I call chained with the "say" command so I get a notification when it is done. It usually says something like "done" or "boom goes the dynamite"

This time I was upset so I had it say "Fuck"

And of course it completed while I was on a teleconference. 😆

I was a contractor working for a large government agency. I was only on the project for about 2 weeks when the director called a meeting of all the involved personnel.

Little did I know, he called these once a month or so and they had a formula. He would pontificate for about 20 minutes, ask indirect questions of various project leads (for which he expected non confrontational answers), and then would pontificate for 20 minutes more before ending the meeting with nothing really accomplished.

Since I did not know this, I answered one of his questions with an honest question about defining requirements. He looked at me for a long moment, said, "I think that's all for now" and abruptly left the meeting.

All of the other contractors then congratulated me for ending the meeting by speaking out of turn. Then they let me in on the true purpose of these meetings: To let the director talk

I was asked to leave the project a week later.

Oh, boy....here we go. Flamewar time.

Worst: Sourcetree
Best: vim

Imma show myself out now

It was my last day as a network administrator at a major US telecom company. I was in charge of anti-virus for the corporate HQ on top of being a Lotus Notes admin and was working on a migration to Outlook for my supported departments.

Then, we got hit with the Melissa email virus around 10am.

The folks I worked with were some of the sharpest I've ever known. They got into the VBA code for the virus (easy) and figured out what it was doing (also easy). When Symantec gave us a virus definition, several hours later, one colleague changed the comment code in the VBA and the A/V failed to pick it up. I spent hours on the phone with Symantec support with them denying they were using file signatures to detect the virus. They eventually admitted they were but didn't have a better solution.

We took the mail servers offline, cleaned the message stores, manually disinfected countless workstations using USB sticks and met with the CIO's assistants several times.

Around 6pm the man responsible for my leaving the company took me aside and sort of apologized for being an ass to me. He said he didn't realize how committed I was to the job. I shook his hand, thanked him and watched him go home.

I went home around 11:30pm and came in the next morning, a Saturday, to complete the migration of Lotus users before I turned in my badge.

Ye flipping gods, the notification center in macOs BigSur is atrocious!

Change my mind.

Spent 2 hours yesterday troubleshooting a database connectivity issue

In the end, it turned out the problem was a set of single quotes. One program understood they meant "these are encapsulating a string" and the other "these are part of the string"

The number of hours I've lost to crap like this is astronomical

Went to upgrade my Fedora 29 server to 33 yesterday.

Upgrade from 29 to 31 went fine.

Upgrade from 31 to 33 hit a hard roadblock.

OpenVPN AS uses python2-PyMySQL

Fedora 32 got rid of Python2 completely so there is no way to upgrade python2-PyMySQL

I'm stuck at 31 until I change to another VPN solution.

Backwards compatibility. BAH! Who needs it? Amirite?

This is sort of a dev-related question, considering the nature of the beast...

Does cryptocurrency have any place in the world economy other than as a fraud-laden asset?

Chemist

Think Linus Pauling, not Walter White

<Slack beep>"Hey, can you help me with something that is suddenly very important that I get done today even though it has been sitting on my to-do list for 4 weeks?"

clamonacc can suck my nuts

That's all.

Anyone else sick of "x will change the Internet" stories?

I know I totally am:

5G
Starlink
Net Neutrality
New domain names
Apple's new privacy feature
Google's new tracking feature

A few too many to mention but the one I can recall the clearest was when, as part of a convoluted website update process I inherited, I dropped the PRODUCTION database instead of the STAGING database and we had a 90 minute outage while we rebuilt.

My boss shrugged it off as a bad process.

Dating myself here...

I learned to write BASIC on a VIC-20 and then a C-64 by typing in code from Compute's Gazette magazine and trying to figure out what I fat fingered.

Later, I got a copy of the game "Monopoly" for the C64 which it turns out was written in BASIC and I learned how to modify the code, add joystick controls so I could play away from the keyboard and add new features.

Boy, did Apple make a naming mistake with Big Sur

I've started calling it "BS" and so have some of my colleagues.

What is the most overused term at your company?

Here's mine: Standardize

We've not defined said standards so "standardize" means, "Please make X as close to the running Y as you can. We're calling that the 'standard' for the moment"

Reading DevRant instead

A process created and owned by a given developer will fail on the first day that developer is on holiday

Me 8:31 AM
Good morning! Do you perhaps have a moment to discuss <this task>?

Coworker: 8:38 AM
Sure! Would 9:30 work?

Me: 8:38 AM
I'm usually working at 9:30 so I see no reason why it shouldn't, too

Does anyone else have this type of Slack/Chat/IM conversations with their boss?

Boss: "Is this possible?"
Me: "I think so let me know if you want me to research it further"
...
6 hours later
Boss: "OK"
Me: "Ok, research it or OK, thanks don't do anything?"
...
Next day:
Boss: "Yep"
Me: Bangs head against desk

TFW you realize you aren't working with idiots but are the idiot

Yeah, happened twice today before lunch.

It's not a good day.

When someone asks a group question on Slack along the lines of "Did anyone...?" I sometimes respond with

!me

meaning, NOT me. But, then I realized old admins like myself sometimes call a ! a "bang" so

!me

becomes "bang me"

which could get me into trouble with HR

Idea for a new pageant: Women who work in IT compete in challenges to show off their skills and the winner is crowned "Miss Information"

I didn't choose my specialty.

And I still haven't.

I'm a bit of an odd bird in that I'm a generalist in a world of specialists.

How did I get my current specialty? I went where the job told me to go.

Not from a coding job: "Optional" after work social gatherings which I declined to attend. My boss told me I had to attend them. I said, "That means they aren't optional." He said, "They are optional insofar as I don't have to attend them but you do."

Satisfaction: I quit while he was on vacation and gave only 1 week notice

From coding job (and this has happened several times):

"We value your input! What do you think of ..."

And then NEVER listening. NEVER giving feedback as to why my ideas aren't useful/helpful. But continually asking for input.

Yeah, go fuck yourself.

Well, we bugged out of our offices in March 2020 and the company decided we aren't going back. From now on, we are all virtual.

So, I guess I'd like to convince my coworkers that the company changed its mind. Just to see what happens.

Pet peeve: systems that have case sensitive user names

Losing your job while a pandemic is going on