I signed on to my teleconference 5 minutes before it started because I wanted to get a good seat.

Needed to to look up how to use a command in linux yesterday so I typed:

man touch

Which was then quickly followed by

man chargedwithsexualassualt
man shamed
man fired

It's April 1st on DevRant

DML!

Spending 8 hours automating a task that takes you 2 minutes to do every other month probably won't show a good ROI

Life lessons learned from programming?

1. Always put things where you look for them
2. You may know better than some people but you never know better than all the people
3. Fuckups happen. Deal with them and move on
4. Take responsibility for your fuckups
5. There is no nice way to tell someone their baby is ugly or that their code is unreadable

I think "clean code" won't last.

With the ongoing democratization of coding and the myriad lowest-common-denominator coders flooding the market, the concept that code should simply explain itself and be intuitive to all readers will be more and more difficult to achieve.

Clean code requires the reader be on the same or greater technical skill level with the language than the authors. As developers go back to being generalists from over-specialized this becomes more of a time waster than a time saver.

Bought my wife a new laptop. She's a windows user so I had to go that way.

First, windows 10 now requires you log in to a new installation using a Microsoft login. You can remove it later but you need one to start. <gnashes teeth>

Then, because I chose to use a phone number to set up the Microsoft account, it created the home folder using the first 5 digits of the phone number, including the 1 country code for USA. <gnashes teeth #2>

Finally manage to get the initial set up out of the way and go to copy files from her old laptop which I can see in the "Network" area in explorer but when I click on it am told it doesn't exist <gnashes teeth #3>

Eventually realize that something needs to be shared on the old laptop so the new one can "see" it.

All the while I kept muttering, "Why the fuck does Microsoft make everything so simple so damned difficult?"

Can we please kill the "You just logged in" emails?

Each time I log into my brokerage or Google or Yahoo I get one or more emails along the lines of "Hey, you just logged in. If this was you, ignore this email. If not, well, suck to be you, I guess. Someone else has logged into your account. Just thought you'd like to know."

Anything that allows me to forget my imposter syndrome for a few minutes.

Examples include:

- Coworker sending me a Slack message commenting on a function I sent him: "Dude this thing is awesome"

- Manager commenting on a data sync process I wrote: "I love that. Seriously."

- Myself finally solving a problem that had been eating my lunch all day: "In your face, computer!"

"Tensorflow" sounds like it would be a drug for BPH

Some days I am reminded that IT is just the first and last letters of the word IDIOT

Log into tech support community website...

Get prompted to change password because my current one is too old...

Paste in the same password I already am using...

ACCEPTED!

My phone just tried to locate me using GPS and gave me an answer that was "uncertain" by 1500m

That's helpful.

Y'know, I'm really not all that good at this.

Bug them right back.

True story: I once had a manager who was so much more of a people person than I will ever be and she managed to get the PMs to slow down and let us work by taking every thing we said about the project back to them in friendly, yet annoying, terms.

Once they got a taste of their own medicine, and she pointed out to them that's what they were doing to us, they suddenly stopped being jerks.

I'm thinking of a number between...6 and 8

Strava announced this morning that their app will no longer support direct BTLE or ANT+ syncing with heart rate sensors or bicycle speed/cadence sensors.

They say this is because it is causing the app to crash.

And they suggest we use a different app instead and then upload the data to Strava.

I read this as "We don't have competent developers who can solve this issue so, please, go use a competitor's product"

All in favor of deleting old code from a git repository to make it neat, raise your hand.

And yet the question is in binary...

The latest version of Chrome and Brave on OSX are throwing Aw, Snap! messages on pages like Gmail when left alone for several minutes.

WTF Google?

When your website developer is trying to use Google maps on the cheap...

I signed up for an account at an online retailer a few months back and used an extension to my gmail address using the + symbol. I do this so I can track who is selling my address to what spam^h^h^h^h marketers.

Since then I've been getting a few too emails from this retailer so I clicked the unsubscribe link on one email and was told that my email address, with the + in it, is an invalid email address so I can't unsubscribe it.

Someone needs to get their code on the same page. Or...perhaps this is a feature designed to not let clever folks like me be too clever?

To stay relevant and productive until I retire.

Yeah, pretty prosaic but that's just me.

Typos are the bone of my existence

Four letter word for "Windows 10 won't boot. Fuck you"

UEFI

Hate it when a website asks for a phone number and throws this error at you:

Please correct the following errors:
Phone please use the format 555-555-5555.

LEARN TO FUCKING PARSE!

Those artificial "hair on fire" moments.

You know, those moments where a supervisor or executive walks into your office and says that something needs to be done "right away" but without any real business reason behind it other than they want it RIGHT NOW! Frequently subverts current work with real priorities which causes other "hair on fire" moments down the road.

As a former co-worker once put it, it works like so:

Step 1: Manager comes in and lights your hair on fire
Step 2: You run around a bit
Step 3: You set a coworker's hair on fire
Step 4: They run around a bit
Step 5: They set their manager's hair on fire
Step 6: Manager runs around a bit

Proceed at your own pace once you get the gist.

You know it is going to be a bad morning when your coffee goes cold before you get a chance to drink it.

Walk in on the first day and am told: "We don't have a computer for you yet and we're not sure where you're going to be sitting so just hang around for a bit."

"Ok...what will I be doing?"

"We're discussing that."

"So I'm to be spackle, then?"

"Huh?"

"You'll use me once you see a hole that needs filling."

I've hopped jobs more than getting promoted but my last promotion was when I moved from a desktop support engineer to the team's sysadmin only to be forced out with --get this-- an 8 month notice because they had promised the job to someone else.

Long story short, I found a new job in 4 months and gave them just 5 days notice. Manager said, "We need two weeks." I said, "No." He said, "I understand."