A company I once worked for actually had an IT management reporting process called TPS reports. Completely non-ironically. I did ask if they were giving homage to “Office Space” and they were like, “Wut?”

And, yes, the report was obnoxious and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Oh, look. Google cares about my well-being. https://wellbeing.google

Part of me dies a little inside every time I have to log into GoDaddy for any reason. Is this really going to be our reality for the foreseeable future?

My mom passed away in 2014. Were it not for the pain she was in all her life, I’d love to have her back and I’d gladly provide all the computer help she’d need.

Hey, freelancer programmers, web developers, etc. I need your help. I’m writing a “Mother of All Blogs” post about why clients should a) pay you for your work and b) expect to pay you your asking rate. I’m trying to make the argument more forcefully that you get what you pay for with this work and that when you cheap out you only hurt your business bottom line. So, what are your experiences (positive and negative) or points that you would make to a potential client, who wants you to work super cheap or even for free, that you find are irrefutable about this topic? I want to include as many as I can! Thanks.

I’ve been on a couple of projects like this. Not to this magnitude, but similar types of communication and tech problems.

https://theregister.co.uk/2019/04/...

Move over, James Damore. You have a new ally. And, she’s a woman.

Microsoft engineer complains that company is biased against white men
Internal memo suggests that women don't think the right way to be engineers.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...

I hadn’t seen this interview until now. I was low-key discriminated against at a job, because of my gender, by a hierarchy full of women, and eventually let go. And I wasn’t the only one. This crap just makes me angry. It’s why I always want to be independent and not be directly employed by corporations anymore. https://youtu.be/6NOSD0XK0r8

Google Home Mini security nightmare stories. Aaaaand, go!

I'm about to send an email to a client with some well-written recommendations and advice in it. I swear that if he calls me quickly like he usually does, and before sufficient time has passed for him to actually read and grok what I've written, I will ignore that call and wait until tomorrow morning to get back to him. RTFM, dude!

What’s your favorite high performance video card for PC gaming for between $250-$300?

The 2019 StackOverflow Developer Survey is out. What are the most relevant key takeaways for you?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/...

When my mom died in 2014, I was shocked to find that her profile on Facebook was suddenly changed to “memorial” mode and therefore I was no longer able to log into it. (If you’re tempted to tell me I’m dumb for using it, I don’t disagree, but save it for another thread...she and I kept in touch over FB because it was easier for her to manage.)

I think it was triggered by their monitoring of things and seeing keywords like “funeral” and “passed away” associated with her account, then having a person on their end change its status. Or something like that.

What I hadn’t known about (or I would have used it) was the legacy contact setting where she could have set me as the contact so I’d have at least a little access and control. But because of their strict policies, I’m forever locked out.

I get why they need to do this (to avoid fraud and impersonations) but the fact that there are zero documents or proofs I, as the executor of her estate, can provide that Facebook will accept to make an exception seems unnecessarily severe.

Anyone else experience this? Known workarounds?

Is it just me, or is form autofill in the browser just a major PITA for shop owners when people get to the checkout screen? I've had two clients in the past week with problems where users didn't pay attention to their autofill outcomes, or where the form absolutely has to keep a certain value that we've autofilled for them but gets overwritten by their browser. Now there is a shipment of product out in the wind that is going to return to sender and be delayed in a correction cycle. If you've been able to halt this type of nonsense, I'd love to know how you did it.

function ignoreAutoFill() {return browserSitDownAndShutUp;}

Google’s SEO glitch over the weekend resulted in both a ruined weekend for my client and I but also a little billable time for me and extra moolah in my bank account. I only wish I had seen this article, but it did help us uncover a nasty hotlinker to block and disavow. Thanks, Google?

https://searchenginejournal.com/goo...

Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.

The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.

Clients should pay their bills, yes. But also, developers should check their bank accounts before shutting things down.
https://thesun.co.uk/news/8253908/...

Bought a nice widescreen monitor from Samsung through B&H Photo. 2 weeks later it wouldn't turn on. Shipped it in thrice for repairs and on the third time Samsung exchanged it for a new one. 7 days later the new one won't turn on. Same symptoms. The seller's money-back guarantee has expired, of course. No idea if Samsung will just give me the original value in cash so I can find another one from another manufacturer who knows how to make monitors. I'll probably just get ripped off. Time to die?

Clients that call to ask you for the URL to the test environment seem to never have heard of these things called “email” and “text”.

Dear client. Your web development project budget has no room in it for me to help you fix your broken POP3 mail settings. May the odds be ever in your favor.

A long time ago I got an idea for an Internet concierge shopping service that would pair you up with a human to help you comparison shop anything. Obviously this was before AI or the kind of tech we’re used to now. The idea was that the help of a real live person to help you track down deals was better than some of the emerging product recommendation engines I was researching. I figured I’d at least make a short term business out of it until tech caught up. So I built the site, DB, and business logic and recruited my bargain-hunting wife to help people find good buys. It worked ok, but wasn’t easy to monetize because people wanted her help for free rather than pay any kind of fee. Their perception was they weren’t saving a substantial amount if they had to pay someone to help them. Of course, our pitch was that by paying someone to help them, they might avoid paying more by trying it on their own.

It was an interesting experiment anyways.

I think the award for “riskiest dev choice” might be awarded to the developers who wrote the Boeing 737 Max anti-stall MCAS code. But it could also be argued that the root cause was hardware and lack of redundancy of sensors.

https://cnbc.com/2019/03/...

I have found a DVD with a Windows XP backup file with my late mother's photos on it. However, nothing seems to open the file. I, of course, did a lot of Google searches on how to do this and what it seems to come down to is a need to run the restore on an XP, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machine. There are several legacy ntbackup restore programs out there, and Microsoft seems to still have a page for downloading that, but it relies on the long-deprecated Removable Storage Service that no longer exists on Windows 10. So, a) Microsoft are a bunch of jerks for not supporting restores of legacy backups and b) does anyone have a successful method you've used to get a BKF file to restore? All the things I've tried say the BKF file is corrupted, but how to know for sure when Removable Storage Service isn't present?

To the remote dev who ghosted me right after we discovered a major bug in your code, and whom we paid up front for development, thanks for nothing.

You’re fired.

Everyone in the world can browse to my client's website on every browser. I can get to my client's website on every browser EXCEPT Chrome even on mobile devices. Doesn't even work in Incognito mode, nor after flushing cookies, cache, and history. Just the annoying ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT. And then I switch over to another Chrome profile I have and it's all fine. Google Forums are completely non-helpful because they all say it's ipconfig /flushdns or reinstall All The Things and delete and re-create my whole profile. Things like this make me want to flush Chrome forever.

I don’t recall why but a project was in need of an all-nighter and I was the only programmer available to do it. I even brought a sleeping bag and, about 2 hours before people started arriving for work the next morning, I slept in a gap between my cubicle and a wall. I brought a shaving kit and everything. For some reason I didn’t want people to know I had pulled the all-nighter so I had to make sure to get up and look presentable before the first person got there.

When my kids get the mistaken notion that they’ll be able to be like me right out of school and be able to make the money I make and have the flexible schedule I have and work from home and choose projects I like, I tell them my war stories about how I had to work 23 years of some hellish stuff to gain that privilege.

So I says to the wife, I says, “When you go to Costco tomorrow, I need a new Oral B electric toothbrush. My old one’s battery is no longer able to hold a charge.” I’m picturing her coming back with one that’s pretty similar to the one I had. You turn it on, you brush your teeth, you turn it off.

She comes back with the Oral B Pro 6000. Go on. Look it up. I’ll wait.

So this thing has about 6 modes and Bluetooth that connects you to an app that not only keeps track of how often you brush, but tracks your performance and gives you trophies if you do well at specific tasks and techniques. And there’s a coach to take you on an “oral health journey” depending on your particular goals. There’s even a mount you can buy to attach your phone to your mirror so the app can watch how you brush and give you pointers. I don’t have the mount so I got an 85% on performance because who can hold a phone pointed perfectly at your face while brushing? The final report had what might be the app dev’s attempt at a pun.

It’s 2019 and everyone is judging you. Why not your toothbrush as well?

Re: Momo the Monster challenges and the sickness and bullying of Internet culture towards vulnerable people in general: That’s enough Internet for the next 600 years. Cue asteroid.

OMG!!! Stop with the image captchas, Shopify and other sites that do this! Good grief! Is this my life now? Budgeting extra time with my clients just to log into websites? That last login took a full 5 minutes of clicking on traffic lights, buses, cars, crosswalks, and parking meters. I swear, when the Singularity apocalypse happens, we'll be attacked by traffic lights, buses, cars, crosswalks, and parking meters.

Round 2 of trying to warranty repair a new monitor (Samsung CF791 ultrawide). Of course, it would die right after the 30-day return period with B&H so now I’m at the mercy of Samsung. Spent $70 on special packing to send it to Samsung so they couldn’t claim it broke during shipping. It came back to me in a box that looked like a homeless person had once lived in it. And it still didn’t work. I just sent it off again, this time in the same box they sent, as if to say “screw you for making me spend $70 for nothing”. I fully expect it to come back still not working. And I’ll demand a replacement. $700 monitors aren’t worth what they used to be.