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.

In the spirit of true randomness, I like to speculate about aliens. What’s your favorite theory about them? Anything’s fair game: whether they actually exist, methods of propulsion, origins, exobiology, exopolitics, eyewitness reports by credible reporters (pilots, military, air traffic controllers, high-profile political leaders, etc.) whether abductions are real and, if so, why they do it, etc. If you’ve had an encounter, I’d love to hear about it.

Dear Client,

Proper English sentence structure, the kind that accurately conveys what you mean to ask me to do for you, requires a subject and a predicate. To hearken back to “Schoolhouse Rock”, if Mr. Morton is the subject of my sentence, then what the predicate says, he does. Mr. Morton walks. Mr. Morton talks. Etc.

Just tossing out random nouns and verbs in random order in an email will not help me to help you.

Sincerely,
Mr. Morton

Me: Yay! I’m getting more clients which means more income which means my accountant won’t look at me funny anymore when I say I’m still running a business and not a hobby! Go me!

Also me: I need $1400 worth of project management software subscription for 2 years (to get a discount) so I can manage the Agile workload among the developers and writers. I also need to recover $700 of accidental ad spend for that stupid Yelp account I forgot I had a “free trial” on. Guess I’m still running a hobby for a bit.

My wife and I met on a university VAX BBS just as Tim Berners-Lee was concepting something called “the World Wide Web and before the NCSA Mosaic browser was built. She had once dated a guy in high school who eventually worked on Mosaic and then became a founding Netscape programmer and whose twin brother went on to write the first version of the Apache web server. I saved her from a life of wretched millionaire excess when she married me, a lowly web designer.

So it’s feast or famine as a freelancer. I went from just a couple active clients to three new clients and four new proposals to write for new prospects. Discovering the limits of my productivity and brainpower at the moment.

Shopify sucks. Change my mind.

"The Postmates app is no longer available for download. If you already have the Postmates app installed, you can continue using it until January 10, 2019."

So, if your client built their site so that it depended on this app for a big requirement in their online store fulfillment, you now have to hope that there's another app that could match its capabilities. Or, you have to spend more budget to develop your own so you have 100% control over it.

Git Merge 1 of branch to master: COMPLETE
Git Merge 2 of branch to master: (code change on branch, no change to master, exactly the same conditions, command, and procedure as before) FAILED - CONFLICT

Guess I’ll just die?

This is too much power for one company to wield.

Google Takes Its First Steps Toward Killing the URL
https://wired.com/story/...

Google is like the parent or teacher who is never happy with your work. I've never seen something so unattainable in a world where non-technical clients rely on CMSes, theme templating, server-side page rendering, and external scripting as Google's mobile PageSpeed recommendations. Especially under the Lighthouse audit in Chrome Inspector. Unless I go back to pre-2001 web development methods, and never have external scripting, and make every page have its own CSS file with only critical path CSS for each page, I will never get all the high scores I'm expected to have to rank well for mobile. When and how will Google get called out on this B.S.?

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

Well, this is certainly not encouraging. Get ready for LOTS of ads in Chrome and decreased performance.

https://forbes.com/sites/...

The ::before and ::after pseudo elements. I’ve spent an hour sometimes trying to figure out how to get some element to do something and not realizing it was because of those.

Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: Ok, so why does your Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Optimize code drag my site down to the seventh circle of Hell in performance?
Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: ...

Had one of those unicorn coding moments where my from-scratch code worked the first time I wrote and tested it. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

How I feel when I ask a question on StackOverflow...

Looking for help for my daughter who is an American exchange student in Germany struggling to learn to code Java in a classroom that only speaks German. She is using Java-Editor for her assignments but doesn’t know how to translate English-based tutorials into German. Like, what’s the German word for “properties” for finding the properties tab in the UI? That sort of thing. Is there an English to German glossary, or better yet a way to switch the UI to English?

I don’t speak German but I do code, so trying to help her is difficult.

Thanks for any help.

I bought a Samsung 34” ultra wide monitor for the express purpose of being able to arrange multiple windows however I deemed necessary for productivity. Only to find out that it natively only offers a single vertical split. The software they provide to offer more split options simply does not work the way it says it will. And DisplayFusion software is no better.

Is it seriously 2018 and we still don’t have a simple way to make the most of a widescreen monitor? Good grief!!!!!

Even Santa has CAPTCHA.

Some programmer or QA person somewhere in the world is having a moment of great reflection on the subject of thoroughly testing their code. If not that, then on the subject of a super crappy manager who knew better and pushed to production anyway.

“Then in September this year, nearly three years later, he got a letter from Wells Fargo. "Dear Jose Aguilar," it read, "We made a mistake… we're sorry." It said the decision on his loan modification was based "on a faulty calculation" and his loan "should have been" approved.

"It's just like, 'Are you serious? Are you kidding me?' Like they destroyed my kids' life and my life, and now you want me to – 'We're sorry?'"

https://cbsnews.com/news/...

Google is being evil.

More Than 600 Google Employees Are Demanding an End to Project Dragonfly
https://gizmodo.com/more-than-600-g...

Does anyone here have experience with the eBay iOS or Android app, specifically with setting up alternate payment gateways on eBay (other than PayPal) to collect payment on purchased items? I have a client who for various reasons can no longer use PayPal to collect payment on eBay. On purchases made via the website on Desktop there are no problems with Authorize.net. But when people try to purchase via the app specifically, they are given a stupid and unhelpful message to use the desktop browser purchase experience instead. For the client it is costing about 60% of potential eBay sales.

Everything I’ve been reading on eBay’s own forums and elsewhere shows that this is an ongoing and unsolved issue for a lot of store owners and eBay seems to be in no hurry to remedy it. I’ve been over this several times with multiple eBay support reps but all I get are inconsistent and misleading answers. Or maybe I’m just not asking or searching right and the answer is out there somewhere. Any advice?

Which one of you is it that works for Apple or Microsoft and writes the code that tells a computer to slow down, lose its internet connection, freeze, reboot, crash your browser, or generally respond to a request for a website with a friggin' spinning beach ball of death right at the moment of highest productivity or crisis?