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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My company originally said you got two free days off per year, outside the accrued PTO: one for your birthday, and one for parity because office #2 got a state holiday that #1 didn’t.

    Now they moved to the “unlimited PTO” gimmick which has no right answer for how much time you can take off, so I follow the old PTO accrual schedule for my seniority as a guide.



  • Just to be clear, the chicken sandwich itself holds no ill will to the homosexual community. Sandwiches are generally incapable of hate.

    Sadly, the ghouls that own the company that makes the sandwiches are incapable of reaching the same level of human empathy that an inanimate foodstuff can.

    Aside from that, you ain’t missing much. It tasted weird and sweet 20 years ago when they started selling them here, before the controversy.



  • I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:

    • Real Motif apps
    • Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
    • GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”

    There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)






  • I’ve heard that some grant money is earmarked to be spent in stupid ways. “Here’s $2M for technology” means they can put a Threadripper on every desk, but not replace the desk, or the 30-year-old textbooks within it.

    I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors that know ways to help cashout such grants. Buy these garbage PCs for $1000 each, and we have a “surplus trade in programme” to buy them back for $600 cash each in 3 months, giving you no-longer-restricted cash to actually fix the hole in the cafeteria floor that’s already swallowed Mrs Baxter’s third grade class"



  • I didn’t. It just looks like the fair number of Cisco (and the occasional Dell) 10/100/sometimes Gigabit switches I’ve seen in junk shops.

    I bought a nifty blue Netgear 24-port one mostly because I’m more willing to buy junk from the Humane Society shop, but then decided it was too loud (40mm fans) and went to 2.5G (with smaller fanless switches) instead.




  • The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.

    But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…