LovableSidekick

We'll be back with more US government right after these messages!

Dammit, my friend just said he would give me access to his file server, all I have to do is install Plex. Presumably this announcement means that will become impossible without a subscription.

I don't think there's a plan either. By "everything that's happened" I meant just that - things that have happened. Not a plan. The mere fact that this sounds like I'm envisioning a plan just reflects how popular that type of thinking is nowadays. People attribute all kinds of things to heinous plots. Two major things that have happened over the last century are unprecedented comforts and conveniences, and overexposure to fiction.

Technology and well-organized logistics have brought us goods and services our ancestors could only dream of. If we still had their life expectations we could be living lives of comparative ease, with all kinds of spare income and free time. But in parallel with new toys that eliminate various survival needs we've also developed erxpectationa that make us want/need to consume more and more, so our expenses always stay a little ahead of our incomes.

At the same time entertainment, especially fiction, has become vastly more available than ever in history. We can escape reality in more ways and forms than humans have ever been able to. Cheap book printing, radio, television, and now the internet have made fictional characters and their lives seem so vivid and real to us, they're part of our vision of how we're supposed to be and how life should be. This leads to all kinds of disillusion and feelings of inferiority - life just isn't as exciting, dramatic or entertaining as it should be, based on our fiction-distorted vision.

We've become more childlike and incapable. Americans tend to think we inherited "pioneer spirit" - most of us couldn't pioneer our way out of Walmart. But this wasn't anybody's insidious plan, it just happened. We've responded to new developments the way we have because apparently that's how we work. How that turns out is anybody's guess.

Wow, the last time I actually used VMS was when Digital Equipment Corp still existed. It was written for their VAX systems, not PCs but a "minicomputer" of the 80s, successor to the PDP-xx of the 70s (which the original Advent and Zork were written on). When DEC went out of business or got sold or whatever VMS became OpenVMS. There's an x86 version now but I've never tried it.

ARC?

edit: Right, didn't see your edit. Yes ARC was Attack. Retrieve. Capture. It was created by two guys, Brian and John, who were at WON when I was. They created the game in college (Duke University I think) before dropping out to come work at WON. They had formed a company called Hoopy Entertainment so we called them the hoopies. At one point somebody found out they had been coming in on weekends, working 7 days a week for months, so they were basically ordered to take some time off. Bona fide nerd life - the hoopies were the real deal.

Those guys were a lot of fun - one time they ran another guy's speaker wires under the partition to their cubicle and through one of their computers, so they could mix sounds into his audio. Occasionally they would fade it up for a while but usually they kept it very faint. He was going crazy, thinking his hardware was picking up a radio station or people's phone calls, he couldn't tell. After he figured it out he retaliated by attaching a spare wall section across the opening between the hoopy guys' joint cube after they left, so they had to climb over it to get back in. The hoopies actually left it that way for a while because it was kind of like a fort.

I remember Brian writing a really nice connection simulator that artificially added network latency for testing. They also created a game based on cops and robbers driving around a city, but the prototype turned out not to be fun enough so they scrapped it. Eventually I think Hoopy became PopCap. I'm sure those guys both got rich.

Good memories.

I don't know what argument you're having, but what I said was that the Linux Foundation doesn't have any control over the code.

How does that little scooter carry his massive steel balls?

"Hey, isn't that Dave's skull?"

"Can't be, I just saw him this morning. Sure looks like him though. Weird."

It might not sound like much, but the French people who committed the prison concrete sabotage weren't ordinary people who showed up with sugar in their pockets, they were a well organized group that had also broken into offices to steal construction plans. One of their documents describes sabotaging the concrete as "a simple matter" of adding sugar, but that's all - it doesn't say whether they added it to a running truck (which would be quite a trick because everybody on a truck crew knows who's in the crew) or mixed it dry with sacks of concrete in a storeroom, or what. It also doesn't mention observing any actual results. People's vision of how this would work is way too simple - "Just toss a 50-lb bag of something into a truck!"

The subject matter really isn't that important in computer programming. My work was all with databases and web pages. At WON I wrote an online tournament system, which I got to do entirely by myself because it was such a small organization. At Fred Hutch I worked on a system where clinics around the world entered test results, biopsy data etc. for cancer research projects. My own daughter had been cured of a brain tumor (which is what made that job meaningful to me). I planned on spending the rest of my career at Fred Hutch, until shit happened. On the plus side, after Fred Hutch I got to work at Wizards of the Coast (more db and web dev), which always impresses people. I would say that place was more fun thatn World Opponent Network except at WON we had Unreal tournaments and occasional nerf gun fights.

I got laid off from my most meaningful job (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute) because of cutbacks resulting from the 2009 "Savings and Loan Crisis" - which happened to occur while the grant that paid for my job was being renewed.

I got laid off from my most fun job (World Opponent Network, a spinoff of Sierra Games) because of cutbacks when the parent company lost a shareholder lawsuit after some executive fuckwads cooked the books to manipulate the stock price.

The big-money people don't care what kind of shit rains down on the peasants. Their world revolves around having more money they don't need than they had last year when they also didn't need it.