I could easily do it but my bladder has other plans.

I went the grocery store today and was very good about not buying any snack junk. On the way out I encountered those demons from the depths of hell known as “girl scouts”.

their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles

The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.

My favorite approach to team processes was to work entirely alone and do everything by myself.

At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.

I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own sin() function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.

The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.

An organisation that harvests the organs of homeless called “Rivendell”?

Surely “Mordor” would be a better choice?

Ironically enough, even most of the plantation “owners” didn’t really own their plantations or slaves. They were typically massively in debt, usually to English bankers who were financing the loathsome operation to provide cheap raw material for their cotton factories. This is why the British government – which had led the way in banning slavery in the British empire and using its navy to interdict the transatlantic slave trade – was somehow on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

If you’re blonde and hot, you’re an ex-pat, not an immigrant.

He’s just doing work for Putin.

This is libelous. He’s also doing work for the Saudis.

I started working as a professional programmer in 1995. From the outset, I was pitching to clients how a GUI (thanks, Visual Basic 3!) would be so much easier for their employees to use than a command prompt. I find it very interesting how command prompts are still around 30 years later. I’m way more amazed by the continued existence of vinyl LPs, however.

I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn’t have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don’t think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM’s servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you’d made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I’d like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

I hope he died in battle just in case the Norse are correct

He did, he died battling cancer.

“Kitty, here’s what’s wrong with the hyperloop concept …”

I took German in high school and forgot it all immediately. A decade later I found myself in India studying Malayalam, the language of Kerala which is the southern-most state in the country. Very hard language to learn but as I was learning its formal grammar I was like, wait a minute this is very familiar. Turns out a German monk in the 19th Century visited Kerala and gave Malayalam its first formal grammar, which was basically just German’s grammar. So it wasn’t totally useless.

I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.

Hare down there

a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard

Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).

drinking one glass of whisky

To be fair, medical professionals generally triple or quadruple patients’ reported alcohol consumption.

In college I arranged a co-op at IBM. They made me take a drug test which I failed (for marijuana). A person from IBM’s HR called me and said literally “you need to clean up your act” and they brought me in to do the co-op anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that was all about.

I also got pulled over for speeding one time and the cop smelled the joint I had been smoking. Luckily he let me go with just a speeding ticket, but he made a point of scolding me – not for driving while high but because I was 49 at the time. He told me it was time for me to grow up. I was seriously enraged by that but of course I kept it to myself.