Posts by parrot 87 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Sep 2023
Bananas are more of a stealth fruit in my opinion, you can pull small chunks off with your fingers which can be scoffed quietly and quickly without making much noise.
Apples are the best balance of practical and conspicuous, crunch, crunch. You could show up to a meeting and start chopping up a pineapple or a watermelon but it’s a lot of effort in comparison to just pulling out an apple and biting it. I’m tempted by the pineapple though.
About ten years ago my Dad had laser eye surgery, he asked me to drive to the appointment as he wouldn’t be able to drive home afterwards.
When he came out with a clear plastic eye patch taped to his face I laughed and said, “is it ok if I tell some pirate jokes?”
He sighed and said, “go on then.”
At which point my mind went blank and I couldn’t think of any!
Perhaps some kindhearted commenters would like to share a joke they would have told under the same circumstances? Replies please!
Lucky it wasn’t a platter, after wiping the source disk.
Friend of mine did the same thing, face went white like they’d seen a Ghost. Would have been SMART to check the disk first. Luckily we were able to recover the most important Partition. Magic! Luckily it wasn’t my other colleague who did it, Zero Phil.
Weird, for many years I used GIMP and Photoshop and I always said Photoshop was alarmingly unintuitive compared to GIMP. Which was annoying because Photoshop could do more overall (working with RAW files for example) but I took that to be the natural consequence of more powerful software.
Haven’t used either very much lately, Lightroom has replaced them for what I mostly do.
Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.
Discovered last week that the only way to push out a setting for which we previously had a group policy is to use something called “Intune Remediations”.
Sounds a lot grander than it is. It just lets you deploy a PowerShell startup script. Using a web based gui. It’s the worst of both worlds.
Currently in a position where my own workload is unmanageably high. But overall that’s my manager’s problem, and what I don’t have time to do in a day will have to wait.
While I don’t believe the necessary time should be found from one’s own time, I agree with the general point that the user needs to take reasonable responsibility for managing their time and doing things properly.
The point really is if you fall for a fake phish you could fall for a real phish. Regardless of workload it’s essential to pay attention. Security is a higher priority than most other concerns, after all, if you muck it up you’ll have a lot more on your plate to deal with.
Responsiveness should be valued more.
I find unresponsive systems stressful to use. I’ve used plenty of systems where the latency is so bad I find myself watching the words write to the screen several seconds after typing them. The cloud based CRM and ticketing system we currently have can sometimes take minutes to load pages or submit information. I’m convinced this has an adverse effect on productivity and mental health. You’re trying to get through your workload as quickly as you can but the system is a bottleneck. It just keeps making you wait.
My sense is that decision makers see a loss of responsiveness as acceptable if it allows them to access the benefits of using the cloud (mainly just shifting liability/responsibility off themselves). But if you asked the user, responsiveness would be their number one priority. In my opinion systems should be responsive enough for the user never to think about it.
A few weeks ago I was having a lovely chat with someone about how they were fundraising to help homeless people. Suddenly it switched and they went off on a rant about immigration, shoot them before they get off the boats they were saying, no apparent awareness whether I might not agree or share their view. Perhaps they just assumed I would.
Last week a similar thing happened with another person I don't see very often, seemed like they were permanently plugged in to twitter. Their phone would ping and they'd be making comments condemning far right violence, then suddenly celebrating violence against Israel. Then we had an airing of views about supposed trans boxers in the Olympics, and "the trans agenda". They'd be upset if they knew what pronouns I was using for them here... ;) Again, no apparent thought to what I might think or feel about any of it. It was just awkward.
I believe it's healthy when we talk about our beliefs and values with people who have different beliefs and values, and I get into that kind of conversation occasionally with people I know. It doesn't have to be heated and it challenges you to examine ideas which might not be immediately intuitive to you. I think there's a societal norm now that we avoid those discussions to avoid awkwardness, which I understand. It's not always appropriate. But a hallmark of someone caught in an echo chamber has to be obliviousness to the views of others.
That said, I don't think having conviction is a bad thing, because some things are right and some things are not. But that is subjective, and I find myself considering the things which make me angry, even the music I listen to, and wondering where my own blind spots are.
I very much share your sentiments. Up until the pickaxe at least. The inclusion of advertising another distracting crap in the start menu has always struck me as completely inappropriate for a business product. I have to switch a lot of these things off because they affect my focus when I’m working. The same goes for the default home page in most web browsers, disappointingly I have to include Firefox in this.
When I am supporting other people I notice they are affected in different ways by this type of thing. Many, as you say, just accept it as an everyday annoyance and work around it. There are some whose work can be significantly impeded when presented with something they don’t know how to respond to. In my experience, with the most excruciating irony, it’s all the tips and tricks and welcome messages that cause the most hassle. They don’t help people to use the product. They just get in the way.
I had the low tech version of this as a child; sibling desperate to pee breaks the door handle and I'm stuck in there until my Dad got home. No air freshener to worry about. Managed to receive a delivery of a book, and a plate with my dinner on, through the tiny window. Could have been worse.
Waitress: You can't have Word Excel Teams and Outlook without the Teams.
Wife: I DON'T LIKE TEAMS!
Husband: Now dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your Teams. I love it. I'm having Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Slack Teams Teams Teams and Teams!
Waitress: Slack is off.
Husband: Well could I have her Teams instead of Slack then?
Waitress: You mean Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams Teams and Teams...?
Vikings: LOVELY TEAMS! WONDERFUL TEAMS! TEAMS TEAMS TEAMS TEAMS! etc...
Quick question, sort of relevant but a bit tenuous, I’ve often thought it’s a bit annoying that there’s no obvious easy way of setting up the address bar in Firefox so it doesn’t search. Why can’t we have it like in the old days, where a malformed url just goes nowhere? I know there’s a risk of malware from typo squatters but for most stuff I use bookmarks anyway and if I do press enter too quick when typing a url I’d rather see an error message than trigger a search query.
Any thoughts? Am I missing something?
"As Europe stands at the threshold of society’s next major technological evolution, some activists are advocating extreme approaches to data and AI. Let’s be clear: those positions don’t reflect European law, and they amount to an argument that Europeans shouldn’t have access to — or be properly served by — AI that the rest of the world has. We deeply disagree with that outcome."
This actually makes me feel a bit sick. Even if Meta believes its "AI" is going to have a positive effect on the world, this will at best be an "end justifies the means" sort of endeavour, which is always dubious, because the only reason anyone is letting them use this data is they can't be bothered or don't know how to stop it. Does that really constitute consent? If it was the other way around and, presented with clear accurate information, people had to opt in, would anyone actually do it? When it comes to an "extreme approach" Meta take the biscuit.
Source (linked from the Reg article): https://about.fb.com/news/2024/06/building-ai-technology-for-europeans-in-a-transparent-and-responsible-way/
Many years ago on 1 April, whilst working in a school, I logged a support ticket with RM saying their command had broken my Linux server. It was a stupid obvious joke and wasn’t really very funny, but I must have worded it more convincingly than I realised because I got a call from an account manager who sounded very worried.
Somehow the words “April Fool” did little to diffuse the situation. My boss seemed unconcerned and just sat opposite laughing.
I stopped saving card details in websites for convenience a couple of years ago, even though some sites make it tedious and annoying (talking to you, ParentPay). I no longer trust any online retailer to be secure enough not to leak something at some point. Perhaps it was naive I ever did.
My friend, a few years younger than me, bought a posh new heat sink and fan for his PC and asked me if I’d fit it for him. It was the sort where you had to put a fair amount of force on the clip to get it in to place, and he was anxious about damaging the board. It was a routine job for me as I was swapping out maybe 20 motherboards a day at work. Bad caps were a constant problem back then.
Anyway, I messed it up, screwdriver slipped, severed a couple of tracks on the board and chipped off a little surface mount resistor. Some tense moments followed with a soldering iron, a couple of bits of wire and a fibreglass pencil. I managed to bridge the broken tracks and put back the resistor. To my great relief it booted back up and worked fine, but I felt bad when it stopped working about a year later and ended up buying him a new motherboard!
The interface was the bit Microsoft got right in my opinion, tiles customisable for regularly used functions on the front, everything else in an alphabetical list at the back. Simple.
I would love to go back to it, if only it were possible, I find iOS and Android cluttered and unintuitive in comparison.
Most Christians would expect baptism to occur in water, because the bible says Jesus was baptised in water and they aim to follow his example. Arguably infant baptism already strays from Jesus’ example because at no point is the child fully submerged in the water but the tradition goes back centuries and is valued in many denominations of the church.
There are plenty of subjects not specifically covered by the bible itself, Gatorade is definitely one of them! Christians have to discern what they think is in the spirit of their teachings generally. There may be nothing to say you shouldn’t use Gatorade so if you really wanted to then perhaps you could. But as baptism is a meaningful public declaration of faith, I think most Christians would discern the suggestion of using Gatorade as intentionally silly and not in keeping with the occasion. Justin did not possess this necessary discernment.
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