Re: Hilarious!
It's always September on the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
139 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2009
Isn't one of the survival tips to keep a length of fibre optic cable in your back pocket?
If you ever find yourself lost in a forest or stranded on a desert island, bury the cable in the ground. A back hoe will be along in 5 minutes to accidentally dig it up. You can then ask the driver for a lift back to civilisation.
"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry." -- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
GNU Terry Pratchett
At one place I worked at, the team rule was that Friday afternoon fixes were never rolled out until the following Monday.
I got to hone some of my Linux skills by making a "simple" change to my personal Linux systems before going to bed. Two hours later, I'd still be unpicking the fallout from the "simple" change.
The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.
Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.
The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.
The new, itemized bill reads….
Hammer: $5
Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
The 1990s called and want their argument back. Dependency hell is nothing to do with the packaging container but rather how careful the package maintainers are with specifying the dependencies and how many third party repos you're using. The Debian packagers were, and probably still are, anal to the extreme about such matters. I cannot recall the last time I encountered any RPM dependency hell using the officially sanctioned repos for the Red Hat systems under my control and my personal Fedora systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Although, with me, it's not a rubber duck I talk to but a non-programmer. I've lost count of the number of times I'd be explaining a knotty coding issue to someone when they'd notice the light coming on behind my eyes. "Gotta go!"
Been there, done that. A friend's daughters had received identical laptops for Christmas, could I call around and configure them for wi-fi access? First laptop, I got it onto their wi-fi no problem. Second one, just wouldn't. Went through a few cycles of driver installs and other diagnostic steps until I noticed a little slide switch on the front edge of the laptop. *Click* and the laptop could see the wi-fi.
A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...
And I don't mean the ones used for baptisms. Which monospaced fonts have you found offer the clearest distinction between lower 'el', upper 'eye' and number '1' and upper 'oh' and number '0'? And also look good at a range of sizes? Lucida Console (Windows) and Liberation Mono (Linux) are my go-tos, just wondering what else is out there.
My dad mainly uses his laptop these days, but in his study has a old tower PC I built for him. I recently got a call from him, "My PC won't turn on."
Me: "Well, it is quite old, it's probably given up the ghost."
Dad: "But I hardly use it."
Me: "Didn't you tell me that you never used to turn it off because it took too long to start up?"
The next time I was around my parents, I cracked open the side panel to see if I could spot anything obvious but nothing jumped out at me. Out of curiosity, I did a search for the motherboard model number. Released in 2004, so a 16 year old PC, most likely running XP.
Me: "Yeah, after 16 years, I think it owes you nothing at this point."
Fortunately I was able to pull the IDE(!) HDD and successfully copy his files to an external HDD.
I've done "rm -rf /usr" before. Fortunately it was on a personal Linux machine. For whatever reason I'd made a copy of /usr and then came time to remove it. Of course muscle memory kicked in and put the '/' before 'usr'.
Back to the title of my post. I got into Linux in the late 1990s. Back then, you learnt by scouring Usenet groups and using this up and coming search engine called 'Google'. (I wondered whatever happened to them?) You'd try something, break your system and work out how to put the pieces back together. Over the years I've noticed a trend for newer users not to experiment but want the answer spoon-fed to them.
Many moons ago, my dad had the electrical maintenance contract for a local software company. One day he gets a call from the head of facilities.
"There's a big board meeting going on and the room's in darkness, can you get here ASAP and look into it?"
My dad drops his current task and hies himself to the software company. He gets escorted to the boardroom where his first diagnostic test is to flick the light switch, which had the effect of illuminating the room. My dad left shaking his head at the thought of all these people charged with running a company not thinking to check the light switch.