What You've Done Today - Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life

[LadyCrimson]

"Wrinkle Resistant Shirt" (in the US at least) = lots of embedded formaldehyde that you cannot actually wash out entirely. Even if it's not plastic-fibers. Although I think you could maybe get to a point where 50% of it is gone. Maybe.

That chemical is in freaking everything now, from cosmetics, clothes, bedding, rugs, memory foam/plastic fibers, EVERYTHING. I seem to not be bothered too much by small amounts of gas-off air exposure but direct skin contact wreaks havoc. So after a while new carpets won't bother me a lot nose wise but I cannot lie down on them for more than 60 seconds. I remember lying face down on carpets as a kid.  Didn't bother me then for whatever reasons (did they use less chemicals in carpets back then or I just hadn't become sensitive yet?). Now I'd have a big red itchy patch on my face.

Anyway ... just a reminder that that seeming acne and/or eczema or skin swelling flare up might come from one of those millions of products around your home that you may suddenly have become sensitive too. It's not always your diet or anything "exotic".

[majestic]

Got a shipping notification, my hardware will - any issues aside - arrive on Thursday, so that gives me all of tomorrow to prepare. Not exactly my most favorite part, but I am looking forward to the reduced loadng times.

[Guard Dog]

7 hours ago, BruceVC said:

GD somehow I knew you were going to say " I dont think I could live their " 

You comparing it to the beauty and serenity of Cold Creek and the  majestic wilderness  of Tennessee

 Or maybe I am wrong, why are you glad you dont live their ?

Demophobia I believe it's called. I get very irritable around large crowds. 

[Hurlshort]

1 hour ago, Guard Dog said:

Demophobia I believe it's called. I get very irritable around large crowds. 

I am pretty sure that is just called common sense. Who wants to be in a large crowd?

[Gromnir]

3 minutes ago, Hurlsnot said:

I am pretty sure that is just called common sense. Who wants to be in a large crowd?

just 'bout every southerner on saturday?

HA! Good Fun!

[Malcador]

30 minutes ago, Hurlsnot said:

Who wants to be in a large crowd?

Suicide bombers ?

[majestic]

Going through the checklist. Item #2, right after creating a Mozilla account to be able to sync my Firefox stuff was finally giving in and start using a Microsoft account for my windows, otherwise I'll run into licensing shenanigans sooner or later (a friend of mine just recently bricked two Windows licenses, better safe than sorry). I was reminded of why I only had a local account until now, Microsoft just stubbornly refuses to create a Microsoft account with my regular mail adress, telling me that I can't use work, school oder university mail addresses for my Microsoft account.

I realize why that is there, because these are usually transient. Here's the thing, while my mail account is hosted by a communications non-profit, it is just that. It is a non-profit association under local law, the mailbox is not transient and I've had it for, well, 26 years now. It is probably older than the twerp intern who set up the validation.

Halfway through changing my mind and just refusing the delivery. Would save me a pretty penny too. Time to stare at file copy progress bars.

edit: I realize that I could also just physically transfer my old hard disk to the new computer for easier access, but that's work I don't want to do. I'd rather stare at a progress bar for the time it takes to copy the relevant 400GB through an external hard disk. Plus it'll make a long overdue backup of the important stuff in the process. *shrug*

Edited April 20, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

5 hours ago, majestic said:

Going through the checklist. Item #2, right after creating a Mozilla account to be able to sync my Firefox stuff was finally giving in and start using a Microsoft account for my windows, otherwise I'll run into licensing shenanigans sooner or later (a friend of mine just recently bricked two Windows licenses, better safe than sorry). I was reminded of why I only had a local account until now, Microsoft just stubbornly refuses to create a Microsoft account with my regular mail adress, telling me that I can't use work, school oder university mail addresses for my Microsoft account.

Alternatively, just install Firefox on the new system, then replace the AppData\Local\Mozilla and AppData\Roaming\Mozilla folders with the originals from your old system. I've done this a number of times when I haven't wanted to re-setup settings and extensions on a new system or VM, and then I just clear the personal data...but you don't have to clear the personal data, .

As for Windows, I've seen that happen to other people before too. Well, to myself a few times as well, but um...well, that's usually a two minute fix for my personal devices, .

Edited April 20, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Alternatively, just install Firefox on the new system, then replace the AppData\Local\Mozilla and AppData\Roaming\Mozilla folders with the originals from your old system. I've done this a number of times when I haven't wanted to re-setup settings and extensions on a new system or VM, and then I just clear the personal data...but you don't have to clear the personal data, .

As for Windows, I've seen that happen to other people before too. Well, to myself a few times as well, but um...well, that's usually a two minute fix for my personal devices, .

I already made a full backup of my entire user folder, so yeah, good to know that works too. Kinda hoping that'll work for Thunderbird just as easily, because otherwise that's going to be boring fiddlework. Oh, yeah, funny, I still have a local mailbox because that non-profit can't afford unlimited space. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't analyze my mail traffic to bring me tailored ads. Screw gmail.

 

[Bartimaeus]

I moved away from gmail to protonmail since the incident where gmail unilaterally decided I was no longer lord of my own email address. I imagine it'll work for Thunderbird just as well - don't think I've ever had a problem with transferring settings/account information from a local application like that.

[Malcador]

Some genius decided having teams compete by seeing who can close off the most items was a good idea.  Now some drama has unfurled as some team took another teams items and closed them, thus stealing them. Was funny as I have the same first name as the team lead of the supposed thief, I log on to find an endless stream of snarky Teams messages and accusing emails until someone realized it was the wrong person

This happens too often, really, I come on and find people talking to me about some random crap because they can't read. 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Malcador

[LadyCrimson]

Y'know, I've never been a doomsday prepper sort, not even remotely. Based on any current budget ofc, I try to be somewhat frugal in areas, am "super cheap" in other areas (furniture? clothes? "home decor?" what are those?), and have those areas or occasional few things where I just go "F it, I'm getting it."  It sorta balances out usually. I don't stockpile goods, buy lots if it's a sale, or any of that type of thing.

But all this inflation recently (and the size increase of it vs. time, mostly) and the fact I can no longer eat barrels of rice, pasta, and potatoes etc (the diabetes), has me thinking about food and groceries and wondering if I should actually get a garage freezer and start freezing bread (hubby), giant CostCo meats (cut up into smaller portions at home), etc.  in case this next year sees grocery shelf shortages of such things.  >.>

More likely, I should probably stop watching YT/news videos.

Edited April 21, 2022 by LadyCrimson

[majestic]

Hardware just arrived. Funny, usually you get a "warranty void if opened" sticker on the case. Not so this time, there's a huge fat sticker on the case that reads: REMOVE TRANSPORT PROTECTION BEFORE TURNING ON. Yeah no wonder, the transport protection is a bag of instant foam. If you'd turn the computer on while the CPU and graphics card are wrapped in hardened material blocking all airflow, you'd get some very expensive and quite crispy trash.

Well, time for the not so fun stuff, let's see if it works and set everything up. Now, where did I put my display port cable? Hmmm. Questions, questions.

[Sarex]

4 minutes ago, majestic said:

Hardware just arrived. Funny, usually you get a "warranty void if opened" sticker on the case. Not so this time, there's a huge fat sticker on the case that reads: REMOVE TRANSPORT PROTECTION BEFORE TURNING ON. Yeah no wonder, the transport protection is a bag of instant foam. If you'd turn the computer on while the CPU and graphics card are wrapped in hardened material blocking all airflow, you'd get some very expensive and quite crispy trash.

Well, time for the not so fun stuff, let's see if it works and set everything up. Now, where did I put my display port cable? Hmmm. Questions, questions.

Did you already say what the specs are?

[majestic]

No I did not, will do once everything works. Currently throwing out old hardware. I had two printers and a document scanner under the table that were not used in a while.

I do mean a while. Parallel ports and a parallel switch. A Four way parallel switch. Like this only with four ports…

 

[Guard Dog]

Talking with B today after she finished up some work for me. BTW hiring her to take care over data entry from me was one of the smartest things I've ever done. She hasn't made a single mistake that I've seen. Anyway she was asking about the engineering profession and how many women were in it. That gave me pause for a moment. You know, I've never met one. Not a single female EE. I've heard of a few but never interacted professionally with one. In my graduating class in college there were 23 of us. One was a woman and IIRC she was from China and was going back there. What are the odds?

Other disciplines have plenty of female practitioners. I wonder why not us?

[Amentep]

1 minute ago, Guard Dog said:

Talking with B today after she finished up some work for me. BTW hiring her to take care over data entry from me was one of the smartest things I've ever done. She hasn't made a single mistake that I've seen. Anyway she was asking about the engineering profession and how many women were in it. That gave me pause for a moment. You know, I've never met one. Not a single female EE. I've heard of a few but never interacted professionally with one. In my graduating class in college there were 23 of us. One was a woman and IIRC she was from China and was going back there. What are the odds?

Other disciplines have plenty of female practitioners. I wonder why not us?

Dude cooties.

[Malcador]

4 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

Other disciplines have plenty of female practitioners. I wonder why not us?

Because Engineering requires masculine energy (was told this once by a classmate I usually fantasized about garroting, actually...did that for a lot, strange.).  Your age, maybe.  More and more women are getting into it over time.  And also might be the discipline, I've always found it odd that the women engineers at my University were heavily into Chemical, Mechanical and Aerospace.  The smartest ones (well ok, with highest GPA) were all Elec's though, funnily enough.

[Azdeus]

3 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Talking with B today after she finished up some work for me. BTW hiring her to take care over data entry from me was one of the smartest things I've ever done. She hasn't made a single mistake that I've seen. Anyway she was asking about the engineering profession and how many women were in it. That gave me pause for a moment. You know, I've never met one. Not a single female EE. I've heard of a few but never interacted professionally with one. In my graduating class in college there were 23 of us. One was a woman and IIRC she was from China and was going back there. What are the odds?

Other disciplines have plenty of female practitioners. I wonder why not us?

I don't know how the education works over there, but here you had two different ways to start the road to become one, Natural Sciences programme and Electrical worker programme, we had exactly 0 female students in the electrical worker programme, but there were quite a few girls that went the Natural Science route and later became EE's.

[BruceVC]

8 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Talking with B today after she finished up some work for me. BTW hiring her to take care over data entry from me was one of the smartest things I've ever done. She hasn't made a single mistake that I've seen. Anyway she was asking about the engineering profession and how many women were in it. That gave me pause for a moment. You know, I've never met one. Not a single female EE. I've heard of a few but never interacted professionally with one. In my graduating class in college there were 23 of us. One was a woman and IIRC she was from China and was going back there. What are the odds?

Other disciplines have plenty of female practitioners. I wonder why not us?

Engineering and Finance are subjects that the majority of women will not  naturally gravitate to or choose in University 

In SA its very rare 

[Gorth]

7 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Engineering and Finance are subjects that the majority of women will not  naturally gravitate to or choose in University 

In SA its very rare 

Which is weird really. But those are very male dominated professions. It used to be the same with software developers. When I did Computer Science at university, there were like 5% female participation (like 7 out of a class of 140, I know, my math sucks, but a decent approximation). Which is quite depressing considering that 2 out of the 3 best, sharpest and most competent developers I've ever worked together with were girls.

[Malcador]

12 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Engineering and Finance are subjects that the majority of women will not  naturally gravitate to or choose in University 

In SA its very rare 

I am highly skeptical that they are naturally disinclined to pursue the subjects, sure is a lot of other factors - having to deal with male engineering students is probably an enormous negative

Working the weekend validating after other teams do some work.  Now, you'd think someone would have let them know to let me know that they've done their tasks, but that's something a sensible organization would have done.

Edited April 23, 2022 by Malcador

[Bartimaeus]

IIRC, many of the early pioneers of computers were actually women. Once it became a "serious" field with lots of research and money going into it, it very "suddenly" became male-dominated to a pretty unhealthy degree. While yes, there are inherent biological differences between men and women that may make them more naturally inclined to go certain directions than others, it's hard not to think that the extreme disparity in many fields that are either male or female-dominated is more cultural and institutional than anything else. There seems to have been a little bit of a shift towards women in computer-related fields as of late, but I'd say it's still not nearly enough.

Edited April 23, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

I'd be curious how many girls are at the school I was at nowadays. We had like, don't remember exactly, but maybe 15 (out of 220) in the first year. Only five or six graduated, and one of them wasn't part of the original 15.

Although, on average, that makes the girls a good deal smarter* than the boys. 30% graduation rate vs. the ~10 to 15% overall.

*Obviously, that statement is factually untrue there are a whole lot of different factors to consider. Teacher bias and the fact that applying for a course like that meant a special interest for any of the applying girls while it was fairly normal for boys (it was 26 years ago, after all), for instance. There's also something else to consider - not many of them ended up working in the field they studied. One of them became a psychiatrist. With a special focus on 'kink awareness' and 'non-traditional' relationships (i.e. polyamory).

[Gromnir]

we were physics at berkeley in late 80s, so not the same as engineering or cs.

gut level demographics as am recalling:

+80% male.

o' the women in the program, almost 25% were foreign nationals, though am gonna note many o' those were working hard to find ways to stay in the US following graduation.

in more concrete terms, our graduating class had 'bout 120 awarded a bs in physics. so if our demographic guestimates is correct, 18 woulda' been women who were not foreign nationals. sounds 'bout right.

'course keep in mind we went to a particular inclusive/hippie university... sorta.

18 hours ago, Gorth said:

Which is quite depressing considering that 2 out of the 3 best, sharpest and most competent developers I've ever worked together with were girls.

gotta be careful considering today's environment. refer to young women as "girls" may be seen reflexive as patronizing especial on a board like this where 'cause o' general anonymity most readers will not realize just how old is gorth and that your girls remark is likely a innocuous descriptor o' any woman under 30 (35?) with whom you may have crossed paths over the decades.

HA! Good Fun!

ps as for demographics, the real curiosity were african americans. the issue got special attention 'cause there were literal two african american students enrolled in undergrad physics during the three years we were enrolled. were a fair number o' latinos but had as many native americans as african americans. explanation were that all the african american students with grades to get into Cal were also getting scholarships for princeton and stanford, so...

 

Edited April 24, 2022 by Gromnir