Anthropology is another bad choice.

At least he didn’t name it “Tricorder” - after Star Wars!

I mean, the GOP has long aimed their rhetoric at a fifth-grade reading comprehension level, so in a real sense everything they put out is a children’s book. Trump’s “innovation” was targeting a third-grade reading level.

Unrelated, but I have always hated how they use roman numerals for Super Bowls. I can convert roman numerals to arabic but I never feel like actually doing so, so whenever I read something about a particular game I never really know which one they’re talking about. Even if they used arabic, it still wouldn’t be as useful as just knowing what year it was.

Good thing nobody really uses transistor radios any more.

LOL the phones.

During the 2000 election, the Diebold electronic voting machines used in many states stored results in an Access database. Kids today wouldn’t understand how disastrously insecure that was (Access DBs had an audit table that was manually editable). I have zero doubt that newer machines have similar “flaws” baked in (even if they didn’t use Starlink as was reported briefly), making the results absurdly easy to rig.

Drug stores are so fucking weird. It’s a business model that apparently supports a store on every corner, yet they often go out of business too. And it’s always Rite Aids going out of business, although I couldn’t say what the difference is between those and the other chains.

Using gift cards is OK if you’re boycotting a place, right? I mean, Target already has the money and you’d just be helping them out if you didn’t buy anything with them.

I’m a school bus driver and I always get a lot of tips (Christmas and end of year) in the form of Target gift cards. BTW yes, I agree that tipping school bus drivers is fucking weird. We already get paid and it’s not like we’re going to drive the kids into a tree if we don’t get tipped.

Same, I get major K-Mart in its final days vibes: lots of empty shelves, stuff in dented and torn packaging, hostile and surly employees etc. etc.

Browsing through the Target grocery section has always mystified me. Not great selection and everything costs about 50% more than the local grocery stores. I have never understood why anybody would shop there for groceries.

For me the weirdest moment was when Joe Rogan - before the election - said that Musk “saved us”. Not “is going to save us”, already saved us.

The most efficient use of my time as both an engineer and a people leader

My last company had the most efficient standup meetings possible. We always did them by phone since 4/5 of the team was in India, so I was able to shower at home during them and then catch the bus in to work.

I would actually like to work at a place like that. I’ve worked with a very wide variety of languages and platforms and I don’t much care which one I use now. I’m much more interested in what the project is than in what tools are being used to produce it.

Just kidding - nobody has interesting projects any more.

This reminds me of how much “fun” it was to write Blackberry apps back in the day. Whenever you compiled your app, not only did the entire app need to be signed by the RIM servers, each individual module of library code you incorporated into your app had to be signed, so the more shit you added the longer the process took (and signing a single app sometimes took 30-40 minutes or never happened at all because the signing servers were down). I remember once I needed to use the sin() trigonometry function, which forced me to incorporate one of the cryptography library modules, which in turn doubled the amount of time it would take to compile and sign my app - so I ended up writing my own custom sin() function for no good reason at all.

There was a whole website back then called isthesigningserverdown.com (long gone now) devoted to telling you whether the RIM servers were working or not. The only good part about this was that if I ever felt like blowing off work, I would just tell my bosses that the signing server was down and go home.

I see a few cyclists doing that these days on the bike trails. Some of these absurd $10K+ bicycles even have speakers built into them. I guess it’s slightly less obnoxious since a bicycle will pass a walker or runner very quickly, but it’s still dickhead behavior. Even worse than music, though, is people who blast fucking preachers.