Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Old guy checking in. I was a computer science major, graduating in 1985. My goal at the time was to go into computer animation (note that Toy story, the first full length computer animated movie, wasn’t released until ten years later). But there was a big computer animated project that was canceled or tabled just before my last semester, so the market was flooded with out of work animators and I decided I’d better do something different. I was getting married, and I needed a job.

    I had good grades, but I didn’t think there was much that made my resume stand out from my classmates, each of whom was making 100+ copies of theirs and applying to every software job they could find. So instead, I asked everyone I knew if they knew anyone who worked at a place that hired software people, and asked if they could get me a name of a hiring manager. I got seven or eight of those, and I sent each of them a letter with my resume, mentioning who pointed me their direction. Out of that I got three interviews and two job offers. My first job ended up being writing control software for the space shuttle main engines, and I stayed at the company almost 40 years. I just retired in January.





  • That’s why the right aligned with evangelicals all those years ago. Prior to that, Republicans were actually for abortion rights as a personal freedoms thing. But then they started with the family values stuff, casting Democrats as literally against God. “You need to vote for us because we’ll protect marriage, keep you safe from the sin of homosexuality, and most importantly will protect the babies from being murdered.” Once in office, they could pass all of the tax cuts for the wealthy and reduce corporate oversight, which was the actual goal.




  • I had mixed emotions when I read Time Ships last year. Here’s what I wrote in my notes:

    Authorized sequel to “The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells. It’s strange, in a way, because I of course read Wells’ work in the modern era, though it was written in 1914. Part of the charm was reading his notions of time and his commentary on class divides from this time a hundred years later, when the author has no knowledge of what happened in the intervening century. Baxter’s sequel is written from this modern era, but from the perspective of the same protagonist. Many of the advances in the sciences are captured, but it feels oddly artificial to have them observed by our early 1900s hero. Still, it’s a very ambitious book, with a very broad scope, and much more commentary on the nature of man. Well worth reading.

    Wells’ original is for sure worth reading. The prose is similar, of course.