Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.

grey vinyl flooring

I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.

Might be mango lassi - possibly the greatest drink on earth.

I drive a 2001 which is in that dead zone after cassettes but before aux plugs. I still had to be burning CDs a few years ago but eventually stumbled across an adapter that tricks the car stereo into thinking my phone is a 6-CD changer in the trunk.

My best friend in high school in the '80s had something on his home stereo I’ve never seen before or since: an 8-track tape recorder. We would make 8-track mix tapes and take them to parties … which we promptly got kicked out of because they were tapes of stuff like Yes, King Crimson, Laurie Anderson, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and didn’t nobody want to listen to that kind of shit back then.

Would you think those guys would know to do something about a dude on a roof with a rifle?

Should’ve put “John” above the “Holmes” logo and made fun of your boss’ small-dick energy when he complained.

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people mistakenly associate Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering with Gabriel despite being voiced by Phil Collins

Just saw an interview with Peter Gabriel where he said people come up to him almost daily and tell him how they much they loved Trick of the Tail. He just had this defeated look on his face when he said he had to keep telling them that was Phil and not him.

However, you may be overestimating the impact of Hackett’s departure on their shift to pop. Genesis the band was deeply in debt by that point and they really had to make the shift to more accessible pop in order to become profitable. Additionally, this was a time when all of the prog rockers (except Robert Fripp) were selling out: Asia (supergroup formed from Yes, King Crimson and ELP), ELP themselves (with their hilariously awful Love Beach album) and later Yes with 90125.

My house came with a real bollard, a 4" diameter steel pipe embedded in concrete, to protect its corner parking lot. It’s amazing how scraped up this thing is. I suppose I should put some kind of reflectors on it, but it’s more amusing to imagine dumbasses running into it at the same frequency they drive up on my lawn.

I have a giant oak tree next to my house, perfectly positioned so that my house is in direct sunlight in the morning but completely shaded by the tree from noon onwards, so even when it’s 100°F outside my house doesn’t get above the low 80s. I love that tree - except for right now when I have to rake the fucking yard.

Elon Musk’s vertical is horizontal.

I heard the older folks say that I would wake up and be old one day and it would feel like barely any time has passed.

I’m almost 60 and I feel more like I should be 100 or so. I’ve had many different careers and technology has changed so much that I feel I’ve lived through multiple lifetimes. I think people who do basically the same thing every day (and night) over and over again, with the same people, tend to perceive life as flying by because there’s no real difference between one day and the next.

It’s a slur for Asians, more specifically Vietnamese. I can actually trigger my coworker to say it, by merely mentioning that I like Chinese food.

Even before AI, I definitely encountered people writing things on their CV with no actual idea about them.

I’ve actually done more than one phone interview where I would ask a question and then hear either keyboard tapping or multiple people whispering (or both) in the background during the long pause before the interviewee answered. It was hard to not just laugh and hang up on them.

I will never implement a sort IRL

My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.

I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.

At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.

I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.

I watched a documentary at a film festival a few years ago about a Vietnam vet, who was there for the premiere and took questions from the audience afterwards. The vet mentioned how much he hated hearing “thank you for your service” all the time. Another Vietnam vet stood up and asked him a question, and the first vet started off his answer with “thank you for your service”.