A strong stance would be saying you’re committing troops to the defense of Ukraine. This is not much more than the international political version of thoughts and prayers.

My personal desktop machine is a Linux box I assembled from $500 worth of parts about 14 years ago. I’ve increased RAM and added about 8TB of storage for an Emby instance.

It still manages to get the job done, but it is obviously way, way, WAY overdue for replacement. We’ve been struggling financially for about 25 years.

Now I’m thinking I need to finally pull the trigger and get it done before January.

I do that with our guinea pigs.

They get a cookie* every day at 5:00 pm when I get finished with work. After 5:00, whether l come in the back door or just come downstairs from my office, they start wheaking and chewing on the bars of their pen (which they think encourages us to give them food for some reason).

Sometimes, after I’ve given them their cookie, I’ll go back up to my office. When I come back, they start acting like they didn’t get the cookie.

I just walk up to them and tell them that they already got it and they aren’t getting another. They stare at me for a moment, then just go back about their business.

I don’t think they actually forget they they got it. I think they just hope I might have forgotten. But it is interesting that all they need me to do is tell them they got it already and they give up.

* The cookie is a vitamin C supplement made of pressed hay with molasses as a binder. The molasses is why they lose their minds over them.

Don’t forget all the American lives yet to be sacrificed!

If the electoral college had worked as intended, Trump would not have won in 2016*.

So, yeah, get rid of it. It’s not working anyway.

• You could, of course, consider the attitudes and biases of the founding fathers and come to the conclusion that they would have preferred to see a man win instead of a woman. However, I don’t think that’s fair. Even in their lifetimes they were shifting their views based on their experiences. If you are going to ask them what they would do today, then you have to give them the benefit of having experienced the events of the last 248 years. You have to assume they would have continued to grow.

I can’t be sure, but I think that look means, “you post it, you die.”

If you don’t have a car that can drive in snow, don’t drive in snow.

Last blizzard I was in, I had to pull over to try to help two people get up a small hill.

The first woman was afraid to steer while me and and a tow truck driver pushed her up. She wanted one of us to steer her car, but that just couldn’t happen. She ended up paying the tow truck driver more than $300 to tow her.

While that was going on, a Honda Civic ended up sliding backwards down the hill. I pushed that one about 100ft along the road until it leveled out enough to move on its own.

We have a Civic, but it sits in the driveway for blizzards.

If you get serious snow where you’re moving, and you have to drive, get something with all wheel drive. Just remember that all wheel drive doesn’t mean you can stop. You still need to drive like a Granny in Sunday church traffic.

Yes, just what we need! Finally there’s one source of news without that left wing bias!

/s

We often only get a couple trick-or-treaters every year, and this year was no different, except we left the front door open all night, which means we heard and saw kids walking past our house.

I’m one of the few groups that came to our porch, I heard one girl whisper to her friends, “that’s the creepy house”

So, I guess our house is the haunted house of the neighborhood. I’d be ok with that if we actually had any ghosts.

We’ve been here for over 140 years, and I’ve never seen a single ghost.

So, one more item in the “Pro” column for voting against Trump.

Then maybe we can work on fixing the problems here.

Wear gloves when they hand you that guideline because they might be pulling it out of their ass.

I’ve often thought LLMs could replace all of the C-suites and upper and middle management.

Funny how no companies push that as a possibility.

Not really related to the post, but I feel like sharing.

Big boss where I work wanted all managers to read a book. He had staff scour the Internet looking for copies of this book so that they could give every manager their own copy.

He said we were going to have meetings with the entire management team to review chapters of the book one at a time.

The gist of the book was: take the time to make sure you hire the right people for the job, retain the good ones, and get rid of the people who don’t work out.

I think we covered two chapters in meetings.

After that, an upcoming hiring freeze was announced, and everyone was told to fill all their open positions within two weeks or the position would be cancelled.

I refer to this as companies wanting to hire the person who just quit.

If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it’s happening to me too.

I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.

Many, many years ago, the hospital where I work had a medical transcription company to transcribe dictated radiology results.

At the time, users would access the server via DEC terminals or a terminal application on their computer.

One radiologist set up a script in the terminal application to sign off all his reports with one click. Another radiologist liked it so the first let the second copy it.

Later, the second radiologist opened a ticket with IT because all his reports were being signed by the first radiologist. Yeah, because he didn’t update the script to change the username and password being used to sign the reports.

That’s an amusing anecdote, but the terror comes from the fact that NEITHER RADIOLOGIST WAS READING THEIR REPORTS. BEFORE SIGNING THEM.

The reason they are supposed to sign the report is to confirm that they reviewed the work of the transcriptionist and verified that the report was correct.

No matter what the tool is, doctors will assume the results are correct and sign off on them without checking.

It’s in Philadelphia. You’re lucky you got baby kangaroo.

Yep.

Perhaps, but she seemed more sleepy than stressed.

However, I’m willing to trust the handler about what she could handle. I’m also hopeful that they managed to squeeze a sufficient chunk of change out of my employer to make the lives of her and the rest of the kangaroos better.

Either way, I couldn’t walk past a baby kangaroo without taking a turn.

Edit: my guess is that since the kangaroo came from a farm that does these sort of things regularly, she’s probably pretty used to it. Over it even, judging from the look on her face.