We interrupt our regular schedule for this short squirrel boop.
*BOOP*
Working on a project which splits into 100 equal parts, so I have this constant tally of how far through I am. It's quite weird. Not usually doing anything quite so quantifiable.
Anyhow. 20%.
Have a Snout Snuffler family snapshot to celebrate.
#sillyScribbles #photography #googlyEyes #silly #cute #seaShell
@stavvers @esvrld@octodon.social *health warning*
isolate light fitting from mains electricity before action and beware of hot fittings causing steam-related issues
@stavvers @esvrld@octodon.social overhead lighting?
have you never worked in an office with suspiciously stained light fittings and just figured someone upset the cleaners into action?
Ambiguity. Just after dawn in the Pennines. A combination of light and space and landscape when everything is fluid and uncertain.
#mastoart #photography #moorland #peninnes #foto
- She said she was running out of shells, aye?
- She did.
- So has she stopped posting them?
- She has not.
Brain: I'm disappointed in you
Me: Why?
Brain: You know why. You had one of your silly little people do the chicken dance.
Me: Yeah, but it's just a bit of fun.
Brain: It's the CHICKEN dance.
Me:
Brain: Well?
Me: I can't draw chickens.
Brain: You don't usually let that stop you.
Me: Oh FFS.
When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that's not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
What's happening at Microsoft, I think:
- Reality is everything is way too complex
- lots of MS things ship in risky configurations
- nobody (including Microsoft) can figure out how to scale securing it
- everything is way too expensive
Microsoft’s two biggest commercial security risks are ransomware groups, and /itself/.
They've gone from saying attackers think in graphs to getting attackers to live on the Microsoft Graph, which has allowed them to monetise their cloud security failures.
Has anyone ever tried telling you that the perfect bath mat doesn't exist?
Probably not, because that would be a really weird thing to say.
But anyway, I've created the perfect bath mat.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/bath-mat/Low-Quality-Bath-Mat-by-LowQualityFacts/154631604.FZTEY?utm_source=rb-native-app&utm_campaign=share-product&utm_medium=android
@davidgerard these are the things I enjoy though, so if you do accidentally find yourself in unsupported Pentium-II hardware on an old IDE storage medium do shout up ;)
I'd be impressed in the data-capacity of the IDE drive vs the estimated data-load of the human brain though
edit to add: in personal terms this is called "not junking your old crap in a timely manner" whereas in business terms it is "technical debt" and is usually a whole lot more critical (also prevalent)
Steve:
frequent overthinker, compulsive fixer, digester-then-explainer, "why?" question relishing father, minor-irritant partner, excessive disassembler, original-form hacker, high-efficiency googler, borderline-competent car-fixer, expert-level car-breaker, faster-by-qwerty communicator, indiscriminate photo-taker, Leatherman owner.