I did Chicago to Dallas and back.
Never again. On the way down I had coach seats only and the trip was about 20 hours. Trying to sleep in those seats was hell.
The moment I got off the train, I walked to the ticketing desk and immediately upgraded to a sleeper for the return. “That will be an extra $400, sir.” Don’t care, just do it.

The sleeper was slightly better in that I got to stretch out, but actually sleeping wasn’t as restful as I thought it would be.

The number of delays while waiting for freight trains was the worst. Before arriving into Dallas, you could see the city. We were 15 minutes away from arriving into the station, but had to sit and wait for about 90 minutes. I could have gotten off and walked and gone back for my bags later.

I did meet some nice people, as you’re forced to sit with others in the dining car when you’re traveling alone since there’s only so many seats. And the food was better than expected. That was probably the only real plus.

Funny how surgeons don’t seem to have the problems this flyer describes.
And I better not open this person’s closet and find a single scarf.

How anyone can still believe this shit just confounds me.

::slow clap::
Well played, friend. Well played.

Physical buttons in cars for radio and environment settings.

There used to be a time when I could have my hand on the gear shifter and just reach out with my fingers to change radio stations or adjust the heat or a/c without needing to look down at all.
Now with modern touchscreens in cars, you can’t do any of that. I have gotten used to playing with the radio via the steering wheel buttons, but anything else requires hunting around, looking for the correct spot to touch the screen.
And yet they say, “don’t take your eyes off the road!”

There has got to be a way to disable that. Not being able to bump start a manual transmission car is a sacrilege.

I’ve said for years, if it weren’t for Halloween, the Christmas season would start in August.

No kidding. Where I’m working now, it takes an HP CE over a week just to bring out a new hot swappable drive after we jump through a number of request hoops.

Strap in friends, because this one is a wild ride.

I had stepped into the role of team lead of our IS dept with zero training on our HP mainframe system (early 90s).
The previous team lead wasn’t very well liked and was basically punted out unceremoniously.
While I was still getting up to speed, we had an upgrade on the schedule to have three new hard drives added to the system.

These were SCSI drives back then and required a bunch of pre-wiring and configuration before they could be used. Our contact engineer came out the day before installation to do all that work in preparation of coming back the next morning to get the drives online and integrated into the system.

Back at that time, drives came installed on little metal sleds that fit into the bays.
The CE came back the next day, shut down the system, did the final installations and powered back up. … Nothing.
Two of the drives would mount but one wouldn’t. Did some checking on wiring and tried again. Still nothing. Pull the drive sleds out and just reseat them in different positions on the bus. Now the one drive that originally didn’t mount did and the other two didn’t. What the hell… Check the configs again, reboot again and, success. Everything finally came up as planned.

We had configured the new drives to be a part of the main system volume, so data began migrating to the new devices right away. Because there was so much trouble getting things working, the CE hung around just to make sure everything stayed up and running.

About an hour later, the system came crashing down hard. The CE says, “Do you smell something burning?” Never a good phrase.
We pull the new drives out and then completely apart. One drive, the first one that wouldn’t mount, had been installed on the sled a bit too low. Low enough for metal to metal contact, which shorted out the SCSI bus, bringing the system to its knees.

Fixed that little problem, plug everything back in and … nothing. The drives all mounted fine, but access to the data was completely fucked,
Whatever… Just scratch the drives and reload from backup, you say.

That would work…if there were backups. Come to find out that the previous lead hadn’t been making backups in about six months and no one knew. I was still so green at the time that I wasn’t even aware how backups on this machine worked, let alone make any.

So we have no working system, no good data and no backups. Time to hop a train to Mexico.

We take the three new drives out of the system and reboot, crossing all fingers that we might get lucky. The OS actually booted, but that was it. The data was hopelessly gone.

The CE then started working the phone, calling every next-level support contact he had. After a few hours of pulling drives, changing settings, whimpering, plugging in drives, asking various deities for favors, we couldn’t do any more.

The final possibility was to plug everything back in and let the support team dial in via the emergency 2400 baud support modem.
For the next 18 hours or so, HP support engineers used debug tools to access the data on the new drives and basically recreate it on the original drives.
Once they finished, they asked to make a set of backup tapes. This backup took about 12 hours to run. (Three times longer than normal as I found out later.)
Then we had to scratch the drives and do a reload. This was almost the scariest part because up until that time, there was still blind hope. Wiping the drives meant that we were about to lose everything.
We scratched the drives, reloaded from the backup and then rebooted.

Success! Absolute fucking success. The engineers had restored the data perfectly. We could even find the record that happened to be in mid-write when the system went down. Tears were shed and backs were slapped. We then declared the entire HP support team to be literal gods.

40+ hours were spent in total fixing this problem and much beer was consumed afterwards.

I spent another five years in that position and we never had another serious incident. And you can be damn sure we had a rock solid backup rotation.

(Well, there actually was another problem involving a nightly backup and an inconveniently placed, and accidentally pressed, E-stop button, but that story isn’t nearly as exciting.)

I wore a standard wristwatch all the time until about 25 years ago. I began noticing that I was conscious of feeling something on my wrist and I couldn’t stand it.
I then carried a nice pocket-watch around for a while until I got my first cell phone.

What distro are you running as your daily driver?

All, the, fucking, time.

It isn’t “bad”, as it does have a purpose. It’s just fucking annoying to work with.

https://docs.platform.sh/learn/overview/yaml/what-is-yaml.html

This looks like an IRL Far Side comic.

Having your own router/access point can’t be stressed enough.

And, you don’t even need their modem. Sure it’s an additional outlay of cash, but buying your own modem gets you a nice upgrade and no worries about someone connecting to the Xfinity access point that’s bundled in their equipment.

No, and I don’t miss it at all.
I’ve used BT headphones even when my last two devices had jacks and wouldn’t want to go back.
Prior to that, I can’t count the number of times I would snag the wires on something or get them tangled in some way.

Now I use my BT bone conduction headphones everywhere.

It could be in large red flashing neon and people will still ignore instructions like this.
Even if the trash dumpster is a mere 50 feet away.

People just don’t care. Once it’s out of their hands, no matter where it ends up, it’s someone else’s problem.

One complex where I used to live, our trash dumpster was a full on compactor, very nicely concealed behind a small hill. Signs leading up would say, “No cardboard!” Signs plastered all over the machine, “No cardboard!” Yet, at least once, if not twice a week, the thing would be clogged because people would toss in boxes by the truckload. Not even broken down.
Meanwhile, just around the corner, a specific dumpster meant for cardboard only that would take all of 10 more seconds to get to.

nun?

Ugh, I once made the mistake of not checking what I was ordering at a bar.
Sour pumpkin beer. I know that many people like sours, and I like some pumpkins, but together, I’m out.

I’ll use Google maps to check for traffic on my route before leaving, but that’s all.

If I’m going somewhere I’ve been more than two or three times, I don’t use GPS.

Lock Up (1989).
Yes it’s a generic prison movie with quite a few standard tropes, but I’ve always liked it.