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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • A few years back I was training to ride the Seattle to Portland in the 1-day format. Had a training regimen I put together and was steadily progressing and building endurance and strength.

    One day I go on a training ride on a very cold and rainy December day in Seattle. Decide to take the trail that rides through the train yard then pedal up to the docks.

    As I’m riding along the trail there’s this segment that crosses some train tracks at an angle. The temperature is also colder here next to the shore than by my home and the rain here is mixed with snow.

    Having ridden this segment dozens if not a couple hundred times in rain or shine, I didn’t think too much of it. However the added mix of snow and colder temps caused those rails to become the slickest surface known to man.

    I come up to the gentle curve at speed, my front tire hits the rail of the track and my bike goes sideways while I continue moving forward. I land in puddle on my right side and then the water acts like a slip-N-slide on the blacktop and I proceed to slide along the trail at speed and slam head first, which deflected to the side, then followed up to my right shoulder, into a bollard.

    I was wearing a helmet when this happened and I still laid dazed in that cold ass puddle for a good 2-3 minutes before standing up, pulling myself together, and called my wife to pick me up and take me to the ER to get the confirmation that I had a concussion and to rule out anything worse. My shoulder was also bruised and sore for a good week.

    Even with the helmet, I had memory issues for 6-10 months.

    If I weren’t wearing a helmet I’m not sure I’d be here telling this story. If I were to have survived I would have had some serious trauma and recovery if not permanent damage.


  • I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive & Teams from my work computer thanks to a Windows update reinstalling them. My IT director is getting frustrated by it too because he has to keep updating GP and other tools to prevent them from showing up and users inadvertently putting shit into the MS Cloud accidentally because OneDrive likes to insert itself the default documents folder.

    I also prefer my start bar to be on the left hand side of my left-most monitor in vertical orientation (I run a tri-montior setup in a tie fighter configuration).

    As already stated, the new right-click menu is also ass, and I keep having to fix it to get the actual fucking options I want/need without having to click a button to “show more options” from a menu that loads noticeably slower, or shift-right-click to get the intended menu.

    There’s a ton of other little annoyances, like removing or relocating configuration flows with inferior tools that don’t support everything that used to be configurable. AI search in my start bar (so glad for PowerToys Run).

    Windows 11 has done a great job at removing user control over their OS by forcing changes (often inferior to the old version/way) and forcing optional software installs (just wait til Recall is sitting on everybody’s machine).

    Things that are nice: A better networking stack, blue tooth management, and a powerful built-in windows layout manager (Snap Layouts)








  • Co-pilot is amazing and terrible at the same time.

    When it’s suggesting the exact line of code I expect to write, amazing. When it can build the permissions I need for a service account for a TF module I’ve written, amazing

    However, it will suggest poorly formed, un-optimized code all too often.

    That said, knowing when to use/not use/modify the suggested code has greatly improved my productivity and consistency.




  • Firefox had some major memory leaks when Chrome first launched (2008). It became noticeable with the more tabs you had and the longer the browser was opened. This was also during the days for consumer systems with 16GB max RAM & 32GB on higher end enthusiast systems.

    We also have to remeber that this was 10 years before Google removed their “Don’t be Evil” motto, and there was still a great deal of trust that had been earned by tech professionals.

    So when Chrome came in, had a minimalist UI (for the time) and was light weight and memory light without any obvious memory leaks, it was a performance boost for a toooon of users.

    Chrome has since become a memory hog and is now being developed and pushed by a company that has become heavily enshittified & evil. Firefox has become lightweight, memory efficient, and is an FOSS product that’s not evil and enshittified making it the right choice in 2024, but is going to be an uphill battle that hopefully more tech professionals move to as Manifest V3 becomes a reality.


  • I switched off of Firefox because of those memory leaks. I remeber when it hit the tech news circles when the community contributer that was frustrated with them went in and fixed two of the biggest culprits.

    Then I just didn’t bother til somewhat recently. For the most part, it’s great and does what ilI want/need. Biggest complaint is that some UX overhauls are needed for Mobile FX, especially around tab management.





  • As somebody that’s been working on computer hardware since the early-to-mid 90s, installing the drivers before connecting the printer was the norm. It was actually the norm for most peripherals. Just be glad you didn’t have to do manual irq assignment. Hell, that is probabaly the issue, is that the driver installer borked the irq assignment when the device already had a handshake agreement with the hardware.

    I digress though, this shouldn’t have been the pattern for a modern printer in 2007, when PnP had been standard for several years at that point.