You never forget your first.

Next she’ll start adding magnets into the mix.

Hahah, no, but reordering 200+ cards was just a pain in the ass.

My first coding class was Cobol and we used punch-cards.

(Side story, nothing strikes a feeling of dread more than the sound of cards being shuffled behind you.)

I am so sick of this shit.
I hope that the suspect “stumbled and fell on his face” a lot while in custody.

And to all news media… Please do not print, post or broadcast the suspect’s name. Do not give them the hard-on they are looking for by having their name in the news.

But when that noise is used in the right hands …

https://youtu.be/AtRVTYMA87k?si=kC1U5Q_Y3hOeC1t5

I used to use a plain text system, “encoded” in such a way that only I knew what the actual password was, and I kept it on Google Keep.
But that for harder and harder to manage, coupled with, if I were to get run over by a bus, no one else would be able to access my accounts.

Now I’ve been using Dashlane for a few years. Not just for passwords, but secure notes as well.

Works seamlessly on all of my devices and zero complaints.

It flies under the radar, but I really liked him as the crooked warden in Lock Up.

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.

But if it’s locked up, it takes too much work when you want to wave it around feeling badass.

I made the mistake of juicing raw potatoes once, figuring the other vegetable juices like beets and carrots would mask any of the potato flavor.

Won’t ever do that again.

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.

Not “Eclipse”, the last track from Dark Side. Just over two minutes, which will a little longer than the amount of time my area will have totality.

If only we had vaccines for this.
Oh, wait.

Tell me someone is ‘fuck you rich’ without telling me they’re ‘fuck you rich’.

But what is animal consciousness in terms of being self-aware? Pigs are damn smart, but I’m not sure they’re on the list of animals that exhibit self-awareness.

Also, the article merely states that blood flow to the brain was interrupted, not that the head was removed, which, I’m guessing, is why brain activity was largely unchanged.
If the head was still attached to the spine, then I would assume that all the nerves were still functioning normally. As normal as they would in an anesthetized pig that is, with no interference from outside stimulus. In this study, the animal was quietly sleeping. I can’t imagine any reputable doctor of science today doing such a thing to a conscious animal or human.

And, in one of the linked articles, it talks about how this research can further work on better life saving techniques for humans by developing much better blood and oxygen machines used during complicated surgeries.
So long as the animal is treated respectfully, I have no issue in using animals for research that help human medicine.

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

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.)