Deep 6 FaWtL


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All together now.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH


Limeylongears wrote:

All together now.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

kinda how i feel after having gone to the theater (for the first time since Endgame) to watch Dune: Part Two.

am disappoint.

it's a decent movie, mind you, and presents solid perspectives on the subject matter, but . . . .

it just missed me.

i'm totally with you on what you said, Limey -- i liked the first one better.


My computer just decided that the D drive no longer exists.

My fury is considerable.


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It just changed it's mind.

Perhaps now is a good time to create a system restore point.


It might be a good time to back up whatever is on D drive.


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Fantasy Monster: Gallows-wight

Hang them high!


My older brother means well, but his tactlessness is the stuff of legends. My mother's going in for (relatively) routine heart valve replacement surgery on Tuesday. Except she's 93, so nothing is particularly routine when it comes to anaesthesia.

So yes, brother texted me with, "Mom's going in for heart surgery on Tuesday. We should probably do a Zoom so you can say goodbye just in case she doesn't make it."

All very true, but a wee bit blunt...


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Oh, little Lemon Rat!!!

Spring is rearing its beautiful head in the Bay Area, hence the cats, especially the Calico, are spending more time in the back yard.

Lemon Rat was not notified of this change of plans.

He came within 12" of lead of being yet another mess for me to clean up. And that lead's locking mechanism is sketchy. He is alive through sheer luck and the fact that Cranky Calico has definitely lost a couple of steps since her heydey.

But at 18 she's still a death machine. If she hadn't been harnessed, Lemon Rat would be no more.


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I am not sure whom should I be cheering for...


Drejk wrote:
I am not sure whom should I be cheering for...

My life with cats has demonstrated to me why in olden days people accused cat owners of being witches. Mice? Rats? Any other vermin under 10 pounds? They have a survival rate of -0- on your property. So you don't worry about them.

Which makes you an outlier in any place where every other house has an infestation of some sort. Is it the cat? Or evil, evil magic?

EDIT: I think I mentioned the infamous winter of '94, when the fields east of Davis flooded and all the field mice, voles, gophers, and everything else on 4 paws came flooding in to the houses. Our little tabby gained a lot of weight. And throughout the winter we saw *one* live mouse in the house... just as she was catching it. Everyone else apparently had serious issues. Even our neighbors, who had a non-hunting, terrified-of-mice cat.


Horizon Forbidden West came to the PC. And Ghost Of Tsushima will be released for PC in May...

*starts saving money on PayPal*

At the current rate, maybe next year...

Yeah, right, as if nothing will pop up on sales earlier, burning through whatever I stash away.


I hope the Ghost of Tsushima is truly subtitled, not only partially.


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All I know is Ghost Of Tsushima is definitely my 2nd favorite game other than Elden Ring.

And in some ways (story, fluidity of combat) it even surpasses Elden Ring.


I swear, people like my brother are the ones who give Boomers a bad name. Technically he's Gen X, but he's right on the cusp.

Yesterday afternoon:
Older Brother: Let's do a Zoom call at 6:30 pm.
NobodysHome and Younger Brother: OK.

Yesterday at 6:30 pm:
NobodysHome and Younger Brother: We don't have any Zoom invites yet.
Older Brother: Oh, we're going to do FaceTime instead.
NH: Well, that excludes Impus Major because he doesn't have an iDevice at all, and I'm going to have to try to connect on my Mac.
(10 minutes of fumbling later)
Older Brother: I can't figure out how to invite anybody. I'm going to have my son take care of it.
(15 minutes of fumbling later)
Older Brother: We managed to get Younger Brother on FaceTime, but the connection quality is terrible at only 2-3 frames per second. And we have no idea how to invite you on your Mac. We're switching to Zoom.
(5 minutes of fumbling later)
NobodysHome: I still don't see an invite.
Younger Brother: He sent it to you at (email address I haven't used in 20 years)
NobodysHome: PLEASE fix this.

So Younger Brother finally got me the invite and we had a call, 30 minutes late because Older Brother decided to switch technologies at the moment of the call and then had no fricking clue what he was doing.


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Facewhat?


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Wow... Global Megacorporation's IT department is really going above and beyond in incompetence.

I filed a service request Friday morning about the security fiasco. Today I signed in and saw these messages:
Saturday, 00:33 (Yes. After midnight on Friday night). Hello, I am xxx. I'll be helping you resolve your issue.
Saturday, 00:34: If you have not responded within 2 hours we will close this ticket as customer did not respond.
Saturday, 02:33: This ticket has been closed.

So yeah, they wait until the middle of the night on weekends, then offer to help you, and if you don't happen to be at work at that time, they close the ticket.

Easy gig.


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It's definitely your fault for not working on night between Friday and Saturday!

Spoiler:
Yes, I was working on Friday/Saturday night, finishing a text and sending it further on 2:52 AM


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Drejk wrote:
Facewhat?

It's Apple's exclusive video conferencing software so you don't have to use Zoom. As with all things Apple, it's crappier than Zoom, it doesn't work with people who aren't on Apple machines, and pretty much the moment anyone non-technical tries to do anything unusual everything collapses like the smurfstorm last night.

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software, I dare you to try to use Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and whatever-it-is for slideware. With decades of experience, my ratings are Apple's stuff << LibreOffice << Google's Stuff <= Microsoft's stuff.


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NobodysHome wrote:

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software,

You lost me complete there...


I am still bitter that McIntoshes survived when far superior Amiga went down because of Commodore's sheer stupidity and incompetence...


NobodysHome wrote:
Drejk wrote:
Facewhat?

It's Apple's exclusive video conferencing software so you don't have to use Zoom. As with all things Apple, it's crappier than Zoom, it doesn't work with people who aren't on Apple machines, and pretty much the moment anyone non-technical tries to do anything unusual everything collapses like the <redacted>storm last night.

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software, I dare you to try to use Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and whatever-it-is for slideware. With decades of experience, my ratings are Apple's stuff << LibreOffice << Google's Stuff <= Microsoft's stuff.

Libre Office is worse than Google drive functions now? I haven't used it in a while.

It used to be better than Google and almost, but never quite as good as Microsoft.


Drejk wrote:
NobodysHome wrote:
Drejk wrote:
Facewhat?

It's Apple's exclusive video conferencing software so you don't have to use Zoom. As with all things Apple, it's crappier than Zoom, it doesn't work with people who aren't on Apple machines, and pretty much the moment anyone non-technical tries to do anything unusual everything collapses like the <redacted>storm last night.

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software, I dare you to try to use Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and whatever-it-is for slideware. With decades of experience, my ratings are Apple's stuff << LibreOffice << Google's Stuff <= Microsoft's stuff.

Libre Office is worse than Google drive functions now? I haven't used it in a while.

It used to be better than Google and almost, but never quite as good as Microsoft.

OpenOffice was a great competitor for Microsoft. When all that legal nonsense happened and they switched to LibreOffice they plummeted in quality and they've never recovered.


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LOL. It's GothBard's first day of work and she's setting up her various mandatory travel, and like any reasonable company she puts it all on the company card and never spends a dime out-of-pocket.

And her reaction? "G******... I'd forgotten what it was like to work for a legit company"

EDIT: It'll be interesting to see how she reacts to the travel. I'm a xenophilic introvert so travel was heaven for me -- seeing new places and things, then locking myself in my hotel room by 7:00 pm and not speaking to another human being for the next 12 hours. She's a xenophilic extrovert -- I don't know that the hotel stay will be nearly as pleasant for her. Though she can catch up on her baths and reading...


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We tried sparring with blunt Bat'leths today, and nobody got injured, which, given they weigh around 4.5kg, might suggest that we know what we're doing. Don't be fooled.


NobodysHome wrote:

Wow... Global Megacorporation's IT department is really going above and beyond in incompetence.

I filed a service request Friday morning about the security fiasco. Today I signed in and saw these messages:
Saturday, 00:33 (Yes. After midnight on Friday night). Hello, I am xxx. I'll be helping you resolve your issue.
Saturday, 00:34: If you have not responded within 2 hours we will close this ticket as customer did not respond.
Saturday, 02:33: This ticket has been closed.

So yeah, they wait until the middle of the night on weekends, then offer to help you, and if you don't happen to be at work at that time, they close the ticket.

Easy gig.

Megacorporate IT is such a pain in the ass. Easy for the IT guys, since in many cases they just stick to policy with no thought, and they're generally so siloed that they have no actual responsibilities.

The megacorporation I worked for at one point had a team of 8 people that did nothing but handle internal DNS problems. And they didn't actually look at DNS to handle them. Someone wrote a script for them, and if they veered outside of the script they got in trouble.

I, for one, would be fired within 2 days if I had to go back to that.


NobodysHome wrote:
Drejk wrote:
Facewhat?

It's Apple's exclusive video conferencing software so you don't have to use Zoom. As with all things Apple, it's crappier than Zoom, it doesn't work with people who aren't on Apple machines, and pretty much the moment anyone non-technical tries to do anything unusual everything collapses like the <redacted> last night.

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software, I dare you to try to use Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and whatever-it-is for slideware. With decades of experience, my ratings are Apple's stuff << LibreOffice << Google's Stuff <= Microsoft's stuff.

Apparently, US is suing Apple over monopolistic practices.


Drejk wrote:
NobodysHome wrote:
Drejk wrote:
Facewhat?

It's Apple's exclusive video conferencing software so you don't have to use Zoom. As with all things Apple, it's crappier than Zoom, it doesn't work with people who aren't on Apple machines, and pretty much the moment anyone non-technical tries to do anything unusual everything collapses like the <redacted> last night.

EDIT: And for those who want to defend Apple's software, I dare you to try to use Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and whatever-it-is for slideware. With decades of experience, my ratings are Apple's stuff << LibreOffice << Google's Stuff <= Microsoft's stuff.

Apparently, US is suing Apple over monopolistic practices.

I think I remember hearing that the E.U. had already done so as well.

I’m not going to defend Apple, just going to say that I have all my music CDs loaded into my iPhone, and that’s pretty great.
I don’t use their rent-a-song service though.


this term, "siloed" . . . .

i have heard it a few times in recent days, but don't quite have the zeitgeist definition nailed down.

is it something similar to "specific services-function entrenchment"?


Syrus Terrigan wrote:

this term, "siloed" . . . .

i have heard it a few times in recent days, but don't quite have the zeitgeist definition nailed down.

is it something similar to "specific services-function entrenchment"?

In corporatespeak, it's departments that can't be bothered with communication nor cooperation: They have ONE job, they do THAT job, and it's irrelevant to them how that job impacts others.

A great example comes from Global Megacorporation's early attempts at "full suite" software (every CEO's pipe dream of having all their products in a single application so customers never have to buy anything else). It sounded like a great idea, with the best of intentions (yes, I've been watching those on YouTube and loving them), but each engineering team was allowed to do its own thing. They were all siloed.

So, as any group of engineers will do without guidance, every team rebuilt exactly their old program using the new architecture. So every area of the application looked different, behaved different, and you literally couldn't tell that they were integrated at all. On one page you'd hit the grey Save button in the upper right. On another page you'd hit the blue OK button in the lower right. A third page had implicit saves so there was no button at all. It was a catastrophe.

But it's still fairly standard in large corporations: Every department wants to do its own thing, and you need extremely strong leadership with a fairly big hammer to force them to change.

Seriously. Our new SVP was brought in specifically to fix this problem, so every single page type has a template and scripted behavior. Not a single page is supposed to make it into the application unless it adheres to the templates. We even have dedicated gatekeepers.

Yet just last week I had to submit a formal writeup that three different engineering teams were still refusing to adhere to the guidelines and their "gatekeepers" weren't doing their jobs.

It's amazingly hard to get a company out of that mindset. "If I just do my job exactly the same way I've been doing it for 20 years, they can't fire me."

EDIT: The best analogy is in gaming. Imagine if game developers didn't talk, so when you transitioned from one region to another, suddenly the movement buttons changed so you had to learn which keys made you move for each region. It's all functional. It all works perfectly. But the end user experience is nothing short of nightmarish.


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in other words, something very close to "yes".

gotcha.

i definitely appreciate the deeper contextual illumination. thanks, NH.


In other news, it only took 4 weeks, but there are finally cleaners and repair guys in the neighbors' house. And I'm pretty ecstatic about the whole thing -- it turns out that corporate dude was checking out the apartments across the street, and these guys are fairly obviously local non-corporate hires, so it may well be that my neighbors are planning on keeping and re-renting the house after all.

From everything I know, they were darned good landlords. So hopefully they continue to be so.


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FWIW my mother's "routine" heart surgery was routine, and she's recovering nicely...
...except they couldn't reach any family members in Seattle so they offered to have me come visit her at 4:00 pm. I don't think I'll make it.


Syrus Terrigan wrote:

in other words, something very close to "yes".

gotcha.

i definitely appreciate the deeper contextual illumination. thanks, NH.

And here I was thinking it had something to do with fermenting alfalfa.


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As I may have mentioned before, Iowa is the land of custom license plates. Today's sighting was a guy who passed us on the interstate with Iowa plates that read "GDAYCNT." I'm guessing he's a transplant from somewhere a little further south.


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Ugh. I hoped that the mission I have started on Watch Dogs 2 will be the last one, but apparently there are four more...

NobodysHome, if you hear about an young Afro-American male rampaging across the Bay area, don't worry. I'll try to finish before the end of the month.


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NobodysHome wrote:

FWIW my mother's "routine" heart surgery was routine, and she's recovering nicely...

...except they couldn't reach any family members in Seattle so they offered to have me come visit her at 4:00 pm. I don't think I'll make it.

Thank god she's alright.


Crazy week at work. And it's only Wednesday. Heres hoping I'm able to get a lot done today.


Freehold DM wrote:
Crazy week at work. And it's only Wednesday. Heres hoping I'm able to get a lot done today.

I am sort of overwhelmed with things myself. I should have cleared a bit of queue of things to be done yesterday—taking the advantage of not getting new text to translate—instead of laying on my back. Today I got even more of them.


Holy f+&&ing s#@+ is it intense leveling flagstone when it's 35 degrees out and you're on a lake shore. And you have 25-35 mph sustained wind.


So, after 2 years of Elden Ring what video game has me so absorbed in it 2 hours fly by.

Dragon's Dogma 2? Nope.

The Witcher 3? No.

Baldur's Gate 3? Again, no.

Forza Horizon 5!

G%#**~n, is it fun!


captain yesterday wrote:
Forza Horizon 5!

Racing game?

Nope.


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LOLOL. Speaking of being OP in-game. In anticipation of Dawntrail, Hi and I are clearing out all the lower-level raids in FFXIV. Turns out that one of them has one of those, "You need at least 3 players to pass this phase," irritations.

So I happen to know that one of the kid's friends just got into FFXIV and is really into it. I think last time we spoke he was level 54. So I sent a message via the kids, "Hey! We'll carry you through 10 preliminary level 60 raids and you can have all the loot from all of them if you can help us with this button-mashing round."

Hopefully he'll take us up on it. It'd be a night or two of solid entertainment.

FWIW, FFXIV lets you perform raids unsynced so a level 90 player can easily solo a level 50 24-person raid, so it's been mostly easy sailing for the two of us. The problem arises when said raid has some mechanic or other that says, "Now we paralyze 8 random people and if the other 16 don't free them everybody dies," because with only 2, it's no longer random who gets paralyzed...

EDIT: OMG. Just watched that trailer for the first time. Looks like they gave up even pretending they're not a "cozy" game and the next adventure is, "You and the crew go to Disneyland!"


captain yesterday wrote:

So, after 2 years of Elden Ring what video game has me so absorbed in it 2 hours fly by.

Dragon's Dogma 2? Nope.

The Witcher 3? No.

Baldur's Gate 3? Again, no.

Forza Horizon 5!

G!*%*~n, is it fun!

wow, insulting the Witcher 3?


No, I haven't played it yet.

I'm sure it's worthy of all it's praise and awards.

But there are races to be won and barns to be pillaged for their historically rare cars and trucks (and things that go).


NobodysHome wrote:
FWIW, FFXIV lets you perform raids unsynced so a level 90 player can easily solo a level 50 24-person raid, so it's been mostly easy sailing for the two of us. The problem arises when said raid has some mechanic or other that says, "Now we paralyze 8 random people and if the other 16 don't free them everybody dies," because with only 2, it's no longer random who gets paralyzed...

It is similar in Lord Of The Rings Online, though many instances that have a scaling option that allows you to set the instance level in a range between the instance minimum level and the current level cap (or the party leader level, you can scale above your level), and a few that lack scaling option.

You can easily breeze through a twelve man raid or six man instance when you are a few dozen levels above its level, and three man instance when you are a few levels above its level (and I managed to solo some of three man instances on multiple classes on level cap). There are a few instances that have mechanics that require presence of multiple players to pass through—for example Drake Wing of Helegorod requires three players to pull levers to open the doors, Lair Of Draigoch requires use of fellowship maneuvers (an interesting but long obsolete mechanics from before expansions), and fight against Mistress Of Pestilence in Dar Narbugud in the depths of Moria has adds spawning that completely paralyze party members until killed (allegedly, particularly skilled players can solo kill them before getting paralyzed but I never managed that trick).

I have offered to carry random low level players through the dungeons on level when I was running those dungeons myself to complete deeds inside (for in-game store points).

I should probably get back to LOTRO and farm some store points in preparation for expansion (and the newest class) hitting the in-game store somewhere around May.


I need to get back to Witcher 3 and finish it too.


I mostly just needed a bridge game until they patch up some of the performance issues in Dragon's Dogma 2.

Also, there's a guy I knew in high school that plays Forza, so it's extremely cathartic crushing him in every race together and then pass him everywhere in the open world.

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