palordrolap

A large percentage of the world finds Donald Trump being president of the USA unacceptable.

So. True story. I did this a few years ago. As an adult. Spun around while looking at the carpet and watched it turn into a circular blur. “This was fun as a kid, why don’t I do this any more?”

Then I stopped and regretted absolutely everything for about 15 minutes afterwards. Was very nearly sick everywhere.

Do not recommend. Strictly for dogs. And kids.

My unending soul-sucking void is also named Bort.

All five dimensions (three space, one time, one probability) exist as a solid unchanging block, an enormous, incomprehensible overarching solution to some equally enormous, incomprehensible mathematical equation.

And if you look at it from one particular direction it almost certainly looks like forty-two.

Openwraps, Hail Marys and cheesebreads.

Why Hail Mary? Burrito means “little donkey”.

A weird and distressing noise woke me this morning. Pretty sure it was a fox. It’s not even near the woods here, but I’ve seen urban ones around if I’ve looked out early in the morning.

The alternative is that it was a dog being suddenly and unexpectedly hurt, and I’d prefer to think it wasn’t that.

Whenever the character came back from the future, his future incarnation had a mouth. And he was drawn with one occasionally before it, uh, stopped being cool to read the strip.

Hate to say it, but I think Adams would have been OK with this. Not with being hated and dead, obviously, but you know.

TBH I haven’t seen (or sought) White Ninja in years, beyond that one “c’mon, do something” poking with a stick meme that escaped into the wild.

Doesn’t work like that for me. If I see someone in pain, I feel their pain. If they cry out, it hurts to my core. That’s empathy.

The hard part for me is not being able to do anything about it. It is often not my place, I don’t know the correct course of action or I don’t have the means. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t play on my conscience.

And it’s harder still is seeing those with the means apparently be able to completely ignore any empathy or conscience they might have. Maybe they don’t have any. Maybe they can’t tell the difference between that and annoyance at the noises the person in pain is making, so they ignore it or try to shut the injured up in other ways.

Well shoot. I was holding out for a change of heart from him because I really resonated with his comics back in the day.

Unfortunately, it seems he only ever had sympathy for those whose misfortunes he shared and never came around on that.

They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.

… but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

FOMO and FOOPMO

(Fear of other people missing out (on what they have to say.))

Uh. You should keep your hands to yourself - regardless of intent - unless the job explicitly requires it or there’s some kind of danger to life or limb.

Someone that “needs cheering up” does not qualify.

If you think there needs to be an exception, ask for consent. “But then it wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise!” Wrong. You have no idea how the person will react, and they might even pretend to like it for the sake of decorum. Just don’t.

And remember, even if you do get consent one time, it does not imply consent going forward.

No. You’re right. I’ll never completely understand until my bank account goes negative. Or I have no bank account. And I have to go a day or more without eating.

But I do have anxiety. And a very limited income. My grocery shop spend for two weeks now is about the same price as I paid for one week, fifteen years ago. I have to budget every little thing.

So while I can’t fully understand, I have more understanding than you think I do, and it’s not just me that needs to be careful about ignorance.

This was a long time ago. I think the replacement card I got was the first I got that had a chip in it.

Or I’m misremembering and it was the chip on the card that was acting strangely. Either way, the card was basically worn out.

There’s a hybrid BBC / Commodore 8-bit computer I’d like to have seen, for sure.

IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet.

But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.

I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.

Not strictly true.

If you have a card long enough (several years between issue and expiry, say) and you use it often enough, the magnetic strip can start to fade and transactions can fail. More and more often. Edit: It might have been a chip problem rather than a magnetic strip problem. I can’t remember now, but it makes no real difference to the story.

And sometimes there might be weeks with no trouble and then you’ll get that one card reader that’s particularly finicky and there’s a cold sweat moment as you realise you don’t have enough cash. “Try it again. It’s done this before.” Please work. Pleeease.

This usually happened to me in the supermarket, so that scene from InnerSpace was playing on loop in my head.

After the third or fourth time, I called the bank and they sent me a new one ASAP.

Surprisingly wholesome for Cyanide & Happiness, tbh.

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.