“Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a leopress above the Serengeti.” I spent most of my adult life thinking a leopress was a female leopard because of that fucking song.

I mean, you only need an n of 1 to prove that you shouldn’t drive a school bus behind a 747.

follows design and accessibility standards

Ah, this reminded me of another reason this dude hated me. One of my responsibilities with this gig was ensuring that the client’s mobile apps passed accessibility testing. Making an app accessible is tedious work and every time we released an update the accessibility would be broken again. I tried to get this dude to bake the accessibility requirements into the design documents themselves on the off chance that the other developers would actually read the documents (lol as if) and make accessibility work from the get-go. He wasn’t having it and couldn’t be convinced that it mattered if blind people could use the apps or not. I had to sic the client (who faced enormous fines for failed accessibility tests) on him to get him to do it.

I’ve only worked once with a UX person and all they did was order other people to produce design documents before any software was written. Like, he didn’t design anything himself and didn’t even critique others’ designs. He made over $300K and eventually left for a job on the west coast making twice as much. He stopped talking to me entirely after the client had me write a prototype TV guide-type app for Blackberry. I created it entirely myself and the client loved it and wanted it released to the public exactly as it was. UX guy insisted (client didn’t care at all) that all software needed a design document before any coding could take place, so he was forced to order somebody else to produce a design document for my app which already existed. He wouldn’t even look at me when we passed in the hall after this.

I assume that this is not actually what a UX person is supposed to be doing, but I have no idea what their real job is.

the grand alliance scheme demanded total conflict

The core reason that France and Russia entered into the alliance that so worried German military planners was that the Kaiser was a belligerent asshole. If he had simply not been such an asshole – or better yet if Bismarck had not put supreme military power in the hands of the German emperor in the first place – then the grand alliance scheme that was supposably responsible for the war would not have been there.

Even with that alliance in place, Germany’s perceived need to quickly stomp the shit out of France before turning on a slow-to-mobilize Russia in order to have any chance of winning – which was their main reason for wanting the war to start when it did and was why they backed Austria’s farcical ultimatum to Serbia – was proven to be ridiculously wrong by the events of the actual war. In actual fact, Germany was able keep France (with British troops thrown in for good measure no less) completely at bay while kicking the shit out of Russia for most of the war. Germany lost because of America’s entry into the war, and they weren’t even involved in the supposed “powder keg” that started it all.

I also saw Falling Water as a teen. I was in awe … of the fact that an artist could actually have the name “Lipchitz”.

I also waited an hour but I still had to go live by the start of the fourth quarter. And then being stuck watching the ads was excruciating.

I’m personally embarrassed by the fact that every time I see one of those players wearing the pillow over their helmet I just think about how bad it looks.

This is an interesting read on the subject.

It’s funny, I’ve watched Honnold rip on that guy. He (Honnold) considered climbing buildings to be way easier than cliff climbing because it’s basically the same move over and over again. But now Honnold is doing the same shit.

Magic Text Box 2.0 – now with AI!

I can’t even find my own real apps, let alone Magic Text Box.

which would never happen because I have decency and morals

I would never be in the trump circle of corruption not only because I have decency and morals but also because trump’s type of person is just so fucking awful to be around on a personal level. Those people are just so boring and stupid in addition to being evil. If I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life only socializing with them – even if millions of dollars came along with it – I would just kill myself.

The shared open office thing is pretty much why I quit the profession. I don’t know what’s wrong with most people, but I need peace and fucking quiet in order to code effectively.

I used to work at the Comcast Center in Philly and I randomly ended up working on one of the higher floors where about three-quarters of all the offices were empty. I spent my days alone in a huge corner office that had a perfect view of a battleship. Somehow during this run Comcast was building a second office tower two blocks away because the Comcast Center was supposedly stuffed to the gills. The reality was that it was stuffed to the gills with Indian contractors down on the lower floors and the corporate leadership wanted them out.

At my first job as a programmer I had a full old-fashioned desk. Unfortunately it was in the server room which was kept at 58°F. The servers didn’t actually need to be at that temperature any more and I sure as fuck didn’t need to be at that temperature since I was writing desktop apps, but that was how that company had been doing things for literally decades. I had to wear a hat and motherfucking Oliver Twist fingerless gloves all day.

Free speech!

[with purchase of regular-priced speech]

I got banned for racism … for making fun of a non-existent race. And the whole point of my comment was to mock racism itself.

I’m scared as fuck of heights but once in a while I torment myself watching videos of Alex Honnold, a freak of a human being who likes to do shit like free soloing El Cap. Watching him do crazy shit is actually kind of soothing, except for one time when he finished a climb on a slope like what these goats are on. It was basically like steps about 1" deep and a foot high; nothing to grab onto, he just had to stay leaned slightly in to the wall to keep from falling off. And I guess hope no wind sprung up. Just terrifying.

One of my cats vanished on New Year’s Eve one year, because my idiot friend who came to pick me up left the door open for ten minutes when he showed up. I was distraught and spent New Year’s Day driving around the neighborhood and calling for her. Turned out she was just hiding under the house and she came running back in that night and never went near the door ever again.