I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it’s still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that’s also the part that is less important.

I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.

Those fucking cord tangles GOD DAMN IT!!!

Tantrum at 58: I need a nap.

Monty Python used to be my favorite comedy group. Now it’s the Cleveland Browns.

Ironically, one of the universal things I’ve noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking “why am I writing SQL? I’ll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!” resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague’s code base and found two classes named “OR.cs” and “AND.cs”. All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of “OR” and “AND” were ever to change in future versions of SQL.

I always liked United Snakes.

My dad’s doctor told him he needed to eat more protein, and he was like “ChickenLady, what can I eat to get more protein? High-protein Boost?” No dad, fucking meat … you can eat more meat. The thing is he loved meat, but it never occurred to him that he got protein from meat. And he was a biology professor!

My favorite thing was my mother at one point thinking she needed to eliminate her intake of fats, carbohydrates and protein because they’re all bad for you. Fortunately she does like kale …

They should ditch Microsoft 365 due to lack of not sucking balls.

Ah, I was thinking Portuguese-esque.

Microsoft’s business model has always been getting businesses who are even stupider than them to give them tons of money. Nothing is ever going to change that calculus.

forgejo

How is this generally pronounced? I feel like “for-GAY-hoe” would be the only workable pronunciation.

Interestingly, the calorie counts on food packaging are derived from the Atwater system (and later modifications) that estimate digestible calories from the amount of fat, protein and carbohydrates in each food item. These numbers are based on experimental research on food substitution and weight loss/gain done in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The calorie counts for alcohol are similarly based on the measurable amount of alcohol in each drink, except that the number used (7 kcal per g) was just a complete guess on Atwater’s part since they couldn’t do equivalent substitution experiments involving booze.

I had a friend in college whose parents were big into world government and had founded an organization to promote that. Talking to them was a weird experience because 1) they felt every problem facing the world could be solved by a one-world government, and 2) they actually felt achieving that world government was a realistic possibility. And it wasn’t like they thought the solution was just the USA taking over everything; they were very critical of everything about this country.

I don’t know if this is irony or not, but that friend is now worth $34 million after her parents’ company went public. She doesn’t say anything about world government any more.

My dentist plays a '70s soft rock channel. It’s really impressive how good the production is on that stuff, and people could actually legitimately sing! No autotune or melodyne in sight.

I thought Imagine Dragons was a band I’d never heard until I checked out some of their songs and realized I’ve actually heard them a million times … always in grocery stores shopping at night.

That’s what I said now

Thank god Alton Brown is still cool. My first TV cooking heroes were Brown and Jamie Oliver, and I couldn’t have taken it if both of them had turned into soulless, money-grubbing idiots.

A couple of years ago I tried pre-butchering my turkey and it really works. It’s useful to be able to cook the bird in one to one-and-a-half hours instead of all fucking day, but the main benefit is that you can cook the white meat until it’s 155-160F and the dark meat until it’s 195-200F, and both kinds of meat taste great. When you stuff a bird and cook it whole, you have to get the stuffing inside up to a safe temperature, which means both the white meat and the dark meat have to be turned into shoe leather. Also with pre-butchering you can make stock out of the carcass the night before and it makes the most fantastic gravy.

“Awww, that’s so …”
“I’m thankful for line drawings.”