+1 to this one. I cut my teeth writing boring in house business software, some 15 years of that. Time went on and the company started to automate, so as the in house software guy I ended up messing with various pieces of industrial automation. It has been interesting, I've learned a lot and coming from outside sometimes I can think non conventional approach to a problem.

Oh, and find a laptop with real RS-232 -port. Protect it with your life.

Me too. To this Day our national Electric invoice standard uses ISO-8859-15. An that's just fine until somebody feels the need to have a look with Notepad, add a random space and save the file.

Notepad then helpfully changes the encoding to UTF-16 and the whole patch errors out somewhere down the chain.

I don't want to be too much of an asshole. In any case, I'd like more Germans being the meme Germans and less of them being the fax using, sending random pictures as Excel files and demanding answer in snail mail.

And yeah, I do work with quite a lot of legacy German industrial machinery. The average German I interact with is quite possibly closer to the end of their career than to the beginning. But on this particular lemming said experience is taxing.

I do live in a bit of a different part of the globe. It is a losing battle here on side of humans. Trees pop up and every year there are less people around.

I like it here, may it make me a hillbilly on a flat ground or not.

Some animals are truly more equal than others. Years ago we had a really smart horse. (And those of you who have been around horses much do know what an oxymoron that is.)

So this cat moves in. She was one of those that just moved in, no chip and no other luck finding her home. And she was pregnant and made a little nest and had her kittens.

And the smart cookie of a mare that I began this with made sure that we knew where the kittens were.

Then there's the normal horse experience where there's been a rock close to road for years. Then on one random occasion the rock is an apex predator.

It's really not that hard. I'm the IT department for a medium sized bakery operation. Around 200 employees. This just means that I'm available when it really is necessary. I'm in situ or on call when orders come in and when shipments go out.

In the end I'm cheaper than outsourcing all the in house software and hardware. And I'm available at 3am when the bakers do their thing.

And yeah, I do have somebody somewhat trained in every bakery. When they're at end of their wit I'm the person they call.

In the end, I'm around 1% of the payroll. IT is not that special.

I'm ancient, websites with little to no CSS (and absolutely no client side scripts) are refreshing. I don't know if I'd like all of web to be like that, but there's something to be said for the absolute individuality of everybody writing their sites from scratch.

It's way too easy to spin up a Wordpress installation and be done with it.

Salute!

The article has some really weird parts underlining somebody's anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian while discussing Gaza/Israel -situation. It's like there's one larger eastern power killing indiscriminantly a smaller population west of them. And per article it's horrific when it's Gaza but somehow it's US and UK imperialism when Russians are killing/raping/pillagin in Ukraine.

I'd take the source with a grain of salt.

My father is a leftie and as a young child I found it cool that he could do stuff with left hand while I was only able to use my right.

That inspired me to learn how to use both arms and that really has been a blessing - being ambidexterous is awesome. It was especially great when I finally learned to stick weld with my left hand. So many impossible corners are just corners now.

To my knowing there's round 5% of people that are totally left handed or totally right handed. Every one else, please learn to use your non dominant hand.

There's also the fact that in Finnish it's properly ihmissyöjä (personeater or some such). Kannibaali is quite used loan word but we do have our own.

I will not make vim my sweet as it is optimized for us keyboard. Most of the shortcuts are awful in my native (Finnish) layout. As much of a heretic I am, there is a place for mouse and windowing display managers.

What I do miss from the Redmont dystopia is Notepad++. Can do anything, can be explained over the phone.

That's the way it works. I had an uncle with multiple sclerosis (spelling?). He used to get his PC infected with all sorts of ransomware back in late 90's. For him credit card was the answer, luckily his siblings mostly got somebody to clean the shit up.