| Timestamp | Sender | Message |
| 2025-01-24 21:23 | Kali | Sounds like a success. |
| 2025-01-24 21:23 | Rairila | they got paid up front! |
| 2025-01-24 21:23 | Kali | But did they make money doing it? |
| 2025-01-24 21:23 | Rairila | *improve |
| 2025-01-24 21:23 | Rairila | spoiler alert - they did not imrprove our processes |
| 2025-01-24 21:22 | Rairila | at the cable company, we had 2 consultants brought in to imrprove our processes.. so immediately a group of us had lunch with the director: "so.. what's up with The Bobs?" director: "ah.. it's just to improve.." us: "now now, we're not.. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS." |
| 2025-01-24 21:21 | Zaffer | Except that MFDs still suck. |
| 2025-01-24 21:20 | Rairila | PC LOAD LETTER? - man that joke is showing its age |
| 2025-01-24 21:20 | Zaffer | Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks. |
| 2025-01-24 21:20 | Zaffer | They don't appreciate Michael Bolton or the Geto Boys. |
| 2025-01-24 21:20 | Rairila | that is very sad |
| 2025-01-24 21:20 | Zaffer | There are new employees who have never seen Office Space, and it makes me sad. |
| 2025-01-24 21:19 | Rairila | 1st Bob: What would you say you do here? Tom: Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! |
| 2025-01-24 21:19 | Zaffer | Khan Souphanousinphone! |
| 2025-01-24 21:18 | Alrin | if that one's got youre ire; wait till you read about "SEO Specialist" |
| 2025-01-24 21:18 | Rairila | ive worked with some good ones... conversely... also true. |
| 2025-01-24 21:18 | Zaffer | It sounds like a four-letter word. |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Zaffer | I picked up a book on putting together software requirements. Haven't quite made it through it yet... I get bothered by the term 'business analyst' |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Alrin | it's immensely accurate :p |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Rairila | alrin that's a good comic |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Alrin | t* |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Alrin | have that image saved on my phone to show people/friends when they don't get why software eng is so difficul |
| 2025-01-24 21:17 | Zaffer | I am a big believer that my company pays me to think, not to do rote tasks. |
| 2025-01-24 21:16 | Zaffer | Heh, *nod Alrin* |
| 2025-01-24 21:16 | Rairila | I worked for a cable company back in the day. when we swapped from paper spreadsheets to electronic payments for salary and hourly - that was the day the lady in accounting retired. |
| 2025-01-24 21:15 | Zaffer | Most of the improvements that I force onto my job are because I'm lazy :) |
| 2025-01-24 21:15 | Alrin | https://pmac-agpc.ca/sites/default/files/Tree.jpg |
| 2025-01-24 21:15 | Zaffer | even if it took me a week to do it, it would be better than mindlessly clicking around for 3 days. |
| 2025-01-24 21:14 | Zaffer | I told my boss that if I ever had to do it again, I was going to find a way to dump all the info out of the database and replicate everything. |
| 2025-01-24 21:14 | Rairila | job security |
| 2025-01-24 21:14 | Zaffer | Make sure you have someone click 5 different tickboxes, wait 30s, save a PDF, and then do it again 800+ times. And hope they don't make a mistake. |
| 2025-01-24 21:14 | Rairila | of course. why improve the process when you can just duplicate it exactly. |
| 2025-01-24 21:13 | Zaffer | Dont' think about how you can have the software do that all at once. |
| 2025-01-24 21:13 | Zaffer | Nevermind that the annual report required 800+ versions of the same report for different parameters. |
| 2025-01-24 21:13 | Zaffer | So they designed the software to produce a single report at a time. |
| 2025-01-24 21:13 | Zaffer | I've ranted about this before, but we had some software made to exactly replicate a mostly paper process from the 90s. |
| 2025-01-24 21:12 | Rairila | that's everywhere. "tell us about product" ok.. what are you trying to do? "all the things." yeah. not sure I can solve that. |
| 2025-01-24 21:12 | Zaffer | My biggest beef at work these days is people purchasing / contracting software development without actually knowing what their own requirements are. |
| 2025-01-24 21:11 | Rairila | the wiki language is not bad, but I would like it more if i was markdown |
| 2025-01-24 21:11 | Zaffer | Sometimes it'll just be on the back of whatever meeting package that I'm stuck in :) |
| 2025-01-24 21:10 | Zaffer | *nod* I make outlines in whatever before I actually start doing any work. |
| 2025-01-24 21:10 | Rairila | I find myself writing more notes and blogs in markdown or asciidoc before anything else. |
| 2025-01-24 21:09 | Sole | Considering it was a mech. eng. degree, it was well-suited for it. |
| 2025-01-24 21:09 | Sole | It's a very powerful language for that *nod* |
| 2025-01-24 21:09 | Rairila | *has amazing |
| 2025-01-24 21:09 | Rairila | I heard it was amazing capabiltiies around scientific and math notation |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | We ended up with a report that looked like it belonged in a journal. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Rairila | oh wow. that's hardcore, and you're not the 1st person I heard use LaTex for something like that. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | I told my entire group to just write the content in plaintext, and I would take care of the rest. |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Sole | I wrote my senior project paper in LaTeX |
| 2025-01-24 21:08 | Rairila | WYSISYG - not always the best. I think in the early days, I would spent WAY too much time finding the right font to use. |
| 2025-01-24 21:07 | Sole | Word is slowly getting better, but it's still such a pain to properly typeset anything in it. |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | Because the forms they had to fill in were perfectly formatted in WordPerfect. |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Rairila | hah! I bet! I can completely understand that |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | Lots of lawyers got very annoyed when they had to migrate to Word |
| 2025-01-24 21:06 | Sole | *nod nod* WordPerfect was miles better than Word. Especially w/ the show formatting. |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Sole | Too many people (management) just want a pretty interface, instead of an efficient workflow. |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Rairila | I mean.. wordperfect was pretty darn amazing - especially with that shortcut key overlay for the keyboard |
| 2025-01-24 21:05 | Sole | If the goal is data entry, then avoid the need to move hands from keyboard. |
| 2025-01-24 21:04 | Rairila | consistency is king as well. like I'm glad that ctrl-C/V is very similar to the mac's CMD-C/V |
| 2025-01-24 21:03 | Sole | I was just bitching about whomever at Microsoft that decided the default keyboard shortcut for a non-breaking hyphen should be ALT+SHIFT+- instead of the usual CTRL+SHIFT+- in Word. |
| 2025-01-24 21:03 | Rairila | yeah. I mean the new system was technically superior to the old one, but they failed to account for the most important thing: the folks using it. |
| 2025-01-24 21:02 | Sole | Keyboard shortcuts and responsive programs are unbeaten for efficiency. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Rairila | nurses were like, I could enter a new patient in 30s on the old system: tab tab enter, enter, type tab, enter - but now I gotta move the mouse and type for 3 pages. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Sole | *nod* I can see that happening. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Rairila | in the end, they rewrote the whole thing for windows and went full GUI. This pissed off all the nursees and admin staff, b/c it was a "green screen" terminal that they used for 10-15 years and they memorized all the screens and tabs. |
| 2025-01-24 21:01 | Alrin | such efficiency and so much added value |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Rairila | haha yeah |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Sole | Which was the whole motto of SCO :) |
| 2025-01-24 20:59 | Rairila | my company was just a distributor, so the owner was kinda wary of using it.. as we also didn't wanna get sued by the software dev for bypassing their "security" check. - which was just a way to get more money from folks that wanted to run it on linux vs sco |
| 2025-01-24 20:58 | Rairila | yeah. the medical software dev created a linux version at one point, but they handicapped it so that you needed a special "client" to connect to it. so I reverse engineered the telnet protocol they used and figured out that the login sequence they used just added an extra char, so I wrote a program to just inject that for a normal telnet |
| 2025-01-24 20:58 | Sole | But... I made the right decision when going to university, and picked a degree that wasn't related to computers. I kept a hooby as a hobby :) |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | At a certain point, I started reading books on software engineering in my spare time. |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | And then I picked up some PostgreSQL and Python. |
| 2025-01-24 20:57 | Sole | Learning Linux and playing here helped me learn a *lot* about hardware/software. |
| 2025-01-24 20:56 | Sole | Oof. I assume you were slightly conflicted about that. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Rairila | I worked for a medical software company that sold a solution that only ran on SCO unix - smack during the time SCO was suing linux |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | But not enough to matter. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | tbh, I always found Slackware to be *slightly* more responsive. |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Rairila | gentoo was intersting. learned a lot. took a lot of time. eventually I got tired of waiting and making my computer generate BTUs |
| 2025-01-24 20:55 | Sole | Arch is probably a better balance. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | Just seemed like too much work for too little payoff. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | Of all distros, I never really used Gentoo. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | I remember that heh |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | (backed by Microsoft) |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | ain't nobody got time for that |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | For those that don't know, Caldera ended up being very fond of lawyers. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Rairila | I was a gentoo fanboi for a long time |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Sole | I used CorelLinux for a little bit too. |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Emperor | we're the same! |
| 2025-01-24 20:54 | Emperor | I once partitioned ubuntu on a windows machine |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Rairila | I think it was slackware |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Rairila | nice. my 1st linux install was from like 30 floppies burned from a alt.binary usenet group |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Sole | And my older brother had a set of Slackware install disks too |
| 2025-01-24 20:53 | Sole | Heh. We had Caldera on 3.5" disks a little after that. |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Rairila | there was a guy from the mud that told me about linux. I was like what? you mean.. it's not msdos? it's not windows? |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Ryoki | I remember KoalaKnight being one of the first people I interacted with here. |
| 2025-01-24 20:52 | Sole | And then got Gnolen to play at school in the new year. |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Sole | Gorion and I were super bored at my place, and found here. |
| 2025-01-24 20:51 | Sole | I started on here on Dec. 31, 1999. |