Darrell Root

I vaguely remember a 20+ year old commercial (for PAC Bell?) It shows one person in a suit talking glowingly about the cloud Cuts to another executive talking glowingly about the information superhighway Pans to another person talking about the future of information Then it cuts to a stressed out technician in the basement with a bunch of wires in the background: “if I don’t get this network up in 30 minutes…I’m a DEAD MAN” 😳 That technician in the basement was my role model I’ll bet there’s a network engineer in Portugal today feeling like that…

Sometimes I’ll make a typo in a reply and copy, delete, paste, correct. Guess I’ll need to not do that.

In Scalzi’s book “Redshirts”, the Astrogator (based on Checkov) suffers PTSD from almost being killed every week/mission, but then miraculously recovering repeatedly. 😂 Could have been based on O’Brien too.

When that poster said “good news”, perhaps he meant good news for India

Good news for India you mean?

Day hikers not equipped for the hike may take infinite days to go 78 km

Nice photobomb! I got two shots of the F35s south of Cupertino at 12:42pm 11/8/26. Presumably the same group. There were four, but one was flying loose so my pictures only captured three.

I think the inconsistent Cybertruck pricing caused problems. Remember the $60k cybertruck? They priced so low, they generated a seven month backlog while simultaneously not making enough money to motivate them to maintain production. It makes sense the price is higher. Hopefully that will clear the backlog while encouraging them to still sell the truck. Once the backlog clears, we would hope they maintain the production line while gradually lowering the price. I’m not personally a Cybertruck customer, but the world needs an EV self-driving pickup truck. I’d like it lower priced, but higher price is better than unavailable (effectively infinite price).

One annoyance is the “payor” is usually an organization with an arbitrary and often deceptive name. Something like “paid for by puppies for utopia”, which is a PAC funded by Hank Scorpio. A recent example is “Right for Alaska” funded fake Dan Sullivan. Of course “Right for Alaska” was funded by left supporters (per thealaskastory.com/democrati…) So the disclosure is an improvement, but they “launder” the money to hide their motivations.

I liked how in Wrath of Khan after Chekov was injured and in sick bay: they had him recover enough to go to the bridge, man the weapons console, and fire the final volley at the Reliant. Changed his role from victim to victor in that movie, which was important treatment for original cast.

My old IT department had excelence t-shirts made for everyone for our annual offsite picnic. Yes, they misspelled excellence. 😂 Due to the limited budget and time, they couldn’t remake the shirts and handed them out for everyone to wear at the picnic. I never saw anyone wear that year’s shirt again.

This is why I dislike airlines that charge customers $$$ to change their flight schedule. It discourages people from cancelling or delaying travel if they have a cold.

Netrek (1989) was the first Internet team game. College students played it over the Internet before the World Wide Web was created. It introduced teams, logins, saving stats between games, chat, and switching the network protocol between TCP/UDP during play (for performance reasons). It’s still played occasionally. Newer clients get implemented for newer operating systems periodically. Originally we played it at 5FPS.

Can confirm!

My Dad used his GI bill for a correspondence course that included three Heathkits: Voltmeter Oscilloscope TV set The TV set was our primary living room set for 20 years My Dad also got a job at Tektronix writing manuals for their products, including oscilloscopes

I wonder if my set still works?

Conan The Librarian approves!

Get a Tesla and let your car do the driving. My “driving range before exhaustion” doubled with FSD. It’s safer too: FSD never gets tired and is always looking 360.