Worked at a place where our CIO was completely unqualified to be a leader, much less a leader in IT. She was a micromanager who took the position of “telling stakeholders” instead of “working with stakeholders” so any project she was on was really her pushing through whatever agenda she had at the time. Meanwhile her deputy CIO was stealing computer equipment from the server room but I digress…

April fools one year and I decide to prank it up. I moved the hinges (not the door handles) of the freezer/fridge in the breakroom so that the handle and hinges were on the same side. It’s a fifteen minute job to move everything so I did it the night before the 1st.

The next morning our hungover CIO stumbles into the breakroom and cannot get the fridge to open. After a few seconds of futile tugging on the handle, she gave up and took her lunch to her office.

Others in the office figured it out pretty quickly and had a good chuckle.

Later on that day CIO sends out a nastygram about pranks being unprofessional, property damage, someone was going to be in huge trouble, yadda yadda…

But she’s not the director. The director tells her to basically fuck off, it was a funny prank, and perhaps she needed to lighten up.

She never found out it was me.

I’m an instance owner and mod. I’ll describe what we see.

Like anyone else, I can check a post or comment and see the upvote and downvote counts. If I click on a specific menu item by a post or comment I can also see who voted which way.

I check it often and to date have only banned two users, out of thousands, who were consistently downvoting posts. These bot accounts were literally voting within seconds of the post going federated.

It’s a useful feature on my end and I think others should be able to see it.

Stardate 4

maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.

Wow. A tornado needs to find its way there.

Nowadays? Depends on a whole set of indeterminate variables.

But odds point to tazing. arrest, something on that end of the spectrum.

A Catholic Christmas Eve Vigil (not Midnight - different kind of Mass).

The scene was thus: A strange-to-me Catholic church off of something and Capital in Milwaukee, near where my mom, not a religious person but a nice person, took me and my sis when Christmas happened to fall on our regular visitation weekend one particular year.

The priest spoke on and on, as fathers and Father tend to do. The readings familiar, unre(M)arkable, (L)ukewarm, Psalm verse, same as the first.

The Homily was delivered in the patented priestly monotonic nasally drone, the incense and insensitivity flowing too freely. The easily-employed white, gray-haired, “middle class rich”, Kohl’s-suited, stoic husbands stood, sat, knelt, genuflected, stood, knelt, stood, sat, stood, knelt, genuflected, prayed, sang-chanted, with their wives, who were fully guilt-jeweled for common marital slights, whether real or imagined, or who benefited from rich parents who left their ill-gotten legacies to their ill-raised, now boomer kids who have become reluctantly over-sexed wives. The department store credit cards tucked safely in their expensive clutch purses, these women were fully-prepared to wage full-out Karen-esque, post-Christmas sale consumerist war in the following post-holiday sales season.

Retail workers never stood a chance.

In short: The church was overheated, like hell hot, probably good prep for some of these people, and my not-Catholic mother was next to me trying to morally fix or better herself, or maybe she was trying to impress my sister and I, or, more than likely on reflection, trying to placate my very-Catholic dad and stepmom, but mostly I had been standing for what seemed like FOREVER, and my knees alternately locked and unlocked, and my youth-fitting suit that was too small but too expensive to replace at Kohls just yet sweltered me under imagined and real guilt, and the incense, and the droning, and the HEAT…

I was about 4 seconds from passing out when some stranger approached me and said “Hey, you don’t look OK. Let’s go outside now before you faint.” and I swear it’s the best religious experience I’ve ever had: A human being a human and taking pity on a young kid dealing with physical and emotional distress. I went outside and cooled off in the Midwestern December air. Soon after, my mom and sis came outside and we left in the beater car that smelt like gas if the heater was fully turned on, so we had to leave the freash air selector on and the slider control at no more than 3/4 quarters, but that’s OK because the A/C, which hadn’t functioned in many presidential election cycles, was fully-replaced by the December air, the religious experiment over.

I’m not at all religious but I hope that guy knows just what he did for us that night. We were faking faith, just trying to be good people, and the droning, heat, guilt, and THAT FUCKING CHRISTMAS INCENSE just did us in.

Lesson learned.

Pew or pew not - there is no die.

Backblaze is a great backup solution. They publish drive stats and even show you the hardware they use.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/storage-pod

The simulation keeps on churning…

Ex-Army infantry guy here.

In basic training, location Ft. Benning GA, late August. Hydration was important, and that was impressed upon us by the drill sergeants, who would pause the activity at hand for the moment and do the ‘Drink Water!’ call, to which we’d reply mostly in uninspired enthusiasm ‘Beat the heat drill sergeant beat the heat.’

We’d then down a canteen (a quart) of water. On especially hot days, we’d do two canteens. No dumping on your head or on the ground - you had to finish one or both. We’d refill canteens and get back to the day’s task of doing push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and in-between those, learning Army stuff (sir).

One guy, Peterson (name changed), couldn’t do a canteen of water. This guy was the opposite of Joey Chestnut. He ate and drank like a bird but never lost weight. Slow metabolism and high energy conversion I guess. He never seemed dehydrated I would say. But water and food were just minimal for the guy. He’d drink a pint, maybe a sip more, and done.

Our drill sergeants weren’t having that. You had to finish the canteen and flip it over your head. Failure to comply was met with drinking more water, until you finished the canteen, while your platoon did push-ups. No pressure.

The rest of the story transpired really quickly.

The drill sergeants hit him with the order to drink more water, and he did, and he stopped, and then they said keep going private, and he was in obvious pain, and he said no drill sergeant, and you could see the crinkle in the eyes of the questioned, but before that drill sergeant’s body language became verbal, Peterson puked up water, gallons of water it seemed, then breakfast, and the upper contents of his colon I’m pretty sure (j/k being illustrative). A medic, who just happened to be Starship Trooping on by, got on the horn and got the kid to a clinic. He was water intoxicated, we later found out.

One of the great things they forget to show you on the recruitment brochure lol. He was eventually fine, and we were relegated to drinking until we could spit out saliva a few inches.