So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

"Personalized Advertisements":

No Amazon, I'm not interested in buying any of these phones, I just bought a new one five days ago, remember? You sold it to me! And stop recommending the same book I already got five YEARS ago!

YouTube, why are you always showing me the same ad about an app I already own and use regularly? And why the FUCK do I you show me the new trailer of Star Wars Ep8 as an ad video before the actual video of the new Star Wars Ep8 trailer?

Audi, I am an university student, barely able to pay my rent, why are you telling me to buy your newest car? How do you expect me to afford this?

Monster, why exactly are you showing me job offers as "Technical Product Designer at company X" for which I'm not remotely qualified or even interested in?

Neither do I have 5000£ (I live in Germany, at least match the currency, ffs) to invest in some suspiciously promising stock market schemes, nor am I in any need of rheumatism pills or a hearing aid (I am 19). I cannot afford or want any Rolex watches and PLEASE, I don't know why you think I would, but I really do not need a special new and innovative brand of tampons, my dick is doing fine, thanks.

"Hot local singles near {my actual location} want to fuck!
Click here!!!"
At least there are still some ads you can trust to be relevant...

Just a friendly reminder not to believe anything that you see on the internet tomorrow (today based on timezones).

...not that believing things on the internet is every really a great plan...

PS. No, Half-Life 3 is not announced, you did not see a trailer, and it is never coming out.

NOT A RANT!
No jack in new pirates of carribean trailer. Looks like everyone is following apple's example

I just found a game (have not played it yet) that I think everyone here will cream over.

It's an insanely detailed hardware/ low level/ make-your-own-computer game.

I watched the trailer and it sets you up by teaching you logic gates and basic circuitry.

Then, it eventually teaches you how to build your own computer using these gates.

Then, you start creating your own assembly language using the computer you made.

Then, you use your computer to solve problems like sending a robot through a maze or just building snake on a display.

Absolutely check it out, it's on sale for $13 USD. I just bought it. Turing Complete on Steam.

Who else is excited for Mr. Robot's second season? This is on par with Breaking Bad for me and that teaser trailer just got me even more pumped!

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

"Systems open to all, but closed to intruders"

HEY, HP, PACK YOUR WHOLE FAMILY OF TRASH SOFTWARE INTO YOUR TRAILER HOME AND DRIVE IT OFF A CLIFF. WHAT THE __FUCK__ DOES THAT EVEN MEAN YOU LITERAL BLOAT FLIES. HOW ABOUT WE START WITH THE FACT THAT ALL IT TAKES IS ONE DUMB MOTHER FUCKER ANYWHERE IN A COMPANY GIVING AWAY ONE LOGIN IN A SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACK TO POP THIS NICE FART FILLED BALLOON YOUR DRUNK SALES AND MARKETING MORON PARADE CAME UP WITH.

STOP FUCKING ADVERTISING ON MR. ROBOT AND LET ME PRETEND IT'S NOT A PRODUCT FOR JUST ONE MOMENT FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

You know what is fucked up, when you click on a YouTube video to watch a trailer for a movie and you see an ad just before that for the exact motherfucking movie trailer just in local language. Wtf Google.

when you want to code but new star wars trailer

So I pulled an OLD ibm out of a trailer, that is literally falling down, today. Anyway, this cpu had been rained on and been in extremes of heat, and cold, so much so that there was moss growing on it.

I pulled it out and plugged it in, with the original plug *that was rusted in*, and.. it worked. The screen and everything worked perfectly! The floppy disk that hadn't been used in over 14 years and was stuck inside the reader, worked...

Mind blown!

As the old saying goes, they don't make 'em like they used to.

I just saw the Aladdin movie. It was a beautiful and fun movie. I loved it.

Will Smith was perfect as the genie. I don't understand why everyone created a big fuss when they saw Will Smith as the genie in the trailer.

People are dumb.

Sex is cool and all but have you seen the new KSP2 trailer? Fuck me I'm excited

Is this a devrant sticker in the silicon valley VR trailer?

Bought a series on Amazon, "Normal People". Trailer was English, my profile is set to Germany/English, but when I started the film, it was the German dubbing audio, with no option to switch to English. Could be worse, as I am a native German, but often 80% of the original atmosphere of anything gets lots by translation and German studio speakers.

Just in case staff at Amazon wonder why I rarely watch nor buy anything from them, this is one of the reasons. Of course they wouldn't, I'm just one in a million customers, but fuck them anyway.

!rant

I just watched the new Mr. Robot Trailer.
I'm sure that s3 will be awesome.
2017-10-11 contdown is started.

Why does the Snapchat ad for a "blender cake" have to have a trailer involving blending rubber ducks? Do they not know how useful those are????

!dev
Matrix 4 trailer was such a shit show.

I don’t know why, but I honestly believed that it would not be as bad as it turned out to be. I’m such a stupid prick for believing in it.

FUCK YOU LANA WACHOWSKI. I HATE YOU AND EVERYONE RELATED TO THE PRODUCTION OF THIS CANCEROUS PIECE OF SHIT.

I label all packages I know are coming as being for a company: Derp Industries. This is from an old in-joke between my friends and I. This tells me whether a package was something I ordered or not from the label (as I often forget I have a package coming.) However, I just got a call from a DHL driver asking me how long we'll be open. I, uh... I told him we close at 8. He said that's perfect, as he has to pick up from the local holding station at 5 and i'm his first stop.

I'm tempted to call back and tell him I'm just a dude living in a trailer...

Ugggh. Has anyone else on here worked with MFC?

I've been updating some legacy software and it's been like wading through a swap that was caused by a malfunctioning trailer park septic system: no map, and mostly shit with the occasional nasty surprise.

So I am driving home and stop at a light. Some dude in a truck behind me starts flipping me off at the light. The road is 45mph and 2 lanes. I am in the right lane. So when the light changes I speed up to 35mph so he can pass me. He decides to tailgate me and honk at me. So I stay steady and he eventually goes around me. I keep my distance. But it looks like he is going to the same place as me. Before I get to the road I want to park for my destination he takes the same road and parks his truck and trailer where I normally park facing the wrong direction. Okay, wtf, but okay. So I go further down the road to turn around and park somewhere else. He guns his truck to cut me off from that parking spot. I have to hit my brakes to prevent hitting him. I raise my hands in the are like "why?" I then finish turning around and head back to my parking spot and park. So this guy tried to cause a car accident. At this point I took my stuff inside and put it away. Came back out and called the police to report the incident. They said they cannot identify a crime, but I can fill out a police report. While I am on the phone with the police this guy leaves that street giving me this bizarre deranged smile. I refuse to engage. I spent the next hour filling out the police report. In the process I find out he lives on that street a few houses down. I am nowhere near his house, but he seems to not like me parking on that street. This guy must have seen my car on that street before and decides to randomly road rage. I gave his name and address to the police. My intent to build a case file if he doesn't knock this shit off.

So now I gotta buy a fucking dash cam and put it in my car because of some nutjob plumber. I have nothing against plumbers, but this guy fits the definition of knuckle dragger. His name isn't even Mario or Luigi, bummer.

Another thing that might be related is that during the winter somebody dumped a ton of snow onto my car when it was parked there. It looked like it was on purpose. If this is the same guy this guy drove his snow plow 4 houses down. Definitely has mental problems.

wtf! the star trek: picard trailer made me (37m) literally cry out of sheer nostalgia.

I don't like the "hype" culture/algorithm tech industry follows these days, like seriously.

I watched Marvel Spiderman 2's new trailer and now most of my YouTube recommendations is filled with "I spotted THIS in the new trailer" or "OMG Peter said what in the new trailer?" related videos.

And my Google feed is now full of "MSM2 will have this villain" or "Peter Parker faces off new villain in MSM2" news articles.

I get it, I am interested in this product, but It doesn't mean that I have forgotten about my previous interests and potential new topics I may be interested in.

Saw Passengers - some pretty good tech. Holograms, robots, androids...
Trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets by same director as Fifth Element loaded with really really cool tech but July 21 release date a ways off.

Related to queueing theory...

Suburban traffic at a stop lights has developed a tendency to include invisible cars.

You can see where these invisible cars are by the gap between the front bumper of one car the back bumper of the next. Sometimes there is an invisible motorcycle, sometimes there is an invisible semi-tractor trailer. It is becoming an epidemic.

The dumbasses in traffic who do this are usually texting behind the wheel while stopped and they are not always Buffy the ding dong cheerleader nor Sally the Soccer Mom... Suits too... It seems to have gotten worse with pot becoming legal I just realized...

But to the point, you can tell these people would never be able to comprehend software engineering... they have no idea that for every invisible car in front of every dumbass driver like them, there is a real car way back that has to sit through two lights. (side effects of bugs and inefficient hash tables) Worse, these dumbasses do this in the left lane so it keeps a host of others from being able to get past their big fat ass into the turn lane.

Simple queueing theory escapes these people.

Computers will someday take their jobs.

Sometimes it motivates me to code faster... "There goes your job beotch! Get used to mac and cheese..."

But once in a while I am in a position to be able to be stopped at a light, and note that next to me is one of those "gapsters" and then pull my car (or motorcycle some days) into that invisible car's spot. The gapster gets so mad sometimes... >:-> so much satisfaction I almost feel guilty...

Queueing theory rules... LOL

hcf season 3 trailer is out

!dev

my problem with gaming in linux is not really inherent to linux.

my problem is that there are no linux game torrents.

and torrenting for me is a way to know if I'll be playing a certain game for a while, and eventually buy it.

I can watch all the trailers in the world for a game, but I truly make up my mind after the first few hours of direct playtime.

so I'm not interested in spending money on a game that I might like because it looked nice on the trailer only to find out I hate playing it.

the problem with torrents is that once users get the game, and the game works, they're probably like
"why bother buying it? the game works right? why risk losing the progress i achieved so far by moving save files?"

on top of that on linux, you need to check protondb to see how compatible the game you found is, so an extra layer of difficulty.

I guess I would like to have legal demo versions of games, but I see very little devs doing that so maybe that commercial model failed? I don't know really.

Spent all day yesterday making an iMovie trailer as a pitch to try to encourage a company to hire me because their application page said cover letters were 1990s and you should do something different. And then I couldn’t just attach the thing to the application, so I ended up writing a cover letter and adding a “TLDR, a la movie trailer” and a link to the YouTube video. Let it not be said I didnae put effort into job searching.

*Wakes up*
*Message from aunt*
Aunt: Hey sweety I can't find this movie anywhere on the internet plz use ur cyber superpowers and help me thx
Aunt: *Link to the movie's trailer on Youtube*
*Clicks link*
*Scrolls down*
Youtube comment: *Link to the movie*
*Copies and pastes to aunt*
Aunt: omg thxxx <3
*Goes back to sleep*

Because why even try when you can ask your nephew to do it for you?

OMG I have a proper rant from last night.
It involves an unwanted rebase and lost uncommitted code from weeks.
Tune up after my shift.

I've got some free time at school today and decided to go to our teacher assistans room after checking his schedule. It was obviously his 'office time' and the only purpose of that time was assisting students that need help with something.
I've been there before and we had a nice conversation about tech stuff other than school things. So I thought I could go there in my free time today.
He said he's kind of busy when I've asked him if he got some time or not. Eventually we had a 5 min talk and I left BUT I've seen something on his monitor at the exact moment I stepped into his room.

Bitch, you were watching John Wick 3 trailer before I came in. So this is how you're busy, huh?
Stop fucking lying please.

Deciding whether I should buy a PS5 is driving me nuts these days.

It has started to grow its library of amazing games. You may know about the Marvel Spiderman 2 trailer. It looks fire AF. So I know I'll enjoy playing games on it.

But I am afraid it'll take a hit on my productivity. So alright, don't play on weekdays.

But then it'll keep collecting dust and I don't want to buy something I'll use only couple hours a week. And who's to say I'll play every weekend? You skip one weekend and bam! You forget you even had a PS5.

It'll cost me about 500 USD which is right around the mark of me spending money that's on the umph side. It's not too much to make a dent in my savings but at the same time not too little that I don't have to think about it.

I'd probably end up not buying it because I am 30 years old and people like me shouldn't be wasting time playing games.

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