Posts made by tonyshowoff

@scottalanmiller said in Better Than Aliens:

@tonyshowoff said in Better Than Aliens:

@scottalanmiller said in Better Than Aliens:

@nadnerB said in Better Than Aliens:

@wirestyle22 said in Better Than Aliens:

I can never tell if he's trolling or serious. I think the general consensus is he's serious but I've been on the internet too long. He may just be an amazing troll

Get him along to MangoCon.

Ok... that was trolling sarcasm.... or was it?

We did a reading of his interview live at MangoCon 1. It was one of the funniest things ever. Freaking hilarious.

What interview was this and is it recorded anywhere?

Sadly, no. It was insanely hilarious. One of these days maybe @Nic and I can do it all over again. Somewhere he has the longer version that was edited to make it not so embarrassing from what was originally sent in. I've never seen the truly embarrassing version and supposedly it is so much funnier.

Interview for Spiceworks then?

My story: I studied nuclear science, I loved my classes... yes that's a song but it's actually true so I said it that way. What's funny is during that time I was doing some computer stuff for people, learning to program for fun on my own time, and then because people stopped making nuclear weapons I ended up getting a job programming for one of the world's largest ISPs (more like an internet gateway at the time) working on their new fangled Instant Messaging system, then I did some other IT work after I was downsized because management was absolutely stupid in every possible way. I realised I could make more money doing it myself than working for someone else and it went from there. It came easier to me than it does a lot of people and I'm not sure why. The only certifications I ever got were because an employer wanted me to or because in some cases vendors required one for some dumbass reason.

@Bill-Kindle said in How did you get started in IT?:

handed me a CD and that boot floppy said good luck and to make sure I brought back his CD.

But did you give back the CD or not? Five years is far too long to leave us hanging.

@scottalanmiller said in Better Than Aliens:

@nadnerB said in Better Than Aliens:

@wirestyle22 said in Better Than Aliens:

I can never tell if he's trolling or serious. I think the general consensus is he's serious but I've been on the internet too long. He may just be an amazing troll

Get him along to MangoCon.

Ok... that was trolling sarcasm.... or was it?

We did a reading of his interview live at MangoCon 1. It was one of the funniest things ever. Freaking hilarious.

What interview was this and is it recorded anywhere?

In that original thread, I never caught this before, he also said:

Most of you have never even setup a printer to print through word and mail merge so that when a letter is printed it prints the envelope, pulls from tray 1 for Company Letterhead and prints the rest from tray 2 and collates them.

This is not easy to google so let me here the steps if you can do this.

In my experience it's always the biggest idiots on the planet who make assumptions about what someone can and cannot do as a means to measure knowledge or ability. Suggesting someone has almost certainly never setup a printer scenario in such an asinine way and as though that's bragging rights of some sort is sort of like when someone told me that I [thinking I was a different person than I really was] wasn't capable playing Sweet Home Alabama on the guitar... three times, and each time more indignant. This was a case of a genuinely stupid person.

Holy shit, I took a nap and literally over 200 posts are added which are off topic, maybe we should remember this thread is to mock and ridicule the OP about his delusions when it comes to caring about insane employers. Hopefully there's a way to bulk split off the other posts about taxes and government corruption.

@DustinB3403 said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

And all I wanted to do was open up a conversation so they could start looking for a replacement. I wasn't expecting a circus.

What were you realistically expecting?

I think he had a pretty good idea, I mean both said he wasn't expecting a circus but considering what else he says I imagine deep down he knew it wouldn't be good:

I've been wanting to leave my messed up job for some time now, been there 8+ years. It's been a roller coaster with management here.
To top it all off, she won't read stuff that's too long. If I send emails that are too long or detailed, she refuses to even read them and then chides me

But then he goes on to basically explain an obvious problem that people get into who work for others for a long time, almost an employee-style Stockholm Syndrome.

I consider them friends and I'm happy to have worked here 8 years so I don't want our relationship to blow up at the last second and lose any kind of reference I might have here.
I don't want their business to suffer, nor our relationship, nor my reference with them.

Undervalued, underpaid, still believes that such people will ever be a good reference for him, and yet wants to extend help as much as realistic even when admitting it'd take forever, i.e. be impossible.

@scottalanmiller said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

I know a lot of responses here might be "just leave", but these things are easier said than done. I don't want their business to suffer, nor our relationship, nor my reference with them.

No, not really. They are equally easy because telling you to do it is literally as easy as you calling in and saying "Im' done, bye, don't ever call me again."

Literally, that easy. You don't want their business to suffer? Why not? You are describing how awful these people are, and you want them to stay in business? That's not right.

Why do you want a relationship with them at all? These are terrible people. You need them out of your life.

You don't want them as a reference. These aren't ethical people, you can't safely use them as a reference regardless. Walk away.

All of your reasons for staying are false ones, there is no reason to stay.

Indeed I am a bit confused as to why someone who admits to themselves before they quit that they already know it will be a disaster, and that they map out all of the ways the management is a huge pain in the ass... so what benefit is it to maintain a relationship? With people like this even if you leave 100% like they want you to or expect you to, they'll still trash you in references, it always happens.

It's not your business, and presumably not run by a family member, so who the hell cares? It's capitalism, if they can't run a business correctly then it's their fault, not yours to help prop them up.

Lots of lecturing about how she doesn't know what some vendor or another does, and IT people have "secret knowledge" that is complicated so laypersons can't understand it. She says all my notes "might make sense to an IT person, but it's not how my brain as a layperson understands it".

To top it all off, she won't read stuff that's too long. If I send emails that are too long or detailed, she refuses to even read them and then chides me. But if I write stuff that's too short, she complains it's not written for the layperson.

She sounds like she's either totally stupid or insane, or really trying to manipulate you into doing more work and demean your job, and that seems more likely based on everything. Don't bother helping this psycho, don't feel guilty, do as @JaredBusch said:

Turn over passwords and walk the fuck out tomorrow..

And @scottalanmiller basically said all that needs to be said on this, at this point I think we'd all be repeating each other and if you aren't listening to it then you need to really change that mindset or just do whatever they want since that's the mindset you clearly want to be in despite obviously knowing how terrible of an idea it is -- remember even you said that you knew beforehand that it would be a disaster, why in the holy hell would you give them such a long notice and why would you put up with any of this after they started increasing your workload and reducing benefits?

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Drinking:

Had a good beer at East Cide in Denton.

All I know is that the Hill family takes a yearly vacation trip to Denton. That and you can get a lot of bat guano at the Denton Flea Market.

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Drinking:

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Drinking:

@travisdh1 My daughter has the same Mario question box as well as the red and green mushrooms. They were full of disgusting candy.

Yep, same sort of thing. I like the box. The look of the candy was the coins, but I tossed all but the one I actually ate.

I also only had a couple of them, but like many children, even though the candy was terrible my daughter ate it anyway despite me asking "Are you sure you want to eat these?" They'll eat any candy no matter how crappy it is, but the same isn't extended toward vegetables.

@travisdh1 My daughter has the same Mario question box as well as the red and green mushrooms. They were full of disgusting candy.

@JaredBusch said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

Tea is ちゃ (cha) in Japanese. It uses this Kanji: 茶

Not surprising. The han is the same as well as the kanji, pronounced chá in Mandarin. Anyway so as far as languages I am familiar with to spout off with an American-influenced pronunciation key:

German/Finnish: tee (pronounced tay, well a bit different depending on dialect/accent)
Arabic: shay (pronounced shy, and I didn't include the arabic script because of unicode BS flipping things around)
Hungarian: tea (pronounced tay-ah)
Russian: чай (pronounced chai)
Bosnian/Croatian: čaj (pronounced chai)
Serbian/Macedonian: чај (pronounced chai)

Generation X here, and I hate tablets and smartphones, I just don't like them. Plus I think there's a bit more blurring of 5 or so years rather than hard cut off of certain years. Or maybe it's different in the UK, but really from what I remember of the UK in the 90s and prior was that everything was super crappy, backward, and cheap. There was barely seemingly any difference between the Three Day Week and when AOL entered the UK market.

The only place more backward is Australia, their government didn't even recognise computers existed until the 90s or so, but what was funny about that is, in the 80s a lot of Aussie hackers were able to dial up to American companies, break things, and nothing at all could be done. That's really funny.

Of course I'm only talking about the English speaking world because if I included everyone else, I'd have to explain why I still acted like it was 1985 in 1995 as far as music, fashion, and hair go.

@StuartJordan said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

@JaredBusch looks nice never tried chai tea before though.

What's even crazier is that in many languages "chai" means "tea", but as far as I know, in English speaking countries, I think "chai tea" is some sort of Indian tea. While I'm on the subject though, in all languages the word for "tea" is descended from the original two words for tea, "chai" or "tea". In German it's "tee" and in Slavik languages it's "chaj" or some variant there of.

@scottalanmiller I like her, I always liked digging defensive positions. Sounds good to me.

@scottalanmiller said in What does your desk look like?:

@JaredBusch that guy must make a lot of calls.

I thought maybe he was a very busy octopus

@StrongBad said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

Chinese?

No, hillbilly.

@StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I think VMS copied Kildall. C/PM was 1974, VMS was 1977.

Yes, you are correct. In either case, he still at least copied RDOS. What's astonishing to me about the whole thing is we know that people were aware of Unix and its well thought out approach to CLI, or even Multics, et al. I imagine though OpenVMS probably copied RDOS.

I recall reading something many years ago where Bill Gates mentioned the superior command syntax of Unix (after all Microsoft had their own version of Unix, Xenix) but they had to remain mostly-compatible with CP/M for competitive reasons.

@JaredBusch said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

So used to Windows using / for switches on the command line.

The moronic decisions of Gary Kildall and everyone else that decided to copy the command syntax of OpenVMS and RDOS rather than something a bit more logical like Unix. Not to mention busted ass syntax made worse even today with PowerShell... great, commands with hyphens, that's not irritating at all. Maybe let's copy bash or something, oh no let's instead really mess things up even more and invent something worse.

Also with classic DOS, you want to run it in the background? Can't use &, instead && is used as a command separator. Essentially the bad syntax choices made early on made it to where every additional change was equally terrible or made even worse.

@LilAng said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

Hush puppies (not actual dogs)

pfft wimp