14.4 modems were common in 1994, and 28.8 was common by 1995.
Common, yes. Inexpensive, no. Not for a college student who got kicked out of the university and worked three years as a restaurant cook. Most of my hardware were hand me downs from people who upgraded their PCs. Once I got my technical career started in software testing, I was able to start custom building PCs.
Cool stuff indeed, but I would humbly request that you not call 1994 "pre-internet".
The Internet didn't become popular with the public at large until 1995. I had my first dial-up UNIX account and browsed the Internet with Lynx in 1995. For me, anything before 1995 is pre-Internet.
That was my 10th year on the internet!
Anything that suddenly becomes popular with the public at large has probably been around for at least ten years or more. Thanks for confirming what everyone else already knows.
Discovering usenet in the mid 80's was... interesting.
I ran a WildCat! BBS on an old IBM AT computer with a 2400 baud modem during 1994-95 school year when I was at the university. TradeWars and Legends of The Red Dragon (LOTRD) were my favorite DOOR games. I was planning to build my BBS empire until something called the Internet came along. I was a dot com bust before there was dot coms to go bust.
The only thing I ever brought from Staples was an Ergotron Neo-Flex monitor stand that I had to special order as the local stores didn't carry it and was less expensive than ordering through Amazon at the time (circa 2012).
You forgot to include the chapters on
350#, 1500 calories a day
Laid off two years
Gov't it job
No plans to write about my weight in the near future. Being laid off for two years will in the essay about the Great Recession. My current job is off limits until such time I'm no longer working there and a few years have passed.
They are all self published books by the way.
Self-published ebooks that make me money. Surprisingly,
my original essays sell better than my previously published short stories in anthologies and magazines.
If you're making a reference to playing card games in the wee hours, I got off work at midnight from a restaurant job and it took several hours to unwind. My college roommates and I didn't have classes until noon. These days I can't stay up late because I get up at 4:30AM to start work at 7:00AM in government IT.
#1 I am Not a Troll l
#2 I am a Troll
#3 My Life as a Liar
Not quite. One essay will be about my software testing internship in 1997 at Fujitsu's WorldsAway virtual world. Several essays on being a video game tester and lead video game tester at Acclode/Infogrames/Atari (same, different owner, multiple personality disorders). A longer essay on testing the Sony Reader in 2005. Of course, an essay on the Great Recession when I was out of work for two years (2009-10), unemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filing for Chapter Seven bankruptcy. And, for shakes and giggles, an essay on how I love to troll the trolls on Slashdot.;)
I'm not a troll. I'm just someone who loves to troll
On your permanent record now, troll.
Not yet. I'm working on a Python script to scrape my ~8,000 comments from Slashdot. When I publicly release the script on GitHub, everyone can have access my comments — or their own.
In fact your weird over-reaction is surely why the guy replies to you,,,
The blog post came a month after the asshat started hounding me on Slashdot. I think he stopped going after me because I kept posting my blog link to every comment he made to me — and thanking him for the increased ad revenues.
,,,just the way the weird kid in 9th grade gets made fun of too.
I graduated from the eighth grade, skipped high school,
went to community college, and got kicked out of the university in my first year for playing too much Magic: The Gathering card game into the wee hours. So I don't know what happens in high school. Everyone in college behaved like adults.
When I asserted my First and Second Amendment rights in a Slashdot discussion, some asshat went on and on and on for six weeks about how I threatened to shoot him. Never mind that neither amendment gave me a right to shoot him and I was using named account with a link to my website that even the dumbest FBI agent could figure out who I was. The asshat later claimed that I was bullying him by writing up a blog post and posting the link (see below) when he was just "joking" about the false accusation that I threatened to shoot him. I'm still waiting for the asshat to make a snarky comment on my blog so I can capture the IP address and report him to the FBI.
During my tour through college in the early 1990's, I always asked my roommates who wanted to have cable TV. Everyone raised their hands. I then asked who wants to pay for cable TV. Everyone put their hands down. We never had cable TV.
During my second tour through college after the dot com bust, I had my own apartment and still couldn't get cable TV.
Not that I couldn't afford to get cable. It's just Comcast refused to open an account unless I went down to the office to prove I wasn't the last tenant who didn't pay the bill. Nearly 12 years later, I still don't have cable TV.
Another obscure book that is only available in hardback and just as expensive as a traditional programming door stopper. Adding this one to my list. Thanks!
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez. The author and his two engineers leave the startup they worked at to create a startup at Y Combinator to create a better version of the Digg toolbar (remember toolbars?) for Google advertisers in 2010. I'm at the part where they get served with an intellectual property lawsuit, as one of the engineers wrote half of the code base at old startup. Fun times.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV.
There are level-entry tech jobs that start off at minimum wage ($10 per hour).
I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
For the nation wide project I'm working on, all the system admins are getting paid $25 per hour and computer engineers get $40 per hour. Doesn't matter where you live. So the people who telecommute from the hills are making out like bandits. However, I'm halfway through a five-year contract, I get full benefit package with month of PTO (Paid Time Off), and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus
You have to make grave compromises with your lifestyle [...]
Like what for example?
[...] PLUS have the government distort the rental market for you.
The rent control law applies only to large apartment complexes that were built before 1978. My particular apartment complex is 50-years-old. I got a great deal in 2005: $810 per month, $199 deposit and a free microwave. My current rent is $1466 per month and $300 below market rate after five years of rent increases. After the original owners sold out six years ago, three corporate owners tried to squeeze out as much money as possible. The first two slapped on paint, redid the landscape and charged "luxury" rates. Third one did the same but had to upgrade the apartments to keep up with the brand new apartment complex down the street. Funny thing is that this 50-year-old apartment complex has the same market rate as the brand new apartment complex and both have a 50% occupancy rate as the rental market is softening. Under free market economics, the older apartment complex should reduced rent to stay competitive with the new apartment complex. That's not happening. Must be communism.
$25 an hour isn't much for living in California though. That's getting borderline poverty level.
I live a modest lifestyle, save 20% of my income and have a rent-controlled studio apartment in Silicon Valley. If I moved to the Sacramento or the Central Valley, things are more affordable. If you think I have it rough, there are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who only make minimum wage ($10 per hour). Not everyone around here is a newly minted millionaire.
And that poor unemployed slob who really wants to come back to work? Well, he "doesn't have the skills".
For the two years (2009-10) I was out of work, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for anything else. I didn't listen to them. I got a weekend job for a moving company, working 20 hours per month for six months. The day after my Chapter Seven bankruptcy got finalized, I got a new fulltime job. I spent the next two years working seven days a week to rebuild my finances. As the economy got better, so did the jobs that got offered to me. Sometime you just have to hang in there until things get better.
Fortunately when the mandate to fill the toxic troll quota was handed down, it included mandatory time off for toxic trolls, otherwise everyone else would resign.
Why aren't you're taking your mandatory time off then?
You would think the steadily dropping comment participation would be a hint to the owners that the place needs some serious attention... but it looks very much like they're just squeezing the dishrag dry. It's beyond benign neglect and well into pernicious decay.
The flipside is that not many good articles are being submitted for consideration. Most are usually a variation of something that got posted the week before. Unique content is probably harder to find since people prefer to run with the herd than stand out. I'm keeping my eye out for stuff that I like to read that others might want to read and discuss.
This is why I'm in IT support. My employment contracts for 10+ years have prohibited me from working overtime. My current job gives me 20 days of PTO (Paid Time Off) per year, and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
14.4 modems were common in 1994, and 28.8 was common by 1995.
Common, yes. Inexpensive, no. Not for a college student who got kicked out of the university and worked three years as a restaurant cook. Most of my hardware were hand me downs from people who upgraded their PCs. Once I got my technical career started in software testing, I was able to start custom building PCs.
Cool stuff indeed, but I would humbly request that you not call 1994 "pre-internet".
The Internet didn't become popular with the public at large until 1995. I had my first dial-up UNIX account and browsed the Internet with Lynx in 1995. For me, anything before 1995 is pre-Internet.
That was my 10th year on the internet!
Anything that suddenly becomes popular with the public at large has probably been around for at least ten years or more. Thanks for confirming what everyone else already knows.
Discovering usenet in the mid 80's was... interesting.
So much ASCII porn, so little time.
I ran a WildCat! BBS on an old IBM AT computer with a 2400 baud modem during 1994-95 school year when I was at the university. TradeWars and Legends of The Red Dragon (LOTRD) were my favorite DOOR games. I was planning to build my BBS empire until something called the Internet came along. I was a dot com bust before there was dot coms to go bust.
Getting old is remembering when the floor-to-ceiling walls weren't made out off glass and you could bang your secretary on the desk with some privacy.
The only thing I ever brought from Staples was an Ergotron Neo-Flex monitor stand that I had to special order as the local stores didn't carry it and was less expensive than ordering through Amazon at the time (circa 2012).
You forgot to include the chapters on
350#, 1500 calories a day
Laid off two years
Gov't it job
No plans to write about my weight in the near future. Being laid off for two years will in the essay about the Great Recession. My current job is off limits until such time I'm no longer working there and a few years have passed.
They are all self published books by the way.
Self-published ebooks that make me money. Surprisingly, my original essays sell better than my previously published short stories in anthologies and magazines.
Everyone?
If you're making a reference to playing card games in the wee hours, I got off work at midnight from a restaurant job and it took several hours to unwind. My college roommates and I didn't have classes until noon. These days I can't stay up late because I get up at 4:30AM to start work at 7:00AM in government IT.
Published in three volumes!
#1 I am Not a Troll
l #2 I am a Troll
#3 My Life as a Liar
Not quite. One essay will be about my software testing internship in 1997 at Fujitsu's WorldsAway virtual world. Several essays on being a video game tester and lead video game tester at Acclode/Infogrames/Atari (same, different owner, multiple personality disorders). A longer essay on testing the Sony Reader in 2005. Of course, an essay on the Great Recession when I was out of work for two years (2009-10), unemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filing for Chapter Seven bankruptcy. And, for shakes and giggles, an essay on how I love to troll the trolls on Slashdot. ;)
Flaming narcissist downloads his posting history onto a pen drive and masturbates with it. So appropriate.
Reference materials for my Silicon Valley memoir.
I'm not a troll. I'm just someone who loves to troll
On your permanent record now, troll.
Not yet. I'm working on a Python script to scrape my ~8,000 comments from Slashdot. When I publicly release the script on GitHub, everyone can have access my comments — or their own.
Cool story, troll. Keep trolling, you're hilarious.
I'm not a troll. I'm just someone who loves to troll the trolls on Slashdot. Being doing that for years.
In fact your weird over-reaction is surely why the guy replies to you,,,
The blog post came a month after the asshat started hounding me on Slashdot. I think he stopped going after me because I kept posting my blog link to every comment he made to me — and thanking him for the increased ad revenues.
,,,just the way the weird kid in 9th grade gets made fun of too.
I graduated from the eighth grade, skipped high school, went to community college, and got kicked out of the university in my first year for playing too much Magic: The Gathering card game into the wee hours. So I don't know what happens in high school. Everyone in college behaved like adults.
When I asserted my First and Second Amendment rights in a Slashdot discussion, some asshat went on and on and on for six weeks about how I threatened to shoot him. Never mind that neither amendment gave me a right to shoot him and I was using named account with a link to my website that even the dumbest FBI agent could figure out who I was. The asshat later claimed that I was bullying him by writing up a blog post and posting the link (see below) when he was just "joking" about the false accusation that I threatened to shoot him. I'm still waiting for the asshat to make a snarky comment on my blog so I can capture the IP address and report him to the FBI.
https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/2017/03/21/have-i-threatened-to-shoot-you-today/
Wow, great story. You must be a lot of fun at parties.
I made 17 dozen deviled eggs one holiday season. Nothing impresses a woman than a man's deviled eggs. ;)
During my tour through college in the early 1990's, I always asked my roommates who wanted to have cable TV. Everyone raised their hands. I then asked who wants to pay for cable TV. Everyone put their hands down. We never had cable TV.
During my second tour through college after the dot com bust, I had my own apartment and still couldn't get cable TV. Not that I couldn't afford to get cable. It's just Comcast refused to open an account unless I went down to the office to prove I wasn't the last tenant who didn't pay the bill. Nearly 12 years later, I still don't have cable TV.
Another obscure book that is only available in hardback and just as expensive as a traditional programming door stopper. Adding this one to my list. Thanks!
I'm reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez. The author and his two engineers leave the startup they worked at to create a startup at Y Combinator to create a better version of the Digg toolbar (remember toolbars?) for Google advertisers in 2010. I'm at the part where they get served with an intellectual property lawsuit, as one of the engineers wrote half of the code base at old startup. Fun times.
I doubt this book will replace Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan as my favorite Silicon Valley startup book.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV.
There are level-entry tech jobs that start off at minimum wage ($10 per hour).
I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
For the nation wide project I'm working on, all the system admins are getting paid $25 per hour and computer engineers get $40 per hour. Doesn't matter where you live. So the people who telecommute from the hills are making out like bandits. However, I'm halfway through a five-year contract, I get full benefit package with month of PTO (Paid Time Off), and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus
You have to make grave compromises with your lifestyle [...]
Like what for example?
[...] PLUS have the government distort the rental market for you.
The rent control law applies only to large apartment complexes that were built before 1978. My particular apartment complex is 50-years-old. I got a great deal in 2005: $810 per month, $199 deposit and a free microwave. My current rent is $1466 per month and $300 below market rate after five years of rent increases. After the original owners sold out six years ago, three corporate owners tried to squeeze out as much money as possible. The first two slapped on paint, redid the landscape and charged "luxury" rates. Third one did the same but had to upgrade the apartments to keep up with the brand new apartment complex down the street. Funny thing is that this 50-year-old apartment complex has the same market rate as the brand new apartment complex and both have a 50% occupancy rate as the rental market is softening. Under free market economics, the older apartment complex should reduced rent to stay competitive with the new apartment complex. That's not happening. Must be communism.
$25 an hour isn't much for living in California though. That's getting borderline poverty level.
I live a modest lifestyle, save 20% of my income and have a rent-controlled studio apartment in Silicon Valley. If I moved to the Sacramento or the Central Valley, things are more affordable. If you think I have it rough, there are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who only make minimum wage ($10 per hour). Not everyone around here is a newly minted millionaire.
And that poor unemployed slob who really wants to come back to work? Well, he "doesn't have the skills" .
For the two years (2009-10) I was out of work, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for anything else. I didn't listen to them. I got a weekend job for a moving company, working 20 hours per month for six months. The day after my Chapter Seven bankruptcy got finalized, I got a new fulltime job. I spent the next two years working seven days a week to rebuild my finances. As the economy got better, so did the jobs that got offered to me. Sometime you just have to hang in there until things get better.
Maybe the government should pay them to break windows to generate jobs for glaziers.
Trump is working on that one.
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CoverStory-Blitt-Trump-Golf-1200x630-1490910856.jpg
Fortunately when the mandate to fill the toxic troll quota was handed down, it included mandatory time off for toxic trolls, otherwise everyone else would resign.
Why aren't you're taking your mandatory time off then?
You would think the steadily dropping comment participation would be a hint to the owners that the place needs some serious attention... but it looks very much like they're just squeezing the dishrag dry. It's beyond benign neglect and well into pernicious decay.
The flipside is that not many good articles are being submitted for consideration. Most are usually a variation of something that got posted the week before. Unique content is probably harder to find since people prefer to run with the herd than stand out. I'm keeping my eye out for stuff that I like to read that others might want to read and discuss.
This is why I'm in IT support. My employment contracts for 10+ years have prohibited me from working overtime. My current job gives me 20 days of PTO (Paid Time Off) per year, and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus.