I had a guy busy moving his family across the US when they cancelled remote work. Management decided to do layoffs while they were en route. He was on the list. At the time, I was actively interviewing to GTFO of that place and when we were chatting about work stuff I brought up that a position I saw at one would be perfect for his skill-set. He seemed worried and confused by my insistence that he apply. Anyway, as expected he showed up and they canned him before I could even walk in the door. But he got the other job and ended up loving it.

Pretty much. Maybe worse. I’m not sure how the business survived for so long. That is barely the tip of the iceberg.

I dumped a batch script into a dev’s startup folder that would draw the text effect from The Matrix all over the screen. I thought he’d immediately catch on but apparently he stood up and started yelling about his workstation being hacked.

When I worked at an MSP in early 2000s they would “prank” new hires with a site that did this. It would keep creating popups so you couldn’t close them. That stopped after customers heard it. More horrid graphical “pranks” replaced it of course.

Gentoo is fantastic for learning. It forced me to get intimate with internals I had no exposure to before. And I learned a lot of little tricks from it that accelerated my career. Or at least made it easier.

I’d try to find something a bit more beefy if you plan on compiling almost everything. And once you get it where you like it, take a backup or system image you can restore to. Because when it breaks, it’ll be a lot less painful to start over.

My old Thinkpads and even my first iPad had SIM slots. I kinda miss that as it’d be much more handy now. LTE and the precursors were painful to use at the time.

Trump softened his stance on China tariffs and admitted he wasn’t going to fire Powell. Market went up right after that.

Audio gear. Car parts. Laptop. All were due for an upgrade anyway.