Grab a few usb sticks and put different images on them to try some different OS’s. Get a feel for how easy they are to install / config / use.

Then put your favorite on your internal drive, and maybe keep a couple of specialized sticks for whatever: troubleshooting, browsing, streaming, gaming, office…

The processor is just cold!

You’re gonna love what’s happening in the kernel!

All substantially less likely to make me think of condoms

Coworker loves extensive code reviews flagging every slight deviation from her preferred patterns but literally cries if pressed on why the change is necessary.

Constantly criticizing and nitpicking but can’t actually point to a firm technical reason. “I just don’t feel comfortable…”

Just posturing to present an appearance of technical authority. Tries to badmouth and backstab challengers, doing more harm to herself than anyone else in the process.

Probably projecting, but I’ve heard enough about her family and upbringing to believe it’s internalized abuse. At the time she was moving back in with her parents , which I think was her falling back into the clutches of her abuser, exacerbating her feelings of vulnerability.

Just trying to be assertive snd protect her autonomy. I did my best to get along and shielded her from consequences.

But I don’t nearly have the energy to deal with it every day. Switched teams. Life is better. Hope she’s found her footing.

1940: “These mechanical monstrosities lack the intuitive check of a human mind. A mathematician can spot a stray digit through reason; a machine will blindly process an error to its conclusion. We are trading the elegance of thought for a noisy, fallible crate of glass and wire.”

1950: “Direct control is the only honest way to command a machine. If you cannot visualize the specific vacuum tube you are firing, you aren’t truly programming. To delegate this to any intermediary is to invite a loss of precision that the hardware simply cannot afford.”

1955: “These ‘mnemonics’ are a crutch for the lazy. By using words instead of addresses, the programmer loses the vital ‘feel’ for memory layout. We are seeing a five-fold decrease in efficiency; no automated assembler can ever match the tight, hand-calculated loops of a master of bits.”

1965: “Compilers are the death of performance. These languages allow ‘programmers’ who don’t even understand the CPU architecture to bloat memory with generic subroutines. Software is becoming a black box—impenetrable, unoptimized, and dangerously detached from the reality of the silicon.”

UI’s peaked with the CLI. It’s all been downhill from there

I’m fairly sure this isn’t something human brains can do

No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.

And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.

After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.

We’re like a family, see.

LAN tester.

I thought of it as fancy electrician / network equipment. Not anymore. Now it’s basic troubleshooting / procedure.

On a particularly frustrating switch installation, I picked one up for like $20 on Amazon, and it’s made me much less annoyed by network changes.

For context, I’m one of those people who hoards any electronic bits that might prove useful on a hobby project later, so lots of old patch cables and cable reels with unknown breaks, so maybe a LAN tester is really only worth it for others like that, but I’d recommend it to any level of tech enthusiast at least.