I was on the phone with our ISP after our internet service went out. The rep asked me if the box had a green light on it - yes - then asked me to plug a light into the same outlet and confirm the power was on. I said, “Look, I understand you have to follow a script, but you literally just asked me to confirm the power light on the box was on. Clearly the power is working.”

Same ISP sends me an email whenever we have a power outage letting me know that our internet might not work when the power is out. (I’ve joked that this email arrives before the ceiling fans have come to a stop.) But when my internet goes down, they’re completely clueless. “Ohhhh it must be that your power is out even though we monitor that closely and aren’t showing a power outage right now!”

I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.

It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.

I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…

I’ve never used Rust, but this definitely reminds me of my days running Slackware on my computers.

Oh, hey, I’d like to run this new package. Great. I’ll need this dependency…and that one…and the one over there…

I know it now has dependency management, but I just couldn’t do it any more. I was tired of worrying about what was going to break. I started with Slackware in the 3.x days, too.

I switched my server to Debian, and I feel like I never have to worry about it any more. Laptop and desktop are both Kubuntu, but they’re going to go to Debian at some point in the near future.

The original thinking was the electoral college could stop any truly disastrous votes. But we’ve seen how that goes! Now we’re stuck with it because it helps one party and would require a constitutional amendment to abolish, and too few people in power are interested in doing what’s right for the country - they’re interested in doing what’s right for their party.

(For another example of the “party first” mentality that has taken over: Washington, DC residents have no vote in Congress. This seems like an obvious thing to fix, give them a two members of the House and two Senators…but whoa, we can’t do that, it would change the balance of power in Congress! Seriously. That’s why DC residents have no real voice in Congress. For clarity, their votes do count for the Presidential election.)

A few weeks ago, I was riding my bicycle on the street I live on, heading for a stop sign, when one of my neighbors driving their SUV passed me, not caring I was stopping at the stop sign. When I’m on my bike, I normally slow down and roll through this sign if it’s safe, but this time, a pickup was coming on the cross street. The neighbor rolled out right in front of the pickup without stopping - she was so intent on passing me that she completely ignored everything else. I even pointed at the truck because I had a feeling she was going to do that. Fortunately, the pickup was going slow enough to stop and avoid a collision. I just shook my head as the people in the pickup waved at me.

“Must Get In Front” is the term cyclists use for drivers that do stupid shit to pass us, only to pull into a driveway or something similar a moment later, instead of just waiting for a few seconds for the situation to resolve itself.

I am often amazed by the aggressively-driven minivans I see. It’s like they’re upset they’re driving a minivan, and taking it out on the rest of us, or something. I don’t know.

I mean, I see plenty of other aggressively-driven vehicles as well, but the minivans always stand out because they seem like pretty much the antithesis of a vehicle you would expect to be driven aggressively. No one is buying a minivan for the performance, handling, or cool factor.

I don’t have anything against minivans - they’re extremely useful vehicles for hauling people or things and reasonably fuel-efficient while doing it.

I have a Kodak Brownie here somewhere. I’ve never tried using it, but it should work - the shutter spring is in place and functional. The mirror for the viewfinder is messed up, too, so I might not be able to frame the shot correctly either.

4:20 p.m., known as 1620 in much of the world.

4:20 is the traditional time to smoke marijuana.

The smaller subs (such as for specific hobbies) do not have the same momentum here on Lemmy. That’s probably why.

I enjoyed the part with the other journalist where he was on the phone with someone who hung up when the reporter pointed out that kids could stop working if their parents made more money. Insane that he was defending that practice.

No argument from me. If nothing else, they were taller, which is better for many documents, web pages, etc.

I’ve ranted about this before, but the lead pilot as a nurse is a bizarre management decision by Janeway. He has two critical jobs when shit hits the fan.

I stayed out of the Star Trek fandoms for years because of this. I’ve always liked Enterprise, and I like the new shows, some more than others, but I’ve enjoyed all of them at least to some extent. I don’t need some jackass telling me why I’m wrong for liking something. (Edit correction - I just couldn’t get into Prodigy. I’m sure it’s great, but it just didn’t work for me.)

I joined a Star Trek Wholesomeposting group on Facebook where belittling the shows or the people that like them is explicitly not allowed. It’s great.

If you were, say, across a solar system from a ship that fired a torpedo at you, you’d have that much more time to maneuver (or fire phasers) to destroy it. So for those maybe it’s really about effective range - you have to be pretty close to the target simply because they’d just step out of the way.

Also, I think it’s a reasonable possibility phasers would lose energy over distance. Otherwise, those missed shots would travel across the galaxy and blow up someone in the Gamma quadrant or something.

Thanks. My wife has an iPhone, but I’m an Android person.

What interface do you use? I have two of our Fire TVs connected to home assistant and can sort of control them (play, start, pause) but is there a way to open different apps and select programs?

The FireTV is great - we added it to a circa 2008 LCD TV (of the dumb variety) we have hanging in the bedroom and got rid of the cable box. Now we just stream whatever we plan to watch. Works great!

I will note the person that originally told me about FireTVs now recommends the Roku stick instead. I haven’t tried those, though.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop looking at memes.

Ah. This just reminded me that one of mine was about to expire. Thanks!