A few years ago I went to visit my mom around Christmas, I picked her up and we were heading over to my grandmas. On the way, while my 1 year old is screaming in the back seat, she asked if she could run into a store on the way.

When we got to my grandmas she gave me the bag that she had just bought, store logo on it and everything, no hiding a thing, that contained 1 roll of camouflage themed duct tape, and a pack of trash bags.

I had told her earlier in the year that I was using trash bags and duct tape to block the windows in my garage while I was doing some renovations in there, and so she got me trash bags and duct tape, almost a year later…

I still appreciate that she got me anything at all and there was at least a thought behind it even if I don’t understand that thought.

The chicken looks pretty cool too, like he’ll steal your wallet and your girl in between puffs before you even finish coughing.

Not your main point but for the past few years I’ve spent half of the months sick. I got a cold 3 weeks ago, everyone else in the house is better, my throat is still halfway swollen shut, my nose is a broken faucet, my heads still filled with helium. I’ll start feeling better just in time for the Christmas party where I’m almost certain to get sick again.

I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me and got a bunch of test done, got a nice ~$800 bill and haven’t been able to get in touch with the doctor since. I missed 2 calls from them about a week after my tests and since has been calling in a couple times a month to find out if there’s something up but I keep getting “the doctor will call you back later”.

I would like to assume the fact that no one is calling me back means I’m don’t have anything seriously wrong, but I still would like to know for certain.

That’s always a possibility especially when every company under the sun is making smart things on a whim for as cheap as possible. I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw an oven.

I have a few random smart things, but before I connect them to the internet I make sure they have a decent api that I can use, block external access from the router and set up a little interface so that I can VPN into my home and control stuff if I need to. So in order for anything to be compromised my whole network would have to be owned. Which is still possible but I trust that a lot more than letting 20 different apps for each device have access to anything in my home.

I can totally see a point in some of the features.

The other day my wife and I got 20 minutes from home before I said “oh shit I don’t know if I turned the oven off”. Turns out I did, but we had to drive home to check. I would have loved to pull up an app that told me it was actually off, or even if I was on be able to turn it off from there.

With that said, it’s not worth all the extra bullshit in my opinion.

At a previous job where I had basically become the manager of my manager and held my department together, I spent 3 months just trying to get a meeting with the guy who had the power to give me a raise.

In that time I found another job and put in my two weeks, my new job paid 90k but for shits and giggle I told them I was getting 130 and asked if they could do any better, they immediately came back with 110 which was almost worse since I was only initally asking for 80. I said no and went on to my new job which was 110% the right call.

Shortly after that they announced that they were selling the company, I heard from my old manager that the sale went through but in the mix that had to drop a good chunk of their clients from my old department (the most profitable one) since I was the only one there who knew how to handle a majority of the work and the only reason they could bring them on was me. I don’t know how it all worked out but the old owner got sued for fudging numbers and is now the current owner.

Last I heard they fumbled keeping my department alive and all of my coworkers got layed off along a lot of other people and the company’s not doing so hot.

I hate apples almost as much as corn on the cob.

The skins always get stuck in between my teeth and it makes me want to use a chainsaw to get it out.

I’m all for skinned apples and uncobbed (decobbed? cobbless?) corn though.

Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn’t doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.

One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn’t find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was “the best language”. So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it’s the best language.

It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.

I later on got my current job because of that leap.

TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.

I’m here for this, I recently found out that I can’t really distinguish shades very well, so pink just looks mostly red and I have a really hard time telling blue from green, but can usually make it out if I look hard enough and get at least 2 guesses.

Either that or my wife got my doctor in on a really intense year long prank.

To a lot of people that’s too much effort for “no reason”.

People care, but not enough to put any effort in whatsoever.

deleted by creator

I generally agree with this, there’s specific circumstances but for the most part its true.

I went from a C# position to PHP, to Python, to perl all with little or no experience with what I was jumping in to. There’s different nuances and the syntax might take a bit to get used to but as long as someone understands the how and why of what their code is doing that can be pretty easily transfer to most other languages. It’s all about the fundamentals.