Datan0de

AC, or sometimes just "air". I've never heard "aircon", bit I like of like it. I have some British friends. I need to ask them about it.

Thank you. That makes sense.

I tell coworkers "I'm going to go water the plants."

To my American ears, it sounds crude for some reason. I guess we're just so used to less-clear euphemisms like "restroom" or "bathroom". I vacationed in Ireland once, and had to take a minute to get accustomed to the change in term. It only took a moment, though. By the way, "loo" doesn't carry any crude connotation and is just as clear to me, though some Americans might not be as familiar with the word.

Could that be handled through software or a driver?

They're a little dated but wouldn't stand out as particularly odd, at least to me. Then again, my own lexicon is a bit nonstandard.

You're painting with a broad brush. Some Americans are painfully gregarious. Some of us are painfully introverted. The loud, social ones attract all of the attention. The quiet ones hate the nose but are happy to not be noticed.

This is the correct answer. Also, in areas that get heavy snow, we have trucks that drive down roads dispensing salt (mixed with sand, I believe) to reduce ice formation.

When he said "external power supply" he meant "requiring a power connection (molex from the PSU)" as opposed to the drive getting power from the same USB cable that's providing the data connection, which is what most of the USB floppy drives he was comparing with do.

My university had a VAX system, and it was THE social hub for all of us nerds. The last two rows of terminals in the computer lab were referred to as "VAXxer's Row". In retrospect, it was weird having a social computer system where most of the people on it were literally in the same room, but it seemed perfectly natural at the time. It was great! There was an internal BBS. chat, games, UseNet access, etc., etc. I'm still in touch with a few of them, and married to one of them (though that's not how we met).

We were one of the first adopters when cable modems became available in our area. The cable company clearly knew fuck all about network security, so every household in our area was just in a LAN together. I had a firewall program called Black Ice Defense that was hot stuff back then. If suspicious traffic was hitting your machine, it would block it and also give you forensic information including the originating IP address. Someone tried to hack into my computer, and I could watch it happening. Once I was sure of the point of origin, I turned it around. Ironically, they didn't have a firewall at all, so I could literally just browse into their computer. I grabbed a random file from their My Documents folder, mapped their own printer, wrote a nasty message telling them to cut it out, printed out on their printer, and then printed the document I'd grabbed to prove I was serious. It stopped, and I never had to do it again. Felt super cool, but it really wasn't difficult. Just creative. Never did anything malicious or destructive beyond that one time. (And no, I didn't save the file.) Unrelated anecdote: A friend had scored a developer beta version of Windows 2000 and installed it on his PC. Apparently, (I got this second hand so this may not be entirely correct) the ISP assigned DHCP controller to whatever machine on the network was running the highest version of Windows, so for about a week his PC was the one serving IP addresses to his local area before the ISP fixed it.

I love a story with a happy ending!

And my boot disk!

Max Headroom! Also, I would recommend the early '80s series "Whiz Kids" except that it appears to have been lost to time.

Oh wow The Lawnmower Man! I'm a total VR junkie, and one of my guilty pleasures is the cheesy, over the top portrayals of VR in '90s media (even though the gulf between the fantasy portrayals and the reality of the time created such a sense of unmet expectations that I think it STILL taints the public perception of VR 30 years later). TLM and the TV series VR5 are wacky fun. I'd forgotten about Disclosure. Saw it in the theater but don't remember much about it. I should rewatch it.

SETEC ASTRONOMY!

This! Between archive.org (which is a national treasure) and YouTube, I love watching random episodes of Computer Chronicles. Great historical perspective, and I'm old enough to remember some of the things they talk about firsthand.

Damn, that does suck. I'm sorry. My mom has to sign out when she leaves and sign back in when she returns, and if course visitors have to sign in/out. Finding a place that would let her keep her dogs was an absolute requirement for her. I think she got lucky with this place.

We're in Florida. My point is that while yes, some facilities are shit holes, there are plenty of good ones out there, and not just for the super rich. Like anything, there's good and there's bad. The default assumption by a lot of people commenting here that it's better to die alone on your kitchen floor than to be in a care facility causes a lot of needless suffering. My mom had that same attitude until my sister and I pressured her to at least check a few places out. She's glad we did.

My mom just moved into an assisted living facility a few months ago. It's like a freaking resort. I'm almost envious. If you think death is better than assisted living, you either haven't looked at all of the assisted living options or your life is awful. Also, assisted living doesn't mean "can't wipe your own ass." My mom has memory issues, but she gets along fine, still drives, takes care of her dogs, and is social.

We desperately need laws like the GDPR in the UK.

"move the laundry to the dryer"

I've never heard of such things, and never heard of them being necessary. We always put the "do not disturb" sign in the outside of the door for the entirety of the stay, and if it's a cheap hotel/motel I don't usually leave my laptop in the room, but that's the extent of my precautions. Never had a problem, and don't personally know anyone who's ever had a problem.

I can, bit probably less than half of our generation can.

Almost unheard of. Our long distance rail system is almost entirely freight oriented. You *can* cross the country by rail, but it's prohibitively expensive, slow, and extremely niche. Sadly, even local commuter rail is only really a thing in a handful of cities. Seattle has a *fantastic* commuter rail system, and after experiencing it I suddenly realized how deficient most of the rest of the country is.

I love the skin. My wife doesn't care for it, so if we're both eating baked potatoes I'll eat her skin, too. (Disturbing ambiguity intended.) :-D

LOL! No. She had an MRI done previously and had gotten the results on a CD. A different doctor needed to see the results, so we copied the disk to hard drive before she gave the second doc the disc. She never got the disc back, but a third doc wanted to see the results also, and apparently they can't accept flash drives. (Presumably for HIPAA/security reasons)

Thank you. I've seen this a million times but it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Absolutely love it.

The first time I ever camped out for tickets was for U2 during the Joshua Tree tour. My older sister was the big driver behind it, but she let me come along. Camping out was great until the sprinkler system started up, but the concert was fantastic and worth getting damp in the middle of the night. My favorite U2 songs songs are probably "Where the Streets Have No Names" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". I wasn't bothered at all when they pushed out an album for free, but I totally understand the people who were pissed about it

Not obscure, but the transporter accident scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture gave me nightmares. I rewatched the movie a few years ago and was surprised that my heart was racing as it approached that scene. Poltergeist also scared the hell out of me. I saw it in the theater was definitely too young.

Yup! Messy but fun. The cellophane is critical!

We did it and it worked! They were a bit messier than actual popsicles, but they were good and it was fun.

Family and friends all had unch together at my favorite restaurant, then we went to the Replay Museum, an awesome classic arcade in our area where you pay an admission fee and then all the games are free to play. It was fantastic, and we did the same thing again a couple years ago.

Yup. I did that just this morning.

Life: You're doing it right!

I'm the past year, I've discovered a secret. I'm in my 50s. No kids, but been happily married to a girl I met freshman year of college for just shy of 30 years, own a home with my poly family that we designed ourselves, I'm politically active, and have had a successful professional career with the same Fortune 500 company since the Clinton administration. I also have green hair, a bunch of tattoos (most of which I've gotten in the last 10 years), play video games every single day, and am posting this comment while also playing D&D with my friends and family. I love cheesy '80s sci-fi and fantasy movies (Tubi is your friend!), Invader Zim (one of my partners and I have paired Gir tattoos), and Lucky Charms. So what's the secret? I realized that the thing that most consistently and reliably brings me pure joy is fulfilling the dreams and wishes of 9-14 year old me. Sometimes it's a big thing, like getting an arcade machine with 1200+ games from my family for Christmas/birthday. But usually it's little things, like watching a movie I didn't get to see as a kid or re-watching a cartoon I loved as a kid. The other day I spent the evening playing games on a Commodore 64 Ultimate while watching Chopping Mall and was in heaven.

I'm an old school techie in a tech savvy household. There's a part of our attic that we call CompUSA because it's packed with all the latest technology from the early '90s. Last month, one of my partners had some MRI results that she needed to take to a different doctor. Of course, the doctors use old tech and needed it on a CD, so sure asked if I could burn it for her. I have several DVD/Blu-Ray/M-Disc burners, so I figured it would be trivial. What I didn't count on was that somehow I've lost the enormous supply of blank CDs I used to have. I have plenty of all of the other optical media, but plain old CDs? Not so much. After tearing apart the attic and two other rooms, at the bottom of the very last box I could find that *might* have a blank CD I managed to find exactly one. We ordered a spindle just in case.

Part of my job involves regularly interacting with university graduates starting professional careers who were born after 9/11. I try not to think about the fact that I have concert T-shirts that are over a decade older than they are.

I'm only a handful of years younger than you, but videogames are a part of who I am. It's a fuzzy memory, but I think I remember the first time I ever played a videogame. I was maybe 6 or 7. A dinner near our house installed a Pong machine, and my dad showed me how to play. I was terrible at it. Not long after, Space Invaders came out. Of course, initially I was terrible at that too, but I was also completely hooked. The growth and development of videogames parallels my own life, and my love for them has never faded a bit. I got an Atari, then later a Commodore 64, never passed up an opportunity to go to an arcade, got into PC gaming, and more recently VR gaming. I had several other consoles along the way, and still own all of them. Last month, my family got me an early Christmas present: an arcade cabinet with 2000+ games built in. It's my second arcade machine (Terminator 2 is the other one). For me, games have been both my core entertainment when I'm alone as well as a social focus. As a kid, my friends and I talked about games constantly. Today, my family is all gamers to varying degrees, and we have a server set up that hosts 7 Days to Die along with some other games that we play together. Oh, and I have a Space Invader tattoo to commemorate the start of it all.

I wish I'd known about EWS! That would've been fun. I actually got to put my familiarity with OS/2 to use at work precisely once, helping with an issue on a backup server that ran it.

Ouch. I know that by computer standards it's ancient history now, but as someone who was hardcore Team OS/2 back in the day, to see someone who's a techie but has never heard of it hurts a bit. How hardcore was I? I had two cats named Merlin and APAR. Merlin wasn't named after the wizard. He was makes after the internal IBM project name for OS/2 versión 4. APAR is an acronym for "Authorized Program Analysis Report", the internal IBM-speak for aa software bug. I have never worked for IBM. I have a shelf of old software in the next room over from where I am right now that includes the full retail box sets for OS/2 V2, v3, and v4, along with a couple of unopened retail boxes of PS DOS 2000 that I salvaged from work. OS/2 was advertised as "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows" and it actually was. More stable, better memory management, true multitasking, a more powerful command line, and a nifty built in scripting language called REXX. However, it has two critical things going against it. It never got the market share or mind share of Windows, and as a result it didn't get the software or driver support that Windows got. And also, while it could do things that Windows couldn't dream of at the time (like run Command & Conquer and X-Wing simultaneously), running Windows programs on it required an insane amount of tweaking of settings, and every program needed its own configuration. That was great for people who love that sort of thing and that level of control, but a nightmare for someone who just wanted to play cool games. Despite being put out by a major tech company, it struck me as having a similar "vibe" behind it that later showed up in a more pure form in Linux. When IBM went in hard on supporting and contributing to Linux, I wasn't the least bit surprised.

Correct. Originally. Microsoft was a partner with IBM on OS/2, then Gates decided "screw it" and announced Windows. Then, if course, they had to start actually making it.

Do not assume that because someone is a police officer they're proficient with firearms or even cognizant of basic gun safety. I personally watched a cop hold a firearm under his arm to free his hand up while he managed paperwork during a traffic stop. It was in a residential neighborhood, so this clown has a loaded gun under his arm with the barrel pointing at a house behind him. He was unaware that it was loaded and hadn't even checked to see if the safety was on. (It was.)

Not at all. I live less than 2 hours from Orlando, but other than a handful of times when a friend who works for Disney got a bunch of us in for free, I've only been once or twice in the last 25 years. On the other hand, we have annual passes for Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure, and go there a few times a year. Definitely our favorite Florida parks, and much, much cheaper than Disney as well! Closer to home, Busch Gardens is local for us. We attend Howl-o-Scream, their excellent Halloween event, every year, and maybe go during normal operation once every year or two.

More than one!

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are most common. Supper seemed to be used roughly as often as dinner when I was a kid, but it's less common now. Among my circle of friends, "second breakfast" is perfectly acceptable and common. Oh, and a meal that takes the place of both breakfast and lunch is called "brunch" here. I suspect you use the term as well but don't want to make assumptions.

Your dog and my brother have a lot in common.

Your dog and my brother have a lot on common.

This is really weird, but I feel the need to share. Without getting into detail, when the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life happened, I was in an odd state where after the first wave of grief I was strangely calm, but knew that in a few hours at most I was going to be a complete basket case. I was with my family, who basically had me on suicide watch, and we were on our way home, but we were all starving, emotionally drained, and in desperate need of comfort food. I pointed out Waffle House, and we pulled in. The waitress came up and asked how we were doing, and in my dissociated state I cheerfully answered "Today is the worst day of my life. Can I get a double order of hashbrowns scattered, covered, smothered, chunked, capped, and diced?" (For those who don't know, that's Waffle House speak for a large order with specific selections from the WIDE array of customization options they offer.) I honestly don't remember anything after that other than the food was delicious and exactly what I needed. For a while, I used to make a point of going to Waffle House on the anniversary of that day. Fortunately, the association didn't room WH for me. Kind of the opposite, in fact.

Beautifully put. My only criticism is the insufficient praise for their hashbrowns.