Yeah, I started ripping my own CDs to MP3 early on in the game and quickly realized that putting my collection in Apple's hands would not let me retain control of my collection. That was back in the days of the white iPod. I currently use git annex to keep my collection synchronized across two computers and my android phone. That mostly seems to work, although the android client does seem to be a bit flaky.

...by writing a simple page and putting it under load on a Sun E4500... which was the front end of our dot-com's website. We were only invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, thankfully...

Stores information and processes it in the same place? You mean like every other computer ever?

Just fifteen minutes ago I realized that my script to refactor the primary file server (newly converted to ZFS) into more sensible datasets had an irritating detail wrong (a path element was being duplicated in some paths).

I said to myself "oh, I'll just roll that whole thing back to the snapshot I made 30 minutes ago".

Then I go "zfs list -t snapshot" and discover that my snapshot was holding onto 0 GB because I forgot the -r switch to make the snapshot recursive.

Oh, well. By some impossible-to-separate mixture of good management and good fortune, it turns out I had a set of (different) snapshots from the last two days covering all datasets in questions. I lost very little work (only scripts were executed against these datasets and I still have all the scripts).

My real screw up?

Back in my second co-op workterm job, I managed not to notice that a system I was backing up changed the order of the listed drives between two very similar screen requests that I made almost immediately one after the other. Unfortunately, on the second pass I selected the active system drive as the recipient of the system backup, picking from the position in the menu where the desired destination drive had appeared moments before.

I had become accustomed to my home system being deterministic in the order it listed things. My bad.

This is back at the very beginnings of the 4.77 MHz era, so my PC was actually not yet what we now know as a "PC" (its father had an S-100, and its mother had a itty-bitty CRT).

Thirty years later I still can't type dd of=/dev/ada3 without making three trips to the metaphorical bathroom.

Whenever I type a disk-level dd command, I leave the sudo off, until after the third proof-read and several console consultations in which at least two different programs give me the same view of the drive name.

In dollar costs I couldn't say. In psychic cost, it's indelibly etched onto my permanent record.

I had a co-worker once (EEng) who claimed that as a junior intern during the late 1990s back when laser gear for fiber optics was all the rage, he routinely fried extremely delicate $2000 DUTs while the old hands just shrugged their shoulders. Dotcom dollars. Who really gave a fuck? It was considered barely worse than ruining a nice chair.

A good workmanlike book? It is to SF what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, and one of the greatest pieces of world creation ever written.

Smoke plus meat not hard. Og do great!

Funnily enough at the satellite company I worked for that one time, one of the older guys there mentioned how he almost lost a satellite once by logging in to his own account and issuing a maneuver command to the satellite. Problem was the satellite was expecting times in GMT and got them in MST. Took them days to get it oriented correctly again.

Now the programmers in the audience could probably think of like 10 different specific things that could be coded into the system to prevent that from happening, but this company didn't. Which really isn't too surprising. I asked one of the devs on the ground systems team if the ground systems was using GMT or UTC. His answer was "What's the difference?" I was able to infer from his answer that it was most likely GMT, and that did appear to be the case. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the system there was presumably some piece of code written by an Indian contractor with a math degree adjusting times for leap seconds, but it wasn't in any code that anyone knew about.

The early history of that company read like a Monty Python sketch. The first satellite exploded on the launch pad. The second satellite fell over and then exploded. The third satellite burned down, fell over, exploded and then sank into the swamp. The forth satellite got into orbit and was promptly bricked by sending the wrong version of Windows(!) to it. To be fair they only had to do that because they launched it with the wrong version of Windows(!!) in the first place. One would think that ANY version of Windows would be the wrong version of Windows to shoot into space, but that's why you're not the head of a billion dollar satellite company.

Was curious what an apparently undocumented feature on the login page did. Turns out what it did was crash the mainframe. Go figure. You'd think they'd take that shit off the login page, but apparently no one had ever been so curious as to explore it before. Which says a lot about that uni, now that I think about it. Also, once trash talked a uni in a story on a news blag website. Yeah, those were the days...

Mostly I make my career out of fixing other people's tech mistakes. Which is not something that uni taught me how to do. Man I'm glad I got out of that place before I ran up any significant student debt. Did I mention I trash talked a uni on a news blag website?

In America, we have 7500 rebate. In addition, most states have another 1-3K rebate.

Yeah. It looks like a merger of the Aztec and Pacer. HORRIBLE design. I think that Pacer will end up outselling it because it looks so horrible.

e-golf does not HVAC their batteries properly. To keep their costs down, they went with LARGE cells, which means that you will have un-even heating. As such, ever time that you try to fast charge it, you will be killing the lifetime. However, in your case, you are in luck. There are FEWER than 20 fast chargers in ALL OF AMERICA that the e-golf can use. As such, you will have to wait 4-6 hours for a charge.

What is there to like about the e-golf? Absolutely NOTHING.

Tesla cars sell great in Norway. And they, along with others living in Mn, speak volumes about how decent the car does in winter (for starters, the weight is balanced, not over the front wheels).

e-golf is ugly, slow, bad design on the battery (which means that they will not last), etc. etc. etc. VW could not design an electric car even though their life depends on it. Hopefully, Bently will do the job right since the rest of VW just plain sux.

The prius is NOT an EV. It is a POS hybrid.

and yet, everybody that owns EVs (real EVs, not hybrids like the volt or the I3), walk away from ICE cars. Why? Because they are far less hassles than ICE cars. Rare stops at charging stations. Just plug-in at night time and go.