Sure sounds a lot like the stuff I've been reading while doing a new deep dive into the work of W. Edwards Deming via his books (Out of the Crisis and The New Economics), the podcast of The Deming Institute, and other related books.

Similarly to the parent I learned to program about 33 years ago in junior high. We had a couple of different "computer skill" tracks available which included a keyboarding (touch typing [PAWS] and math games [Math Blaster]) starting in second or third grade (can't quite remember anymore) and later programming (in BASIC taught by one of the math instructors), and a skills class which taught word processing and spreadsheet type skills. These were all taught in one of the computer labs on our campus using the Apple IIe. In high school they started offering an AP (optional) Computer Science course, also taught by one of the math instructors, which used Pascal. I didn't have a computer at home, but had access to various machines (Apple IIc and PCs) at friends' homes until my freshman year in HS when I got my first computer of my own as a birthday gift (and brief access over a summer to a PC at home while the school was remodeling the library and sent all the computer equipment home with teachers [my mom was one]).

Once I got a computer of my own I got really into this stuff. I got onto the internet (through a BBS style service which was one of the many Free-nets which existed around the country at the time). I ended up sticking with Pascal (and then Delphi) for a while. Wrote programs for other classes. Learned how to work with Japanese text input and all sorts of other things. Which eventually landed me an internship working for a local university programming in Java and Tcl/Tk (which I learned on the job) and switching my major at the university I'd applied to from biology to something more like computational biology (though I eventually dropped out before graduating to work for the university where I had been an intern).

So I definitely feel like there was value in having it available as an option for me, but I feel like I also got a lot of value from all the other things my school offered (Japanese, Design, Drafting, Photography) and the experiences I had available to me out side of school (like getting pulled out of school for a month to work on a film shoot as crew or on a TV show for a summer).

The thing which seems to be missing in education today is any sort of attempt at helping students try and find the particular niche in which they are interested and using that to build out some kind of base to everything else. Cause as we probably all know here everything is deeply intertwingled (you suck macos spell check how do you not know that intertwingled is a word :kick:).

You sound a lot like W. Edwards Deming. He was a big proponent of figuring out ways to help the business serve its customers better (and try to continually improve how the business was run). Though I found his particular focus on how management is more responsible for the function of an organization than anything the individual workers can ever be responsible for quite interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Out of curiosity what is Minion and where does it come from?

Not to say I'm a fan of the current copyright regime but if we were going to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for what he was doing then all the AI companies have a lot of explaining to do.

I've actually been looking forward to the next generation of the Lenovo X1 Fold. The main reason I've been interested in it is that it solves a very specific problem I have with my workflow. I do enough of a mix between tasks which benefit from a drawing tablet like screen and writing that having a device which can do both is valuable to me. The problem with most of the existing tables with their attached keyboards is that those are really uncomfortable to use when you're not at a desk. The kickstand design just doesn't work for me if I'm in bed, or propping the thing in my lap. But you get a nice drawing tablet. Though in the case of many of them the keyboard isn't bluetooth so if you want to use it for say keyboard short cuts while you draw... it's not so great. I also tried the Surface Book which worked better for the typing task, but still has the issue of the keyboard not being usable when detached from the display. The Lenovo looks like it might solve some of those issues since you can kind of combine things together to have a small laptop form factor when you're writing or a full drawing tablet plus attached keyboard when you want as well and that looks appealing to me. But as I said I'm probably in a serious minority here.

It's a framework and DSL for provisioning cloud resources. It gives you some nice properties for managing them and making changes to their state of composition. What's nice about terraform/opentofu in a theoretical sense is that you can use a single tool to deploy and manage the configuration of resources with multiple cloud providers. It has built in support for AWS, GCP, Azure and others. What's not so nice about it is that these aren't abstracted in anyway so how you provision compute resources for each of these services is slightly different, so if you are doing something with multiple providers that are similar you have to write separate code to manage them. I got pretty deep into terraform a couple years back for an employer. I'd been using the AWS specific CloudFormation prior to that with some success. The employer had actually made the decision to move to terraform before I joined based on a misunderstanding of how its support for multiple clouds worked. It worked pretty well for us at the time trying to manage the configuration of resources for a system with hundreds of microservices. The DSL for it is "okay" but had many restrictions which made some tasks annoying. We built a lot of scripting around the management and maintenance of our DSLs using a mix of shell scripting and Python. Haven't worked with it in a few years since I moved on to other kinds of work.

Hadn't had to deal with a printer in a while until I got this bluetooth connectable p-touch label printer a few weeks ago. The damn thing is supposed to be able to connect with bluetooth, my computer can see it and pair with it, but it can't actually print and all support can tell me is that I need to uninstall and reinstall the drivers which doesn't fix the issue. Works fine talking to my phone. Works fine talking to my mac. Completely borked in Windows connected with bluetooth or USB.

I also switched in 1999. Coming from a flurry of distros over the previous year or two (RedHat -> BerliOS -> Mandrake -> Caldera -> Mandrake). A friend introduced me to it in college and I've pretty much never looked back. Starting out on slink and then dist-upgrading to potato which was an AMAZING thing having come from rpm based distros where the major version upgrades were always a very time consuming thing. I still run Debian today, though I've had some flirtation with Ubuntu which I abandoned about 8 years back for personal use. At work I've used a LOT of different distros, though it's mostly been Ubuntu except that job where we were using CentOS.

Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within

I ordered a pile of these for the office where I used to work. But this is a fantastic analysis of the shortcomings/limitations of PowerPoint and slide ware in general.

From the cover art:

Comrade, Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero!

Okay so is the amount of money being spent here more or less than the amount of money fare evasion is costing the NYC MTA more or less than the money being spent trying to track and dissuade evaders? Maybe we should just stop all this foolishness and just make public transit free to the end user and manage the cost of running it through taxes. I'm not even a regular rider anymore (but used to be) and dealing with paying and the slowdowns related to paying were constantly making the bus late which just made riding it that much more of a pain. We just had a story about this a couple weeks ago too: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/07/09/1847221/should-public-buses-be-free.

My fondest memories of pinball were playing the machine which was part of our sets on a TV show I worked on back when I was in junior high school. So many hours playing and all for free since the machine was in free play mode. We had a little score board on the wall next to the machine since we couldn't rely on the machine's memory since we had to unplug it all the time. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The grasping for resources reveals there are too few.

I used Gopher back in the day... though had some access to the web as well through a bbs interface to use lynx (though still not sure why the admins of the LAFN disabled the ability to go to specific URLs). But Gopher was still mostly a read-only medium as far as I was concerned back then but there were certainly interesting things to be found on it or WAIS servers. Most of my early experience on the internet came through a course I took via listserv: Patrick Crispen's Internet Roadmap

Forced onto Chrome at work due to a dependency on Endpoint Verification but would be willing to try something new. Been hating my browser (and computers more generally) for many years. Whatever happened to getting some better tools for working with our information? Something maybe inspired by the work of Bush (MEMEX), Nelson (Xanadu), or Englebart (NLS). Or maybe I'm expecting too much from a device which is just a fancier TV.