Open Bar: Drinks are on the Supreme Court

[Doktor Howl]

So tomorow or Monday, I find out if I have in fact found the worst job yet.

Which would be better than what I have now.

I wish you luck, if that's appropriate.

Thank you.  I found out today that I do in fact have the worst job in the world now.   

[Doktor Howl]

So this afternoon I was talking to a guy I knew back in Chicago.  He was my friend's nephew, really smart kid.

Now he's got his masters in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and I was left in the dust.  I mean, it's not that I forgot all that much of math (I have), but that I never even heard of half the shit he's talking about.

I never thought of differential equations as "the end of the beginning," but I do now.

[Cain]

We had a couple of "pure mathematics" types when I was doing the logic courses in Philosophy.

I don't think anyone understands them.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

So tomorow or Monday, I find out if I have in fact found the worst job yet.

Which would be better than what I have now.

I wish you luck, if that's appropriate.

Thank you.  I found out today that I do in fact have the worst job in the world now.   

Oof. Sorry to hear

[Doktor Howl]

So tomorow or Monday, I find out if I have in fact found the worst job yet.

Which would be better than what I have now.

I wish you luck, if that's appropriate.

Thank you.  I found out today that I do in fact have the worst job in the world now.   

Oof. Sorry to hear

I am remarkably okay with that.  It beats hustling for PLC programming gigs.

[Al Qədic]

Woke up at 8:30 from a nap, now it's 10, and I'm in Tennessee and jet lagged as hell. Hooray for summer.

[altered]

With a lot of help, a lot of frustration, and a lot of digging for the perfect solutions to a problem that might as well be hand tailored to prevent me from making headway...

I can now kind of read Lua, and am on my way to maybe writing some. It's intimidating and scary since I couldn't even literally see large blocks of code for most of my life, sort of like dyslexia but weirdly specific.

But I'm here now, and while Lua is basically fucking worthless, it's what I can do, and the roadblocks I hit with other languages I've found myself sort of able to read (ability to do things I can motivate myself with, decent resources, literally anyone willing to explain things to me without trying to be a smug bastard about it) do not exist here.

Lua is built for video game stupidity, has resources designed to make you feel like a genius, and lots of regular people who don't consider themselves technically inclined who can write it. I have no fucking excuses.

So...

It might happen! I might write a big code for the first time in my godforsaken life! It's a big day!

[chaotic neutral observer]

My digital LED clock stopped working.  (It was a novelty clock, that supported binary and hexadecimal display, but I never used those functions; I just wanted a decent clock that showed the date and time in seconds, and this is what I got.)  At first, I thought there had been a power outage, and it had just reset itself, but not only could I not set the time anymore, but the display began to flicker.

I opened it up with considerable difficulty; instead of being held together with screws, there were six of those plastic springy-wedge locking thingies, which are impossible to defeat without a flat-blade screwdriver, which inevitably scratches the case.

The guts of the device were worse.  Ignoring the oxidized flux residue, the hand soldering was so horrible it belonged in a text book of How Not to Do it.  Burn marks, excessive solder, insufficient solder, soldering on the wrong side...  I already had more skill than that after two hours practice under the disapproving glare of one of our manufacturing staff.  I can only assume that it was assembled by a baboon.

The worst of it?  There was a small circuit board that had been bodged onto the main PCB.  Not screwed on; it was just sort of flopping, held on by a couple of wire leads, and maybe a thin strip of glue.  There was nothing preventing the metal case of the crystal(?) on that board from making contact with two pins on the main PCB.  Definitely not IPC-compliant.

I found a part number on that small board, and discovered that it was actually the guts of one of those cheap AA-battery powered mechanical wall clocks.  Whoever designed this disaster apparently couldn't figure out the "clock" part of making a clock, so they just sort of tacked one inside the box.  This may have explained why it gained about a minute a month.

I tried powering it up with the case off, but it didn't even flicker.  Probed the power connector, but there was hardly any voltage; there was a dead short somewhere.

But, at this point, I didn't care enough to try debugging further.  I ordered a raspberry pi and a TFT display from digikey.  I'm going to make my own clock.  You want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

[Doktor Howl]

My digital LED clock stopped working.  (It was a novelty clock, that supported binary and hexadecimal display, but I never used those functions; I just wanted a decent clock that showed the date and time in seconds, and this is what I got.)  At first, I thought there had been a power outage, and it had just reset itself, but not only could I not set the time anymore, but the display began to flicker.

I opened it up with considerable difficulty; instead of being held together with screws, there were six of those plastic springy-wedge locking thingies, which are impossible to defeat without a flat-blade screwdriver, which inevitably scratches the case.

The guts of the device were worse.  Ignoring the oxidized flux residue, the hand soldering was so horrible it belonged in a text book of How Not to Do it.  Burn marks, excessive solder, insufficient solder, soldering on the wrong side...  I already had more skill than that after two hours practice under the disapproving glare of one of our manufacturing staff.  I can only assume that it was assembled by a baboon.

The worst of it?  There was a small circuit board that had been bodged onto the main PCB.  Not screwed on; it was just sort of flopping, held on by a couple of wire leads, and maybe a thin strip of glue.  There was nothing preventing the metal case of the crystal(?) on that board from making contact with two pins on the main PCB.  Definitely not IPC-compliant.

I found a part number on that small board, and discovered that it was actually the guts of one of those cheap AA-battery powered mechanical wall clocks.  Whoever designed this disaster apparently couldn't figure out the "clock" part of making a clock, so they just sort of tacked one inside the box.  This may have explained why it gained about a minute a month.

I tried powering it up with the case off, but it didn't even flicker.  Probed the power connector, but there was hardly any voltage; there was a dead short somewhere.

But, at this point, I didn't care enough to try debugging further.  I ordered a raspberry pi and a TFT display from digikey.  I'm going to make my own clock.  You want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

REAL dilettantes make their own wind up clocks.

[chaotic neutral observer]

REAL dilettantes make their own wind up clocks.

Now that you mention it, a steam-driven self-winding mechanical clock, that used nuclear power to produce the steam (Polonium-210, let's say) would be pretty nifty.

(Edit - hit the modify button instead of the respond button. - Dok)

[Cain]

Then you can bring it to school, and have deranged people make conspiracy theories about you for forever

[Doktor Howl]

REAL dilettantes make their own wind up clocks.

Now that you mention it, a steam-driven self-winding mechanical clock, that used nuclear power to produce the steam (Polonium-210, let's say) would be pretty nifty.

(Edit - hit the modify button instead of the respond button. - Dok)

They called me mad.

[Doktor Howl]

Then you can bring it to school, and have deranged people make conspiracy theories about you for forever

Oh, shit.  That thing.   

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Then you can bring it to school, and have deranged people make conspiracy theories about you for forever

Oh, shit.  That thing.   

Tell them you're a Mason. And Jewish. They'll shit themselves to death.

[TastyCle]

So, where is everyone? Legends tell that once the place was thriving and filled with actual people. For some reason i keep refreshing the page like this was some social  media. Does anything happen like, ever?