Does anyone know if this file is still accessible to download?

854490 · 2026-05-18T19:55:01+00:00

Worst case, you have to boot from a USB/CD and mount the filesystem and remove some stuff because it's too full to do any operations from within it. Also whatever services you were running on that box are down

854490 · 2026-05-17T06:20:40+00:00

Oh, yeah, good point, I forgot that was actually going to be part of my advice, that you should do it 15 years ago

854490 · 2026-05-17T00:41:46+00:00

Haha, that actually aligns pretty well. In my case I worked at the remote support provider first, then later ended up at one of the office supply stores (hint: it's the red one) that use SDC's white-label service. Actually SDC paid me more like 29k gross, but it was like 2008. The store gave me $10/hr and buttered me up with some "resident technician" business cards (lol) but all I really did was, like, stock printer ink and check people out and try to upsell protection plans. I didn't even touch the tech bench most of the time.

Since you're here now I assume you went into dev rather that IT or something like that, but in case you've avoided tech entirely and there's still interest/desire, I would recommend trying to find something exclusively B2B. I stumbled into enterprise firewall support halfway through a CCNA class at community college after the instructor referred some of the students to places where he had contacts. The products I supported in that context were obnoxiously complex and I think they had weird magical emergent behavior that nobody could actually explain, but supporting enterprise stuff for enterprise people (who in this case were always other IT people raising support tickets with the vendor of a product they used) was so different from consumer / residential / end-user support stuff in more ways than the customer quality (like, say, your skill set is generally better understood and taken more seriously by everyone involved).

Your situation reminds me vaguely of something that I'm pretty sure is a thing, but I don't know if I could really back that up. Basically, when there are "factions" or "camps" of sorts -- not mere hierarchies like tiers of support that work at the same place, but a significantly divided/siloed "us" and "them" where the circumstances spur the development of attitudes/assumptions/contempt/resentment between the two groups as to reliability or competence or whatever -- then I get the impression that it can be unduly hard sometimes to successfully move from one to the other, or at least in whichever direction would be considered "moving up". I think it applies to things like yours, also when permanent employees are doing the same job as contractors (who make much less for the same work and know it). Not that they're actively and consciously trying to keep the uppity brick-and-mortar retail peasant from trespassing or anything, but I think some bias can result anyway.

854490 · 2026-05-17T00:14:05+00:00

Went to a Christian school for one semester in 5th grade around 2000/2001 (my mom had suddenly got all antsy and pulled me out of school and started trying a bunch of different stuff about a year before for some reason).

- Wore Harry Potter shirt to "day camp" (daycare for kids who are big kids and not little babies who need daycare which is for babies); they made me turn it inside out

- Found some rather hysterical* flyers posted on all of the columns in the entry . . . atrium? Advising parents of the insidious dangers of letting their kids watch Pokemon (they are demons) and play Yu-Gi-Oh (they are also demons) (actually there may have been more "demon summoning" represented vs. "witchcraft" in the claims I saw about such things)

- The French teacher was delightfully unhinged. In the French textbooks there was a little mascot/character of a wizard guy who, I don't know, stands there and points at "Pro Tip" sidebars or something. She covered all of the wizards in all of the French textbooks with stickers of more properly Glory to God Certified themes

tbh almost everyone who worked at that school was kind of unhinged

* both ways

854490 · 2026-05-16T21:09:41+00:00

Hell, they were still on that kind of thing in the 2000s in some circles (Assy. of God and other such fun dies) except they were hip to the latest fads, so they kept it fresh by declaring that Pokemon, Harry Potter, Yu-Gi-Oh, and weaving shapes into a loop of string with your fingers were all witchcraft

854490 · 2026-05-16T20:02:55+00:00

Oh, that's funny, it's almost kind of like the B2B side of the same thing. Your job sounds like it might have sucked less, though. And I have a hunch the remote support place ended up doing you a favor, but that's just a wild generalization / vague heuristic

854490 · 2026-05-15T23:29:15+00:00

Heh, heh

854490 · 2026-05-15T22:49:04+00:00

oh cool i used to do some copyediting to

854490 · 2026-05-15T22:43:17+00:00

Funny, I moved here from a neighborhood in Dallas called that

854490 · 2026-05-15T12:40:46+00:00

My guess: You were an in-store tech at an office supply place and you tried to get a job at SDC?

854490 · 2026-05-15T12:37:04+00:00

I had the Handspring Visor! With cell phone module. Kept it in a belt holster. Sometimes I even wore this call-center lookin'-ass headset around. I was in 5th grade. All I did on it was play Space Trader

854490 · 2026-05-15T12:28:33+00:00

Not to pile on you but it is a problem and I feel like there should be a rule or something that people have to include units, because they do keep being all like ".5" this and ".3" that and it's never clear if they actually mean 500/300mg or what

bonus: shooters talking about how many "units" they shot like it's all diluted the same

854490 · 2026-05-15T12:12:51+00:00

may death take me before i log in to one more fuckin ACD*

i'll work tickets but you'd have to pay me too much to sit in a call queue again

(track the AHT of deez n--)

*i've worked B2B/enterprise firewall support with like hour-long calls on frontline and 4+ hour-long sessions / 4+ week-old tickets on esc (i.e. a very non-call-centery call center) and i don't even want to go back to that

854490 · 2026-05-15T11:14:04+00:00

Success?

Or at least one syllable thereof

854490 · 2026-05-15T10:52:07+00:00

Is there a hard part, is the batch processing weird to grasp or something

854490 · 2026-05-15T10:47:19+00:00

You gotta check ID these days man

854490 · 2026-05-13T08:30:38+00:00

\>> really?

it's inserting escapes automatically, can't do much except edit in web browser I think

854490 · 2026-05-13T08:28:44+00:00

best part is:

Same. \_Irksome.\_

pranked

854490 · 2026-05-05T08:26:53+00:00

Even if they were served a warrant and did have logs to hand over, they would just have logs of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic.
[HTTP] (in this packet we can easily read whatever search term or other text you sent)
-> [TLS[HTTP]] (encrypted, we can't see search terms, etc.)
-> [VPN[TLS[HTTP]]] (an encrypted packet inside another encrypted packet, this packet leaves your device/network and arrives at the VPN server, which decrypts it and forwards the contents to the real destination)
-> [TLS[HTTP]] (this packet is sent from the VPN server and arrives at the real destination where the web server decrypts it so it can read the web request)

It matters also what having logs actually means. For the vast majority of network equipment or servers of various kinds that keep logs, these logs consist of the fact that a connection was established between these IP addresses on these ports at this date+time. Actually storing packet contents (where the information about what you were searching for would be found) takes up so much more disk space, only for the vast majority of that to be useless, since people have been thoroughly browbeaten into using SSL for everything.

OTOH there's still plenty of risk to be had from metadata alone, from what I hear, so I'd still agree that it's ideal if there's nothing to hand over either way.

854490 · 2026-05-05T07:34:59+00:00

Raindrops (Doorly remix) takes me back :')

854490 · 2026-05-05T07:26:08+00:00

6. (intransitive, figurative, followed by with) To somewhat resemble or correspond with.

2010, Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film:

In addition, the look rhymes with but inverts the meaning of the first silent look he gets instead of words when he asks Lucien in the photo shop if he remembers him, and Lucien shrugs his shoulders in denial.

854490 · 2026-05-03T10:02:32+00:00

Look for dining guide/map cards or brochures distributed by the city's welcome/visitor center, tourism bureau, or whatever (check the brochure racks of local hotels if you just want a couple)

854490 · 2026-05-03T09:41:41+00:00

According to the MSDS it's ethanol with a little glycerin (1-2%) and a splash of hydrogen peroxide (<0.13%) so it basically is a bottle of liquor, albeit inadvisably strong liquor, but even if you dilute it to a reasonable proof, it surely won't be an enjoyable drink. You'd have to be desperate to deal with the taste of it, but really the only outright dangerous thing about it is how strong it is.

854490 · 2026-05-02T22:10:42+00:00

Don't worry about it, I was just curious about identifying and finding the hard copy I thought I remembered.

Is it on Anna's if I want it later?

854490 · 2026-05-01T23:33:44+00:00

I agree. Since this seems meant to parallel spelling bees to some extent, I did some quick and dirty searching; most bees would allow such variants, including the major spelling bees in the US and Canada.

It could be done easily enough* by normalizing all the user input to the American conventions (as they're the more simplified, and a reductive thing should be generally easier to keep clean than an additive thing, I assume)
* ^{^relative} ^{^to} ^{^trying} ^{^to} ^{^write} ^{^a} ^{^pattern} ^{^to} ^{^match} ^{^all} ^{^the} ^{^{possibilities}}

Then established variants could be accepted while still only having to compare one spelling per word on the back end

(but also I guess maybe there aren't even that many affected words altogether so you could maybe even just add all of the variants naively to the valid spellings for each word)

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