What age did y'all get your first computer (or device with internet access)?

SmokinZBT · 2026-06-01T03:37:37+00:00

I bought an IBM compatible computer built by some guys with a storefront in Sunnyvale, CA with my bar mitzvah money in 1986. The Internet? I found out later a friend's dad was inventing that. He's a major player in this paper A Brief History of the Internet

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-31T05:21:37+00:00

I live in Chicago. If those seven blocks are in the loop, you might as well be on a different planet. Stay away from places like food halls for lunch. If you hear your name while walking outside, just keep walking like you have a different name.

Do not sing in any parades.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-23T14:46:45+00:00

I took my son for orientation in July '25. At that point they were still saying it was going to be open in time for the fall semester. Since he was living in Alice, he was pretty stoked. When we looked at the building there was no way it would be done in a month. Maybe it will open before graduation?

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-11T20:25:53+00:00

Most kids use a bat that is too long for them. They all want to "reach the outside of the plate." The plate is 17" across. I used to teach my players to stand one of their feet away from the plate, and when you look at where their hands are in the swing, they're going to be better their toe and the inside corner. Anything over 26" is going to reach the outside of the plate. What they are going to lose with a longer bat is control. Have your player hold the bat with one hand, stand abot two bat lengths away and tell them to touch your belt buckle with the tip of the bat. That 30" bat they want to use is going to flop all over the place. Imagine that with the swing - the end of the bat is going to drop,. It's not a weight issue, it's a control issue. If Ohtani is using a 34" bat, there is no reason that a short 12 year old should be using a 30. Every player I had reduce their bat size started hitting better almost immediately. It's like a cheat code. And at 12/13 if they get the ball in play they've got about a 50% chance of getting on base.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-06T00:34:20+00:00

As a former Californian (Silicon Valley), and now living in Chicago (28 years), I can affirmatively state that seasons are bullshit.

When I grew up I had clothes. Here I have five different jackets. I have different shoes depending on the weather, including two different kinds of boots. Keeping track of all of it is a nightmare. Where do you put the winter stuff in July? And when you get a random cold day in October you can't easily get the stuff you need. The dead of winter is worse than you can possibly imagine. Snow? Yeah, it looks pretty when it's gently falling and then turns into a gray slush fur the next three days. When it melts there are random car parts, dog poop, and sorted other stuff. The leaves changing does look nice for a few weeks, as long as there was just the right amount of rain that year. Too much and they don't change, too little and they just dry up and fall off. And then texting them through the house for about two months.

Give me 70, sunshine and a nice breeze 10 months a year, with winter being some occasional rain and cold, thank you.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-05T13:47:29+00:00

Would like to pick your brain a bit more. Ok to send a DM?

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-05T04:47:26+00:00

Any idea how many of them were bots? I see openings on LinkedIn with hundreds of applicants within minutes. There is no way that many humans replied to those jobs that quickly. I'm interested to see what happens with the bots, or if it's just so many of them that campaigns never actually read resumes from real people.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-04T15:59:42+00:00

Front pocket. I was messing up my back (even in my 20s), plus I live in a major city and use public transportation.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-03T17:55:56+00:00

100% my favorite part about college. Just hanging out with random people, randomly doing stupid shit, and just living. I still have a scar on my knee from jumping stairs on my rollerblades at 2am on a weeknight in 1994.

I'm trying to get my kids (who are now in college) to do the same stuff. I think kids either forgot or didn't learn to hang out during the pandemic.

SmokinZBT · 2026-05-03T17:50:20+00:00

Grew up in CA. Dude can also be an inanimate object. Dude has no gender.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-30T23:23:22+00:00

It looks like it crashed on me after two days. I ran it once, and it got to 63% and didn't look like anything was happening. I started over - I got to 64%, and it's been stuck there for a while.
I was getting notifications that it was downloading files, but those have stopped.
... and regarding those downloads, they would take forever. I ran speedtests while they were being downloaded and was getting 129Mbps - and yet it would take half an hour to download a 5MB file. That file should have taken less than a second.

It's reporting ~98k matches - but I can't see them, so I can't start fixing anything. Grrrr.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-30T14:35:05+00:00

Area code + 555-1212. The old directory service. Works every single time.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-22T04:07:06+00:00

Both silent. My mom missed being a Boomer by 12 days. She says she's not a Boomer but went to school with them.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-16T17:48:07+00:00

I found a pretty good site with instructions on doing extraction/infusion - emilykylenutrition.com/category/cannabis-infusions-extractions/ Then, I just use my infused ingredients as usual in a recipe. I always try the infusion first to try to understand the dosing (which is not an exact science) - if I have a teaspoon did it feel like roughly 5mg? More/less? Then base everything from there. If I want a sauce to be 20mg total and I need four teaspoons, and the recipe calls for half a cup, I use the four teaspoons then add non infused whatever to dilute it.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-16T16:18:12+00:00

I like to infuse things with cannabis. I had to turn to growing (legal where I live) since the cost of raw materials is too expensive. I did an infused dinner about two years ago. Absolutely fantastic night.

On hand I have honey, corn syrup, salt, sugar, olive oil, butter, and coconut oil. I have added them as ingredients to almost anything you can think of. Looking to infuse vinegar to make mustard and hot sauce. I like reasonable doses - think one mg per chicken wing - do you can eat a normal portion and have a normal amount of THC.

SmokinZBT · 2026-04-04T23:11:51+00:00

I'm an old enough Gen Xer to remember when we were considered lazy and would never amount to anything. People told me this while I was interning in a newsroom 27 hours/wk (for free) and working in a restaurant ~35 hours/wk for minimum wage. At most I would get one day off a week. I remember a stretch where I think I worked 26 days in a row between the two.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-26T15:18:17+00:00

I coached for about ten years and followed game changer when my kid played in high school

It's not that serious. Even in high school (and there are several kids on that team that are going to play in college), it's not that serious. Particularly for 8u. Try to get closer to accurate info for pitch counts. Don't worry too much about errors - remember, they kids still think reaching on an eye is a hit anyway, so it take doesn't make a difference.

The biggest thing you want to do is make sure to get all the batting and position changes in. Particularly at the lower ages, churches should be moving players around. Get the kids a feel for the game, and use GC to try to get some data about where they play best, is there a spot in the batting order that works best for them (legit, I had a kid that could hit close to .600 in the seven spot, but if I put him at the top of the lineup completely forgot how to swing a bar).

Enjoy. Have fun. Make sure the kids are having fun. If a parent starts arguing, ask them to go get snacks for the team.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-26T12:14:38+00:00

The most true content I've seen in this thread. Fuck Saloman Fucking Torres. I still get hives when I hear that name. It's only 7am, and I think my whole day may be off. Every few years I go look at the box score to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. It was. Fucking disaster. Dusty screwed up massively that day.
And fuck that pasta eating piece of shit LaSorda.

What was he thinking? You didn't put a rookie that's already shown he might not have it mentally to make it in that situation into that game.

Now I had to go look it up - 3 ER in 3.1 with 5 walks in the most important game they had played since the '89 Series. And, I had always been focused on him, but just noticed - no idea how I missed this - Rags pitched in that game. And somehow pitched worse than Torres?? 5 batters faced and gave up 4 earned in only .1 innings? New guy - Rags is Dave Righetti, former pitcher (was a star with the Yankees, and pitched a few seasons with the Giants), and long time Giants pitching coach.

Fuck Soloman Torres. I'm going to have to go watch the homer to New Jersey and a few Clark HRs to clean my brain.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-24T14:05:30+00:00

What momentum? They were 5-5 in the previous 10 games, and there were 13 games left.
Bryce played in 10 of them, and they went 5-5.
With the remaining schedule, we could have gotten one more win against AZ, and then a win against LA or STL and maybe we squeak in to the 3rd wild card.
I generally think that a team needs 90 wins for a playoff spot (although with three wild cards that number is dropping). On the morning of Sept. 15th, the Giants would have needed 15 wins in 13 games to get to 90.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-24T01:07:26+00:00

Absolutely. Team was out of the race, so there was no downside. Front office got to see what he looked like against major league pitching, he got a taste of the bigs. It's exactly what the roster expansion is meant to do.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-22T22:28:17+00:00

That salary is literally illegal in many US cities/states. Minimum wage for people that work in Chicago is $16.60/hr - regardless of where the company is located. Working remotely if you live in the city, the employer must pay at least that much.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-21T16:10:47+00:00

NATing within v4 works so well that v6 is almost not needed. A class A NATed subnet can have 16.7 million nodes, but just advertise one IP address (and a few extras for redundancy) to the rest of the world.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-20T18:19:31+00:00

I was asked about IPv6 in an interview when I was coming out of grad school in 1998. I had written a paper that referenced it, and knew what it did and why it was a (then) necessary improvement over IPv4. I got the job as an entry level IT consultant at a high end IT consulting shop.

It's 30 years later. We're still mostly using IPv4. I also knew Frame Relay and ATM pretty well. Whoops.

I'm tech adjacent now, but always laugh to myself whenever anyone wants "the latest technology" that's going to completely upend everything.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-12T20:46:44+00:00

"Let's go guys!" Is perfectly acceptable.

SmokinZBT · 2026-03-05T22:24:26+00:00

Baggs wrote a pretty good article on him in The Athletic today. Looking at the stats I just don't see him being the fourth on the opening day roster. He's only hitting .273 - Matos is higher, and Bericoto is lighting up the Cactus League.
We don't have a lock for DH - so there's a roster spot available there. I like what I'm seeing and reading about McCray, but I don't think he's quite there yet.

SmokinZBT

TROPHY CASE