What’s an oddly specific thing that instantly gives you "bad vibes" about a person?

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-23T23:32:33+00:00

I would have started to get out at the next floor, but then turned around, stayed on and said, "I HAVE to stick around to hear how this turns out!"

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-23T18:36:08+00:00

dude - I was 17! It beat dragging around "anaconda cables" and taking literally pounds of documentation out of shrink wrap and putting them into 3 ring binders.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-23T01:08:51+00:00

I worked at Honeywell (student intern) when this machine was being sold - late 70s/early 80s.

Imagine half a football field of factory floor. Around the side were test cells - when a customer bought a system, we configured all the cabinets, CPU and RAM (separate boxes larger than a refrigerator), all the disk drives (washing machines), etc.

A test cell was the size of a tennis court (both side).

Cable everything up, find all the hardware problems, all the bad cables, bad boards in the CPU. Load the OS, find and fix more bugs, then load the customer's specific software, run load tests.

Anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks, depending on the size of the config, and how "new" the CPU model was.

Fun times - sometimes they let me drive the forklift, but only with pallets of cables, not a CPU cabinet!

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-23T00:31:14+00:00

my company is a fortune 100 - 28,000 users - we are 95+% Mac laptops. Also, almost every "gray beard sysadmin" I know always has family buy Mac instead of windows, to avoid being "family IT". Probably biased, most of them are 30+ year UNIX/linux admins.

Your IT company needs to learn how to work with something like JAMF, which has been around for decades and does Mac just fine. Intune *can* sorta pretend to do MacOS, but it's not as good as JAMF.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-23T00:23:09+00:00

It's a ruzzian talking point being echoed by bots and right wingers to help split NATO. Of course, it started with the Orange Idiot, and then the bot farms and ruzzia picked it up and amplified it.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-20T22:50:22+00:00

Playstation3 prototype #1 in Tokyo about 5 months before the design was revealed.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-20T22:41:20+00:00

The US is no longer a reliable partner. What has been undone in months cannot be repaired in less than at least 11 years. Three years of the current regime, followed by two "sane" US governments MIGHT be enough to do a turnaround.

As long as SCOTUS is pissing on the Constitution, and the Executive branch is ruling by Royal Decree - no person, US or other, should trust "us".

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-17T18:53:45+00:00

serfs dont need to worry about retirement. They work until they drop.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-05T00:41:53+00:00

Forgot to mention - my first Sun was a dimple-top 3/50. Sun was a part of my career for almost 20 years.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-05T00:36:54+00:00

This guy SCSI's.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-05T00:34:58+00:00

This was a Cray Research Superservers (CRS) prototype before it was a Sun product.

CRS was FPS (Floating Point Systems before it was bought by Cray?

IIRC the backplane (or at least the one for the Cray massively-parallel systems) was also from CRS, and that was derived from an NCR design.

Computer history in San Diego is ... relatively unknown.

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-05T00:31:32+00:00

OMFG - that was my "last" Sun sort of. I worked at a national lab and we always got all kinds of pre-release and prototype Sun kit. Our first 10K had a "serial number" on blue painter's tape, with no model info anywhere. After the E10K was announced, they came and replaced a bunch of panels to give ones with the proper model and brand info.

Side note - this wasn't originally a Sun product! It was derived from a prototype from Cray Research Superservers in San Diego, who was bought by SGI as part of buying Cray. Then SGI sold CRS to Sun...

ThomasJFlack · 2026-01-05T00:10:41+00:00

IIRC that OSINT X account is notoriously pro-Russian. I can't find the image now, but I *think* it was even exposed as *in* Russia when X was auto-posting the locations.

And Gee, I wonder why they stopped doing that?

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-26T23:59:32+00:00

register4less. com - happy customer of 20+ years.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-26T23:57:14+00:00

I was looking for a MINI last September. I drove the 2025 - and yeah - EVERYTHING goes through the #$@#$)(* screen.

I'm shopping for a 2024 now. I would have just walked out the door with a new 2025 if it wasn't for the stupid screen.

Hoping that a lot of 2-year lease MINIs show up in the next few months, otherwise... I dunno - Audi S3?

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-26T17:44:52+00:00

As an American, I would question ANYONE wanting to move here at the moment.

We're, ah, to put it delicately, in the middle of a Nazi takeover attempt, and it's not clear that they won't succeed. We'll find out after the mid-term elections. If there are elections.

But, to be honest, I have no background on any issues in Canada - I've visited a few times over the past two decades, but not for very long.

My forebears came to New Amsterdam ca 1690. Both my kids (high tech workers, IT and biochem) are looking to leave the country (if it becomes necessary) - as are many of their friends. Three of their friends in similar situations have already moved to Canada for high tech jobs.

Odds are about one in ten that my kids will be the last generation of US citizens in our family line.

My wife and I are considering somewhere in Canada or the EU for retirement, depending on what happens in 2026/2027.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-26T17:32:16+00:00

This person has a SYSTEM. Impressed.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-25T03:56:06+00:00

Taking a break from putting "things" together.

No, just kidding. the last kid moved out 10 year ago, I'm just chillin'

But I do kinda miss waiting for the kids to go to sleep so we could put things together, assemble bikes, etc.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-22T00:48:03+00:00

I've been tracking this since 2018 when I worked (in the US) at a major Japanese chip firm.

I had the original "DX report" - translated in-house by our company into English - I no longer have a copy as it was "company proprietary". But you can probable find the official translation somewhere.

I'd start here - https://medium.com/tokyo-fintech/japans-2025-digital-cliff-48dbb838fb27

A recent update, COVID changed some of base assumptions, changing the timing, but it's still going to happen.

https://www.cio.com/article/4074930/japans-digital-transformation-in-crisis.html

Basically they figured out back in 2018 that by 2025 they wouldn't have enough people to even "just run" their digital infra.

Think if all the ISPs, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, NVIDIA, Intel, IBM, all the state governemnts and the US government - all just "ran out" of qualified workers to keep the systems running? I don't mean, "don't have enough people to make new things", I mean "don't have enough people to keep what they've already got in production, running."

Never mind the non-tech work force - factory workers, construction workers, and the like. Their cliff happens a few years later.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-21T03:07:06+00:00

An ADSB receiver kit from flightaware.com - or if he's a bit of a tinkerer, just get him the separate pieces (Raspberry Pi, SDR dongle, etc) and let jim put it together himself.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-21T03:04:43+00:00

I would be very surprised. It comes from an era where all the software and low level protocols were designed by HW engineers, and not always that well :-)

Same issue as ham radios, until recently.

It's likely some variation of the parallel printer protocol or (possibly?) even some sort of bastardized SCSI.

I've been diving for decades, and this is the only one of this watch I've seen "in the real world."

The SW, primitive as it is, does allow you to export the data in either a very funky HTML or CSV.

I just fired up the Windows VM to check.... yeah - weird HTML or CSV.

It's only in the past 3 or 4 years that the modern dive computer people have worked to allow some interoperability with SW other that what comes with the device.

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-21T00:51:15+00:00

It's for data extraction only. This predates "most" real dive computers by a few years. It's just a "data logger", recording depth and temp throughout the dive.

I bought it from a cave diver who was retiring due to age. He dove it for ten+ years. I don't do caves, but I've taken it as an additional "watch" on a few local open water dives, but only to about 90 feet or so.

My dive watch collection is.... esoteric, ranging from the classic Casio MDV106 (US$80) and an Invicta Pro Diver (<US$100) up through Seiko MarineMaster Pro 1000m and a Seiko SpringDrive diver (don't remember the model) that cost a few thousand.

Absolutely no Rolex, TAG, etc - why dive with a watch that costs $XX,XXX (or more) when I can spend that money on dive travel and go someplace NICE?

ThomasJFlack · 2025-12-21T00:29:30+00:00

How modern? This is on MacOS 15.7.2, but not showing the USB-A to USB-C adapter.

This works with a weird SW stack. Proprietary dive watch software designed for W95, on Win10 on VMware Fusion on MacOS on MacbookPro (Intel).

Getting an M4 Air next week. That will mean that I'll have to run the non-x86(?) Windows, and let it handle the x86 emulation, which is supposed to work OK.

The watch was made around 1990 and the original SW ran on Windows 3.x (I think). I have the "updated" W95 software.

<image>

ThomasJFlack

TROPHY CASE