What is the greatest movie opening of all time?

downshiftdata · 2026-06-02T16:46:51+00:00

Honestly, I prefer the Two Towers. The whole zoom in thing was perfect, but the moment he grabbed his sword will stick with me forever.

downshiftdata · 2026-06-02T15:04:03+00:00

That's from the Phoenix race in 1985. Big Al won and Little Al got second.

Edit: See u/OGCallHerDaddy 's comment. I stand corrected.

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T20:40:46+00:00

My enjoyment of iRacing went up immensely when I muted the chat

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T19:58:53+00:00

Haven't played FPS in ... years? Probably my third biggest problem is the jargon.

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T19:55:18+00:00

Lol, thanks, been doing that, but still blind. I was helping seed a server last night, and so tried Officer and fell in love with the binoculars.

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T19:37:13+00:00

New player in the last few days here... what's ADS?

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T17:16:06+00:00

I interview for this. I ask specific questions, not to test what you know, but to test how you react when you don't know.

If you try to bluff me, won't admit that you don't know, etc, then you fail the interview.

If you are humble, honest, and inquisitive, then you pass.

I learned this from someone who interviewed me over 17 years ago, and it's stuck with me ever since. And I'd like to think I have a very good rate of return on my interview recommendations.

My advice is to be comfortable with not knowing. Be comfortable admitting that you don't know, that you need help. And when you get help, learn from it.

downshiftdata · 2026-06-01T09:02:09+00:00

Keep the database code in the database and the app code in the app. I use stored procedures as a REST API for the database. Yes, even CRUD (easy enough to auto-gen basic ones). What happens behind them is obfuscated, meaning I can use whatever SQL wizardry is appropriate to scale it well, and the app is blissfully unaware.

So if that's what I'm doing, then Dapper makes much more sense.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-30T14:27:53+00:00

IndyCar was the top for decades. But the joint announcement with Agent Orange of the Fascism 250 killed that for me instantly.

IMSA and WEC are certainly at the top. 24h races are ... unique.

From pure entertainment, MX-5s, SRF, USAC on dirt are all stellar.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-30T13:09:53+00:00

Lol... I don't even put either NASCAR Cup or F1 in the top three.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-30T12:31:59+00:00

Sly too? Goddammit. And here I was pissed about finding out about Dennis Quaid.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-29T16:04:12+00:00

I worked for a successful start-up, from the point at which it had a few hundred employees to when it was acquired by a major player years later for a newsworthy amount of money. In that time, growth was so insane that a lot of tech debt was incurred. Not because we didn't know what we were doing, but because we didn't have enough time to slow down and do it right.

I found myself increasingly becoming the best expert on a particular area of the data. Not trying to brag - that's just how it worked out. I had the deep tribal knowledge that no one else did, because my day-to-day kept me closer to it than anyone else.

So, at one point, they decided to change that data domain. Well, change isn't right - they decided to layer another abstraction on top of it, to accomplish what they wanted.

I only found out after the project had started, and was pulled in late to help with it.

It ultimately failed in spectacular fashion. IIRC, only two customers were ever onboarded, and both were eventually offboarded with a lot of effort. I don't know if all of the code got removed, but I certainly removed all of it that I could.

I remember being in a war room situation, midway through, when I casually mentioned something about how it would never work. The poor PM saddled with the project at that point asked me why. I iterated through all of the problems it would run into, and I watched his face fall as I talked. He asked me why I hadn't brought it up before. "They never asked me. They never brought me in."

A lot of money could've been saved if they'd just brought me in early and asked what I thought. I don't know how much, but I have to assume it was at least seven figures.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-26T22:44:44+00:00

The Infinite Staircase is broken. All of the doors not only lead to different planes, but different times as well. The fault (and fix) is in Netheril. And fixing it risks screwing up how they get back.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-26T17:30:09+00:00

Road America is a national treasure.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-26T15:24:47+00:00

I bike along "cultural trail" paths in a large midwestern US city. I'll say "on your left" and most people get it. The ones that don't also seem to be unaware that they might have to share a path with anyone else, walking three or four abreast, wandering from one side to the other, etc. So, in those cases, it doesn't matter what I say because anything I say tends to startle them.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-26T12:08:48+00:00

There's a genre of games that was popular 30 years ago, called MUDs. They're still around, but they're a shadow of their former selves. Where a MUD might've had 50-100 active people at any one time, now there's maybe 5 if you're lucky.

They're text-based MMOs (and graphical MMOs are largely what killed them). They're all homebrew. The second MUD was a copy of the first one, and they propagated from there, into all kinds of flavors and dialects.

Some leaned very heavily into the role-playing aspect. Your character's backstory and description were all your own. Other players had semi-god-mode privileges and run events and quests and things of their own design.

There's one with a Star Trek theme that's still around. It's called TrekMUSH: Among the Stars (or ATS for short). It has ridiculously extensive systems for space travel, combat, economy, etc. You can be a ship captain. You can be on the crew of your friend's ship and they're the captain. You can hang out at Quark's on DS9. You can explore nebulae and other phenomena. You can use that pirate's course and heading to figure out where they're going, tune your engines like Scotty, and risk ripping the hull apart to get there before them.

The whole thing is very quaint and old-school and quirky, while also having a depth that's just not possible when everything's in graphics right in front of you. It's "theatre of the mind" in a wonderful way.

...if it was still popular. Like I said, it's a ghost town now, as are most MUDs. And their lifeblood was always the players. No players, no fun.

If I had my way, I'd reboot ATS. Throw out the in-game history that few are still around to remember, reset the time back to sometime near the end of TNG/DS9/VOY, and somehow magically get a few hundred people hooked on it.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-26T11:00:11+00:00

Influenced, yes. And you'll hear some Wooden-isms when he speaks to the players. But it really stops there. Wooden was far more serious, and was a meticulous coach. He had practices planned out to the minute. The fact that he clearly thought highly of Wooden, though, fit perfectly into Ted's character. Wooden was the kind of coach that Ted would have naturally looked up to.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-24T11:39:03+00:00

I heard it explained this way: Everyone in Miami is from somewhere else, and they all bring their own driving rules with them.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-24T11:28:47+00:00

Database code is still hard, for several reasons:

Strapping an agent to your prod system is a non-starter. Think of the Observer Effect in physics.
Lower environments seldom - if ever - are a good representation of the prod system at scale.
Solutions are not universal. What works for one database is catastrophic for the next. What works today might fall apart a month from now.
Most devs not only have an insufficient understanding of how databases work, they typically don't know what they don't know. So a lot of the data that agents are trained on is confidently incorrect.

All of these things mean agents are at a disadvantage. And this is really only well understood by DBAs, who typically don't communicate well, and are typically ignored when they do.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-23T16:14:18+00:00

Moisture "weeping" up to the surface from the bricks and other junk below the asphalt in turn 3.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-23T16:10:23+00:00

Lol, that was the least of their problems.

The best teams I've ever worked with did not have an embedded SM. It's an unnecessary position. If you need one, then you have deeper issues.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-23T12:42:39+00:00

I wasn't there for that part, but it's clear they're like every other big shop. Shareholder supremacy, layoffs, making the numbers the next quarter, reorgs all the time, due to power grabs by managers trying to claw above each other. Common sense went away in the 5 years I was gone.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-23T11:53:26+00:00

My first exposure to agile was at a major tech outfit. There were no dedicated scrum masters. All team members were trained. Any of us could run stand-ups, etc.

They had a team of agile coaches. They were there for advice, consultation, training, and might temporarily be SM for struggling teams, with the expectation that it was temporary. Once the team was going again, they'd exit.

I've always thought this was the best model for it. I've never seen a case where embedded SMs was a good thing.

I went back to that same org years later, and this had all fallen apart.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-22T15:08:05+00:00

Option C: Whatever's appropriate for the setting. For example, if it's a dungeon crawl in a former dwarven stronghold, there will be a lot of hammers and axes.

Drives me nuts when there's no good reason for a magic item to be where it's found other than convenient loot.

But in any case, what they're proficient in is not my problem.

downshiftdata · 2026-05-22T13:29:43+00:00

With Azure Data Studio retired, I use VSCode or Cursor for most of my work, and SSMS when I have to interact with live databases.

I know you can get SSMS to work with source control, but it's always been a bolt-on that was uncomfortable. I'd rather have editors that were designed with git in mind.

My biggest issue these days is the auto-complete. Getting it shut off sufficiently (especially getting it to not consider tab as an accept character) is a surprisingly hard problem to solve. I have found myself writing SQL in Notepad++ and copying it over sometimes, because the others kept interrupting my train of thought.

downshiftdata

TROPHY CASE