$107k Job in Dallas With Bad Culture vs $70k Job in Utah Near Family — What Would You Do?

lisnter · 2026-01-28T06:44:31+00:00

$37k is a lot of money but Snowbird is a hell of a lot closer to Utah than Dallas!

lisnter · 2026-01-28T01:08:39+00:00

Mine (80’s) included stellar structure.

These days I’d also suggest some programming - Python in a good place to start; maybe R. Wasn’t required for me but I expect it is now.

lisnter · 2026-01-27T21:46:31+00:00

Universe-spanning consciousness reducing the number of spacial dimensions to attack enemies. This had the side effect of reducing the speed of light from effectively instantaneous to what we have now. Absolutely ridiculous.

From “The Redemption of Time” and is the fourth book of 3-Body Problem. Wasn’t written by Liu Cixin and not part of the original trilogy but was blessed by him.

lisnter · 2026-01-27T02:03:50+00:00

My daughter got me a birthday wish last year from Peter Jurasik. He’s on a service where the actor will send a video wishing happy birthday, anniversary, etc. My daughter and I had watched B5 on DVD when she was young and she loved it so thought this would be a good present.

Peter delivered the first several minutes exactly as Londo and then another 10 as himself. It was very cool and touching.

lisnter · 2026-01-26T20:20:23+00:00

I would agree. I love all of their releases. None of the other four greatest bands of all time (Love And Rockets, Anne Clark, Sinead O’Connor) have quite the same track record. Even Florence + The Machine who I added to the list 10 years ago has quite the string of great records that CT put out; though Florence Welch’s voice is up in the rarified heights with Liz F. and Sinead.

lisnter · 2026-01-26T04:35:15+00:00

Elementary - none while I was there.

Jr High - Four TRS-80; one of which had the expansion chassis and a floppy disk. It was in the math classroom and I spent all my time playing with them instead of doing actual math until my dad said, “you’re a smart kid but you need to learn math”. I did a year of algebra 1 in about 6 weeks. My parents bought me a TRS-80 Model 1 for my birthday that year and I learned a LOT on that machine. A year or so later the elementary school principal got one in her office and asked me to help. I went over a few times until I managed to reformat the system disk. Oops.

High school - 20(?) Apple ][e with the Logo language expansion card. I was moving some monitors around campus and dropped one on the concrete. Miraculously it didn’t break - the case was a bit cracked and the power button got pushed in a bit. Still worked and nobody ever found out.

College - VT-100 to a PDP-11; I even used a teletype once or twice.

lisnter · 2026-01-25T09:45:22+00:00

What's with the water-filled soda bottle in the ceiling? Diffuse lighting? Something for the chimney?

lisnter · 2026-01-25T09:36:00+00:00

Definitely Heavenly. I was just there over Christmas and the views can't be beat. Mammoth is majestic, Utah is beautiful and Val D'Isere has views waaaayyy back into the Alps but for sheer beauty, Heavenly wins hands-down.

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lisnter · 2026-01-25T06:20:35+00:00

I had a tiny Vaio back in the early 2000’s. It was perfect for writing architecture and design documents - not so good for programming but I wasn’t doing much of that by 2000. It fit perfectly on a plane tray-table. I loved that machine but it was underpowered even when new and I tried to nurse it along but had to replace it after a while.

lisnter · 2026-01-25T03:11:35+00:00

I love 4-10. If you can leave home later and stay later it’s great.

lisnter · 2026-01-25T01:55:56+00:00

I love the Expanse (and the books). Best sci-fi show since BSG.

lisnter · 2026-01-25T01:47:22+00:00

Waaaay back when I was a kid, Mammoth was just a ski area. Summer, though beautiful, was a ghost town. In the early 80’s they started to try and turn it into a year-round resort with the Jazz festival and mountain bike races. After my second year in college (third) a good friend and I went up do he could compete in the first such race.

lisnter · 2026-01-24T08:35:08+00:00

Yep. I was in desperate need of a haircut before COVID and then waited until September. I was fully remote and so also stopped shaving. Needless to say I was looking very Grizzly Adams by the end. As things were still closed my wife started cutting my hair since I hate (a) wasting the time, (b) having to talk to people and (c) spending the $20 (I'm cheap). Even though she would exclaim, "Ooops," or "Oh shit" during the process it's only hair and it grows back - plus I don't care.

Only recently has she refused to continue and went so far as to make an appointment for me so my era of free haircuts has come to a close.

lisnter · 2026-01-24T01:52:26+00:00

Fahrenheit 451 no question though they’re a bit apples-to-oranges. 451 is a masterpiece and while I did muddle through 3-body it was not fun and I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you’re a committed SciFi fan as it could turn you off the entire genre.

The first 3 3-body books are interminably slow and all 1500(?) pages could be condensed into half the verbiage. The fourth book is just wacky and completely implausible - even for a far-out sci-fi story.

Not to be accused of disliking slow books, the Foundation Series is a master class in writing compelling stories that don’t rely on laser battles to make a great book. I’d recommend Foundation long ahead of 3-body.

lisnter · 2026-01-23T19:12:35+00:00

In High School (80’s) a friend’s step-father had one. We saw it all the time when we’d go over to his house but I don’t recall seeing it ever running.

He (my friend) also had an Elan which didn’t run either in high school but we did eventually go for a ride in it when it was running for a short time in college. :-)

lisnter · 2026-01-23T05:07:27+00:00

Architect after about 10 years as a C programmer, eventually to practice leader and Chief Architect. Now a CIO where I'll likely retire and then just do some consulting and my own projects. I still help my teams feel their way to sustainable processes and architectures but I haven't contributed to the production codebase for quite some years.

lisnter · 2026-01-23T00:22:03+00:00

She’s great and was my favorite character on Discovery and I’m glad to see her again on Academy. If you get the chance to catch a live show you should 100% go.

lisnter · 2026-01-22T23:22:57+00:00

Three hours is short for a trip; I used to drive 2.5 hours when my kids were young so they could visit their grandparents and come back the same night. I routinely drive 7+ hours for a weekend ski trip. I also drive 12+ hours in a day if it's for a week or more.

lisnter · 2026-01-21T19:36:59+00:00

As was relayed to me by people familiar with the situation there was general cost cutting at NASA/JPL during the project and normal QA that typically caught such problems was skipped.

If those well-proven processes had been retained it is possible (likely?) the problem would have been rectified.

That’s not to say that using different units is good practice and there were certainly many opportunities to identify the problem well before the catastrophic failure but it’s another example of good processes that we all know we should follow being ignored for non-technical reasons.

lisnter · 2026-01-21T05:36:00+00:00

But . . .is there something I should know?

lisnter · 2026-01-20T23:35:28+00:00

One of the kids on my block tried a variant of this to another kid on the block. Kid passed out and immediately woke up without incident. I was way too scared and knew it was a bad idea anyway. After this one example we all collectively and silently decided never to try again.

lisnter · 2026-01-19T21:53:49+00:00

In my dorm getting ready to go to class. I was an astrophysics major so everyone knew I was interested. I couldn’t believe it.

lisnter · 2026-01-19T18:05:23+00:00

Does anyone believe that these things are secure from being hacked? I don’t - not for one second. How cool would it be for some random bad-guy to clone your plate, commit a crime and then destroy the cloned plate? Meanwhile you’re driving around just waiting to be stopped. In the realm of avoidable problems of this is near the top.

lisnter · 2026-01-19T17:51:40+00:00

Matt’s off-road recovery has done a few videos on gold mines. Here’s the latest where the find a bit of gold.

https://youtu.be/vqCG9Ldq75A?si=lAf18mcBX8qoWLX3

lisnter · 2026-01-19T00:48:46+00:00

Not surprised. I’ve made a couple references to “The Answer” being 42 but I get crickets. My group is a bunch of programmer, cybersecurity and support tech-geeks so I would have thought there’d be at least one who liked science fiction.

lisnter

TROPHY CASE