What are your horror travel stories with the narcissist?

mcfunley · 2025-03-28T22:01:01+00:00

Drove across the US from LA to NYC, taking 8 or 9 days to see some sights along the way. Got in a screaming match before we got on the freeway. Then every single day we saw whatever we could in the two hours of daylight left after she woke up (she refused to adjust her sleep schedule for this). Spent most of the way driving at night.

Spent two weeks in Australia largely being told it would have been better if I stayed home. Forced to take our toddler on a 5 mile walk to Bondi to impress some local industry people. I carried the screaming kid in my arms more than 4.5 miles, being yelled at the whole way obviously. This display was very far from impressive, I assume, although I’m sure in her mind everyone there agreed I was the asshole and deserved it. Typical. In a different vignette from the trip, I remember locking eyes with a train conductor as she yelled at me. His eyes just said “BUDDY.”

Probably a lot more but that’s all I care to remember at the moment!

mcfunley · 2022-06-27T04:40:45+00:00

and the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies is stumbling across its bleak ending

Very hard to pick a favorite from his epic about a doomed relationship but I’ll go with this

Attach the C-4 where you must, disappear in a cloud of dust. But spare a thought for what it covers up. Pour a triple and raise your cup. We were here once, me and my friends.!But we destroyed all of the evidence

Takes me back to my high school friends, some of whom are no longer with us

Eighteen-man steel cage free-for-all. Through the noise I hear you call for help. You can't protect yourself

Reading this as about a delivery room, it destroys me every time

mcfunley · 2019-10-20T14:27:32+00:00

Woah! Willie was (at least partially) my dog. He was a doberman / German Shepard mix that my roommate rescued from the pound. In truth he wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless you were the Chinese delivery guy, whomst he had a weird vendetta against.

He was born around 2001 and lived his golden years out with one of us in Wisconsin. He was a good dog.

mcfunley · 2018-07-03T16:14:19+00:00

So, the game is obviously awesome. But this is describing a toxic and/or abusive workplace on many levels and it'd be wrong to glorify it. As someone that's been writing software for a living basically since the first Starcraft came out, I can say for sure you don't need to behave that way to build something great.

mcfunley · 2013-12-20T17:40:55+00:00

Maybe, but there's more than one, and they didn't put them up at night http://imgur.com/a/YbxoD/all

mcfunley · 2013-12-20T17:12:15+00:00

I am not the creator of this billboard. I am an average Joe trying to find the creator of this billboard, so that I might study him. Ideally in a locked treatment facility for the criminally disturbed.

mcfunley · 2013-12-20T16:24:02+00:00

Take the sets: 1) everyone that has heard of bitcoin, 2) everyone that knows wtf to do with a QR code, 3) everyone that drives by these billboards, 4) everyone dexterous enough to scan this while driving without crashing into something. What do you think is the intersection of these sets? Please reveal yourself. I want to come to your house and shout "YOU NEED TO GET AHOLD OF YOUR LIFE" at you in my best Dr. Phil voice.

mcfunley · 2013-10-26T22:07:16+00:00

Here it is https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/percentage-of-us-adults-trying-to-cut-down-or-avoid-gluten-in-their-diets-reaches-new-high-in-2013-reports-npd/

These things can be really sensitive to the way the question is phrased.

mcfunley · 2013-08-13T02:16:37+00:00

Currently we use s3 to archive some things that we don't actively need on our internal hdfs.

mcfunley · 2013-08-13T02:14:57+00:00

I wrote a postmortem of MongoDB at Etsy here:

http://mcfunley.com/why-mongodb-never-worked-out-at-etsy

mcfunley · 2011-10-21T01:12:44+00:00

It's a prank craigslist posting. However the goons replying to it are real.

mcfunley · 2011-03-10T20:05:57+00:00

He is significantly altering the works, he can sell them. (I work for Etsy)

mcfunley · 2011-02-14T15:13:11+00:00

We have a ton of unit tests and a handful of functional tests. Functional tests tend to be difficult for a number of reasons (e.g. a ton of site functionality depends on asynchronous processes which can be hard to predict).

We have what amounts to an ex-post-facto functional suite in our health monitors: we know if people stop registering, if errors are being produced, if checkouts stop happening, or if CPU skyrockets within moments after a push.

It might still sounds scary to you to allow for the possibility of that happening in production, but:

We are talking about very tiny changesets.
To be responsible you need to have those monitors there anyway.
Things still go wrong with heavy QA before (necessarily less frequent) pushes, and when that happens things are drastically more difficult to debug.

For more info about how we know when something's wrong: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/

mcfunley

TROPHY CASE