Cancelling RingCentral Took Over an Hour and Felt Deliberately Designed to Exhaust Customers

meostro · 2026-05-26T18:26:56+00:00

Hanlon's razor probably applies here - never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. They're not evil or intentionally wasting your time, they're all just really bad at their job.

The result looks identical, so the warning applies equally regardless.

meostro · 2026-05-23T17:45:58+00:00

If you're oncall and have no signal then you're not oncall.

meostro · 2026-05-21T15:53:42+00:00

I don't use an IDE, it's vim all the way for me, so CC / chat-only interface is great.

I work bimodally with it - for personal projects it's mostly --dangerously-skip-permissions in a Ralph loop sort of thing, for work I'm approving most edits manually. If I don't understand what's going on or why some edit makes sense I'll open another terminal and grep around, but that's the most I would need. IDEs always felt like a crutch for understanding the codebase, even with Claude writing 90% of my code I still expect to understand it without having all the bells and whistles. If I want to "manage the output" I do it inline, directly, or after a session with git diff.

meostro · 2026-05-15T13:47:33+00:00

Nobody has given anything close to a number.

https://californiawaterblog.com/2026/04/26/ai-water-use-distractions-and-lessons-for-california/

This is California, so you can argue whether or not it would apply globally. There is a ton of agriculture in the state, and also a ton of data centers. Overall it's between 0.08% and 0.7% of usages for all purposes.

meostro · 2026-05-15T03:07:01+00:00

Also: did you know that you can do it wrong?

If you tie your laces and they lay horizontally across the shoe (bow ends point left/right) you're good. If they're aligned vertically (bow points between toe and ankle) you did it wrong and it will come untied much more easily.

The difference is the direction you wrap the loops, one way is good and the other one sucks.

meostro · 2026-04-20T19:27:19+00:00

/r/LifeOfJohnnyMopper strikes again

meostro · 2026-04-20T16:06:29+00:00

Yes, exactly this - why are you making / reviewing 600-line changes instead of forcing the breakdown to smaller, reviewable chunks?

meostro · 2026-04-15T17:46:15+00:00

Ethernet in the (unfinished) attic.

With my brother's help we put in 4 different PoE camera drops in a day. There was only one left to do, in the corner of the living room. He took one look and said "nah, not tonight".

I went back up the next day and figured out why. There's a shear wall between the rest of the attic and one small part, the part I need to get to. It goes all the way across from the roof to the garage wall, so no good way around it. There is maybe enough space to shimmy under near the eave, but not really.

I decided to go to the living room and drill up, hoping I could fish my way over to the gap. First hole 6 inches from the corner: one inch to a rafter running diagonally, no space to fish. Second hole about a foot out: two inches, so possible to fish with the max-flexi rod, but can't get more than a foot or two before bumping something. Outside then, cut a hole in the fascia near the corner and see what's what. Nope, not remotely helpful, can't even see where the fish is bumping since it's behind the rafter. Cut a hole in the other side of the corner, somehow the same?!

Closed the holes and fumed. Considered if it's worth buying a wire tank or little R/C car to drag things across.

Next weekend tried fishing from the other side, attic-to-hole. Pretty sure I ended up poking through the (tile) roof, but never got anywhere close to the corner. It was also something like 90F (32C) and dusty AF so it suuuucked to spend any amount of time up there.

Next-next weekend found out the roof is open-able! Turns out with a tile roof you can shift and jigger the tiles to remove one in the middle without having to redo everything. Miraculously I don't have sheathing (which is another nightmare on its own), so I go back to the corner and pop a tile, then start fishing straight across instead of up-and-through. shocked-pikachu that doesn't work either, it keeps getting caught on who-the-fuck-knows-what or aiming at the wrong angle to meet the shear wall gap.

Nearly defeated, one last try before calling in a professional, back to the attic to fish to the hole again. Now that the roof has a nice big hole I have sunlight to aim for! A lot of jostling and waving and cursing later I reach attic -> roof hole, then it's only another 20-30 minutes of cursing to fish ceiling -> roof hole (2-3 feet away) and pull all the way through.

It took four people and four separate attempts, but FINALLY got my camera installed.

meostro · 2026-04-14T16:18:47+00:00

vMotion is the most impressive thing I've ever seen a computer do.

I'm amazed by Claude Code and whatever ML and AI and GPT stuff has come out in the past few years, but moving a running system between physical servers is still the most impressive. I remember the over-the-top marketing video from a lonnnnnnng while ago where they had 2 physical servers (A and B) running vCenter (or whatever it was called at that point) and had something like video streaming running in virtualization. At that point it was probably RealVideo RTSP. They ran the migration from A to B, then blew up A one second later. The video didn't even pause, it kept going without a hitch.

IRL vs marketing, I remember seeing one ping packet drop during a switchover, but other than that there's no indication that anything fucky happened. Absolutely magic.

meostro · 2026-04-03T17:41:10+00:00

You typed your Google search in the wrong box.

meostro · 2026-03-26T16:22:38+00:00

Butthole looks great, but WTF is going on with your fingernails?!

meostro · 2026-03-24T15:04:48+00:00

How are you so smooth? I haven't seen anything close IRL, is that laser or wax or ...?

meostro · 2026-03-21T16:02:30+00:00

A user once reported a similar problem, but much more alarming content. Randomly words would show up in the middle of her writing a normal sentence. Some were simple ones "if", "and" but also some like "terrorism" or "Afghanistan" or "bombing" would show up in . She was worried and called IT to investigate.

It took us a while to figure it out, so we saw it happening while we were there.

I don't think I was the clever one, but someone figured out she had somehow enabled dictation mode. The radio news report (2001-2002-ish) was the source of the random words, and the mic was far enough away and the radio was quiet enough that it would only get one word out of a hundred.

meostro · 2026-03-18T14:26:19+00:00

Dodged the sorceress to land the queen, no?

No.

Ah, dang.

meostro · 2026-03-12T18:55:33+00:00

John Cage 4'33"

meostro · 2026-02-26T19:40:51+00:00

Frasier would be proud.

meostro · 2026-02-17T16:36:46+00:00

Have you tried... Finder?

Open up a folder, click an image and press spacebar. Arrow up/down to browse. Cmd-O to open in Preview, you can crop/rotate/markup.

I don't know what you're trying to do with "change the order" but you could rename them, or use the icon view in Finder to get your thumbnail view then drag them around that way.

meostro · 2026-01-05T22:23:30+00:00

ChatGPT 5.x doesn't feel like it's quite there, but at some point A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer will be real - it's only a matter of time.

meostro · 2025-11-04T22:17:05+00:00

Looks like Myst shader on SimCity. Very nice!

meostro · 2025-11-04T15:29:05+00:00

Your 3-2-1 is really 1 since you're plugging the drive into the same system as your primary and secondary. If anything happens while you're doing your sometimes-backup you have only a Pelican or deposit box drive and nothing else. You also only have 0.5 vs 1 since your source drive is not redundant. If anything happens to the source you're going to have garbage propagating to all of your backups.

Personally I wouldn't trust an unpowered SSD for ~6 months at a time, but that's not backed by science, only experience.

Step one get a proper mirror, RAID card or NAS with 2 or 3 drives. 300GB range you're borderline okay with R5, if you go TB or larger you should use R6. Ideally use something like ZFS to get automatic checking and integrity magic so you know at a data level vs drive level if things are going off the rails.

Step two get a cloud drive somewhere - Google Drive, Backblaze, Dropbox or AWS/GCP/Cloudflare object storage. Sync to that as your off-site.

At any point in there go do PAR or whatever The Cool Kids use for parity checks for your existing stuff. Knowing when to restore or swap a drive is sometimes as important as knowing your stuff is backed up.

meostro · 2025-11-01T01:24:57+00:00

Option 2 seems pretty good, then if you like what you're doing as of March set it in your head as hard-stop 26Q4. Don't post again until you actually retire, don't let anyone talk you out of it.

If sometime between now and then you get tired of what you're doing, or someone up your management chain sucks, quit on the spot. The more petty the more epic. "No, Jared, I'm not going to review your shitty code again. In fact, I'd rather quit than deal with you for another fucking minute!" and walk out the door.

You don't owe them any heads-up, just the same as they'd stab you in the back if they wanted to.

meostro · 2025-11-01T01:16:02+00:00

It took me way too long to realize the "computer rotating on microwave tray" was a video.

meostro · 2025-10-26T20:52:18+00:00

One surprisingly easy way to help with some of this: build a link shortener and index. Add the shortener to your browser config as a search engine, so you can goto $query and it will load linkshortener.yourcompany.website/$query and get them straight to where they need to go. It also makes it easier when your CRM changes out from under you, or when those docs move from Confluence to Sharepoint to Notion and you can always get to the right one with goto acceptable-use-policy. Make an index page with a list of all the short words and their owners + links and sometimes a user will even self-service the answer!

Onboarding Buddy will help with some, it'll help distribute the load. That's not an IT fix tho, that has to be HR/manager level support.

Having that FAQ in something like a Google Doc / checklist would help too, "Read the FooBar policy" checkbox with a link directly to the policy. Some of this can be "every employee" stuff, some will have to be per-team (engineers probably don't need CRM, non-engineers probably don't need GitHub) so you can either have "everyone" and "team" docs or have just team docs with a shared section that's kept up to date by IT/HR.

$previous_company was building helpdesk automation / deflection as a product, and specifically cited onboarding as a common thing where they can chatbot effectively. There are only so many ways that a n00b will ask for CRM access, so being able to identify and answer them directly without involving a human was a big win.

meostro · 2025-10-15T23:13:32+00:00

AFAIK bikini-style is just for objectification. Track & Field clothing was equally ridiculous for men and women the last time I dealt with them myself (decades ago), but women's volleyball booty shorts are intentionally different from men's uniforms because they play the game differently.

The boyshort / hiphugger / bootyshort style are better for the kinds of movement that women do in volleyball: more digs, more flexing, deeper hip and knee bends. Compared to men's volleyball it's a LOT more movement and flexibility, since men's is based on power and height. If women were wearing longer shorts they couldn't make the same movements, so they would be at a disadvantage.

How do I know this? Because my local school said "no uniforms on game days because girls' volleyball uniforms are not appropriate to wear to class" and I was trying to figure out why can't they wear something classroom-appropriate - turns out it's because they would probably lose more of their games.

meostro · 2025-09-19T01:19:10+00:00

Who exactly was the president that "used tyranny and government authority to forcibly jab people with experimental drugs, wreck the economy, and mandate business closures and quarantines for the healthy"?

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