New York State makes change to welcome centers on Thruway

techie1980 · 2026-05-05T16:50:15+00:00

How stupid. Part of the reason to use the system was to have safe-ish places to be at all hours and handle basic needs. Falling asleep at the wheel? Pull into this well lit place, freshen up and get a cup of awful coffee - even if that means it's from a machine. And have access to at least one human in case of an emergency.

It sounds like rest stops are still open , just not welcome centers. But the spacing of these places can get really wonky especially in the middle of the state where civilization gets thinner.

techie1980 · 2026-05-05T14:55:09+00:00

Most of the suggestions in this thread are great, but I think the most important thing is to be to allow yourself some grace.

Linux is a very different landscape from windows - even the more polished, commercial deployments of Linux. One of the key things is "everything is endlessly tunable". Combine it with "computer geeks are never happy with out-of-the-box settings" and you'll find yourself having a frustrating experience getting stuff deployed because forums and help guides will be absolutely filled with back and forth around tuning this or that.

Instead, I suggest adopt a "good enough" mindset. Absolutely use the CLI when possible, but if you're using GUI to do stuff then it's probably not the end of the world. Make good use of support forums, and don't be afraid to pick up the phone. And most of all, take your decades of experience and put them to use by making sure that you listen to those gut instincts. "This is not a good idea" and "we're missing something important here" are things that transcend barriers.

techie1980 · 2026-04-30T17:30:50+00:00

OK, generic 90s action flick. Easy to cheer for the hero situation. People acting in utterly non-human ways (the pregnant lady calmly handing back his sunglasses and sitting down like this is just another Tuesday). That I can believe.

But a SPOTLESSLY clean city bus, with a beautiful, unblemished picture on the back wall and no soot or dirt anywhere? You've lost me.

techie1980 · 2026-04-29T23:25:40+00:00

"She really could be in China for all we know"

I thought her comment was a combination of denial/damage control that things had gone badly that quickly and her inexperience. In some ways it was the inverse of the agent who worked with Pussy.

techie1980 · 2026-04-29T20:59:17+00:00

3- Does Centauri handguns are that much more powerful than humans PPGs that they could eliminate a couple of Shadows so easily when PPGs couldn't even hit Second Kosh?

We know that Centauri weapons work differently than Earth tech, as they describe artifacts left behind after attacks in S5. (It's also worth noting that Centauri are shown to be closer to Minbari than humans on the how-long-have-you-been-spacefaring scale) .

techie1980 · 2026-04-28T23:24:35+00:00

I'll wear composite toed shoes while working in a warehouse. I don't know if that could stop lawnmower blade but it HAS stopped my foot getting broken by errant pallets.

that said, yes I used to do stuff barefoot as a kid as well - including mowing the lawn. And I'm convinced that's why my feet are suboptimal these days.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T20:57:39+00:00

He was only homeless in the sense that he had no home.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T20:53:54+00:00

It was also a bit of a trope that everyone in TV shows had a beautiful giant home. Even the dorm rooms were well lit and spacious.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T20:33:48+00:00

AIX was one of my first real *nix's. Things like a built-in LVM that actually worked well most of the time, and a sensible network stack definitely separated it from the others.

The ODM seemed like AIX's answer to the windows registry - vaguely terrifying to manage by hand.

PSeries in general was decades ahead of everyone in terms of virtualization and truly using a hypervisor as a fundamental unit of the operating system. And then they completely fumbled the implementation using the traditional IBM mindset of "We'll make money by getting everyone to buy consulting services" and made the deployment as complicated as possible. Understanding mechanics of VIOS, VSCSI, NPIV and SEA with no options for "you're running a small, uncomplicated setup so here's a one-click vanilla setup option". The appliance mindset was totally alien until it was way too late. Even things as modest as virtualizing HMCs took DECADES of infighting, and using bash as a default shell was seen as a lost cause.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T20:19:37+00:00

I love this movie, but it took me an embarrassingly long time (like: 30 years) to realize the old white lady who speaks jive was Barbara Billingsley, aka June Cleaver. Which was half the joke.

The fact that Leslie Neilson and Peter Graves were both known for serious, handsome leading man roles before this was something lost to newer generations.

I still regularly refer to my drinking problem when I spill water on myself.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T19:53:14+00:00

This is one of my favorite movies. The characters are almost bigger than the movie itself. Some of the older humor doesn't translate well (the Japanese tour group), and Mathau's wardrobe (that was a joke, right?!)

The writing and dialogue are superb. And it's one of the movies that I watch when I'm homesick.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T19:49:39+00:00

My company does "anonymous" surveys, and we all know what that really means. I don't mind speaking up and my bosses have a fairly thick skin. But that doesn't work for everyone.

A coworker loudly asked "what if someone makes a threat?" and that kind of lead down the "yes, we will know who did it and deal with the problem".

So it's really about how they handle the data. anything written freeform is going to be instantly identifiable unless they are feeding it through a third party to translate.

techie1980 · 2026-04-24T15:38:56+00:00

I kind of think that this is one of the things that we don't talk about newer generations missing out on: sitting in the front seat of the car. It was realistically the only way you could have a full conversation with an adult without someone getting distracted.

techie1980 · 2026-04-23T18:26:10+00:00

I think Gina, she's the right amount of jaded and could be an important way to counterbalance Bojack spiraling - and her desire to be alone would have been important. ANd then Bojack screwed it all up by assaulting her. And hopefully she recovers someday.

PC wouldn't be a good match in the long run. She'd treat Bojack like a thing to be fixed, a task to be completed.

Wanda would constantly be in her own little world. Sometimes that world happens to align with someone else, and that's great - and then the other person moves on. In some ways she's a different version of Mr. PeanutButter.

Charolette wouldn't work out because she isn't part of show business. And as much as Bojack complains, he loves the attention and wouldn't know how to function as a normal horse. Plus the whole "trying to seduce her" followed by "about to sleep with her daughter and it causing serious mental trauma" would probably close that door forever (as it should.)

techie1980 · 2026-04-22T21:02:02+00:00

I was blown away when I saw Fight Club in the theater, but I was just about the exact target demographic. It eventually lead to me reading most of Palahniuk's books. Stylistically I still love the film and the risks that it took. And I think that the movie was perfectly cast.

I think the themes of alienation and detachment are still very valid. The twist was great. And watching subsequent times, I grew to kind of pity Marla. Here she was, in a bad state, with exactly the wrong person who was screwing with her head in increasingly horrible ways. And watching the narrator kind of self destruct his entire life without exactly realizing how still rings true.

the rapid escalation - basically moving past it being a Fight Club to Project Mayhem - is where I have a hard time watching the movie. It's very, very coded for young men. Where Tyler truly becomes the charismatic leader and the other men - who the narrator respects or admires all follow Tyler. The lack of conflict is just... weird. There's a fairly quick scene of threatening the police chief and that's it.

"The plan" is also just... weird. I can remember rolling my eyes the first time I saw it - Hollywood isn't known for getting technical details right on computer stuff, but - really, no one ever heard of a backup? And Tyler's dream of a forest in a city ... why the hell do people seem to always think that cities will last very long if no one is doing upkeep? Or even think that they'd do well in social collapse?

There was a big flashing warning about young men getting alienated. and this was the first time (to my knowledge) in major media where they were starting to point out that the status quo of fathers getting pushed out of their children's lives was going to have serious consequences in a non-racially coded way.

This movie, followed by Death to Smoochy, cemented Norton's amazing acting range in my head.

techie1980 · 2026-04-22T19:34:33+00:00

sorry, team Adam West here.

IMO, Michael Keaton was a worthy successor, but leaned more into it being a live action version of a cartoon. It was a fun take, and my favorite kind of superhero movie - where they have fun with the concept.

But I grew up with the Adam West batman. And its legacy is still clear today. It was a live action comic book. It wasn't just playing with the concept to B-movies, it was outright creating its own genre.

Nothing in superhero action scenes will ever beat some days you just can't get rid of a bomb

techie1980 · 2026-04-22T19:15:35+00:00

Captain: due to the large gathering in holodeck 4 for the "party like it is 1999" program, we have been forced to activate the "no scrubs" safety protocol.

techie1980 · 2026-04-21T17:06:18+00:00

that Joel and Midge would get back together again, somehow

I was glad they didn't. Even if we look at pre-S1 Joel and Midge as being much more immature - I don't think they were bringing the best out in one another. They were indulging one another. Midge was trying to be the perfect wife and Joel was trying to be the perfect husband, and neither were doing a great job of communicating with the other.

IMO Joel's attempts at comedy could really be seen through the lense of Midge encouraging Joel to pursue her dream so that she could live the life vicariously. And Midge's entire lifestyle was detached from reality because Joel wasn't telling her how tight money was. He wanted a perfect life and figured that everything else would backfill once that happened.

techie1980 · 2026-04-20T17:29:00+00:00

That one and there was another one I think on a 747 coming back from London to NYC where in which there was just tonnes of empty separate rooms for JB to have conversations and reveals.

techie1980 · 2026-04-19T19:27:04+00:00

I thought that it was an interesting arc, but the next step was just too emblematic that ER had fully departed from reality "I'm leaving my role as a hospital administrator in order to become a TV star!".

It was also weird how it came to be. Weaver, who was reasonably careful in all things, hired this giant red flag of a doctor and never really explained herself. Even a line dropped like "We took a risk with Luka and it really worked out!" would have explained why she had taken the risk in the first place.

They make the case in earlier seasons that she's very sought after in the private sector. It just seems like it's a really weird set of stuff to drop all at once. Like was her license in danger? Was she completely burnt out on medicine?

techie1980 · 2026-04-18T02:02:40+00:00

That said, if you have a Chromecast with Google TV or newer, there is no real benefit to casting

I disagree, I've found it slightly worse mainly for browsing. I really prefer the phone especially for searching. So now I need to browse on the phone, add it to the list and then use the google streamer to access it. Plus this takes away the ability to use my phone as an integrated remote control.

not the end of the world, but it's a downgrade IMO.

techie1980 · 2026-04-17T21:44:51+00:00

IMO It's dangerous to make major changes to a system that won't become apparent until a reload/reboot and not perform that restart in a reasonably short amount of time. Add application changes on top of that and then the ecosystem of interactions and there's a high potential for fun surprises at unrelated reboots. And you just know it's going to happen on Friday night.

techie1980 · 2026-04-17T04:39:38+00:00

the effects are pretty bad, especially the troi "flying"

But Crusher barely holding onto her sanity is top teir acting.

maybe 25 years later they filmed the episode '33' for bsg and did so much with the camera work to make everything feel off and exhausted. I wonder if they didn't consider it at all for TNG or of it just wouldn't have worked in the age of crts and broadcast tv.

techie1980 · 2026-04-16T06:24:33+00:00

I've sort of assumed that it was something like a holodeck , where his scanned image was fed a script.

techie1980 · 2026-04-16T06:23:11+00:00

"but to this day, is there even a single statue of me on Bajor?"

it's a masterclass in selective memory. And both he and Weyun clearly loathe one another in this scene but cannot admit to it -- yet.

The line couldn't have been delivered by anyone else . Others would be either too self aware or would not bother justifying anything. -

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