Who makes a TV with two power buttons?!

Pioneer, that's who.

The remote wouldn't work until I pressed the physical toggle button below the screen.

Dumbest TV ever...

Someday my toaster is going to have an IP address. A bad automatic firmware update will most likely cause it to get stuck on the bagel setting until I plug a usb key in and reflash the memory.

Grandma's refrigerator will probably get viruses, lock itself and freeze all the food inside, demanding bitcoin before defrosting.

My blender will probably be used in a massive DDoS attack because Ninja's master MAC address list got leaked and the hidden control panel login is admin/admin.

Ovens will burn houses down when people call in to have them preheat on their way home from work.

Correlations between the number of times the lights are turned on and how many times the toilet is flushed will yield recommendations to run the dishwasher on Thursdays because it's simply more energy efficient.

My dog will tweet when he's hungry and my smart watch will recommend diet dog food in real-time because he's really been eating too much lately--"Do you want to setup a recurring order on Amazon fresh?"

Sometimes living in a cave sounds nice...

Lecture videos should not have background music.

Please, if you are making a teaching video, do not do this. It is very distracting.

Updated my PC this morning, now it thinks I have 7 monitors (I have 3 and only 1 is working now). This is going to be a fun morning...

When I get home, my wife will probably tell me about all the fun things she did with the kids today. She'll tell me about all the frustrating things they did too and stories about how they made her almost pull her own hair out.

Then 20 minutes later she'll ask me how my day was and I'll say, "Oh, I dunno. I worked on a really hard SQL query today..."

Making board games in VB 6.0 with control arrays. Ah... The good old days... Control arrays were my answer to everything back then... 😎

Oooh and there was also the time I discovered the AutoIt scripting language and made MadLibs scripts that prompted for each part of speech and then typed the final result into Notepad. 😀

🤔 Or maybe if I go back even earlier... that time I discovered autoexec.bat and the escape codes for box drawing characters to make sweet startup screens for my Windows 95 install. 🤓

eTime Xpress by Celayix Software

Quite possibly the worst time and attendance software on the market. The only reason the company is still using it is because the big cheese refuses to pay any per user fees for any product whatsoever.

It requires an installation of Ericom because all supervisors must log in to schedule employees and record hours for payroll.

Printing is a nightmare to support because you're essentially printing through RDP and all print drivers for everyone's assortment of crappy printers must be installed on the server.

The software supports SOAP API calls, but it can't handle more than three concurrent requests without barfing, so you have to code your application around that...

I could go on...

1. Open a couple of tabs in Google Chrome.

2. Close one of them.

3. Try to reopen it from the titlebar right-click menu.

Has anyone else ever notice that you have to right click the title bar twice to get "Reopen closed tab" to work in Chrome on Windows, or am I just crazy?

Laptop manufacturers--stop messing with the flippin' keyboard layout.

I saw this as a ./ comment a while back on a discussion about dev tools (sorry... don't have a link to the actual post...) It was so good that I printed it off and pinned it to my cube. Thought I'd share it here--

"The pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's short lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do without glossing over any of the 'you know what I mean' steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming--the programming. No tool is going to fix that."

Open folder in Windows Explorer.

Right click empty space, then click "Open with Code."

Awesome!

VS Code keeps amazing me.

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!