text doesn’t belong on road signs

Hard agree. Where I live, occasionally stop signs have a white lettered sign underneath that says “EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN”. Usually it’s at intersections where you’re not really turning per se but just continuing straight on a road that happens to be curving to the right. It works fine … for people that are from here that know that those signs are there and what they mean. But people from places where they don’t have these stupid fucking signs approach on the cross street and only see the back of the stop sign and have no idea that the car coming from the right doesn’t have to stop.

You leave Pete Townsend alone!

NYC teachers max out at about $124,000 after 15+ years and if they have a master’s. That’s not some huge amount in NYC. At least they get a pension so they can move to Costa Rica after they retire and live somewhat comfortably.

My local school district (that I actually work for as a bus driver) brought in a new superintendent for $600,000 a year. Did fuck all except for bringing in a bunch of his cronies to work meaningless jobs for over $200,000 a year and pissing off the teachers with more meaningless busywork. Three years into his six-year contract the school board had to run him out, by basically offering him his remaining $1.8 million to leave peacefully.

NYC teachers already start at $68,902 per year. That’s not really “paid well” though considering it’s NYC.

Jesus Christ on a crutch, NYC teachers start at $68,902 per year. That sounds kind of OK until you factor in the cost of … fucking everything there.

I prefer the youtube channels where the person somehow talks about a single tweet for ten minutes. And gets twenty million views.

Well OK, but it will take awhile …

That would only result in everyone entering their own version of what they believe the data should be structured like, making it a completely mangled shitshow without a shred of consistent workflow across the company.

Hee hee, this reminds me of a job I had a couple of decades ago with a company that made software for Clerks of Court offices. I got a bug ticket that said a “States” picklist in the application had a “few” weird entries in it. I checked the DB and found a States table with 511 entries in it – the 50 normal two-letter abbreviations for US states plus the territories, and hundreds of things like “Lousiana” and “Louisana” and “Louisianna”, and even countries like “Frantce” and “The UK” and whatnot (this experience scarred me and I now have great difficult spelling Louisiana properly). Turns out the States table had originally been pre-populated with the proper abbreviations, but another programmer had gotten the job of automating a marriage form that had a line for indicating which state each person came from. The form dated to the fucking 1800s but they had subsequently used the line for generally stating where each person was from. The programmer was obsessed with relational DBs so he tied this field into the States table but wrote code to add new entries to the table if what clerks typed in wasn’t already there.

This polluted every other place in the application that had a states picklist. How it got to 511 entries before anybody reported a problem is a mystery to me.

Fun fact: the cost of this software was $50,000. Per month. All 64 parishes in the state paid that fee. The application was written and maintained by four programmers, three of whom were morons (I’m not saying whether or not I was one of the three).

I had a boss who would walk around the cubicle farm giving shoulder massages to us programmers. He was male, we were all male. It wasn’t sexual, it was just his way of exerting dominance, like how cats use grooming sometimes. I finally started yelling “ow, fuck!” whenever he would do it to me. He never did it again, not to me or anybody else in the office.

Self-documenting!

My code:

Meow. 
Mrrrow?  
Phhht

proper code comments

Is that back in again? At my last job, the guy doing code review on our project wrote a script to automatically remove all comments, because he believed that any comments at all were a “code smell”. It was annoying as hell because my responsibility was making sure the code passed accessibility testing (VoiceOver on iOS). I would make the necessary changes and include comments explaining the why (VoiceOver is wonky as hell and sometimes you have to do weird stuff to get it to work properly); his script would remove the comments and the other developers would do the same damn things that had broken accessibility in the first place. Over and over again.

Fortunately, the app never went into production and everybody was laid off.

I’m learning metal working including welding

I learned metal working and got myself a welding machine and riveter as part of my skoolie project (converting a used school bus into a motorhome). It’s a great skillset to have, in case I ever build a second skoolie – which would require me getting Alzheimer’s first.

I bought a used school bus for $3600 on eBay to turn into a motorhome (“skoolie”). Best $50,000 I ever spent.

You don’t have to tell me – my main rider is a hybrid from 1998 that I bought on Craigslist for $50.

I can hardly think of a more wholesome hobby!

I would agree except for the $15,000 bicycle. It’s just comedy how much these things cost these days.

Planets Fitness

I walked into a Subway one time after a ride wearing my lycra bike shorts and jersey. Some little boys saw me, hiked their shorts up to give themselves wedgies, and started dancing around me like the dwarfs in This is Spinal Tap during the “Stonehenge” scene. Everybody in the place was laughing. I laughed as well and never went into a store again wearing my bike shorts. Kink-shaming can be a force for good.

He’s a New York sculptor, which means it was $100,000 of his parents’ money.