American living in the Netherlands, and I knew of him before moving to Europe. I like some of his music, “Tripping” has a fun video.

I once saw Sam Elliot walking out of a Best Buy and holding a large pack of AA batteries, it was awful.

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”

Wikipedia’s description is pretty good:

In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal economic policies promoted by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics have risen to global prominence because of a deliberate strategy she calls “disaster capitalism”. In this strategy, political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic “shock therapy” favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively. The book challenges the narrative that free market capitalist policies have been welcomed by the inhabitants of regions where they have been implemented, and it argues that several man-made events, including the Iraq War, were intentionally undertaken with the goal of pushing through these unpopular policies in their wake.

There is nothing Oracle could ever do to convince me to use their services or software even if they were free.

Fuck Oracle, fuck Larry Ellison!

Towards the end of last year I bought a home. It wouldn’t have been possible without my father’s passing just a month into his retirement and leaving me everything he had; it wasn’t much but just enough. He was never very close, to the extent that all I have from him is a couple of small statues and photographs – and now my home.

Do you mind if I ask where you are? I’m in Nijmegen and I just don’t see it when paying in person.

Just earlier I went out to wander through the Vierdaagse parties and all of the street food/beer vendors just offered a straight card reading or a qr code to pay.

The article doesn’t match my experience either. I see the option to add a tip when ordering from ThuisBezorgd or restaurants websites for pickup, but they don’t offer a percentage: it’s usually an option to add an extra euro or two or five.

I’ll add a few euros if I’m getting something delivered and its hot or raining, because then I feel bad about being so lazy.

I grew up in a hyper conservative family in a super conservative part of southern Indiana. Even with the remote contacts I made online via BBS, IRC, forums, etc; I was still a quasi-suicidal (and incredibly closeted) atheist and bisexual. If I hadn’t had some kind of community to which I could vent some of my frustrations I’m very confident I would have done myself in. I even met my wife over IRC when we were teenagers.

And, weird as it is to say, if the price of my mental health and training in what would eventually become my profession is that I occasionally had people trying to trick me into looking at goatse… show me that horror anus.

It probably helped a lot that I was 19 and had nothing going for me in southern Indiana.

Asked a friend of mine if he was interested in moving too, and he was. I found somebody with an apartment listing on the then-new Craigslist and mailed them a check, then my buddy and I crammed everything we could into my Ford Escort. We stopped to get a little sleep just after Albuquerque.

Advice: don’t make that drive in two days, it should be three. It is so fucking long to drive.

Challenges: apparently Texas’ highway speed limits go down at night, and (at least at the time) the signs don’t indicate this. I got pulled over for going 75 in a 65 at ~2AM, right next a sign that said the limit was 75. Fuck Texas!

Actual advice: spend some time seriously considering what needs to come with. Most things are just things, they can be replaced. Don’t let your things weigh you down.

It doesn’t count if it’s just the tip!

Programmer and systems admin

So it turns out most of my youtube subscriptions are history related, but…

• Kings and Generals for historical battles because I’m a giant nerd.
• Miniminuteman for fun debunking of archaeology myths
• Mark Felton for WWII history
• toldinstone for Roman history
• History Matters for short introductions to historical topics with amusingly drawn characters
• The Tim Traveller for slightly odd and very nerdy travel destinations
• History With Hilbert because… uh… look, I like history okay?
• Atun-Shei Films for US civil & revolutionary war history
• WorldWarTwo for a documentary of WWII that advances one week per episode (originally recorded in real time)
• TimeGhost for general history done by the same people that make WorldWarTwo
• antichef is some guy that started as a pretty bad amateur chef trying to make Julia Child recipes. Now he’s a decent amateur chef doing the same.
• Dr. Glaucomfleken for medical jokes
• Townsends for early American history and recipes
• Primitive Technology to just chill and watch a shirtless guy in the Australian outback build housing and tools from absolute scratch
• UshankaShow for Soviet history and discussion of life in Soviet Ukraine

I was the sysadmin for a local company that mainly did custom ecommerce & CMS site building for local companies. Way before I started they also provided email addresses to local residents, and the first like ~100 people to sign up got a free account for life. We offered like 250MB storage, which was pretty awesome in the pre-gmail days.

Anyway, one of the lucky residents to sign up was a very interesting guy. In and out of homeless shelters, he ran for mayor every election, and at one point built his own three-wheeled Segway-like thing that he decorated to look like a Roman chariot that he would ride around during the weekly farmer’s market.

So yea. One day we get a call and the usual tech support bump it up to me because they don’t understand it. I answer the phone and am met with a barrage of rants about how my company is in league with the satanic monsters at AOL trying to stop him from becoming mayor and how once he’s elected he’ll blow our cover and expose us all.

Dear reader, he was trying to send an email to an @aol.com account that didn’t exist, and was getting a “no such address” reply from their “mailer daemon” - their mail server software.

I didn’t know who he was before then, but that’s how I learned.

Eh, learn something new every day I guess.

From now on I will only use Newtons when discussing temperature.

It sure is. But it’s also really, really easy to convert between the various units of measurement.

Yes, a US audience:

1. CNN is an American company
2. My comment was specifically for Americans that may not understand or appreciate the situation, as houses there are built very differently and are less prone to baking their occupants during summer.

Why does my labeling the unit of measurement bother you so much you have to comment on it specifically? I’m genuinely confused here.

Why? I’m clearly addressing an American audience from a non-American location; specifying if I’m using Fahrenheit or Celsius just helps avoid confusion. Does the label of the unit bother you?

Hell yea; I love the rain here. You’ll get so many weird looks from Dutch people saying that, but whatever. Fuck summer, I’d rather live with year round winter personally.

After living in the Netherlands for about three years (moved here from the US) I finally gave in and ordered an air conditioner. I was slightly worried about my neighbors judging us for it (it’ll hang out the window, it’s hard to not notice) only to learn that they also bought one that same day.

All the homes are brick, and are well suited to retaining heat through winter. I only set my thermostat to ~65F for a single room and leave the rest of the apartment unheated and the other rooms average about 50F. In summer though it may peak at 85F outside, but inside it will hit 100F and just stay there for hours even when it’s back down to 65F outside at night.

Awesome in winter, and an oven in summer.

Am I mistaken, but isn’t Nix a package manager, where Docker is a container system? They’re related, but really not comparable.