shark mode - noun phrase - The state in which a given piece of software is sufficiently developed that it doesn't really need any additional work, save to keep it working in more modern environments. Comes from the idea that sharks haven't evolved notably in millions of years because they haven't had to. They're so perfectly suited to their environment that any changes are minimal at best.
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For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation about life where you live. I was struck by this when I went to the car dealership to sell my mom's car the other day. While at the dealership talking to the salesman we chatted about where we were from (the yinzer shibboleth of "I'm from Pittsburgh," "Oh - where at in Pittsburgh?" "I'm from X." "I'm from Y, great to meet you!"), which lead to who we knew, when …
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profit honeymoon - noun phrase - When the price of a barrel of oil goes up (or when something occurs that could eventually make it go up) the price at the pump goes up immediately. But when the price of crude goes down, there's always a 1 to 3 month lag time before the price at the pump goes down. If it goes down.
Source: @emsprater1 and @jaydcarr
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Strossian Nightmare - noun phrase - Where the Great Old Ones haven't taken control, but things have gotten so bad that you wish they had.
Source: @tautology
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wad;dis - Working As Designed; Design Is Stupid
Source: Anonymous co-worker
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follicular surveillance - when you use the "you are under surveillance" screens at self-service checkouts to check on the progress of your androgenic alopecia.
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Difficulty: Advanced.
One of these days I'll get around to doing a writeup of an indispensible part of my exocortex, Wallabag. I used it to replace my old paywall breaker program, largely because pumping random articles from the web into a copy of etherpad-lite was janky as hell and did not make for a good user experience. To put it another way, when you're looking for a particular thing in your archive it's a huge time sink to then go through and edit the saved document because it's a single huge line of text. At least Wallabag saves copies of …
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I flew back to Pennsylvania about two weeks ago to wrap up my mom's estate.
I'm really not sure how else to put it. It's short, to the point, but nothing at all like simple.
Lyssa and I flew back on two different days: I got us set up in a hotel and tried to sleep off the jetlag because I flew out at 0700 from California. Lyssa flew out just before midnight a day later. As it turned out we both slept all day and night because we just didn't have it in us to do anything else.
We …
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I've been using Android phones for probably ten years now. Not because I have any particular loyalty to Google or the platform, but just because I can afford the phones. The last time I tried to text on a candybar phone using T9 I about went out of my mind because it was so different from what I'd been using for years. Additionally, my fingertips are just too damned big to use that form factor of keypad reliably anymore. I don't have any particular beef against Apple and the iDoohickey product lines, I just can't particularly afford them. I can …
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This might be a record. Two posts in a month.
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.
Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …
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