Notices by Garrett Wollman (wollman@mastodon.social)

One thing I have never understood about my employer's use of Concur: every time we book a flight, we pay a commission to a travel agency. The agency provides us no service, and it's all on the traveler to actually browse schedules and fares in whatever GDS Concur uses -- there's just an extra $7 or whatever sent off to the agency for nothing, which we have to submit a separate "receipt" for. Why not just book directly with the airline on our travel cards?

@irene Sounds like it would be tasty, but I could never do it because that would be far too much food to have around at once. (Also, my favorite "baked" bean recipe is cooked on the stovetop, not in the oven.)

@irene @dan My freezer is very smol and mostly filled with the meat from my quarterly meat delivery service that I haven't figured out how to use yet. Oh, and bread, because in my house bread starts showing visible mold in three days on the counter.

@irene @dan This is the point at which you have bought half a steer or half a hog and realize you can't eat that much meat right away?

(My parents bought a quarter-steer once, when I was about 10, and had to buy a chest freezer just for that... they never tried that again, although they kept the freezer for another decade.)

@trabex Nearly all public companies are incorporated in Delaware, unless they're really really old and have never recapitalized.

It'll probably finish some time on Sunday, this machine is ancient and slow and small and I would really do well to replace it with something more modern. I guess I could shop for a new build server (more affordable than the one I have at work, anyway).

Hey, it's Friday night! So what am I doing?

Oh, right, I'm waiting for rust to build. It'll be a while...

(This poor old server is a 6-core Dell R415 from 2012 with only 16GB of RAM. It has served me pretty well but modern software is just too resource-intensive.)

@MrMeritology That's what I keep hearing. Even when we have positions open (usually helpdesk) it's difficult to get decent candidates -- sometimes it's difficult to get candidates we know and encouraged to apply through the first-level screen and on to the hiring manager. (It doesn't help that we're a university and HR has a built-in bias towards credentialism.)

@ewen @nic How many eels can you fit in that hovercraft anyway?

@jef @nblr Both came out of Barbara Liskov's research group. In 1994, although Scheifler had moved on, Barbara and her group were still there, around the corner and down the hall from me.

The 5th floor of 545 Tech Square was an astonishingly productive place: X, the End-to-End Principle, library operating systems, packet audio and video over wide-area networks, "soft state", RSVP, mesh networks, content-addressable file systems, TCP time-sequence plots, ...

@futurshox This is apparently why Koreans with the family name "I" still use "Lee" on their passports and not the government recommended "Yi".

@airtower @mcc @megmac There was kind of a religious war about this, with different people arguing that either all header files should be self-contained or that no header file should include any other (user-visible) header file, because namespace pollution. POSIX adopted the former, but also introduced a lot of new typedefs which meant that anyone doing anything nontrivial had to follow suit (because C doesn't have incomplete typedefs) even if most clients would never use them.

@inthehands Stipulated that polysemy is a thing, but to what extent are the students socialized to understand that these different kinds of "discomfort" are not in fact the same phenomena?