So, the only one of my current co-workers that I’ve met in person just left the company for another job. When he announced it in our morning “scrum” (yes, we do a virtual stand-up on Zoom every day; not a fan), I insisted that it’s not my fault.

Unrelated, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Zoom meetings with a co-worker, for the purpose of prepping a major version upgrade. Note that I did not say we were actually working or actually prepping. We have in fact accomplished dick-all in four 90-minute meetings, and I was so frustrated with this after Friday’s session that I stepped away from the keyboard for several hours so I wouldn’t reach through the Internet and smack him. The nice way to put it is that we have fundamentally different approaches to upgrading production services.

So, for the first time since June, here’s some non-animated cheesecake.

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Recommendations

You know what the real difference is between Pixiv and Amazon when it comes to recommendations? No, it’s not that Pixiv does a better job of selecting new things based on things I like, it’s that they don’t show me things I’ve already tagged.

On a good day, when Amazon manages to recommend products that are actually relevant, about a third of them will be things that I’ve already purchased from Amazon. And I don’t just mean consumables like coffee or 3d-printing filament, or things like toaster ovens or watches that theoretically someone could buy 3-4 of every year, or duplicate listings with different SKUs, I mean books and movies that when you click on them, show up as “you purchased this $months_or_years_ago”.

Today is actually one of the rare days when my recommendations consist primarily of consumable items that I’ve bought before and will likely buy again. Never mind that many of them are subscribe-and-save items that I’m already buying again.

File under peculiar the fact that the “Hunting and Fishing Equipment” tile consists of a 4-pack of pointy self-defense keychains in basic black, a 9-pack of the same item in a rainbow of colors, a 3-pack of brand-x pepper-spray, and a 150-pack of fishing hooks.

Three Little, Too Late

MacRumors is reporting that for the next MacBook Pro, Apple is planning to bring back MagSafe, function keys, and a useful array of ports.

There are, however, no rumors that they’ll be bringing back QA.

If you’re going to keep locking my Apple ID, could you at least have the basic decency to notify me via the various email addresses that I have on file?

Now I waste another fifteen minutes logging in again on all of my devices multiple times.

Sleepy Princess Is Sleepy

I enjoyed the first eight episodes. Somewhere in #9, I turned it off. The next day, I finished that episode, started watching #10, and at some point turned it off. Then I checked the wiki and discovered that after 17 manga volumes covering several years, nothing much changes, including her apparent age.

Which, by the way, is “at least 16”, despite the lolicon-bait character design.

Last Boonie Kid Town Dungeon Maybe

Wow, they weren’t kidding about the screaming. If it weren’t for her constant ear-splittingly-loud freakouts, the witch would be quite attractive; perhaps if she toned it down to the level of her Darkness performance in Konosuba. My only other impression is that I found myself disappointed that mere moments after Belt Princess strips down to sexy lingerie and checks herself out in the mirror, she changes her hair to a much less flattering cut. And gets dressed again. Hopefully fan-artists will use that scene for reference and make better use of her belts than she does.

I won’t be watching more of it, but surely some Pixiv artists will.

The Hidden Cheat Code Only I Can Ogle

Our Hero receives the +20 Titty-Rub Of Omnipotence from a chained-up supermodel who seems quite happy to stay that way, and proceeds to charge it up by taking advantage of his giant-breasted childhood friend’s crush and his little sister’s bro-con. I’ll just watch the fan-art.

Easy Drider

It didn’t grab me. Some people seem to like it, though, so I’ll try the second episode in hopes that the worst of the setup fluff is done.

(note that much of the fan-art seems to spoil a major plot point)

Not anime, not watched

I noticed that Stargate Origins: Catherine was back on Prime, so I tried to watch it. Tried. Failed.

Even taking into account the fact that it’s based on just the movie and explicitly contradicts the events of SG-1, it’s just not good. Our Heroine is yet another ass-kicking Mistress Of Waif-Fu with 21st century attitudes in 1938, and all the other actors seem to be in slightly different shows.

You can take the boy out of the Soviet…

…but you can’t take the Soviet out of the boy. Ilya Somin offers “helpful” “advice” on making shampeachment 2 “bi-partisan”.

Bi-Partisan: involving two sets of quislings.

On that note, the only constitutional remedies from a successful impeachment are to remove Trump from office (which McConnell has refused to schedule), and/or prevent him from holding office ever again.

If the people involved are even slightly brighter than the rocks from under which they crawled, they know this, and they’re proceeding anyway, after he’s out of office. Which means that they are either legitimately terrified that he could once again be elected to national office, or they are attempting to utterly destroy him as an example, so that never again will they have to face opposition that is Not Our Kind, Dear.

Or both.

With Apologies to T.S. Eliot

Impeachment of Trump’s not a serious matter,
  It’s really just one of those Democrat games.
You may think Pelosi as mad as a hatter,
  Pursuing D. Trump to the END OF HIS DAYS.

Proposition!

“I’ll concede that Biden legitimately won the election if you spend six months mucking out stables with your tongue. That way we’ll both have the taste of horseshit in our mouths.”

Why did you just lock my Apple ID? Can’t handle criticism, or just more of your usual incompetence at running a cloud service?

[Update: given that I had to re-enter my password 12 13 times across four devices after unlocking my account, incompetence is winning the popular vote]

This has been bugging me for years: the Weather app on iPhones doesn’t completely update the display when the day changes.

Screenshots from around 9:45 AM Tuesday morning:

Three hours later, it’s still wrong. The hour-by-hour predictions are updated, but the day and high/low data are still wrong in both places. You have to force-quit the app to make it figure out that today is Tuesday.

🎶 🎶 🎶
“Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?”
🎶 🎶 🎶

I know Tim Cook is more of a political activist than a leader, but surely there’s still someone at Apple that cares about basic functionality of the product line that makes them the richest company in the world.

Impeachment 2, Electric Boogaloo

You know it’s really-extra-special-important to impeach Trump when Nancy Pelosi can’t even wait for new souvenir pens to be delivered.

(why, yes, this person was kicked off of Twitter; it’s a truth-free zone)

Long ago and not so far away, I worked down the street from Netscape. It was the glory years, and many of my co-workers jumped ship with stars in their eyes and dreams of a glorious future that included retiring before age 30. A few of them did so, but most were of course too late to get the kind of juicy stock options that could enable that sort of thing.

A recurrent theme among the Ex-Scapees, with JWZ perhaps the most prominent, is “Microsoft killed our company”. Some go for a softer form, “Microsoft stunted Internet innovation”; when I once asked for an example, the speaker pointed to VRML. Since he was a friend, I didn’t laugh, just stared open-mouthed in shock.

But the strong claim, that Microsoft’s entry into the web market killed Netscape, has never made sense to me. Because I’ve never understood how Netscape planned to make money in the first place.

I mean, I was there, a not-quite-literal stone’s throw down the street from their headquarters, watching them burn through insane amounts of money to produce only 2.5 products: a free browser, a rudimentary mail/calendar suite that was free to anyone who had an account with pretty much any ISP, and a very specialized item that was already facing competition, Commerce Server.

Everyone was already using free alternatives to Commerce Server for everything but their main secure-ordering site, and those alternatives existed before Microsoft released IS and IIS, and were getting better with every release.

So what was the plan? How was Netscape ever going to make enough money to offset their massive burn rate? What were they going to sell that someone else couldn’t create a competitor for? If Microsoft could kill them so quickly and so easily, with a product that was utter crap, how did they ever expect to succeed?

3D Printing, Reconsidered