grey vinyl flooring
I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.
“Get the fuck out of Florida” -free
The Birdcage is definitely a romcom. Two for one, in fact!
I imagine he’s worn the fuck out ridiculing Melon Husk’s bullshit.
Bros kept trying to imply it was the first gay movie, or even first gay romcom, but it was the first gay romcom that was created and released by a major studio whose initial release was a “wide” release in more than one country.
Torch Song Trilogy (1988)? The Birdcage (1996)? I don’t know about “more than one country”, but they were major studio movies with wide releases.
c-suite
CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.
giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases
Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.
Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.
How is a database a trick?
The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).
Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.
As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.
Is BeOS still floating around?
They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.
/s just in case.
They get taken over by sales & marketing types
Like Steve Jobs lol.
6 cans of Coke (Sam’s cola ftw) a day
Damn, that is 960 calories a day of soda. If you’re an average-sized man, that represents 40% of your daily diet (around 2500 cal per day).
For a while in the programming world “why are manhole covers round?” was a common question to be asked in interviews. I had no fucking clue the first time I was asked, but subsequently I would put on my deep pondering face and reason through it out loud and arrive at the correct answer, which never failed to impress the interviewer. After a few years I started owning up to the fact that I (and everyone else) had already heard that question.
I don’t remember us ever using the thing. My parents were sort of proto-hippies and we didn’t eat stuff like hot dogs very often.
That thing is built like a tank and a probable fire hazard.
Back in the '70s my parents got gifted an electric hot dog cooker. It basically had two rows of electrode spikes and you’d stick a bunch of hot dogs between the spikes and electrocute them. Dangerous as fuck since it had no kind of guard or anything - and how hard is it to just boil hot dogs anyway?
I recently bought a 1970s Sunbeam food processor to replace my broken modern one. It’s so incredibly quiet that I thought it was broken as well until I tried it out grinding stuff and found that it was even better and faster than the modern one. It is much heavier, though, and a pretty ugly shade of '70s yellow.
Old speakers had enormous, heavy magnets and were great at reproducing audio, especially on the low end. The only major “development” with modern speakers has been the ability to sort of reproduce sound with lighter-weight, cheaper materials.
I don’t still have my dad’s whole 60s-era stereo but I do have the speakers and they’re absolutely fantastic. Heavy as fuck with the giant magnets and solid wood cabinets. Modern stuff just does not compare, especially on the low frequency end.
Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.