Did you know that you can edit the title of your post? You should think about it!

There was certainly a plug-in or something that made Reddit look like an Excel spreadsheet, so reading Reddit made you look like you were doing important calculations!

A nation of people so advanced that they decide their dictatorial ruler through a trial by combat.

In a sense, yes. If you are trying to get an international volunteer visa, most developing countries have no interest in more unskilled labor coming into their country. You need some kind of qualification, whether it’s a degree or a carpenter’s certification.

In the same way, to teach English in Japan you need a “Specialist in Humanities” visa. It’s easy to get one, as long as you have a university degree.

A lot of the education and engineering seems to be about the area you are studying, like chemistry or electronics or buildings. But in fact, the most valuable part of it is learning problem-solving skills in the middle of all of those courses. In that sense, I still use my engineering education all the time. But not the degree itself.

When I went into university to do chemical engineering, in 1981, I had never even touched a computer. I didn’t know until I got there that you could even do computers as a career.

I graduated, and then volunteered as a teacher in Africa for 3 years. I came back to Canada, and then taught English in Japan for 3 years.

But after my first year of university, my family got a computer (a Commodore Vic 20, with 3.5 kB of memory) and I was obsessed from that woman onward.

Leaving Japan, I went back to school and did a diploma in computer science. Unlike chemical engineering, where I dutifully learned things that I was told I needed to learn, I was delighted to have the chance to learn about software, operating systems, databases, graphics, etc. The difference was astonishing, and I found it easy to maintain a GPA just under 4.0.

I have been working as a programmer for more than 25 years, and although it has been stressful at times, the joy is still there. I’m not an artist by any means, but I do feel like a craftsman, and I enjoy the opportunity to continue learning everyday.

I have never, ever, in my life enjoyed running. I never got up to long distances, but used to be able to do about 5k without too much trouble. An hour of swimming? No problem. 30 minutes of high intensity rowing? Happy to do that. Cycling 50k? I’m all over that. But running just makes me feel bad.

I’m willing to bet that there are millions of teen parents who would have a different view of this. The problem is that teens often don’t have access to birth control, or are manipulated, or plain stupid because their brains haven’t finished developing yet.

I’m sure that some people would have regrets about not getting laid as teens. But it’s hardly a hard and fast rule.

Captain Sensible. He was the guitarist for the punk band The Damned, but had a #1 hit in the UK with “Happy Talk”, a song from the 1949 musical South Pacific.

I agree. The section on web browsers mentioned that Nicola Pellow joined a team of 19 developers at CERN. It doesn’t say that she was the only woman on the team, but since she was singled out that is the way I interpreted it.

It’s a bit hard to say that web browsers would not have existed if one out of 20 team members was not there.

I see that Focalboard stopped reviewing or merging pull requests since last September, though.

This is actually a shortened version of the original.

Ever since I dropped a hot tray of food on the floor, fresh out of the oven, my wife has said that I season my food with hate, and it still tastes pretty good.

Back in the 1980s, before MS Word was the unquestioned king of the desktop, there was a DOS word processing program called WordPerfect. Everyone used it.

WP had a feature where you could press a special key combination and the screen would split. The top would have your text (not WYSIWYG, that was way in the future, although WP could show an approximation).

In the bottom part you could see your text, along with every control coffee code that turned bolding in or off, marked text for a table of content, etc.

Not only could you see it, you could navigate through it and delete codes, or watch the codes change as you edited text in the to half of the screen.

It gave you a control that I still miss these days. No more wondering why your word processor is doing columns wrong, or why the image you inserted doesn’t line up properly.

Check it out (starting at around 4:20).

Oh, to have “reveal codes” like WordPerfect!

One place where it makes sense to use the word female as a noun is when an individual word like “woman” doesn’t work. For instance, if there are girls and women together, neither “women” nor “girls” is appropriate. In that case, I think “female” is the only option. I’d be happy to hear if anyone has an alternative.

I used to use Rainlendar. Not FOSS but the lite version is free.

Several years ago, we were given clothes by a woman whose husband had died. I still wear some of them, and we refer to one of the shirts as “the dead guy shirt”.

I don’t think that off-ease laptops are very good as they are sold. The batteries are often on their way out and so that’s an additional expense (and some, like Macs, are very expensive to replace).

There are some incredible deals on off-lease desktops, though. Most modern computers are way overpowered for what the average user needs. You can get a perfectly serviceable machine for doing email, serving the web, and office work, for $100 or less. Just don’t expect to play any games released within the last five or more years.

I second this. I have learned four languages aside from my native English, and Language Transfer is easily the most natural and effective system I have ever used.

My wife has a lot of trouble learning languages, but she found Language Transfer very effective as well.

It’s completely free and relies on donations. I have been a monthly donor on Patreon for about 5 years now.

I think you mean Brainfuck.