All true about me except the last one; Time will show

I’m straight spam

The irony: I once drove into a deer with a John Deere

First order of business would be to somehow exchange into a currency I can actually use.

Valid. There’s no practical way of implementing a blanket ban on VPN. Hell, I’ve set up a VPN tunnel to the UK that I use for work. I wish them the best of luck, while I grab my popcorn.

If a ban were to be implemented, there would be no way of enforcing it.

Honestly, more than just Hillsborough survivors should call for the same. I’m not even British, and even I know how scummy The Sun and it’s editorial staff is.

Yeah, considering how common that name is through history, I prefer it including the first name. After all, my job involves a lot of Maxwell’s theoretical work from the 19th century. Probably not the same person as is described in this article, tho.

Out of curiosity, I did some googling, and it seems no matter how stupid, there are someone believing in it: Aliens built the colosseum.

Now I’m not saying that aliens literally came to earth, built the colosseum, and then accidentally left their socks; that would be preposterous. I think they left the socks on purpose so that we would have enough evidence to figure out the truth.

Don’t get distracted. Epstein!

The deep state is doing it to distract us from big farma putting nutrients in our food!

I tried listening to a musical piece centered around it a while back. And while the phenomenon is definitely there, producing a recognizable tune, the unpleasantness of two high pitched sinewaves is simply not worth it.

It’s interesting as a concept, but as music it is terrible. I prefer listening to music that does not invoke the resonant frequency of my skull.

Yes. US Dvorak with caps lock as compose. The keyboard of the Dell work laptops I’ve had for the past few years (with some modifications) as well as the standard Logitech keyboards enable me to type without looking simply because I’m so used to them.

I’m not gonna sit in a taxi for five hours straight.

Python should be even further down - this list doesn’t account for the fact that you have to rewrite everything because “That’s not pythonic”.

Perl should be higher up because it let’s you just do the things with some weird smileys without jumping through hoops.

This holds true for me as well. I get paid monthly, but is a functional of my yearly salary and how many days there are in the month. I know roughly what this means after taxes. I have no idea what this means weekly/daily/hourly.

In the 90s, we kids learned pretty quickly that we could change the language on the sat TV receiver in order to get around censorship.

And still there were people who jumped through all the hoops and paid for porn back then. I’m sure there will be similar people now who will scan their passports, hand in a blood sample, apply for porn viewing license, and send in a stool sample.

Gooners gonna goon.

The Land After Time

I use rental cars at work all the time and Herz has pissed me off so much that I simply refuse to use them, even if my employer is paying.

In fact, most rental car companies have pissed me off… But SIXXT has pissed me off the least, and at times they’ve even managed to pleasantly surprise me.

Lemmy as a platform doesn’t care. But Lemmy as a community certainly does: You should absolutely be on a VPN in this day and age.

I didn’t. I just ended up here, and eventually landed myself in a position I enjoy and is quite comfortable.

STORY TIME!

I’ve always been into computery stuff. Started tinkering with FreeBSD in late 90’s and later migrated to linux. This became a bit of a hobby, and I hosted a few websites in the early 00’s. But I never finished school, so I don’t have any formal education. I took a year of private school in a relatively big city, where I got my CCNA, that’s all.

Come 2007 and I wanted to move back to the previously mentioned city. I looked around for any job, and I landed what in retrospect is the worst job I’ve ever had - “truck driver”. I don’t mind driving trucks. In fact, I quite like it. It’s just that 95% of the time was spent loading or unloading. And the cargo in question was copying machines. And you can bet that whoever needed the machines never wanted them on the ground floor. Literally backbreaking work for shit pay. The only hilight of my day was chatting with the guy who set them up. Given my aforementioned hobby, many cups of coffes were drank while talking about postscript and spooler daemons.

Come 2008 and I desperately needed a new job. The hours at my shit job had been reduced to almost nothing, and I couldn’t say I missed it anyway. I stumbled across a listing on monster.com titled “Seismic Survey Technician”. I had no fucking idea what it was, but I applied anyway as it listed some things that seemed interesting; travel, ships, computery stuff, heavy machinery. So I put my application in just because why not.

A few weeks later I was awoken by the phone at the crack of noon. It was an unknown number. I picked up, and in was the technical manager (Let’s call him Bob. He’ll be relevant later) of the seismic survey company. Turned out my application was interesting despite my complete and utter lack of formal education. Turned out my upbringing around farm equipment and computer hobby was the kind of combination they were after. He confirmed that I was still interested, and let me know they’d be setting up an interview. I’d receive further instructions via e-mail.

A day or so later I got the e-mail. Time, date, and plane tickets for me to fly down there (different city). The catch: The date conflicted with some army-related plans (I was part time in the army at that time. Think of it kinda like national guard), and while I could get out of it, I had kinda looked forward to it. So I asked the people if they could change the date and rebook the ticket. I expected them to say “no”, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t like I was gonna get the job anyway.

Next day I got a new mail. Updated tickets for a rescheduled interview. OK, cool, there were a bunch of people in that city I hadn’t met in ages, so why not. It gave me a few hours of free time, so I might as well go to the interview for the free trip down there. Fuckit, it wasn’t as if I was gonna get the job anyway.

The day of the interview arrived. It went OK. Nothing particularly good, nothing particularly bad either. Before leaving I asked as a formality when they would expect to have reached a conclusion. They told me end of the month. I bid them farewell, and went to a bar on the other side of the town where I got way too drunk at such an early hour. Fuckit, it wasn’t as if I was gonna get the job anyway.

The month ended. Nothing. The day after I phoned them up, as a formality, just to ask about the status. Well, it turned out that it was just a manner of way more applicants than they expected, so they still needed some more time before deciding. They gave me a new date. Well, fuckit, it wasn’t as if I was gonna get the job anyway.

The new date arrived. Nothing. Normal work hours were over, so I concluded that I didn’t get the job anyway. I was sitting by my PC that night and suddenly an e-mail ticked in. 21:30. I read through it. I read through it again. It was a job offer, already signed on their behalf, listing starting pay higher than I’d ever dreamed of. The only thing needed for this to become real was for me to print, sign, scan, and send back to them.

I kicked in the door to my flatmate. “Hey, I need to borrow 1000 bucks.” When he asked why, I told him straight up “We’re going out to celebrate that I won’t have to borrow any more money from you. Also, I need to buy a scanner tomorrow.”

The job was pretty interesting, and it did involve the combination of heavy machinery and computers (Mostly linux), and it took me to the far corners of the world. However, I decided to leave in 2012: The company wasn’t doing that well financially, plus I’d just gotten my first kid. Time to get a “normal” job so I could spend time with my family.

It took me until 2019 to conclude that normal jobs are for normal people. I missed the travel, the freedom, and the substantially higher pay of what I thought was a chapter I’d closed for good. I asked a former coworker of mine what he was doing and whether they were hiring. Well, he was still in the industry, but for a different company (the old one had folded). Turns out they weren’t hiring, but he’d forward my details just in case.

A few days passed and I got a phonecall, again at the crack of noon. Turns out it was Bob, and he’d happily hire me again. I spent a few rotations offshore, but as Covid hit, there were drastic changes in the company. This somehow resulted in a promotion for me. I was no longer what we often referred to as a “backdeck monkey” - They needed someone to handle the shoreside support of the production system. That became me.

And to skip a lot of corporate stuff that I can’t be arsed typing out, a few colleagues and myself were poached by the competition to support their current survey system as well as design the next gen setup. So that’s basically what I do nowadays - Computery stuff. I still joke that I want to drive tower cranes when I grow up. But I’m 42, and I honestly don’t think I’m going anywhere - My career has taken me to almost all corners of the world, and I really enjoy it, so I quite like where I ended up.