Petty first world problem: card reader terminals with the operative bit somewhere unusual - on the back, down the side…
Yeah, I think Chipotle is one of those places… card goes in the top, chip side down, instead of in the bottom chip side up like the rest of the world.
My wife buys shitty pens. Horrible things. They never write, are hard to grip. And she buys them by the dozen it seems.
I just purchased about two dozen good pilot gel pens on Amazon. I’m going to round up all the junk pens and replace them.
I want a pen that will write. Not too much to ask.
Pilot G2s are the best pens ever. My only complaint is that refills are harder to find these days, so you have to buy a whole new set of pens when they run dry. (Which maybe isn’t so bad, as the rubber grippy part starts to get kinda gummy as they age.)
My favourite pens are the Skilcraft ball-points used by the government.
They look slippery. So perhaps a perfect choice for the US GOV.
Nice looking though, my darts have those three silver rings on the shaft.
It’s so cool that those pens have been in use forever by the military. I remember being given one of those to fill out paperwork the day I reported to boot camp forty years ago.
The fact that there still are shitty cheap pens is infuriating. Good, cheap pen manufacturing is a technology that we have mastered. Bic pens are pretty much the example I use of how good a cheap, mass-produced product can be.
My mother was working at a Navy base when I was in junior high school, 58 years ago, and every now and then one of those pens would accompany her home.
In the '80s the plastic pushbuttons that were under the metal cap came in several colours. Every year the ORSE board (Operational Reactor Safeguards Exam) would come on board and run drills all day; before each drill the engineer would walk through the engine room to make sure everything was ready, and those in the know could look at the colours of the pens in his pocket and learn what and where the next drill would be. 
As I sit here and gaze at network packet captures I realized one more thing that is super annoying but never reaches the level of me saying a thing about it.
Everyone who deals with tons of files has their own way of identifying “today’s files”
Most people put a timestamp somewhere in the file name.
Why, oh why, don’t smart computer people catch on to the idea that a timestamp prefix, with year, month, date, and possibly hour, minute, second is the perfect option?
IT SORTS CORRECTLY!
But most people around me at work do stuff like this:
system-x-rtr-y-capture-09-dec-25-04-12.pcap
So a directory full of those files will not sort in any useful order.
Maybe it makes sense if you do all of your work in one way, then they are grouped by “system” but I get them with all kinds of combinations.
How about “12-01-2025-blah-blah-14-00.pcap” which has a non-sorting date as a prefix?
There is one sensible way to do this, why don’t computer people naturally gravitate to it over the years?
I don’t insist on ISO date format, just that the most significant elements precede the lesser elements, so everything sorts perfectly, especially when copied between systems and actual file timestamps are wrong.
Even Wireshark’s tools use suffixes. If I use “editcap” to split a monster capture into reasonable chunks, the tiebreaker timestamp is applied as a suffix. I suspect I can override that, but it’s annoying to have it baked into so many tools.
When I’m in the middle of a conversation with my wife, and her phone rings (it’s almost always her sister), and she stops the conversation with me to answer the phone, then leaves me waiting for 15-20 minutes while she finishes her phone conversation. She will rarely let it ring, or answer it and say “Let me call you back in a few minutes.” Nope, I’ve got to wait.
A lot of times when she does this, and then asks me later what we were talking about, I’ll just mutter “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t important anyway…”
I don’t know how old you and your wife are, but I’m 57 and grew up with a fixed wired landline phone without caller ID and answering machine, so every incoming call was probably important and you couldn’t miss it, so everything and everyone had to stop in their tracks and answer the goddamn phone when it rang. Some people (like my mother) still handle phone calls that way, maybe it also has stuck with your wife.
We’re talking phone calls now? OK. Dimwits who call me at dinnertime. I know you work and I’m retired. I know you just got home at 6:30 PM and figure it’s a good time to talk with me. It’s not. I’m having dinner. Furthermore, I have to go over to my phone to figure out that I should ignore you, you idiot. When do YOU eat? After you’ve taken time to call me? Are you waiting on your pizza delivery?
Wait a minute…”beyond their actual importance?” No. It’s important that they’re calling me at dinnertime and bothering the crap out of me.
Never mind.
This doesn’t bother me at all. If I’m eating, are on the loo, under the shower or wherever else I can’t or don’t want to answer the phone, I just let it ring. They can leave me a message, or else I can look up who’s called after I’m done with whatever and call back.
Do they know you are eating dinner so early? It definitely would never occur to me to think of 6:30 as “dinner time.”
Early???
Well, we are strange early folks. Often get up around 4am. This is mostly due to when my wife was training she would work out/go to the gym before work. And then work a 10 hour day.
So I would be up as well. We never got out of the habit. I have a hard time staying awake past about 8pm.
Yes, they do know. It’s usually siblings, step-kids, or friends calling, not solicitors or Medicare haints. I’m not saying that 6:00 - 7:00 PM is THE dinnertime (supper) for everyone I know, but it’s a popular time range to eat. My step-daughter acknowledges that she and her kids eat fairly “early” at 5:30 PM so everyone gets to bed by 9:00 PM. My other step-daughter acknowledges that she and her husband eat “late” at about 9:00 PM because she works late doing deliveries. If they think 5:30 is early and 9:00 is late, what do they think the usual dinnertime is?
My three siblings were raised in the same house as me, so I know when they ate supper growing up. Even now, my sister will call me at 6:30 PM and say, “Well, I was just about to start supper, but I thought I’d give you a call first.” Great, but I already HAVE fixed supper and my wife and I are trying to enjoy it. Me: “Want me to give you a call back in about 30 minutes?” Sis: “No, we’ll be eating then.”
I have a client who’s a great guy, but he works hard as an engineer and puts in long days. He likes to take advantage of his drive home and so he calls me when he leaves the office around 6:00 or 6:30. He’s a fantastic father with two kids, so I hate to bother him at home by returning his call later in the evening when HE is probably eating supper and taking family time. The little work I do, I do from home. He had all day to call me about his new case.
OK…I’m done ranting. My wife is smiling at me as I type and talk to myself about this. I agree there is no universal time to eat dinner/supper. Going to go yell at the clouds now.
It’s not 1940 anymore, they can go to voicemail. If they don’t leave a VM, I’ll call them back at my convenience.
I am also in complete agreeance that stopping mid conversation to pickup the phone then ignoring the person in the room with you without so much as a nod, is infuriating.
True, Cheesesteak, true. But I am more inclined to answer calls from family members when they call now that relatives are experiencing more illnesses and accidents. (My SIL passed suddenly last week. We had no idea she was even ill.) And I do sometimes make a bit of money from clients. Unknown numbers and solicitors definitely go to VM…if have my phone handy at dinner and can see that it’s not a friend or family member.
And I just checked Google AI, which says that 6:19 PM is a common cited time for most Americans to eat supper. Just saying.
Back to my clouds..
It would never occur to me to think of 6:30 as early for dinner - if we aren’t actually eating at 6:30, we were cooking at 6:30 . Except for the years we had dinner even earlier - if a kid has an activity at 6:30 ( which for some reason was a popular time) you have to be done with dinner by 6 ( or wait until 9 which doesn’t really work with kids) " Early" is when restaurants have early bird specials , usually 4-6.
I don’t expect most people to remember when we eat dinner and avoid calling during that time - it’s not the 1970s and we have voice mail and text messages. I do expect my sisters to remember because I kind of have to answer their calls ( might be about my 85 year old mother) - but they never do. Because they have dinner around 5.,