Spain. The Man

North America

Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area

Kids today will never know the joy of writing apps for Blackberry. You wrote them in Java, which was cool and the gang, but when you tried to compile your app and deploy it to your test device, every library module you incorporated into your app had to be signed independently by RIM's signing servers. If you were lucky this took a few minutes; if you were unlucky it took 45 minutes to an hour. If you were really really lucky it never happened at all because one or more of these signing servers were completely down, and then you could just tell your manager that the signing server was down and go home for the day.

And this would happen even if you'd only changed a single line of code. I got in the habit of making an enormous number of changes before running and testing anything, which is obviously not an ideal practice but was completely necessary in this case. I would also sometimes roll my own code to avoid having to include a particular module. My custom UI, for example, needed to use trigonometry functions but these were part of one of the cryptography library modules which were especially notorious for taking forever to sign. So I wrote my own sin() function instead.

This was probably the main reason Blackberrys were murdered by iPhones, even more than their tiny screens with 16-bit color that RIM refused to upgrade until it was too late. iPhone app development also sucked thanks to its antiquated C-style language, but it was still lightyears beyond Blackberry. RIM was going around offering cash bonuses to developers to write apps for them (my company was offered $30,000 by them) but it still wasn't even close to being worth it.

My mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago. She later got a bill for $2800 although medicare paid for some of that. Turns out the hospital she went to had its own associated ambulance service which wasn't the ambulance service that gave her the ride. She later got a second bill from the hospital's ambulance service, also for $2800, even though they hadn't even given her the ride (medicare naturally enough did not pay for any of this bill). My mom was going to pay this second bill because I guess her generation just pays every fucking bill that shows up in the mail no matter what, but I put my foot down and insisted that she didn't. I had a lot of fun calling them up and yelling at them about this bullshit. They refused to retract the bill and sent it a few more times, but eventually they gave up and didn't send it to collections.

A fun side note to this story is that the hospital system in question became in danger of bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. A vulture capitalist firm noticed that the value of just the hospital system's real estate holdings was a lot more than the sale price, so they purchased it and ran up a ton more debt paying themselves more than a billion dollars in bonuses. Then they spun off the real estate as a separate entity to which the hospitals started paying rent, which increased their operating deficit and debt still further. Eventually the hospitals declared bankruptcy and were closed down, leaving an entire city (of poor black people, natch) without any hospitals at all. Capitalism is just so awesome.

"Black Sails", another person here just mentioned it to me.

historical accuracy isn’t a high priority

I want to see Blackbeard getting a cheesesteak in Philly.

It's Tom Petty ... because Tom Petty fucking hated Republicans since Reagan (and maybe earlier, he probably hated Nixon too).

I'll have to check that out, thanks for the rec.

I didn't buy a cup FWIW. I assumed you guys were paid from the US military budget and hence from my taxes, not from Mission BBQ plastic cups.

It is a bit weird to me that when I was a kid (in the '70s) great emphasis was placed on the inventors of the lightbulb and phonograph (Edison), the telephone (Graham Bell), and the television (Farnsworth).* And now those technologies have all been largely replaced by alternatives that work on very different physical principles. I'm not sure they even teach that inventor stuff in schools any more.

* Yes I know that nothing is ever really invented by one person.

Spy magazine back in the '80s used to have an annual "10 worst people, places and things" issue. Trump always made the list, although it was more of an NYC-centric thing. Each listee always had a "mitigating factors" item and Trump's was always "at least he's not in politics". :(

My favorite bit from back then was that Trump once offered to pay for the funeral of a child who had been killed by a bear, and then reneged on the offer.

Fun fact: "walking the plank" was a myth made up by Hollywood. And think about it, would you bother having the ship's carpenter build a temporary diving board out of precious timber when you could just throw the person overboard instead? There was a punishment called "walking the yard" where they made a man walk off the end of one of the cross-members that held the sails; whether you survived or not depended on the weather and how high up the yard was. Not as cinematic as walking the plank, though.

I don't think I've ever seen a movie where they showed keelhauling or flogging around the fleet.

This is what Mission BBQ is like, but add in the guilt trip to buy a $3 plastic drink cup "for the troops". And the barbecue is not good. It's not inedible or anything, it's just that everything (including the sides) is loaded with sugar.