Bob Tiktaalik, nice to meet you.

Shit, I know some people with bicycles that cost nearly $20K. Meanwhile I have a fleet of '90s hybrids that I paid $50 to $100 for on craigslist.

Some of the roads I drive on for local errands are 45 mph and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that on an e-bike.

As long as they keep all those land mines on the border, they'll be fine.

I just don't see any electric scooters around here anywhere. I kind of have my eye on this thing called an Aventura-X which is a vespa-style electric scooter that can go 35 mph ($3K) or 50 mph ($5K). I feel like that price kind of defeats the idea in the first place, and I still couldn't get it serviced anywhere.

I'm straight-up afraid of motorcycles; somehow the sit-down style of a vespa seems more accommodating. You're of course right about the danger of being hit, but I'm already an avid bicyclist so I assume I'm going to die that way anyway. I could just ride my bike everywhere, but of course that's slower and the logistics of getting a bike ready for a ride is the big pain in the ass.

TBF, my colleague also managed to produce complete disasters in a language (C#) that he knew, the entire company knew, and lots of other programmers in the area knew very well.

I live in the US and I want to start riding a Vespa-style scooter for my local errands. It's crazy how difficult this is, and I live in a suburb of a major city (Philadelphia). There are only two scooter shops within 50 miles or so, and their cheapest scooters are over $6000. Used scooters are virtually non-existent, and even if I found one, the scooter shops won't service anything you didn't buy there. I could buy one on Amazon for $800 plus $400 shipping but I'd have to service it myself and I feel like that would be taking my life in own hands. I'd like an electric scooter but that's virtually non-existent as well.

Then I watch videos from Vietnam and China and scooters are fucking everywhere.

love me plain html

I miss the days of creating web sites in Notepad.

The most insane thing I ever worked in was Qt Creator, which used JavaScript for the UI and C++ for the lower level back end stuff. The switching your brain had to do to go back and forth between the two languages was remarkable. I think Qt is the real reason the suicide and alcoholism rates in Finland are so high.

I had a coworker adopt Ruby for a major project about 20 years ago. He didn't know it, nobody on his team knew it, and nobody else in the entire state had ever heard of it, so when the project failed after two years there was nobody around who could save it. I'm sure Ruby (on Rails) is a perfectly viable language/platform, but you wouldn't know if from these guys.

Unused CNC mills? Damn. When I was in college I did an internship at IBM's TJ Watson research center. They had so much fantastic shit and nowhere to store it. There was a scanning (or a tunneling?) electron microscope sitting in the hallway outside of our lab.

My junior high shop class was in 1980. Both teachers were missing fingers, although I don't think they lost them in the junior high shop.

Incidentally, this was when Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" was playing regularly on the radio. The other kids in shop class achieved the rapture whenever it came on, singing along especially loudly to the "we don't need no education" line. I'm not sure Roger Waters ever really grasped why The Wall was so successful in the US.

I like to think that since she's not in my dimension any more.