DAK catalogs were wild. Each item had a magazine article length description that was clearly bullshit. But by the end you’re certain that the constant emptiness you feel is from not owning the World’s Best 16 Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer.

You’re gonna carry that weight

Then they trip balls, see their life flash before their eyes, and become a space baby. Could be worse.

Up until a few years ago there was a local urologist named Richard Chop, and Dr. Peter Ruff is still seeing clients. Nominative determinism is a thing.

You’re welcome.

Correct. We’ve replaced all our incandescent bulbs except for two 60w contractor bulbs in the a hallway that were installed when the house was built 18 years ago. All of the original higher wattage incandescents died within the first couple of years.

The C64 had a notoriously garbage power supply that would eventually cook the machine regardless of how clean your line power is.

A large green pushbutton with a Molly guard labeled “OK” I found in a scrap pile behind the physics building.

Oh man. Huge company I used to work for had:

• two separate Okta instances. It was a coin toss as to which one you’d need for any given service

• oh, and a third internally developed federated login service for other stuff

• 90 day expiry for all of the above passwords

• two different corporate IM systems, again coin toss depending on what team you’re working with

• nannyware everywhere. Open Performance Monitor and watch network activity spike anytime you move your mouse or hit a key

• an internally developed secure document system used by an international division that we were instructed to never ever use. We were told by IT that it “does something to the PC at a hardware level if you install the reader and open a document” which would cause a PC to be banned from the network until we get it replaced. Sounds hyperbolic, but plausible given the rest of the mess.

• required a mobile authenticator app for some of the above services, yet the company expected that us grunts use our personal devices for this purpose.

• all of the above and more, yet we were encouraged to use any cloud hosted password manager of our choosing.

Nonfiction oldies that still hold up: The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.