ToddWBurgess

I was a funeral director. Left the industry in 2010 due to PTSD. Gave up my licence and never looked back. The mental health toll on the profession is a real thing given the highly emotional work, low pay, difficult working conditions and corporate influences on the industry.

I worked with 3 funeral directors who took their lives. Anyone in the industry is well acquainted with suicide, yet its a topic we avoid talking about. Still, I salute anyone who is still in the industry and those of us who have done it have a special bond and I would drop everything to help another funeral director if I knew they were in trouble (despite being out of the industry).

Unless you have done the job you will never understand the job and you are probably better off not understanding.

No Internet for us back in the day with its myriad of issues. Just BBSs and screaming at the family when the carrier dropped and you wanted to know who picked up the phone.

I think the biggest risk is someone integrates AI with ballistic missile detection systems and the AI creates a false positive event (missile launch). And on top of that the country with the false positive has an alert ballistic missile arsenal of its own ready to launch for this contingency.

Ideally, the leader of the targeted country waits it out but what if waiting it out could mean losing it all? It's not a hypothetical scenario either. There were a lot of false positive events on both sides during the cold war. It's why countries with nuclear weapons only allow them to be launched by humans. That said what if the decision to launch is based on erroneous data?

Found the December 1994 article I read that was my first introduction to HTML and helped me write my first home page. One of the few articles I read that has stayed with me for over 30 years

Before watching that video all the IBM employees would have had to get together and sing songs. It was a long standing tradition at IBM that all employees at the start of the day had to get together and sing songs praising IBM and Thomas Watson. You can still find copies of the IBM song book floating around the Internet.

When my Dad started in the late 60s IBM had discontinued the morning song tradition.

It has never really went away. Check the news and you can see news stories about employees at anatomy schools and funeral homes who were engaged in the illicit sale of bodies and body parts for a variety of purposes.

I am a former funeral director who has had some professional experience with medical donations so I still find it all very interesting even though I have long since left the industry.

sysop breaking in for chat:

I remember getting a modem for Christmas 1990 (2400 baud modem) and logging into BBSs and my world would never be the same. I was a hardcore BBS user from 1990-1994.

In 1994, I got my first Unix account with Internet access when I started University. Once I saw the Internet there was no going back (even if it was only the 1994 edition) and I gave up on using BBSs ever again. I suspect most people have a similar story to mine.

In Canada because of our privacy rules we have the ability to opt out of having our address published in the official government ham database. American hams don't have that option which complicates things for them.

I am a ham radio operator and also a member of Radio Amateurs of Canada. As we all know, the weather can be a matter of life and death and it is important Canadians have access to the latest weather. I am glad that RAC is taking up the cause for Canadians. In many parts of the country weather radio services parts of the country that don't have reliable Internet or AM/FM radio broadcasts. 73

Writing a blog nobody reads is called a diary.

This article reads like study notes for the Canadian Advanced ham license exam. It's a great crash course on diodes.

Sounds like the start of the plot for a heist movie

There is a great YouTube video on the subject if you are interested. Its 38 minutes long but worth the watch.

When The Soviets Hunted Down Their Own Warship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkBQl7YRI3E

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).

Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

QModem allowed me to explore the wonderful world of BBSs before the Internet was a thing. Having access to BBSs gave me a leg up when I got to University and got access to the Internet. BBSs are what got me seriously interested in computers and helped me launch a career in software development.

Your Dad's legacy will be writing the software that opened doors for many of us when computers used to be a walled garden and talking to another person on a computer was still a foreign concept for the general population. Condolences on the loss of of your father but hopefully you can take comfort in the fact his legacy made the world a better place for PC users.

Just wanted to add, found this YouTube video of your father launching QModem on an old PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs7XZs6jOhc

I was one of those Linux evangelists back in the 90s. Tried to get all the undergrads in my CS program migrated to Linux back in the day. Fun times.

I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.

So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.

Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.

Spent hours back in the day getting my ass kicked playing this with my grandfather. It quite often got used as a chance to get some grandfatherly advice. The one lesson he taught me and has stuck with me:

"If you can't win. Make it hard for the other guy to win."

Seeing the name Watcom takes me back to my days of high school computer science doing BASIC and Pascal.

Anyone here old enough to remember from the BBS days when Phil Katz was embroiled in a legal dispute over his program PKARC and the ARC compression file format? At the time it was cast as a David and Goliath story (with Phil being David) when it was really just two small home based software developers fighting it out.

Long story short, Phil lost the arc dispute which is why I assume he moved onto the ZIP format. In the end, Phil Katz was taken from us too soon because his personal demons got the better of him.

Lost my mother to ALS. She was a nurse so she made a point to ask if there was a chance she passed it onto her kids and was assured no we are fine. It is a small consolation considering all she had to endure.

ALS is a horrible way to exit this earth. It is a death I would wish on no one

How about some love for Quick BASIC? That was my big Christmas present once upon a time when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

As an ex Excite@Home employee (anyone remember Excite??) I think its cool to see the old company pop up on HN in 2023

Dr. Dobb's Dec 1994 had an article on writing HTML. I used it as a reference to write my first homepage (remember when homepages were a thing?) in Dec. 1994 on the computer science club's server. It was my first introduction to the inner workings of the web. Fun times.

I was the high school student that used to teach the teachers how to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS back in the day. So many memories seeing it again

To be fair maybe the app is done but not rejected by the Apple review process so there is some back and forth getting the app to pass. A lot of app politics to navigate for both Apple and Google to get your app out and published.

More then likely being a bank they probably have a lot of policies and procedures in place to get an app to the point where it is ready to be published and someone just figured out that Apple did an update.

If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.

Speaking as a Flutter dev, I would say it depends.

If you want to go all in on Android then do the native Android route. Gives you access to the full Android platform. If the app is for personal use you can see what UI framework works for you, XML files or Jetpack Compose. These days native Android means Kotlin which is a powerful language with another learning curve.

If you want to do cross platform or don't want to deep dive the Android APIs, Flutter is a great way to go. It is based on Dart which is easy to tackle if you have a Javascript background. The learning curve, I think for Flutter is not as steep as native Android.

If I had a preference I am biased towards Native Android but doing Flutter professionally has given me access to iOS development (something I could never do if I only did native Android), there is that.

Download Android Studio, try the sample apps and see which one does it for you.

I used to know a BSD kernel developer who wrote all his kernel code with ed