goatforce5

I dropped out of a decidedly average university to do customer support for the first ISP in Australia. After a couple of years of that, I got itchy feet and found myself in London, England. The plan was to follow the footsteps of many thousands of Australians before me, and get a job in a bar (note: I had zero experience in bar work), and get enough money to hang out in London for a while, and maybe do some side trips into Europe.

It was '96 or '97, and the dotcom boom was just getting started. Deciding to try my luck, I picked up one of the trade papers to look at the job listings. I bought myself a suit at Marks and Spencers and jumped on a tube to go to my first job interview. I took the tube home, and by the time I got to the other end I had a message waiting for me saying I got the job.

I found myself reporting to the brilliant Jack Lang (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/farewell-jack-lang), tweaking software developed by Tim King's company, Perihelion. I really was just making minor tweaks to a bunch of perl scripts, so I managed to stumble through it and not make a total fool of myself. Even though I was working with folks with extremely impressive bodies of work behind them and I was just some scruffy backpacker dude, they were always kind and generous to me. I met some great people there.

I never did get a chance to learn how to pour a beer.

To be fair, that's exactly the sort of thing a dead person would say, if they were trying to trick you into believing they were alive.

If this post from Cliff was a cunning strategy to increase sales of Acme Klein Bottles, well, it's worked.

I too just ordered one (having been meaning to do so for a good number of years at this point).

I, too, have a TB-303.

It seems like there might be a disproportionate number of 303 owners here on HN.

At some point in the 2000s I was buying a laptop at an Apple retail store, and just before we processed the transaction the salesperson asked if I was a student.

"Umm, I kinda look like a student."

"Good enough for me!"

I got a student discount.

You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.

I came here to say this. Dave McCormack and Custard were in a popular indie band in Oz in the 90s. A couple of years ago he performed a couple of songs with The Wiggles, and came out on stage saying "Hello everyone, it's me! I'm from the 90s!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEeEjEdTqqk

He uses his normal speaking voice for Bandit, and you can very clearly hear the same voice when he's signing most of the Custard stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP_LSm7FjRI

Wisenheimer and Wahooti Fandango are still both great albums (...and then I moved overseas and drifted out of the Custard orbit). For anyone with kids firmly in the Bluey demographic, I bet you could really confuse them by playing Custard at them.

I'm surprised they (i.e. record companies) haven't been trying to push Custard more, given there's a large fan based just waiting to be tapped. It would be fun to see Bandit do karaoke of a Custard song, or sing a few lines when he was in the shower, or just doing chores, etc.

Or it might be a case of situational depression:

https://www.webmd.com/depression/situational-depression

> His personal security cost was part of his “All Other Compensation” which amounted to $6,802,824 in 2023, and also consists of his 401(k) or Roth plan, and personal use of company aircraft or car.

https://qz.com/google-amazon-apple-tesla-nvidia-ceo-security...

I suspect a large part of that $6.8m is the cost of operating private aircraft.

e.g. A previous slide in the above link states that Apple's board requires Tim Cook to use a private aircraft for personal and business travel.

Can US auto makers (or even non-Tesla automakers generally) manufacture EVs at sufficient scale? Tesla seems to be far ahead of their competition:

https://caredge.com/guides/electric-vehicle-market-share-and...

BYD and Xiaomi in China seem to be catching up to Tesla far quicker than the US/European auto makers are.

You can disrupt an office without entering the office. Just stand outside and block the entrance, yell at people trying to enter the office, or bang pots and pans and create a disturbance.

(I have no idea what happened at Google. The article is behind a paywall for me.)

Where were you in Australia? And what sort of gambling machines are we talking about?

> The laws regulating the use of gaming machines in Australia are a matter for state governments, and as such they vary between states. Gaming machines are found in casinos (approximately one in each major city) as well as pubs and clubs in some states (usually sports, social, or RSL clubs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machines_by_country#Austr...

Useful for people who primarily use their phone for phone calls.

I popped into an Aldi in Portugal ~6 months ago, and I noticed they had some Trader Joe's products on the shelves. Unsurprisingly, Aldi Portugal is owned by Aldi Nord.

I believe a share of revenue is not uncommon in shopping mall leases. e.g.:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/clb-percentage-rent....

Google Flights will allow you to select how many carry-ons and checked bags you have (depending on the route).

e.g., on an imaginary trip to Las Vegas, the cheapest carrier changed when I added a checked and carry on bag (and the price difference from a budget carrier to a mainline carrier shrunk considerably).

I was there ~2 months ago, near Faro. Our driver said they had had very little rain in the past 3 years. He showed us empty creeks and rivers, etc. And the area certainly looked very dry.

It looks like it rained quite a bit in the past month, though, so if that has turned things around for them, then I am very pleased.

While all that is true, I try to avoid breaking the law when visiting foreign countries. I wouldn't want to make future travel unnecessarily complicated.

Just to echo what you said:

I was in Portugal a couple of months ago, and our local tour guide said the drought conditions meant we should expect to pay 3x the price for olive oil over the next year or two.

I visited Vegas for the first time this year and I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.

I was surprised to learn that, despite its reputation as a party city, it isn't technically legal to consume cannabis on the Strip. I guess it's in the interests of MGM and Caesars to keep the alcohol flowing, and all of the profit that comes from that.

Waze seemed to not understand the express/collector system in Toronto for the longest time, and would have you merge back and forth between the two unnecessarily. It seems to have become better over the last year or two, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local–express_lanes

I think the problem is that _everyone has one_.

> The company's meteoric growth trajectory has slowed down in recent years. According to S&P, sales declined by almost 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the seventh consecutive quarterly contraction.

We got one for the house ~4 years ago. It's still working fine, and we don't need to upgrade to one with Bluetooth connectivity or anything like that.

I'm guessing they found the size of their market wasn't infinite.

iAgree

I think those dirt-cheap yearly subscription deals are a US thing. I'm not sure similar deals are common in the rest of the world.

I think it's fairly common to take a wire article and change/update it with original reporting.

For example, the current main article on The Guardian's website is:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/taliban-seize-...

which has a byline of:

"Luke Harding and agencies"

> In 1983, the 61-year-old potato farmer won the inaugural Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon, a distance of 875 kilometres (544 mi). The race was run between what were then Australia's two largest Westfield shopping centres, Westfield Parramatta in Sydney and Westfield Doncaster in Melbourne.[8] Young arrived to compete in overalls and work boots, without his dentures (later saying that they rattled when he ran).[9] He ran at a slow and loping pace and trailed the pack by a large margin at the end of the first day. While the other competitors stopped to sleep for six hours, Young kept running. He ran continuously for five days, taking the lead during the first night and eventually winning by 10 hours. Before running the race, he had told the press that he had previously run for two to three days straight rounding up sheep in gumboots.[10] He said afterwards that during the race he imagined he was running after sheep trying to outrun a storm. The Westfield run took him five days, fifteen hours and four minutes,[1] almost two days faster than the previous record for any run between Sydney and Melbourne, at an average speed of 6.5 kilometres per hour (4.0 mph). All six competitors who finished the race broke the old record. Upon being awarded the prize of A$10,000 (equivalent to $32,067 in 2018), Young said that he did not know there was a prize and that he felt bad accepting it as each of the other five runners who finished had worked as hard as he did—so he split the money equally between them, keeping none.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)

My dotcom 1.0 employer did exactly the same thing, although I think ours was called 'Black Box'.

If a recruiter said they had 'Black Box' candidates ready and waiting to come in for interviews we knew the recruiter would lie, cheat and steal to get candidates placed (and their fat commission cheque).

If a recruiter said they hadn't heard of Black Box but would reach out to their pool of candidates, they'd be considered a bit more trustworthy and perhaps worth doing business with.

"Daisy" as a demonstration of the audio capabilities of computers dates back to 1961:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bell#Computing_and_techn...

I've recently joined an existing fully remote team. Once or twice a week someone will start an Among Us session, with a parallel Google Meet video call. People will play Among Us, and then discuss who the Imposter is in the video call. Once the game resumes, people mute their mics and disable video.

It's been a neat way to spend some social time with my new colleagues. Being on non-work calls has helped me get a sense of who my new colleagues are and I feel it's helped me integrate in to the team.