The dial-up sound just evokes that early Internet feel so perfectly...

(minor use case I had recently was I was trying to find old Japanese blogs for Tamagotchis, which I gather there were a ton of in the 90s but almost none survive today - imagine if I could get those instead of the 1,000,000 sites just trying to sell them to me)

I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.

I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.

(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)

e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.

Never had to do that since, but it sure saved my ass back then...

Carbon was officially removed with 10.15 Catalina in 2019 - what's the statute of limitations on reusing a name like this?

Auxiliary problems are something that always screwed me in college, when we were doing Baby Rudin, if a proof required a lemma or something first I usually couldn't figure out the lemma. Or in general, if I didn't quickly find the 'insight' needed to prove something, I often got frustrated and gave up.

This material seems like it would be good to actually teach in school, just like a general 'how to think and approach mathematical problems'. Feels kinda weird that I had to seek out the material as an adult...

One other thing I got out of the Polya books, was I realized how little I remember about geometry. So many of their examples are geometrical and that made them harder for me to grok. That's something I wish I could revisit.

(don't have any examples on-hand atm, this is just my general perception after years of occasionally looking things up there)

The early experience with the command line in turn made me much better at using it when I started working - new people at my company often struggle with the basics and take much longer to get comfortable with it than I did (the vim learning curve is steep indeed...). Now I prefer doing all my day-to-day computer stuff in the command line.

A more tenuous connection, but it's possible Cuckoo's Egg seeded in me the drive to spend unreasonable amounts of time tracking down root causes of issues and figuring out how things work. But that didn't really manifest until I started working.

Systems, software, and testing all worked in close concert so that software developers could find problems or gaps in requirements, as could testers. And of course there was a strong feedback loop between software & test. Meetings were weekly and people reached out to each other as needed outside of that. A daily standup was usually a sign that something was wrong.

In recent years we've moved to cargo-cult capital-A Agile, so we've basically traded our flexible process for a LOT more meeting overhead and pretty much a negative gain in efficiency. We spend significant portions of meetings talking about process which was never a problem in the past.

All because we didn't fit some predefined one-size-fits-all framework... sad!

(and of course the REALLY dumb thing, is that we're still often tied to a delivery schedule of 1 or 2 builds a year, with customer selloff testing - so the external process we fit into is still 'waterfall-y')

e; I guess one thing I neglected to mention here is schedule. We usually never had issues with schedule, our timelines were generous enough that even if we underestimated the complexity of something we could still make the delivery date. (admittedly there would sometimes be crunch periods in the last few weeks before delivery)

(alright, it has happened though that they needed to wheel out the old-timer who was around when the hardware was originally delivered, come integration time - since the way you hook up to the thing isn't always clearly described. But the software was fine!)