I’ll give it a try, but … jeez.

I make bread and pizza dough with honey or molasses instead of sugar and it’s fantastic. Honey is always better than sugar – except in coffee.

One of the plots in Dune was the idea that Baron Harkonnen initially put the Beast Raban in charge of Arrakis so that he could be a huge dick and make everybody hate him, then he would be replaced by Feyd-Rautha whom everybody would love because he was slightly less of a huge dick. Trump and Vance.

Ride my bicycle. I’m a retired software engineer.

Angine de Poitrine it is!

Our buses have an aux input jack. I just don’t ever feel like messing around with an aux cable and USB-C adapter just for 15 minutes of music. Although i would really enjoy making my elementary school kids listen to Shpongle.

I’m a school bus driver and in the mornings the kids beg me to play music on the radio. So I turn it on, set it to “SCAN” and then I don’t hear one fucking actual song the entire rest of the ride. Even the local classical station is somehow just people babbling.

Just a reminder that ICE vans do have catalytic converters.

Q: What’s the capital of South Sudan?
A: Not a whole lot!

They hate us 'cause they anise.

I once spent three weeks in Amsterdam, mainly for weed tourism. Breakfast and lunch was just an utter wasteland; I just stayed in my apartment all day eating ice cream bars and ham salad. Dinner was salvaged by the Indonesian restaurants.

Ours start wars with foreign countries in order to drive up the price of oil.

My favorite type of pasta lately is called cavatappi, which I assumed was some ancient Italian thing. Turns out it was invented by accident in 1970 and was originally named after Adriano Celentano, the dude who made Prisencolinensinainciusol. The more I learn, the less I know.

I remember some years ago when a version of MSDN came out that had clearly been developed entirely on enormously wide monitors. Despite word-wrapping being a problem that the programming world solved many decades ago, this version of MSDN had completely fucked it up and you could only read it on a normal laptop screen by scrolling left and right with the horizontal scroll bar for every line. I spent months copying every article I needed to read into Notepad.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.

the omnipresent Qt

So weird. I spent more than two years of my career working on a Qt app (not by choice) but I’ve never met another human being who has ever even heard of Qt. Nothing else has ever made me so certain that I’m clinically insane.

My favorite thing about Qt was the use of C++ for the back end and Javascript for the UI layer. It lets companies take advantage of the, uh, four people in the world who are good with both languages.

I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB’s On Error Resume Next “solution” to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn’t actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.

In graduate school I used to go out drinking six nights a week, the kind of thing that would start at 5 pm and end at 2 or 3 in the morning at somebody’s house doing bong hits. Thirty years later, I would choose waterboarding before I put myself through that again.

I have a 76 year old coworker who does 18 mile runs. He doesn’t do marathons because he gets too bored. I console myself with the fact that at least he looks like a pork chop that’s been forgotten in the fridge, but it’s not much of a consolation.

It couldn’t possibly be rich parents.