bridanp

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
118
Submissions
43
Member since
Jan 14
IT check processing, mainframe analyst, and production control manager day in and day out.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Asking 18-24 year olds to make lifetime statements is not the same as asking a 40-50 year old person. One group has no concept yet and the other is starting to regret wasting it.
Comment · 4 years ago
Everyone should zoom into this image on your own because it is just absolutely amazing! I don’t care politically either way, but I’m sure/hopeful NASA’s presentation tomorrow will actually do a better job of showing just how important these visual discoveries really are.
Comment · 4 years ago
I keep a pen in hand and I write in my books as I’m reading. Underlining, bracketing, or rewording parts I find interesting. That seems to help provide a pseudo feedback loop for me. Of course that makes them pretty much untradeable afterwards.
Comment · 5 years ago
It's sounds silly, but the way I've broken the phone addiction is with a watch. I've got it paired as a family member through my wife's phone, and it has a cell plan so the only phone number I have is through the watch. My work requires me to have a mobile "phone" and I get a stipend for having the service, so I'm required to have something. This serves that purpose, but for my mental health, the mindless scrolling and surfing are gone because the apps on this thing are too small for my middle age eyes to bother with. And with work internet access being restricted, I've pretty much broken the smartphone habit. Yes feels like an expensive way to break a habit. I agree, but all things factored in, it meets every requirement and gives me a lot of hours back in the day for what you mentioned: reading, exercising, study.
Comment · 5 years ago
I definitely read this like the two of you. If the information being shown by Google results is what I need, there isn't a need to click further. On top of that, many of us have been "trained" that products like ZScaler are going to block most sites and register a hit with InfoSec. I'm not going to click on bobsfunmainframefacts.com if Google scraped the needed info for me.
Comment · 6 years ago
It should definitely be left up. It’s okay to have that world view at his age, and it is probably serving him well right now. I remember being 22-23 and wondering why everyone didn’t want to work 12 hours a day. Why were some leaving before 5, some came in late, some just in general did not give a shit. Here I was working hard not only to learn brand new systems, but build a disaster recovery plan, capacity planning, and production control scheme from scratch. And trying to finish my degree on the side. While I’m doing all of this, these shiftless people were making excuses about kids having to be places, or wives who wanted their husbands home, or people who always seemed to be sick. I didn’t understand.

I’m 47 now and I completely understand. Over time, I realized that there was life outside of work. Kids were actually fun to hang around, and my wife is my best friend. Not my job, and not my coworkers, the wife I chose to spend time with actually is fun to spend time with.

I get what Alexandr is saying, I really do. Except for the CEO bit, I had the same world view 25 years ago. And it’s a good world view for that age. However life will change, our experiences will broaden, and I feel he will probably have a completely different idea 20 years from now.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I understand what you are both saying. Think it kinda depends on your part of the world too. My home couldn't be deeper into the US Bible Belt. If my family were harassed by a company like this, we would become outcasts very very quickly. Yeah, I'd rather take this over an actual SWAT, but both would have severe and long term consequences.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
The list of storefronts the author gave in the article (Silver Arch Books, Owls Books, Yellow Hammer Books and Sierra Nevada Books) look like they are all "owned" by Thriftbooks, which was interviewed in the article (just search Amazon and then one of the names to find the seller profile). Maybe Thriftbooks has a separate storefront for each warehouse?
Comment · 7 years ago
I'm trying to come up with words to describe this that would be worthy of even saying. All I can say is I love it. I was born in 1973, but for those of you who don't remember the pre-internet edge, current books and movies weren't exactly a click away. It would take years for the encyclopedia sets and science books to be updated. So at the ages of 6-12, all of the materials about space were about the Apollo missions. My friends and I would just absorb anything and everything Apollo and moon related we could find as if it were currently happening. This whole real time experience takes me back to that place of trying to figure what time of day they lifted off, how fast they were traveling, how long it took to get into orbit, how long they were there, etc. All of that kind of thing, and here it is beautifully recreated with time, voices, and video. And point in time data to boot. It's just wonderful.
Comment · 7 years ago
As do I (bank file transmissions representing!) To compensate this partial file fiasco, we tend to rely on the .done file methodology (i.e. we won't pick your file from your server until your script writes out a dummy file we can locate). Or we'll allow you to just push the file to us. Our system will notice partial file send of course, where the transmission stopped. But we can't determine if the file was partial to begin with. So we rely on balance reports to come via alternate FTP or email transmissions.

Don't get me started on sending ASCII as binary to the mainframe to compensate for the EBCDIC formatting. Or the lack of carriage return and line feed characters that cause so many fun issues.

All of that to say that none of it's pretty, but all of it works. The balancing is key as are the extra staff needed to verify them against each other.

Comment · 7 years ago
Haha! Very true. Lost in your thoughts. Better take a notebook though or all of those solutions will melt away.
Comment · 7 years ago
Hands up to that! It totally aggravates my wife that I can just forget about lunchtime or dinner or whatever meal is coming next because I've become so involved in something.

Right now is the worst. I made a list of work I need to do today, but none of it was very stimulating. So I opened up Hacker News, saw this article, and have been on this for close to an hour now. In that time, I've read it and a lot of comments (Jordan's comments being my favorite so far). I've decided to try Todoist as suggested by the author, so I've set that up. I already know that I'm going to fall away from it like I do every other organizational method (Evernote, Keep, Kanban varieties, physical notebooks), so a little mini bit of negativity has set in. And now all I want to do is get up from my desk, and run around to see how my employees are doing. I have 60 of them, so that could take awhile. And before I know it, I've done nothing but read about ADHD and talk about the weekend all day.

I really bash myself for these periods of the day. I feel like I'm wearing a sign on my forehead that says "Brian hasn't done anything for 4 hours!" And that sign would be true. On the flip-side when a problem comes along, I'm all over it. I'll work night and day to get it done. I'll do so to the short term detriment of relationships, but I'll solve it. If I have constant interesting problems flowing in, I look like a working machine. If I just have boring redundant work like dealing with employee "time cards" or invoices, it takes all day to get to it, and I look like I'm day-dreaming or lazy.

It's now an hour and 15 into this sidetrack. So I think I'll go get some water, walk around, and maybe sit back down and get some work done before 9am. I'll have to or else I won't get anything done. I have to attend 3 meetings in a row where I'm listening and not speaking. If you are ADHD, you know how that's going to go.

Comment · 7 years ago
That last bit really got to me too. It seems like a lot of pride and guilt are mixed in with whatever else might be going on. Yes, 12,000 people there, half a million in the country, but someone is trying to help her. So if she would let them, they could then help someone else. And then maybe she could double the effort by helping out others herself.

That all seems so easy sitting here in my air conditioned office and not having experienced anything in her life. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton