jjkaczor

As a "Gen X" kid - basically sooo many channels had the original series on, that it was a constant background absorption.

So - when TNG began airing, I would have been about 15 - right squarely in the perfect formative timeframe - it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was.

Alberta is doing the same November 1st as well - they are even getting their own timezone...

(lots of rush work, Microsoft is still "validating" this new TZ in M365/SPO/OneDrive, users who tried to use that new TZ yesterday, changing their SPO sites end-up broken and unable to load without hitting system pages via URL... users who had changed their desktop OS TZ couldn't edit List items... it was a "fun" day...)

Uh - he made mistakes when he was young, learned from them and went on to healthier lifestyle choices.

I would rather take advice from someone who learned from mistakes than random "influencers" or corporations...

.... and yet the console still can't do YouTube... (sighs in frustration not for myself, but for the kids in my family, who still gravitate towards the first one to watch a video here and there)

Someone who works in an ISP - or one of the media companies which own the IP.

(Or both... here in Canada, Rogers is a "wonderful" mix of both...)

not "his" PC/Computing column, Penn Jillette's... ugh

His written blog of his long-distance ISP trials and tribulations are one of the many things that inspired me into digital radio/comms and even getting my HAM license a couple of years ago.

Exactly - these were essentially celebrity gossip columns - I was fond of his - but even more "had-to-read-every-month" was his "PC/Computing" column - which was never about PC's, nor computing - IIRC, it was mostly about Uma Thurman. (IIRC, it was almost as much as an obsession as Tarantino's...)

Oh the VBX > OCX transition nightmare...

At the time I worked for an organization which pretty much had an unlimited budget for development and had therefore purchased just about every VBX bundle. They also had a solution with about 90+ complex forms - and no standards, so each developer of each form would pick whichever VBX control that "pleased their eyes". Which was "fine", until about 50% of those VBX control vendors simply did not offer an OCX upgrade in a timely manner - or in many cases simply folded/stopped entirely...

(The next nightmare was transitioning to what was supposed to be a more loosely-coupled COM type architecture, where each form could be dynamically loaded - except, referenced dependency tree and "breaking-binary-compatibility" during weekly "clean builds" ended-up taking sooooo much time... Thanks to a tool from a MSFT employee via their consulting service called "VBBuilder" (think of essentially "make") finally helped reduce that manual effort from a full day to just minutes...)

Lack of response and direct human interaction is why I never pivoted to doing "online" sessions, podcasting or even online-first training sessions.

As well - the fact that technical writing (in publishing at least) has been homogenized and steered-clear of the use of humour, metaphors, idioms and analogies has also moved me away from writing/technical editing - I miss the days of "quirky" books - things like Jeff Duntemman's "Delphi Programming Explorer", which IIRC was told as a hardboiled detective mystery. Or "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Sure - I understand the driving commercial underlying reasons for this: profit + globalization - but I still miss those. Of course, with technical blogs available, there are still plenty of unique voices out there.

For awhile I did the public speaking circuit - my focus was on infrastructure engineering, governance and supportability.

So - I would pepper my talks with real-life scenarios and anecdotes - and alot of humour - because my audiences where in the "same trenches" as me.

Then, I gave a talk to an audience of ALL corporate developers (Windows world, so .NET) - it was such a weird vibe, I have never had such a stony-faced, unresponsive crowd of attendees. (But their written feedback/reviews were great, so...)

(It also didn't start well, because the venue hosts attempted to eject an attendee because of the way he was dressed (motorcycle leathers, jeans - honestly nothing offensive) - and "didn't look like he was supposed to be there" - I intervened - it turned out that he was a tech user-group leader in the local community, and was just "different/quirky".)

(On review, I have better camera's on my current model - guess I will wait and see... "Duo Pro Max"... hahahaha)

Of course, the memes are already out about how large a hand you will need to use one of these... Harkens back to the "you're holding it wrong" antenna-gate controversy...