I’m not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.

They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.

They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.

I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like “Hey what’s up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?”

Their response? “I forget what I named it so I can’t find it.”

I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn’t matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.

Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.

Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.

I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by “last modified”, then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.

It ended up being so bad I had to completely re-do it myself anyway.

Thank you!

Yep! I started out with a Windows 98 Vaio laptop and a PCMCIA SCSI card, but now I also have a Windows 2000 desktop with a PCI SCSI card. I’ve uploaded the software to the internet archive

If you find a camera without the cable, take note that it is a proprietary SCSI interface on the camera, so you NEED the Polaroid cable. Said Polaroid cable also has a very uncommon DB25 connector on the PC end, which pretty much no SCSI interface uses natively, requiring an adapter to whatever flavor of connector your interface has, but those are easier to find and not specific to the camera.’

If you can find a PDC-3000, it takes the same photos, but uses Compact Flash memory cards, which is infinitely easier to use. You still need the Polaroid software (which is different for the 3000, someone else uploaded that one ) to convert the camera files, but just plugging the CF card into a card reader is so much easier than dealing with SCSI, turning the camera on, plugging it in, turning the PC on, making sure the camera doesn’t go into low-power mode before the PC finishes booting, etc…

Please, I thought this was a closed-casket funeral.

I plan on being a stubborn ass about mandatory apps until the day I die. I currently use a phone which cannot under any circumstances download or use apps… They recently rolled out app-based 2-factor authentication for some systems at work (Authenticator, etc.)… I immediately sent a request to IT for some other kind of 2FA, like a SMS-based system, physical passkey, etc. It’s been 3 weeks and I have yet to hear back, I assume they just have no goddamn idea what to do and can’t imagine why someone would want to go without the precious apps. I’ll just continue to be locked out of these systems and unable to do my full job until they can do something for me, it’s not my problem lol. My boss is on board and I still have MORE than enough work in non-app-locked systems (mainly that scary thing called real life) to keep me busy until at least the next century, so I’m in no danger of losing my job.

Make no sudden movements! In 12 years it will backhand you into the bye-bye realm!

It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.

And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren’t that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won’t be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.

I will try and dig through my e-reader to find it, but it was a while ago so I might have purged the file.

On a completely unrelated note, just this week I finished up the last of Greg Egan’s works, I’ve been binging all his stuff. If you haven’t read any of his stuff I highly recommend it. They were all so good, but Diaspora and the Orthogonal Trilogy were my standout faves. the Orthogonal Trilogy is so unbelievably deeply technically detailed, it kept me glued to the pages and pages of equations, even if the characters were a little dry. It’s all about the universe-building in that one. Egan has an entire website with a massive amount of additional information and details about the physics of that universe.

Hah, I guess I wasn’t thinking far enough into the Trekkiverse.

I had recently read a book that had replicator-like technology but the matter stream was a luxury that not everyone could afford to connect to, it was laid out as an analog to the internet or other services like that, so that’s where my mind went. I can’t for the life of me remember which book that was…

I have no idea what my local laws are, but I noticed something the other day about my local police vehicles that I will never be able to unsee.

Excellent font choice.

I’ll put on my best Keiko voice and disappointed stare.

“But Miles, where do you think the matter replicators get their matter from? And where does the power to run them come from? Until there is a complete and total change in human philosophy regarding the accumulation of wealth, any required resource will become the new vehicle of capitalistic control.”

The “island of stability” actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The “stability” part comes from “magic numbers” of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.

The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is… difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don’t exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, incompatibility with various acceleration methods, etc.

The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know “elements” to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it’s not like there’s any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.

There’s a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements, where a special number of neutrons added to the isotope can possibly make these superheavy elements stable for a macroscopic amount of time so they could actually be studied and handled instead of instantly exploding apart and only being detected through their decay products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

I think there are elements with experiments designed to produce them up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118. There’s info out there about the theoretical elements. Here’s the page for element 119. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununennium. Purely theoretically, you could just keep adding rows to the periodic table, and it will keep going, but most of those materials will never actually exist or never could exist. It’s kind of like theoretical vs applied math.

Many years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3EN05faZVU

I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.

I’ve been weaning myself off video content altogether, which I feel is the most surefire way to avoid AI video.

I feel like I’m going to turn into such a paranoid tin-foil-hat nutcase and just trust nothing I don’t see with my own eyes… I mean I would be ok with that, it just sounds miserable.

I want to travel outside the US more and take my tourist dollars and give them to some other place… and maybe even though I am white and was born here, they won’t let me back in for some reason and that will just force the issue of me having to leave for good.

The only problem is that when I’m outside the country, I feel like an asshole and feel some responsibility for the current shitstorm (even though I’ve voted against it at every opportunity, part of local political action groups, etc) and feel like everyone can instantly clock me as an American and will hate me… I was in the Netherlands recently and some woman thought I was from Spain, so that did make me feel a little better… I really didn’t want to come home from that trip it was so amazing :(

The corporate entity that owns the company I work at recently bought another company in Norway, and I got very excited as this new company does things related to my expertise that not many other people in the organization have… I was supposed to go visit and learn more about their facility and planned on vying HARD to get transfered there, but after the acquisition and a bit of back and forth they basically just said “We are ok on our own we don’t want any involvement” and that was that…

I’ve done something similar. I’m somewhat different to you in that I don’t really care all that much about eating, but I was having BIG problems with eating because I was bored. I also started smoking weed (occasionally, like once or twice a week, just a little bit), and let me tell you, the munchies posses me.

I switched to eating 1 packet of Huel savory meal replacement for dinner each night, and keeping 0 other food in my apartment (I’m single and live alone, nobody else to feed), and my work has a cafeteria that serves excellent cheap breakfast and lunch. I truly mean nothing in my apartment, because one time I got high and cooked like 2 cups of rice and added a random can of diced tomatoes and some random spices and ate the whole thing. I don’t know why I don’t have the compulsion to consume more than 1 Huel packet, but I’m not going to question it. I’m also saving a buttload of money, because each packet is like $4, paired with the cafeteria at work, I’m never spending more than ~$12-15 a day on food, which is WAY less than what I used to spend buying and cooking myself stuff. I’m also lazy, and clicking the kettle on and pouring a packet being the only steps required to make a whole meal is a big bonus.

The packets are actually really tasty, I get 4 flavors and change it up depending on how I’m feeling. Everyone that I’ve told this to so far thinks I’m some crazy person lol, but it works for me.

I wasn’t originally doing this for weight loss, more just consumption control, because I was constantly feeling like garbage after eating random junk all evening when I had a bored night in.
In the last ~year, I’ve taken 4 inches off my waist, went from waist size 34 pants being snug to 30-31 fitting just right. I just sorted through my closet the other day to pare down the amount of clothes I have, and tried on a bunch of 34 inch waist shorts and pants I haven’t worn in a while, and they were HUGE, like even wearing them with a belt, they’d have been all bunched up and awkward. I have no idea how much I weighed before, or how much I weigh now…

Another aspect of this might be that in the last year, I learned that I am lactose intolerant. Instead of taking lactaid pills or whatever, I’ve just chosen to completely cut out dairy. No more ice-cream, no more pizza, no more fried cheese whatevers… and that definitely feels like it could be helping lol.

I do feel like I’m really lucky that it’s teken aproximately 0 effort on my part. I know plenty of people (like my mom) who have had a lifelong struggle to maintain a healthy body weight.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/483036

~$200 for 8.3e20 tiny golf balls? Pretty good deal if you ask me.

Thanks! It’s on my (very long) list of things to do lol.

Ideally I’d love to host it, too, I’ve been building up a small network rack with some fancy equipment, but I never seem to have the time to sit down and actually figure it all out… One of these days!

Next time, on Microgolf-Z

I feel like you could do this with some kind of stereolithography process like in semiconductor processing… You could very easily create the green, hole, and putter at astronomically tiny scales as microscopic thin slabs of silicon, but the roundness of the ball, I don’t know enough about the specific processes to know how you might go about that. I’m sure it’d be possible with enough smart people thinking about it, though.

Actually interacting with this game, though? Are you imagining like Atomic force microscopy, a tiny tiny little putter attached to a much larger macroscopic assembly able to be manually manipulated?