Jul 6, 2015, 11:59 AM
@Luna Have you thought about New Mexico? From what you're saying, Las Cruces sounds like a possibility.
RL Anger
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Thanks, Gany. I'm not sure that I'm really the better person; I'm letting them both walk, and I'm not going to chase. If they ever want a relationship again, they can come to me. The level of ugly is ridiculous. I found out today it wasn't just me though; they have torn into my other brother and his wife as well (for the same reason -- we all told the sister-in-law that her hatred had no business in any of this) and said they won't have anything to do with them either, and that my brother and her will never be coming out here again.
Something tells me that will change when my father passes, but if I don't hear from them at all until then, you can bet I'm not going to be particularly understanding of their absence. The really sad thing is that I think the reason the fits are being thrown is because my dad refused to give them anything of mom's that they could pawn for cash. They were allowed to take any sort of memory anything, but nothing they could just go sell. Because obvious reasons.
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@WTFE It would be fine if it worked with anything else on campus. Having to deal with something completely different that refuses to play nicely with everything else then have people to call in bitching about it is twitch inducing.
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@WTFE said:
@silentsophia said:
@Shebakoby Having worked campus IT, it's probably both underfunding and people refusing to give up things they are comfortable with (thrown in with 'but it still WORKS!')
"But it still works!" is the single best reason to keep a system in operation. I know that among techies it's all annoying that someone dares to use stuff that was around when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, but the claim that "you could replace it with modern software/hardware and it will be All Better
" has been exposed as utter and complete bullshit so many times and in so many ways that smart business managers are correct to give such claims a dubious eye.Replacing a system that works with a new, as yet untried, system is an incredibly risky venture. There are a lot of up-front costs with no conceivable return for months to years (depending on the size of the project)—and those returns may not even happen!
About three out of every four software projects are deemed failures by the people who make them (Source: Brooks), and the people making them have a vested interest in claiming that they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I suspect, from years of observation, that were you to ask the actual end-users if the software project was a success you'd see that number rise to 9944 times out of ten thousand.
What kind of sucker places expensive bets where the people who have a vested interest in pumping up the success statistics are saying "well, you'll lose 3/4 of the time"? Why would you do that when you can use a system that is provably doing its job right now?
While everything you've said here is technically true, @Shebakoby's gripe is still valid, because 'but it still works' is often a tenuous statement at best, and what they really mean is 'but because we have sixteen workarounds, four kludges, and two pieces of gum in place, it still works!' and that shit only 'still works' in the sense that a rickety suspension bridge that hasn't actually dropped someone into a ravine 'still works' until the moment it doesn't, and that moment will be soon.
When it's getting to the point your program won't even run in a modern OS, and by 'modern OS' we're talking about things that became common a decade ago, it's time to look at more modern options and stop clinging to the familiar comfort of your old ass bullshit. People in the construction project planning industry and holding on to a program written for DOS, that won't even run on 64bit operating systems, and runs for shit in emulation, but then complain that everything ELSE they have to use runs so fucking slow because they're stuck using <4GB of RAM with half a dozen programs open.
There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.
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@Luna Have you thought about New Mexico? From what you're saying, Las Cruces sounds like a possibility.
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@Sunny said:
The level of ugly is ridiculous.
Again, I'm a horrible person, but perhaps you should laugh about it with your older brother. Because nothing pisses off horrible people more than laughing at their horribleness. Except for me, of course: I'm a horrible clown. I want you to laugh along with me, as I pull you down to hell.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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Only a mild annoyance, but homes that are 60+ years old and designed for small people. I don't mean skinny, fit, or any variation. Broad shoulders and narrow doorways do not mix. Feeling like Winnie the Pooh in here or something.
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@HelloRaptor said:
There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.
My first job was at a weekly newspaper that still used dial-up Internet service. I used to beg to go back to my apartment to do anything online, where I could use my cable modem.
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@Ganymede said:
@Sunny said:
The level of ugly is ridiculous.
Again, I'm a horrible person, but perhaps you should laugh about it with your older brother. Because nothing pisses off horrible people more than laughing at their horribleness. Except for me, of course: I'm a horrible clown. I want you to laugh along with me, as I pull you down to hell.
If they were willing to be in a room with me, absolutely. They aren't.
I am almost to the point where I'm laughing about it in general, though. -
Being grumpy/angry/ragey for no damn reason, which subsequently ruins everything about your day and as a result makes you feel like an absolute lunatic, is totally and completely lame. No amount of Parks and Rec or venting has helped, either. Ugh.
flips a table
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@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
@HelloRaptor said:
There comes a point where you need to bite the fucking bullet and move up. The number of times I've talked to companies that have perfectly viable (maybe not perfectly, but still viable) modern alternatives but don't want to spend the money or time to train people to use them, is just infuriating.
My first job was at a weekly newspaper that still used dial-up Internet service. I used to beg to go back to my apartment to do anything online, where I could use my cable modem.
I love how people are like... shocked and awed that there's still dial-up internet service at all.
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I'm not shocked there's still dial up. I had elderly people yelling at me that they wanted their dial up back when the DSL company stopped providing it. And in some places (hi somewhere out in bumfuck, Alabama) there's no infrastructure for anything BUT dialup.
I don't think I'd mind ancient, kludged set ups if it weren't 1) somehow totally my fault that the neglected set up eventually dies and 2) they will be pissed if we /have/ to upgrade.
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My grandparents still use dial-up. And AOL. On something like a 15-20 year old computer. XD
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At my company's old office, we had other smaller companies leasing space on our floor. I got to overhear one of the most technologically challenged of the tenants on the phone with AOL because his AOL email -- that he PAID FOR -- was not working.
Also taught him how to send emails with attachments and such. I tried to avoid being around when he had questions, but my department was right next to his company area.
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So, the whole blow-up with my sibling and his wife was over my mom's wedding ring. They wanted it -- apparently took it off of her just after she passed -- and my dad said 'no, give it back', and explosion. The reasoning behind my being an awful person is that I apparently did not make my dad give it to them nao.
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@Sunny Omg how dare you not be telepathic and then do the exact thing they want!!
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In the most innocent of intentions, I can totally see wanting your mother's wedding ring after she passes away. However, that all gets shot in the face when you take it off her immediately after she dies. Gross. Gross. Gross. Wow. I'm sorry.
"...and a single tube of glorious MAC Russian Red lipstick because I am a fancy motherfucker." - Muffy Bolding
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@HelloRaptor said:
When it's getting to the point your program won't even run in a modern OS, and by 'modern OS' we're talking about things that became common a decade ago, it's time to look at more modern options and stop clinging to the familiar comfort of your old ass bullshit.
Spoken like someone who's never watched a dozen "modern" replacements come in at ten times budget (in both time and money) and still not actually managed to replace the system that it was intended to replace.
A decade? That's what you think is old and decrepit?
I've worked on systems in the '90s where the hardware was considered "old, but reliable" in the 70s. The software was a million lines or so of assembler. But it did its job (online flight route display -- yes, this was air traffic control stuff) and it did its job well. When I was working on it (supplying stress testing of the system via a PC that was, ironically, about 400× more powerful than the system it was testing) it was supposed to have been long-since replaced by a fancy "modern" system (<sarcasm>supplied by the incomparable competence of Raytheon</sarcasm>) that used actual chips as the CPU in a multiple-processor design with all the bells and whistles.
It wasn't replaced yet, though. The Raytheon project was already three years overdue when I worked on this older system. A "modern" system with, like, a dozen 68xxx processors, modern hard drives, etc. was still spending over 30 minutes to load the test database (the spec mandated about that many seconds!), took over 2 hours to format a 40MB (yes, M, not G!) hard drive, and generally performed every task worse than the ancient, 1974-era 16-bit minicomputer. The only advantage it had was a flashier user interface. It looked very pretty in comparison to the serial terminals used on the old OIDS system, so you had a much better aesthetic experience while you waited (and waited (and waited (and …))) to get its job done.
Replacing an old information display system written for a computer that had 128KB of magnetic core memory (and that only because of a hardware hack that doubled its capacity) and displayed screens full of information about 1KB at a time was 3 years (and tens of millions of dollars) over budget with no end in sight using "modern" kit that was literally thousands of times more capable in theory. The numbers looked good … until you started actually working on it. Then it turned out that the old system was actually really fucking hard to beat.
That's one system of many I've seen go that route. There was another one via Anderson Consulting that was supposed to replace the payroll system for the Canadian government (the PSCS – Public Service Compensation System) that went so far over budget in both time and money that the government, in a stunning exception to the usual means of doing business, actually cancelled the project and sued to get all payments made on it back. It was that much a debacle. There was another where an ancient CP/M-based Z80 machine running finances for a drug store got replaced by an IBM PC-based "solution" that damned near tanked the business. (I got my first computer from that drug store; it was that CP/M machine.) In the end they actually shut down the computerized system entirely and went to a purely manual system because they couldn't replace the CP/M machine and the "modern" replacement was such a dog it was impossible to use.
I know techies love to use the latest hotness, but only a dumb businessman listens to techies breathlessly talking up their grand future vision of modern hardware and modern software. If you have a system that works and does what you need, you don't replace it. You introduce a new system iff you have clearly-identified business needs that are not being met by your existing system. And even then, you probably start by having the new system only augment what you've got until it has proven itself and can be expanded to replace.
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@AmishRakeFight said:
In the most innocent of intentions, I can totally see wanting your mother's wedding ring after she passes away. However, that all gets shot in the face when you take it off her immediately after she dies. Gross. Gross. Gross. Wow. I'm sorry.
I took my father's wedding ring off his finger within minutes of his dying. (Or so I'm told. I have no memory of this. There's a bit of emotional trauma fucking with my memories of the time.) Of course this is because my mother couldn't do it. I had to take it off for her and give it to her.
But…
Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.
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@WTFE said:
Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.
Normally, I'd concur, but this sort of bullshit requires a slow slide into death accompanied by the sort of pain and shame that comes with public immolation.
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@WTFE said:
Why do the son and the daughter-in-law think they have a claim on the wedding ring over the husband who actually fucking bought the thing and was wed with the woman? These people need 9mm parabellum of pain relief straight into the brainpan.
Oh, it gets way better than this.
My dad PHYSICALLY MADE THE RING for her.