Anyone’s For A Farthing
Consider this an open thread, but with a catch. Due to my infinite cunning.
Because, yes, it’s time to remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are button in the sidebar with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.
For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last fourteen years, in over 3,000 posts and over 100,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
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As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.
Now share ye links and bicker. 
Uma Thurmond: I see that banner at the top of the Amazon home page.
Count on Amazon to support false claims that these attacks are committed by white supremacists.
Given Amazon’s recent move into the silencing of politically incorrect speech, I have already begun to buy from other booksellers and direct from publishers.
WTP, where I work now provides REST endpoints for people/companies using our services. We only expose to the outer world what is, and should be, accessible to our customers. We use entitlements to determine what they can or cannot do. That is a different space than accessing a local software library on your machine; my point is that entire software industry doesn’t feel like it can pull the rug out from customers.
Exactly. I’ve been pushing the idea of interfaces, and the importance of their simplicity, before the term was understood as it is today. Way back in COBOL times. I also took issue with the top-down thing. But I was never a technology talker. People, my “betters”, would spew techtalk BS at me and I lacked the proper vocabulary or tech hive mentality hot take hipster orientation to argue it. All I had was a gut instinct and a somewhat nerdy think-for-myself suspicion of the industry Narrative. Now of course I was wrong about quite a few things myself, but there was always something about the business, the hive-hype that consciously and I think even subconsciously caused me to recoil from it.
I’ve been pushing the idea of interfaces, and the importance of their simplicity, before the term was understood as it is today…
In retrospect it amazes me that this did not have a higher priority at companies I worked for.
Great blogging, Mr T. Tip jar *pinged*.
Tip jar *pinged*.
Bless you, sir. May your canned goods be rotated regularly, to spare you from unwittingly testing just how long the contents can, technically, remain edible.
Again, thanks to all who’ve chipped in, including all those much too shy to say hello, or who’ve subscribed, or done shopping via the Amazon links. It’s what keeps this place here and is much appreciated.
It looks like you folks in the Northern hemisphere, especially Europe, are going to be in trouble soon: “According to Bloomberg, much of Europe could soon be without coffee as container ships carting the Robusta coffee – the type used in Nescafe and Moccona are backed up – stay waiting.”
It’s something to do with a damned ship damming the Suez Canal:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-25/your-instant-coffee-may-soon-be-at-risk-from-suez-blockage
*stuffs quids in tip jar*
*stuffs quids in tip jar*
Bless you, sir. May your friends admit that they miss you.
disappearances that I as an end-user encountered without warning
MS Office was prone to this in the early 2000’s. Since Microsoft had no competition, they got rather lax about ease of use and the toolbar/ribbon was used not so much to hold features that anyone actually used on a regular basis, but complex, rare features that looked good in marketing demos: “Look how easy it is now to do this! [click]”. Under Bill Gates, Microsoft produced much better products when they had competition because Gates himself was extremely competitive.
where I work now provides REST endpoints for people/companies using our services
Yes, well. The inherent latency in HTTP REST endpoints has led to the development of gRPC, an inferior implementation of…Windows Communication Foundation.
whomp whomp
The author of the piece, Natan Last – the one claiming that crossword puzzles are one of “the systemic forces that threaten women” – is, needless to say, a bit of a twat.
These people have lost their minds.
Ping!
These people have lost their minds.
Well, they’re insufferably pretentious and very keen to signal status – which, for professed egalitarians who work for a non-profit and live in Brooklyn, is terribly important – and which, among their peers, means saying contrived, absurdly woke things that do not correspond with reality. Their wilfully niche problems and bad-faith angst are a kind of social jewellery, an assertion of class. Just like studying at Columbia, annual tuition $60,000 and upwards, or mentioning beach houses. Behaving in this way for any length of time, until it becomes a habit, and doing it competitively, as Mr Last and his peers do, results in a practised unrealism, endless neurotic contortion. So yes, being woke isn’t good for you, psychologically.
Ping!
Bless you, sir. May your friends be punctual.
Their wilfully niche problems and bad-faith angst are a kind of social jewellery, an assertion of class. Just like studying at Columbia, annual tuition $60,000 and upwards, or mentioning beach houses.
That.
That.
As we’ve seen, social positioning is a very common dynamic, especially among the woke, where the self-ratcheting escalation is often bizarre, downright ludicrous. Basically, I suspect that Mr Last is the kind of person that Laurie Penny wants to be. But his parents were richer.
I do advise our host to not read the following unless there is a soft substrate upon which he can land when he passes out due to being terminally uninterested and/or bored to unconsciousness.
I am rather shocked that there could be an inferior implementation of anything Windows does. I’m sure that none of the concepts behind either XML-RPC (which became SOAP, in these modern times) or CORBA were part of WCF.
I will admit that if there actually are cases where there could be an inferior implementation of anything Windows does, I would expect either Google or Amazon to be involved.
The inherent latency in HTTP REST endpoints has led to the development of gRPC…
[ Starts gnawing at own elbows. ]
[ Starts gnawing at own elbows. ]
David, be thankful that was only a few paragraphs. Have you ever been forced to sit next to an engineer for half an hour who, in spite of your protests that you had no training in his field and did not understand what he was talking about, proceeded to tell you long stories about various engineering projects? One should be tolerant of individual foibles, but some dorks are too dorky to be borne. (Needless to say, this engineer was a science fiction fan.)
forced to sit next to an engineer for half an hour who, in spite of your protests… proceeded to tell you long stories about various engineering projects?
Swap engineering with IT. Married life.
[ Starts gnawing at own elbows. ]
[ Nobly resists the temptation to paste a page from Stack Overflow ]
Swap engineering with IT. Married life.
Here, have a drink.
[ Starts gnawing at own elbows. ]
The Irritating Gentleman by Berthold Woltze:
Have you ever been forced to sit next to an engineer for half an hour who, in spite of your protests that you had no training in his field and did not understand what he was talking about, proceeded to tell you long stories about various engineering projects?
Decades ago I studied at IU [Bloomington, Indiana]. My next-door neighbour was doing his PhD in mathematics. Mathematics, for me, was/is a form of incomprehensible black art. Nevertheless my neighbour was a delightful bloke and we enjoyed hours of throwing frisbees all over – though we found they tend to break in sub-zero weather. One day he came to my door clutching 60 pages of ‘scribbling’. He was terribly excited and proceeded to announce he had solved a particular theorem. I congratulated him and asked what it all meant. He started to explain, paused, then looked at me and obviously decided any explanation was going to be a waste of time, so we got out the frisbees and enjoyed a game.
The Irritating Gentleman by Berthold Woltze
Heh. I may show that to The Other Half. Should a suitable opportunity arise.
She’s just pretending to be irritated. They eventually married. He opened a haberdashery in Cornwall. They had five children. Sadly, the youngest died of typhus. The oldest boy served in The Great War but was killed during the initial artillery barrage near Amiens.
Hm. She looks more abstracted than purely annoyed to me … and given that she appears to be in what amounts to primary mourning (even though the brownish gloves are a bit of a solecism and the hankie ought, I believe, to have a black edge) that might serve to explain 1) why she is paying no attention to him at all and 2) that he is not merely irritating but also a cad and a boor for imposing on a mourning female in any fashion.
Megara: Note also the tear falling from her eye. I was not aware that the custom went as far as black-edged handkerchiefs. Could the brownish gloves indicate that this is later in the mourning period where some departures from black were customary?
Sorry. You’re totally wrong. The clasps on her carpet bag prove my point. Though the ash on his cigar should be a bit longer…though Woltze was from Havelberg so that might explain the oversight.
Sorry. You’re totally wrong. The clasps on her carpet bag prove my point…
pst314: I’m no expert on the extremes of 19th century social signaling, but yes — for quite a period “going into black gloves” was synonymous with the deepest – ie initial – phase of mourning, and handkerchiefs themselves were dyed black. Falling back to black edging was an early sign of relief. Obviously the signaling was class-based: no one expected a costermonger’s widow to spring for full blacks when she probably couldn’t even cover the cost of the coffin, but going up the social scale the rules became increasingly elaborate, and the social penalties for error more harsh. Remember Scarlett O’Hara and her fury at having to go into full mourning for her short-lived first spouse? And how startling that total black was at the party, when she kissed off all the rules and actually DANCED? It was a sumptuary code lacking legal enforcement but all the more elaborate for just that reason.
My word, I did warn you.
I do raise a glass to both @pst314 and @NTSOG for their wonderful comments that drained a bit of computer nerdity from these proceedings.
computer nerdity
I confess I have also been forced to endure long expositions on the characters and plots in various Star Wars and Marvel movies. Which reminds me: there are authors I still have not read because the excessive enthusiasm of fans was so off-putting–Michael Moorcock for instance.
@ RC: “computer nerdity”
I sometimes think that computer nerds – my brother is one – live in a different dimension from the rest of us. Further, they cannot escape their electronic ‘reality’, nor can they explain what they do and how they think in Her Majesty’s English.
…nor can they explain what they do and how they think in Her Majesty’s English.
Will you settle for Amurican English? I’ve been able to explain what I do. But you are right that many seem incapable of doing so: for them, English is a second language–or worse. I can name some engineers and scientists who were extremely articulate–Jerry Pournelle, Gene Wolfe, Hal Clement.
Richard Feynman, for another.
I’m no expert on the extremes of 19th century social signaling, but yes — for quite a period “going into black gloves” was synonymous with the deepest – ie initial – phase of mourning, and handkerchiefs themselves were dyed black.
I’m no expert either, but wouldn’t she be wearing a crepe veil in the earliest part of mourning? Failing that and assuming it is later in the mourning period, wouldn’t she at least be wearing a widow’s cap with the veil tied back? Wasn’t a veil more common than gloves?
Good lord.
Next thing we know they’ll have fallen into an in-depth analysis of the intricacies of picnic etiquette in Jane Austen.
NTTAWWT.
Next thing we know they’ll have fallen into an in-depth analysis of the intricacies of picnic etiquette in Jane Austen.
Sounds good. You go first. 😉
Steve: yes, the strictures and requirements fell most heavily on the widow — which is why, looking at that painting and the obvious youth of the sitter, I’m inclined to the idea that the painter was telegraphing her loss of a parent/protector, not a spouse. Queen Victoria wore veils far past the prescribed period — her daughters, not so much if the photographs of the day are anything to go by. The girl also has a few, albeit pretty minimal, decorative touches like the scarf/cloak collar (can’t tell which) that would not have been acceptable in a widow.
As to gloves, they were far more a fact of life in upper-class society than we realize. There is a throwaway scene in the film of The Age of Innocence, a novel celebrated for its accurate depiction of the times, of an antechamber to a ballroom; a table by the door is covered with extra pairs of gloves for each of the gentlemen attending.
Veiling symbolized the widow’s isolation and made it just that much more difficult for her to live a normal life after her spouse’s death; no such burdens were typically imposed on children and siblings, unless they chose to adopt them.
Fred: known more commonly at the time as a “fete champetre.”
[Polity commences to gnaw at own elbows.]
I’m inclined to the idea that the painter was telegraphing her loss of a parent/protector, not a spouse.
Makes sense
pst314: “Will you settle for Amurican English?”
Since I lived in the US for a number of years and had to adapt my accent and word-usage to be understood by the ‘natives’ and my wife is from Wisconsin I consider myself bi-lingual in terms of English*, but not computer-speak.
*New Zealand ‘English’ is another matter.
*pays bar tab*
*continues lurking*
*pays bar tab*
*continues lurking*
Bless you, sir. May your shoe purchases be wise.
Since I lived in the US for a number of years and had to adapt my accent and word-usage to be understood by the ‘natives’…
Or ‘aborigines’. 😀
…and my wife is from Wisconsin…
“Eat Cheese or Die!” is our battle cry.
I consider myself bi-lingual in terms of English*, but not computer-speak.
I greatly appreciate people who can talk about their professions in terms that are understandable to others. “Adapted to the meanest understanding” as 18th and 19th Century books would say. Richard Feynman was a master–and clearly filled with joy when he talked about physics (and many other things).
*New Zealand ‘English’ is another matter.
I know little about New Zealand, except that it sounds like a beautiful land. But is it true that we should not be deceived by Hollywood movies into thinking that all the people have hairy toes and live in holes in the ground? [ assumes facial expression of innocent imbecility ]
[Politely commences to gnaw at own elbows.]
I’d like some guidance on how to do this politely.
I’d like some guidance on how to do this politely.
Hands up, all those who lifted their arm to check.
Hands up, all those who lifted their arm to check.
No, was busy researching how to add twelve vertebrae to my neck.
Berthold Woltze was a German genre painter. Shouldn’t we be discussing mourning rituals among the Prussian classes?
Feynman was a genius at discussing the science of science. I have a copy of six lectures he gave on light, and I managed to get through three of them. The one eye-stretching fact was his admission that describing light as a wave and a particle didn’t really mean that light was a wave or a particle. It was a way of describing how light acts as best they could, given the limitation of language.
pst314: “”Eat Cheese or Die!” is our battle cry.”
Blessed are the cheesemakers! Now if those cheesemakers could find a way to eliminate the State Bird of Wisconsin, i.e. the mosquito, those northern woods and lakes would be heaven on earth.
On another note, the title of this current discussion thread – ‘Anyone’s For A Farthing’ – suggests the manager of this site undervalues himself considerably if he considers his worth as ‘a farthing’.