That era of Internet history was wild. Between weird sex stuff like that and tentacle soup, weird body stuff like goatse and tubgirl, and straight up death like two guys one hammer. It seemed like every third person on the internet was trying to trick you into watching one of those.

Report, block, and move on folks. If the mods want this place to harbor racists then they’ll do nothing. But you did your job.

You can’t really cook a person’s rib primal the same way you’d do beef. People meat is not marbled like beef so you’d want to cook it low and slow with a lot of moisture.

So while you could have a people prime rib sandwich, it’s not going to have a great texture.

Fitz the Cat happened in '72.

I like to add bourbon to that mix to thin it out a little. That’s Christmas to me.

That has been my favorite hacker lore story since I first heard it decades ago.

Agreed.

Theoretically they could still be using it, but it’s pretty doubtful. It was just a GUI to run a set of scripts for an old set of programs that should have been retired before XP came out.

I was at an MSP at the time. One of our customers had stuff that wouldn’t install on anything after Win98, was looking for a bunch of hardware that no longer exists, and all the associated DLLs had to be registered manually. I created it because I was tired of doing it all by hand.

My assumption would be the guys who were there at the same time as me used it (I know they did actually), but a year after I left the whole bullpen turned over and I doubt they used it after that. They lost a pile of clients. Even if that hadn’t happened, if they’re still supporting 25 year old software with 15 year old scripts run by a 12 year old and poorly hacked together front end by a guy who was definitely not a programmer at the time (and barely is now) then they get whatever they deserve.

Absolutely not. I left that job not long after. It officially became someone else’s problem.

I assume they’re not using it anymore. The company was purchased last year so I have to think that they have problems with other code that makes no sense.

#The following code does nothing, but if removed the whole program crashes

-Me, circa 2011

A couple of things. First, things change. Even in places where it doesn’t feel like things change, they do. So if you leave a place and come back it will be different.

More importantly, we don’t look at an objective past. Our minds remember the best and the worst. So when you get older you remember “the good old days”. Those days, objectively never really existed. They were just days. So when you’re 40 you won’t be able to recreate the magic of being 21, or that feeling you had when you went home and someone was cooking your favorite meal, or go back to your hometown and feel the way you did when you and your buddies hung out.

I’m probably explaining it poorly, but it boils down to nostalgia being a hell of a drug. You never know when you’re living in the good old days until they’re gone.

Luckily it works in reverse to an extent. If you had a really shitty childhood, you can look back on it and say “at least it’s not like that anymore!” The psychological damage is already done, but you’re not coming home to an alcoholic berating you or heading to school to a teacher beating your ass ever day.

You can never go home again, both because things have changed and because that place only ever existed in memory, and the real world was some amount (generally GREATLY) different than what we remember.

The guy in charge of letting people in to one of the most prestigious universities in America is overworked? The hell you say! (That’s supposed to be read as friendly, not actually incredulous)

For real, it’s not like job applications where a lot of folks just cut the pile in half and toss them, then cut it in half again and toss them (yeah, I’ve seen managers do that for jobs with high application rates). They’ve got folks going through just checking that the admission was properly submitted, another layer making sure the people who properly submitted are qualified, then they’re weighted to toss out any that fall below a certain percentage of qualification. Then the dean makes decisions. And they’re still probably way overworked.

Something like this got tossed out by the lowest possible level and that person wouldn’t even have the authority to write anything except a standard form letter that gets signed with an autopen.

It’s an entertaining fake, but definitely a fake.

Less than a hundred, and they still charge it.

The problem is that the second you responded to something like that you’d be buried in copycats the next year all hoping to go viral. So you’ve made your job more difficult or burnt bridges on the way out the door.

I had heard that saying for years before I understood what it meant. By the time I did understand, it was too late.

A few well placed and tasteful ads are fine. And sites you tend to read at work show it can be done.

That’s not being slackass. You bringing in a machine to watch porn on is your supervisor’s problem, not IT’s.

I was told multiple places that the only thing they wanted filtered was malware sites. They have a C-level who wants to watch porn but don’t want to pay for someone to set up access groups? Don’t want to pay or give time to have someone lock down the network? Not my monkey, not my circus.

Of course it’s come a long way since I was doing it. Those things took time. Now you just set up your access list based on directory services groups and click a few buttons. But it’s still not my problem.

My cousin had a subscription to Nintendo Power so I gave up after a while and just looked. Otherwise I’d still be in that dungeon.

I’m full l having flashbacks to Fantasy Empires. I don’t know if I ever had the manual. I think I just got a list of words from someone.

I killed an old exchange server with an auto reply to a coworker who had an auto reply to me.

Those were the good old days.

If you don’t want kids to have participation trophies don’t give them participation trophies. You didn’t go out and buy yourself a trophy for everything, did you?