cha-cho's comments

Was it "their rapists" or "they're rapists" that he said? One makes sense in the context, the other makes people outraged.

This needs to develop into a grading system. A "Flanders Threshold" or something.

Kathy Sierra gave an informative talk on the topic of learning at the 2015 O'Reilly Fluent conference. It's entitled "Making Badass Developers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTxC9pl-WM

This is a little embarrassing.

Like most every idea I came up with at the time, it had the word “smart” in it.

Smart Windows.

What are “Smart Windows”? So glad you asked. At the time both NeXTSTEP and MacOS only had resizing handles on the bottom of windows(if I remember correctly). What I proposed was a full perimeter border on windows like what was seen in the Motif Window Manager, CDE, et al.

But wait there’s more...

If you double-clicked the border, the window would jump-move in that direction until it hit either another window border or the edge of the screen. If you held the shift key while double-clicking the window would instead expand in that direction. All together it was a precise way to quickly move and arrange a full screen panel of windows without ever having to drag a window or window border.

I eventually tested out the idea on Windows NT 4.0 inside a Visual Basic project. It was super dope. SJ missed out.

To my young mind, it was more about someone else taking credit for my wonderful ideas. My naive thinking was that Steve Jobs would be dazzled for sure. He'd probably want to hire me or pay me a million dollars, but some other person checking his email or administering the email server... how could I trust them? I was young and foolish and had spent too much time acquiring and configuring a NeXTSTEP compliant SCSI drive and SVGA card.

I sent him an email from a NeXTStep configured PC in around 1996/97/98 stating I had some window GUI ideas that would give him a distinct advantage over Windows.

As I recall, his reply was terse, along the lines of:

~~~

What are they?

sj

~~~

I was doubtful it was actually the man himself responding. I thought it was some email administrator trying to steal my ideas (I was 20yrs younger then). I proceeded cautiously and don't recall if he replied again.

A decade later I learned terse replies were his MO.

I would be interested to see the original spec for Lotus Agenda. That product still has a legion of fans extolling its virtues online. And it was a DOS product.

The solution to all your problems is to get one customer. One person who says “I get what you are trying to do and I will pay you for it.”

The longer you put off acquiring a customer the harder your journey becomes.

A good book about Larry Ellison is “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” from 2004. It looks like Larry himself proofread the book as he offers comments and corrections at the bottom of some of the pages.

Oracle is unlike any other technology company in the world. The majority of their software offerings are not aimed at consumers, so many people (including programmers and IT-savvy folks) have a hard time understanding the company unless they’ve spent weeks studying one piece of their product stack.

I started working for Oracle in 1998. I thought I would be able to get up to speed quickly on everything Oracle. I was wrong. It took a long time to get a feeling of confidence. The main product, the Oracle database, is a vast monolith of technology and features that is constantly being updated. It has a documentation set that could easily fill a bookshelf. Taker a look: http://docs.oracle.com

Every so often someone takes at shot at Larry at a press conference or online, implying that Oracle’s time has passed, that some new hotshot company was going to overtake them in some way.

Spend some time studying Oracle and Larry Ellison, and you’ll understand why Larry always smiles at these questions.

I cobbled together a NeXT-compliant Intel box in '95 so I could get NeXTSTEP 3.2 installed. What started it all? An old BYTE magazine article that featured a screen capture of NeXTSTEP. It looked so good that I just had to try it out firsthand.

It feels a little insulting to read that headline after watching the 20/20 report on the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax. For that story they relied on one source and didn't listen to their own fact checkers. In the process they damaged the reputation of a university, seemingly destroyed the career of the dean, and wasted the time of a lot of well-intentioned people. An ounce of scrutiny or patience could have prevented the whole mess.

Nuts. I don't think I removed the battery and it's been in storage for almost ten years. Then again if it can survive me naively washing the motherboard with a garden house and letting it dry in the sun, I think the Amiga gods will keep the battery intact for me. I hope so anyway.

It's been quite a while (the ole 2500 is in storage) but it seems like a person could change directories without the "CD" command. Just type the path in the CLI, hit return, and you moved to that directory. edit: Likely thinking of the "implied CD" mentioned in the link.

Pretty compelling information. Two observations: 1) No LinkedIn. Are they on top of the problem? 2) I had fun results with the Epic Privacy Browser.

Another option: https://www.windytv.com/?25.314,-76.003,6

I'm glad this work is being done. For kicks, I'd like to see the clickbait classifier take on /r/savedyouaclick

It's really not about self actualization though. I think your therapist may have been a CEBT/REBT dabbler.

The authors of the REBT books I mentioned are at odds with most everyone other type of therapy. One of the books strongly critiques psycho analysis (searching one's past for psychological wounds) and concepts like AA. For this reason (being at odds with other therapies) the authors recommended therapists that specialize in cognitive behavior therapy alone to get the maximum benefit. Again there are slightly different therapies: CBT, CEBT, REBT, DBT - I don't make a distinction that I probably should.

In essence it's about getting in the habit of talking to your brain, interrupting a thought that can easily become a habitual pattern, and disputing what one thinks by default. It's a search for evidence for the thoughts we believe without question because they come from our own brain.

In a conversational sense it's a bit like separating yourself from your thoughts and telling your brain: "That's an interesting thought. It's ridiculous because there is no evidence to support it and it's self-defeating because all it does is harm my mood - but it's interesting. In all the ocean of thoughts that are available you bring me that? How about you go back to the well and bring me something constructive, positive, or at least funny. I don't have time for nonsense."

What I find useful - and again I've only read books about these techniques - is that they can also be applied to negative people in my life. It works externally just as well as it does internally.

CEBT from now on it is. Though DBT is worth a mention too and it's not all that different from what's described on Urban Dictionary.

It's not dramatically different than hitting CMD+OPTION+H every time you switch tasks. It is a little bit easier on your fingers though.

A very clever idea. The UX and the ease to onboard with the demo are both well executed. Congratulations!