Dealing with this at work right now. Digging through thousands of lines of Bash. This script wasn’t written a long time ago, so no clue why they went with Bash.
The script works but it always feels like something is going to break if I look at the code the wrong way.
RIP ICQ. I met met quite a few long distance chat friends on there. Never met anyone in person from there, though.
In my area, we had the Cleveland Freenet with an IRC server. Met a lot of friends in real life from there—I believe they also had periodic picnic meetups but I never went to one of those. Briefly dated someone in HS after we met in an IRC channel, and one of my real life friends met his future wife on a freenet in neighboring state that we could access.
I also had a personal site that a random girl my age a few states over found. She emailed me and we started corresponding for years over email, AOL/AIM and hand written letters. We still do on occasion. We met in person about 13 years after we first emailed.
My wife, former librarian, introduced me to the rule of 50 of Nancy Pearl (famous librarian from Seattle Public Library). Essentially, if you aren’t feeling a book after 50 pages, you should feel no guilt putting it aside.
Recently, it seems Nancy has revisited the rule and adjusted for the 50+ crowd. If you are over 50, subtract your age from 100 and use that as your cut off for putting a book aside.
I think “free” in the sense that it was the same price whether you picked it up or had the place deliver. You only had to tip the driver. This was for delivery only places like Dominos/local chains near me.
The couple of dollars extra for delivery fees started maybe in the mid/late 2000s where I am (midwest USA).
The biggest advantage I found when learning on DOS and Windows in the 1990s was the overall lack of distractions. No smart phone, YouTube, Reddit/HackerNews let me fully concentrate.
The office with a door thing was how Microsoft was back in the day, if I remember correct. From the stories I heard, some of the offices were ridiculously small/narrow but they still had a door.
Joel was a Program Manager for Excel at MS so my guess is he brought that mindset over.
Really, I wish more places would go back to that. Being able to work with minimal interruptions is great.
The general collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art (https://www.clevelandart.org/) is still free. If you are in the University Circle area of Cleveland, definitely recommend.
A few friends and I are doing some side consulting and decided to use a Google Space within our public Gmail accounts. It has worked great and I haven't missed a thing, especially with the Gmail app on the phone, but I can mute pretty easily if I want to.