On a wing and a prayer striding off to the next free meal…

Interestingly, in my profession the media is saying that they’re screaming for people, my peak association is saying that we should issue Visa’s for international recruitment.

That same peak body is publishing articles saying that our profession is demanding too much pay.

Meanwhile with 40 years experience, I’ve spent the past 30 months looking for the next opportunity, getting ignored or worse, getting told that my application won’t be pursued without any explanation. Demoralising is not strong enough to convey the impact of such a response.

I speak with my peers with similar levels of experience and they’re seeing exactly the same thing.

I hung my shingle out 25 years ago as an independent consultant, been through several downturns across my career, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

I think that we’ve gotten to the point where the free market has broken and government intervention is required.

Presumably there’s a record of the medication, given that someone had to pay for it.

I absolutely love the question and I’m going to attempt to answer it in a way that is not a reminiscing by an “old” internet citizen, rather some of the magic and wonder that I have been fortunate enough to experience.

My first time really connecting to the Internet was in 1990. I didn’t have my own account, so with permission I used the account that belonged to my boss at the time, Brian Murphy. He was a statistician and wine maker who had employed me to convert a statistics program (NANOVA) he wrote for a mainframe into something that could run on a desktop spreadsheet program that was new and exciting at the time, Wingz.

At the time the way “the Internet” worked was much more fragmented than the almost integrated experience we have today. Protocols (ways of getting information) like “telnet”[1], “ftp”[2] and “finger”[3] were how you got around, using programs that only knew how to do one thing. All of it was text-only. If you’ve heard of “gopher”[4], it didn’t exist yet. The “Wide Area Information Server”[5] (WAIS), had only just been invented but hadn’t made it to my desk.

You used text only email much like today, but addressing required that you knew how to get your message from your system to the recipient, using a so-called bang path [6] addressing scheme. This was not fun, but it got the job done. You could use tools like “finger” to determine how to get email to a person, which was a great help, but still was non-trivial. It’s like putting an address on an envelope that says, send this message from Perth, to Kalgoorlie, then to Adelaide, then to Sydney, then to Ultimo, then to Harris Street, then to number 500.

Much simpler was to use “Usenet News”[7], a global messaging system where you connected to your local news server, participated in discussion, whilst behind the scenes your messages would be shared with other news servers which were doing the same.

So, I’m sitting at my desk in Brian’s office with a brand new Apple Macintosh SE/30. This is leading edge hardware. I have a text-window open that is emulating a terminal (probably a VT220[8]), using telnet I’m connected to the local VAX cluster[9] that is running (among other things) our local news server.

I am not certain, but I think that this is my first ever message. It’s 4 September 1990 and I’m having an issue with MPW Pascal and the piles of paper documentation surrounding me had no answers. There is no “Google” or anything like it at this point, so I had to find answers elsewhere.

I found the message in one of the “comp” groups[10], “comp.sys.mac.programmer”, as opposed to an “alt” group[11] like alt.best.of.internet. These names are how you navigated the massive hierarchy of information that Usenet represents. Just like with domain names today, you specify the name by adding more dot names.

In today’s terms this could be expressed as a Lemmy community or a Reddit sub. And just like with those today, each Usenet group was a community with its “in” jokes, people who knew what they were talking about and those who didn’t, the whole enchilada.

Anyway, I posted to the group and asked a question about how to achieve the thing I wanted to fix. I went home and the next day I had a reply … from Brazil, where they too had discovered this issue and had found a solution.

It … blew … my … mind.

This started me on the journey I’m still on today. There is plenty more to tell to cover the 34 years since then. Perhaps a story for another day.

I debated providing links to some of the things I mention, but given that links didn’t exist in 1990, finding information was HARD, I thought it would be a nice ‘meta’ joke to include them.

Today I am going to do something much more mundane, set-up a backup job for a virtual server that was cloned from an older system, running a web-site and database on a cloud provider platform that I can use and access as-if it’s sitting on my desk while it is thousands of kilometres away. If my fingers were small enough, I could do this from my mobile phone.

So, yeah, things have changed.

o

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy

As it happens it’s already on my radar.

That said, I’m not convinced that the YouTube video version is worthy of being transmitted on SSTV, given that it’s a waterfall display of the audio.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

I re-read it and loved the: “Always fasten your seatbelt on the Information Highway”, but I’m fairly certain that Malinda McColl wrote it (as part of the mini FAQ on which I expanded with her blessing).

That’s very kind.

You can hear my voice any time. [1]

[1] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

That said, I have stood on stage many times and if I could come up with a topic worthy of the TED talk platform I’d be game.

Thank you for your kind words.

I have been writing for most of my life. You can for example read (a copy of) the Alt.Best.Of.Internet FAQ I wrote in 1994. [1]

[1] https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/aboi-faq

I tend to write how I speak and attempt to create enough context so a casual reader on the topic can come away with something whilst still discussing the complexity for someone more versed in the subject.

I have written articles about identity theft, authentication over the phone, as well as other technology issues relevant to the public at large. [2]

[3] https://github.com/ITmaze/articles

I also write a weekly article about the hobby of amateur radio and have done so for over 13 years. It’s published as an audio podcast, with email, video and Morse code versions. [4]

[4] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

As for the suggestion of a TED talk, I’ve considered it, but haven’t found a topic worthy of the platform.

As a radio amateur I publish using my callsign, VK6FLAB, as an IT professional, it’s under my company, ITmaze.

Some other articles:

• https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles

The business model to require paid credits in order to interact with bots is in my opinion a thing of sheer bastardry.

Apparently, this is how it works: (*)

Women were on the site for free, men were required to pay for and use credits in order to interact with women.

It appears that there weren’t anywhere near the numbers of women claimed by the company. Instead bots would communicate with men, using their credits in the process.

(*) I say works, because apparently the company still exists today and I’m not aware if they ever admitted to using bots, let alone discontinuing their use. The Netflix series goes into detail, which is where I got this understanding from.

Disclaimer: I’m not a customer, have never been one and my comments are based on a single source as described above.

It’s not real.

I think that the missing link for the fediverse is the user interface that most users see.

This is oxymoronic given that the original Reddit looks eerily similar to Lemmy today, but it’s not just looks I’m talking about.

Moderation and usability tools, bots, blocks, filtering and spam control need to go through several iterations before we can actually grow this community.

Search is another issue, as is post deletion. Right now a post vanishes, but all the stuff hanging off it is still there. This makes for a complex user experience.

Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

I consider myself a user of the fediverse before I’m a Lemmy or Mastodon user. We have a way to go before this settles down.

At one point, before we virtualised everything, I had a custom desk built in an L-shape. Instead of a desk and a return, I had the refurbishment team put together a desk with two desks instead. It gave me two sets of drawers, two computer cubby holes and the gap was too small for the horrible keyboard adjustable shelf that kept hitting your knees, so they replaced it with a fixed surface instead.

People laughed.

Colleagues sniggered.

Then they wanted one too.

Now I have a mobile lectern with an iMac clamped to it. Height adjustable, wheels, enough space for keyboard, trackpad and USB hub. I move around my office as the mood or light takes me.

I am part of the Reddit exodus. I’m here because I have no interest in promoting or supporting the atrocious policies that now govern Reddit.

The pace here is different, but the interactions feel more measured.

Based on being online since 1990, I’m comfortable with being an “early adopter”, even though I’ve only been here for a few months and Lemmy is five years old.

Will Lemmy survive? Who knows. The horse and buggy didn’t, neither did Yahoo!, MySpace or Google+, but here we are nonetheless.

I like it here.

Wow…

…okay I’ll try that and see what gives.

So, when you use 40 or so programming languages, your employer needs to supply a mansion…

I’m okay with that.

Now, where is the boss?

Further discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763117

That’s interesting.

The Apple TV is the First generation 4K model with 64 GB (Model: A1842)

Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101605

We bought the new remote because we thought we could use two remotes simultaneously, which turned out to be poor documentation.

The amplifier is not connected via HDMI and does not support CEC.

The ATV is configured to use IR to control the amplifier.

Whilst I agree with your opinion, it continues to astonish me that the majority of non-technical people using a search engine have absolutely no idea just how bad the search landscape has become.

I suppose my question did probably exclude that part of the population, but old habits die hard.

I still use + and - to exclude search terms until I remember that Google+ broke that and I forgot just how ad infested the internet is until I accidentally click on a piece of empty space in an article that would have an ad, were it not for the pihole in my network.

So, yeah. Point taken.