#horror #writer. Stories in the British Fantasy Society, 2022 HWA Poetry Showcase, Flame Tree Press, Crystal Lake Publishing, others. Codex, HWA.

Chief architect. Co-founder of Rocky Linux and the RESF.

New England.

https://semioticstandard.com

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • macOS is just a great OS. It’s polished, and thoughtfully designed with care, as are many of the apps available for it. I like that it integrates very well with my other Apple devices. Because of its BSD underpinnings, a lot of Linux-y things work very well with it. I use the Terminal (actually Warp, but same idea) on a daily basis for different things. A lot of the tools that I know and use on my Linux servers work here as well. I can write automation for it, and apps like Raycast and Alfred make building workflows and scripts, and tying those together, really easy. It’s much more secure than Windows. I also don’t have to worry about stupid shit like literal fucking advertising being built into the OS, as you have with Windows.

    As for Rocky Linux, well, I’m a co-founder of it (and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation) and helped build it, so my biases there are obvious.



  • I drive a large truck because I truly need and use the bed on a weekly basis. I wouldn’t be able to get by without it, being more than a convenience thing, as I have tried (and failed) for years to use my wife’s minivan. There are a lot of things that you straight up cannot do without a truck. I live on 7 acres of mostly heavily wooded land. That kind of property has a lot of maintenance needs that you really need a truck for.

    But when I go to the city, I almost never go with anything in the bed. First, I think it can be unsightly to have my bed loaded up with rotting construction material or large bulky items that need to be taken to the transfer station.

    Second, it can be dangerous, depending on what I’m hauling. The load needs to be secured. I’m more likely to get into an accident in the city, so if that happens, now in addition to whatever comes off from either vehicle, now whatever else that I was hauling is going to be all over the place, impeding traffic even further.

    If my load is heavy, as it often is (think: maybe 1,000 lbs of cord wood), that has a pretty big impact on my gas mileage.

    And if it rains? Whatever is in my bed is going to get wet and soggy and nasty.

    And then there’s the winter. I live in New England. You may have heard about the snow we get here. My driveway is 1/4 mile long, and REALLY steep. I use my truck to keep it plowed. There’s no other way we’re leaving our property when the snow falls. But obviously I don’t have my plow attached in the off-season, so it wouldn’t be obvious to you that I also use it for that.

    So for many reasons, I need a truck. It is almost never loaded when I have to go into the city. It’s not lifted, I don’t have obnoxious wheels, but it’s a big truck (they don’t seem to make them any other way these days). Now I have to also worry about people with attitudes like yours taking their misguided vigilante justice out on my vehicle because you’re not thinking beyond your nose? Do you really think that’s fair?


  • The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.

    There are some pretty big advantages to ‘modern design standards.’ For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don’t have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don’t want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.