I thought NASA has mostly removed Microslop from places like the ISS after they had the microslop windows laptop infect those systems on the ISS? Why go back to this garbage on important facilities?

I was wandering around Amsterdam and ran into The Bulldog. Their logo seemed familiar. I wonder why there hasn’t been legal kerfuffle with Gonzaga University yet.

In my case we’ll be staying in Germany, but having an option to move to Canada with our multiple Phds instead of going back to the US (if forced out of Germany for some reason) would be preferable.

We also have some kids who are going to be looking at college in a few years. If they could have an option to to Canada cheap, that’d rock. Then you’d have some more educated Canadians hanging out and paying taxes.

I did make sure to teach the kids the rules of ice hockey. I know it’s on the driving test there, right?

We already had much of the family archives gathered for genealogical research done. There was a (mostly unknown) great grandfather that we didn’t track down. We just knew he was from canada, fathered one of the ancestors and bailed back to Saskatchewan.

Turns out he’s now findable online (new records were added) and he’s multi generational Canadian. The birth certificate has been ordered. The process might take a while, but we’re filing the day his records show up in our mailbox.

Now we just need Canada to join the EU somehow and all of the stars will align.

It only happened in the last year, or even the last six months to truly be in effect. It was a huge position shift for the German government as part of their effort to increase skilled worker immigration and retention.

Back in about 2010-ish? One of the first “amazon deletes your book remotely” events happened. They removed a Kindle version of 1984 from people’s readers.

I don’t know how much irony fits into an irony singularity, but Amazon is trying to make the most irony ever.

And even that was a fractured history. The Netscape to Mozilla release was heavily influenced by Netscape being bought by AOL followed by the Netscape team dumping a non functional browser (they ripped out a ton of code they didn’t own) on the open source world. People had to basically patch the stubs until it built and then rebuild from there. By the end, Mozilla barely resembled Netscape, but it did get the community finally building a serious open source option.

Too many OSS tools to really be able to mention them all. Thank you to so many GNU/Linus, OpenBSD, BSD*, and other developers!

I’ll mention these:

• LaTeX
• Jabref

Without TeX I’d go insane writing technical and scientific documents. You’ve saved me thousands of hours of work!

Oh, and my current time waster game: Kohan: Immortal Sovreigns.

This whole debacle was a rousing success. The question is for whom. It wasn’t a victory for the US citizens writ large. It wasn’t a win for any NATO allies. It wasn’t a win for the vast majority of the people in the world.

There’s a few people/groups we can assume did win:

• The wealthy: they were given insider trading info and made billions
• Iran’s leadership: they have come out regionally stronger
• Israel’s government: they got to genocide more Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, and Gazans under the cover of a regional war.
• The inside circle in the executive branch that weren’t outright fired

It’s mostly an insider trading game at the expense of lives, money, and the US’ sitting on the geopolitical stage. This is all part of the smash and grab stage of this presidency.

We’re in Germany. There’s always more bread.

Cheese and a slice of sausage is a breakfast. Bread optional.

Empires die when the gold leaves the vaults. Until then, the empire can keep paying the military to keep it in power.

Xenophobia isn’t really a sign of rational decision making.

I got my first full B1 German reading book. I’m a few chapters in.

I’ve managed more spoken interactions, but it’s still small and short kinds of statements. We have been doing more German at work for discussions.

My German classes start this week. They’re B1.2 level. It’ll be a bit of a stretch, but it’ll be great to spend more time focused on listening and speech.

I did try out a few of the Telc B1 tests. I scored about 75%, which isn’t good enough for going right into the exam, but I’m getting closer than I thought to B1.

You’re spot on. That’s a classic AI prose giveaway.

Why the every living FUCK would a serious agency rely on Microslop for any technical component anywhere? Haven’t they learned from the last 40 years of terrible products?

Bingo. They give our masters students (officially) four months to choose, execute, and write their thesis. Nothing of real note comes out of the process.

We can do so much better, but it would reduce profits.

Huge hugs all around because we will do better. The students deserve better and so do the teachers.

Any and all reliance on energy from a foreign source is a national security risk. Many nations are going to be finding that out in a very painful way soon.

Is this the real life?

Thank you. I do like the teaching and student outcomes more than research. That’s not a route to huge success as a professor if you’re measuring on the money, rank, and fame scale, but it’s who I am and seeing my students succeed is my life affirming activity.

When I get out asap it’ll be to another school where I hope I can find a community who values education, not just a grant size measuring contest. It’s somewhere out there.

Huge hugs all around for those making ends meet with their own two hands!

My so-called university is run by people who have never taught a class in their lives. I’m getting out asap.