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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Today, Gene Fourney is the CEO of IT company TechnologyWest in Denver. I thought this story wouldn’t be complete unless I made an attempt to contact him. I emailed him, asking him some questions about NetWorks at the time, but he wasn’t interested in reminiscing. “I’m not revisiting an issue that you may have experienced in 1998 with Networks,” Fourney wrote. “Times are dramatically different in 2023 than they were in 1998. Not sure why anyone would have an interest in revisiting 28K dialup days of 1998.”

    Lmao, what is wrong with this guy? I found this whole article to be humorous and light and it was a fun look back on the old days. Tons of people have an “interest in revisiting it”.

    Given his location it strikes me that I have a solid chance of actually meeting this guy in person and sussing out why he’s such a no-fun prick.



  • One of my favorite takes to throw out at random is “The Grateful Dead was the greatest country band of all time”.

    Now I’ll admit I mostly say it to wind people up, but I don’t not believe it, either. It hinges on two things: most people don’t really think of country music as having bands (even when the singer, of course, has a backing band) and I think Workingman’s Dead is a genuinely great all-time country album. American Beauty crossed genres a little harder but it has its bona fide country moments too.

    What I’ll say is - if you always dismissed the Dead as “17 minutes of masturbation via the electric guitar” (and you’re not wrong either), at least give Workingman’s Dead a spin. The tracks clock in at standard radio play length and I think it will give you a different perspective. If you still don’t like it, fair enough.


  • Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There’s no way around that.

    The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.

    I finally got out of accounting. It’s really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you’re a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I’m serious. I would be in favor of requiring every “small business” to be audited on a regular basis because I don’t know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.

    One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was “he’s defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we’re not the accounting police and that’s why we don’t sign his tax returns.”









  • Just seems like a super weak draft to me. Wall went first and we all know what ended up happening there but fair enough. #2 was Evan Turner - which if I think really hard I vaguely remember the name - but my main thought is “who?”

    There were plenty of good role players who would shine from time to time further down the draft but 13 years later it’s no surprise they’re all gone. Prospects who could do better are always rated higher than known mid-tier players after several years in the league.

    I did a little more digging and Wall, Cousins, George & Hayward are the only players from the 2010 draft to ever get a single all star nod. 9 out of the 60 never played a single NBA game. I’m going with the idea that it was just not a great year for the draft.


  • Neat! I found that after some time playing the guitar I was able to fundamentally understand how a violin works. They’re very similar instruments, in many ways (especially if you are playing pizzicato on the violin.)

    I’m still no good at… either one of them really, but I find that every time I even spend a month messing around with an instrument I gain a deeper understanding of how they all work, and music in general.


  • I’m going to assume that 4g works decently enough where you are at this point. Much the same thing happened during the 4g rollout - it was too sparse, the phone spent too many resources hunting for a 4g signal when 3g was right there. You end up with a less stable connection because it’s constantly bouncing back and forth.

    I think if you look up how to disable 5g on whatever phone you have (which is possible on any phone) and stick to 4g for now you’ll find the performance is as good as ever - if not better, with some of the load from other users being pushed to 5g.

    I worked for “a major phone company” when 4g was rolling out. It’s unfortunate during this period, but I don’t know how you prevent it. 5g will objectively be better for 99.9% of users at some point - it might not be now, but everyone has to sell a 5g phone to “future proof” and have another selling feature. I wish the companies would educate people a little more on the rollout but then you’re basically telling them “this thing we’re selling you isn’t really ready yet”. And I mean, if you live in a major city, it’s working just fine… but not everybody does.