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Breaking bad?
We had Terminator, Star Trek and Babylon 5.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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And Breaking Bad had objectively better writing, cinematography and acting than any of that. Film students don't study Star Trek.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: Film students don't study Star Trek
Not gonna argue.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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That's fine. There are shows I like better than breaking bad, to be clear (The Practice comes to mind, despite the much smaller budget), but that's not what I'm getting at. They broke a lot of ground from a filmmaking perspective, especially given the serial format. They shot everything on 16mm and took a limited amount of film to each set to keep the actors on point. They wrote the entire story arc before shooting a single scene, but every episode was pored over and perfected in a way you just don't see in traditional TV, particularly when you go back a few decades. Deadwood I would argue, similarly, even on HBO you'd have never seen something that took that much effort hitting the screen the way it did in the 1980s.
I think part of it is adults ceded big screen movies to kids, and now its the province of things like Transformers and the Marvel universe, driving some of the bigger budget storytelling to smaller screens.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: I think part of it is adults ceded big screen movies to kids
I threw out the TV a few years back.
Best idea ever 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I recently got netflix, but aside from that I haven't had actual TV fed into my home since a clinton was in the white house.
I do however, occasionally find something worth watching which I will through alternative means, often times with friends or family on their recommendation, because it stands out in some way. I find I like a good story, regardless of the medium.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Any use of expressions like 'objectively better writing' should be prefixed with 'in my personal opinion'. Such as
'Breaking Bad had, in my personal opinion, objectively better writing, cinematography and acting than any of that.'
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I'm using the labor theory of value here. They put more effort into writing their stories than the other shows. More raw time and energy.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Kit is the best actor in the series.
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I'm afraid this is one of those series that did NOT age well, at all, and it's not just because of the technology used. They weren't even trying to be futuristic - it was taking place "at that time", not at some time in the future (which is a problem for a lot of series that try to do that sort of thing).
About the car talking...it was a thing, even when the series was on the air. If "a door is ajar" doesn't ring a bell, then you didn't live through it.  Fortunately car manufacturers came to their senses and realized that because they could, didn't mean they should.
At least KITT was smarter than Siri.
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Back in September 2003, I was very new to ASP.Net, having been using VB6 or VBScript/ASP before that. I'd done a couple of very basic "Hello world, how are you today?" (i.e. a bit more than Hello World) websites but had a genuine (personal) need to write something meatier. I needed a tool that would read an email inbox, extract messages, parse out, resize and save image attachments, extract the email HTML content, insert formatted details about the sender and the subject, put it all in a WYSIWYG editor and allow me to send the combined thing to a database-hosted mailing list. So quite a few discrete areas, plus some client-side trickiness. I managed it in about 3 weeks, not having used C# before. I've been using the tool since then, initially daily but for the past 5 years just weekly, with virtually zero changes and no significant bugs.
However it irked me that the quality of the code was simply appalling. So last night I sat down and rewrote it from scratch, in three hours. It works better, faster, without barfing over jpg vs. jpeg file extensions, or complaining about BASE64 encoding quirks, and without messing up tabs, em-dashes and other characters in the email texts. I've used some 3rd party components, but back in 2003 I wouldn't have known where to even start looking for them, let alone how to integrate them into my own code.
OK, one would hope I'd sped up a bit from a rookie coder, but it really underlines to me the value that experience brings (plus, it must be said, the evolution from VisualStudio2000 to VS2019).
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Yep. I started c# in 2004, with a password storage app I still use and keep threatening to replace with a much better one - but it works, and I haven't had to touch it for well over a decade.
I know the code is cr@p though - and it irks me every time I use it ... 
One day, one day ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There's this story on the internet, my Google-fu is failing me right now, but I remember it, mostly.
Some guy has an issue with his computer and nothing works, so he takes his computer to an expert to have a look at it.
The expert clicks a single button and the issue is resolved.
"That's €100", the expert says.
"What!?" says the man, outraged, "All you did was click a single button!"
"Yeah", says the expert "clicking the button costs you €0,05, knowing where to click is the other €99,95." 
Not sure where I was going with this, but congrats
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I think the original of the story involved a fridge and a kick. Same punchline.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Here's the original story...
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady |History | Smithsonian Magazine[^]
Quote: Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
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Nope, I'm pretty sure my story involved some IT guy clicking a button, but it's a variation on a theme
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I have a DAL that I inherited from another dev written in VB5 using Access, converted to VB6 and SQL Server, then to c# then added Postgre, then added Oracle, then threw out Postgre and added MySQL, then chucked the entire thing out and started again because the code was such a kludge it was barely useable. When I retired I was still not happy with it.
If anyone runs across DBops please do NOT contact me.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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i looked in the mirror, and, it shattered;
shards of flying glass cut my wrists; the
blood became a message on the tiled floor:
unrecoverable error: face can not be null
by the time i found my face, and paid the
ransomware, i'd lost almost all my beauty:
vigilantes were out, hunting for shoppers
trying to purchase mirrors after midnight
there was half a happy meal in the fridge:
i microwaved it so long my cat didn't try
to steal it; my telephone kept on ringing;
i said no to offers of supernatural power
these trifling speed-bumps on the road to
eternity aside, it was a near perfect day remember: [^]
copyright assigned to CodeProject under the terms of the CPOPL license (CodeProject Open Poetic License)
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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Is that the lyrics? They are insane! 
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For days I have been looking for my passport and car papers, turned the whole house upside down, emptied the garbage bins, called colleagues at work if they found something etc.
Today we did search everything again and surprise, the papers were still in my laptop bag.
I had put them in a different compartiment than usual ...
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I have the same problem: I can find anything I put down, provided it hasn't been moved ... and provided I haven't "Put it somewhere safe so I won't lose it" ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I chalk all of this and more up to getting older and the gradual decline of mental cognition and memory. If you add stress to this as well, it makes it much worse.
I write notes to remind myself to do things, only to forget where I put my notes, or to forget that I wrote a note to remind myself to do something. 
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This is why Google Calendar knows so much about me ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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On the positive side: I only need one movie.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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