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When I was in high school I had a free period (we were on a block schedule system) two different semesters that I was not allowed to just not have a class in, so I picked Library Aide and so did my best friend. Basically we helped out in the school library for an hour three times a week or something. Well, it was 1992, so the library was charging into the heady technological future by implementing a magnetic strip system. You know, those walk-through detectors at the door that set off an alarm if you try to leave with a book that hasn't been checked out. Basically we had to put a little magnetic strip into the binding of every book in the collection, by hand, one by one. When you check out the checkout desk puts the book on a magnet thingy that does something so the detector won't go off. The detector was a big sucker, with a foot mat thingy that turned it on, so it was only active when someone walked through it. So one day I took one of the little magnetic strips and, standing to the side of the detector, reached around and stuck it on the inside of the detector in an inconspicuous place. From that moment on, every time anyone walked through the detector, it went off. We left it that way for two days while the poor librarians and the technical staff they called in (basically the guy who ran the computer lab at the school) tried to figure out what was wrong. Eventually I felt bad enough that I just removed the sticker when nobody was looking. So the problem magically fixed itself!  I still feel a little bad about that. But only a little.
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Oct 30, 2018 23:54
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Eric the Mauve posted:Yeah at a university library at 1AM I highly doubt anyone was shaving. Either someone was so drunk off their rear end they fell facefirst onto the sink and broke their nose, or someone jumped and beat the poo poo out of someone, once again probably involving slamming their face against the sink/mirror and breaking their nose. That's the most likely way you end up with that much blood... not sure how they escaped the library without bleeding elsewhere though. It's like 90% likely it was someone shooting up (possibly shooting coke). As addiction progresses, veins collapse, and addicts go to ever-increasing lengths to find a good vein. And apply pressure to get it to rise up so it can be pierced. And then sometimes puncture it poorly and spray arterial blood all over the loving place. Shooting addicts also seek inconspicuous late-night bathrooms to shoot up in. For example: https://www.salon.com/2012/11/14/when_i_became_a_junkie/ quote:I jumped around to Santa Fe and Ashland and then came back to LA, pulling geographics as I tried to get clean. But now that I’d been properly turned out, I was a junkie and it was a whole new hell. With needles, you don’t only become addicted to the drug but to the whole ritual of shooting up. One of my most frightening memories: me crouched in my sink with the belt of my robe tied around my throat like a tight scarf, poking a needle into a swelling vein in my neck. There were spray marks of blood on the ceiling, brownish red splatters on the wall. I tried to wipe them off casually as I trembled and tried to shoot myself up again. Shooting coke makes you desperate and willing: the rush is gone in minutes so you shoot up again and again and again to feed the monkey. I became a human pincushion and had track marks all over. Go to very cheap bad hotel rooms and blacklight near the sink or toilet and you will likely see the remnants of blood spatter on the walls. This is why.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:59
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Centripetal Horse was one of this forum's biggest success stories and there's even a happy ending to the catte parts so yeah that's a good feelgood thread to wander down.
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Nov 1, 2018 19:05
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There's one near my sister's house, in an affluent city in the bay area, but I'd forgotten about that and now I'm thinking it'd be cool to put one in my front yard or something.
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Dec 12, 2018 06:50
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please put the old books into the paper recycling, thanks
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Dec 13, 2018 18:07
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:LET'S LOOK AT ROCKS and SATURN IS A THING dammit, you just described two of my own shelves of books
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Dec 22, 2018 05:55
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People who make like ten bucks an hour, often part time to boot, generally do not have reasonable access to legal resources. They just eventually quit and nothing changes.
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Dec 22, 2018 08:36
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It's not necessary to read the discworld books in publication order, although certain story arcs do need to be in order; but, there are some characters that show up in many stories and if you go in order, they do have character arcs. Death most notably (he appears in every book) but also characters like the Patrician, the librarian, various of the witches, vimes, etc. have cameos in other stories. I think Color of Magic is good enough to capture interest but Pratchett's writing ability improves over time so many of his later books are superior. I would also draw attention to his YA discworld books, the Tiffany Aching ones, as a great place to start, especially for young teens. It's not chock full of fantasy creatures, but CJ Cherryh has a fantasy(ish) two book series with intelligent, psychic, carnivorous horses called the Finnisterre universe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finisterre_universe And she also has a bunch of fantasies exploring modified Celtic and Russian mythological settings; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ealdwood_Stories and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russian_Stories_(C._J._Cherryh) respectively.
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Jan 5, 2019 23:27
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feedmegin posted:Not quite true actually... Oh? Do tell... I've read them all and can't think of an exception, but my memory is poo poo
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Jan 6, 2019 00:13
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feedmegin posted:Snuff, for one. And, apparently, Wee Free Men, and only those two. I wonder if that was intentional, or if he got edited out of something during draft reworks. 
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Jan 6, 2019 07:46
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My Lovely Horse posted:welp At the very least, it's bullshit to send someone an "invitation to an interview" at a particular time, and then wipe their hands on their pants and assume that the interview at that specific time is now set.
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Mar 6, 2019 22:26
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That's actually kind of comforting. There's a lot less to gently caress up. Like, a system written in FORTRAN in the 70s will certainly still have bugs, but by now all of the bugs are known and possibly even documented and nobody is going to download a patch with a zero-day exploit or suddenly find their drivers are now obsoleted or whatever. Plus, some 70 year old programmers are poor and still need work.
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Nov 20, 2019 07:25
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my mother's first name - not her first and middle, not her first and last, her legal first name as a child, was "Mary Christina". Her school stuff always truncated that to "Mary Christ". She went by Tina from the age she could first talk and did not recognize that as even being her, when she was really young. Really confused the nuns at the catholic school.
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Nov 27, 2019 21:00
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Yep almost all woodworking processes are hazardous in some way - I'm not being facetious. Sawdust is toxic to breathe, most every tool is designed to remove or separate wood fibers through the use of (hopefully) extremely sharp and/or serrated devices, and the only exception really is glue. So unless your woodworking is entirely "glue pre-cut blocks of wood together" it's a no-go for a library. Makerspaces make it work by having everyone who gets to use the tools go through safety training first, power tools require more, specific training, it's adults-only unless there's a directly-supervised class for youths, and in any case, at least rudimentary dust collection and management has been installed which is not trivial. Also it's noisy. Textiles could be better, although of course sewing uses needles, sewing machines are nearly as finicky and prone to needing to be adjusted/tuned/fiddled with as 3d printers, etc., but at least it's possibly a little quieter, and things like knitting/crocheting are fairly accessible and safe. My wife was for a while involved with a maker space in san francisco, and her friend helped start up a 3d printer company and then ran a lot of the printers in the maker space. Babysitting a dozen 3d printers takes dozens of hours a week, just un-loving them, not to mention handholding like 90% of the people who want to use them. Gradually they built up a base of people with memberships coming in on a regular basis that could use the machines competently and accomplish small projects with them, but it's on the order of teaching someone a whole new hobby, not just a convenient machine for patrons to use, like a photocopier or a microfiche machine. Actually I think sewing machines are a pretty good analogy. 3d printers are like a modern sewing machine. There's a lot you can do with one, but nobody can just plop down behind a sewing machine and turn out a finished jacket 4 hours later, it takes training, and even with basic training on a sewing machine, you still can't necessarily just use any sewing machine without resorting to manuals, videos, or some kind of assistance. And there's little bobbins and different shoes and little fiddly parts for you to get out of alignment or improperly adjust or just clog up with thread. Shared equipment is always abused, everyone who has an actual project to do wants to actually finish it in a reasonable amount of time, and whoever has to babysit the device will wind up babysitting the device user too. Maybe if you need to convince some blue-haired ancient library boss that the 3d printer is a bad idea, that'd be a useful analogy. It's a pure fantasy to plop down 3d printers in some room in a library and expect patrons to be able to just waltz up and make use of it without an expert sitting right there with nothing better to do with their time than hold their hand through the entire process, and even then they're only going to print quite small things in a matter of 1 or 2 hours. And they're really noisy when running. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Dec 23, 2019 |
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Dec 23, 2019 08:01
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I wanna see (from a safe distance) what happens when someone on the top floor vomits.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:30
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For further reading: Sandkings (1979, GRRM) and then watch the Outer Limits 1995 relaunch, episode 1, which is a movie-length TV adaptation.
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Jul 10, 2020 00:20
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Captain Monkey posted:People experiencing homelessness. Yup this is the preferred term now. To elaborate: "homeless person" defines the person by their homelessness. "Person experiencing homelessness" more strongly implies that they're a person, with other things going on with their lives and history and stuff, to whom homelessness is happening (right now, which isn't or doesn't have to be permanent). It's more awkward to say and longer to type out and that's unfortunate, but it's a good practice to use the term because the way we describe people has an unconscious biasing effect on everyone, we can't help it.
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Jul 10, 2020 21:56
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Yeah probably. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co107701/stone-amulet-square-tablet-carvings-on-top-face-amulet Stone amulet. It's time cube.
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Jan 26, 2021 21:38
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Oooh, PC DOS 2nd Edition! I wonder what the updates are from the 1st edition. gently caress MS-DOS, PC DOS for Liiiiiife, amirite? lol@DR-DOS
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Feb 18, 2021 18:55
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JacquelineDempsey posted:As someone else who makes art out of old boardgames, and adores old tasteful porn, holy poo poo that is the score of the year, I'm so jealous! how old does an old boardgame need to be, to qualify as old enough?
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Mar 7, 2021 03:42
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I have countless unread books at home that I will probably never read, because I have weird unresolved nostalgic/romantic feelings about books themselves, and I assume that libraries are run by people exactly like me, and when I find out they actually cull their collections regularly that is directly insulting me and my own behavior.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:36
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Congrats on your impending job doing what your boss used to do!
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Feb 24, 2022 20:43
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Tippecanoe posted:but they can certainly see what IP addresses our users are coming in from (depending on the database) How does this work with VPNs? I could live next door and be using a VPN and appear to be in Norway. If I'm logged in to my work VPN I'll appear to be in Texas (I'm in California).
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Jan 17, 2023 20:50
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I brought my Drake posted:To use my library's online services, patrons need an active library card, and if they live outside the state and don't work or own property in the state, they need to pay for a card that lasts about a year. We also started to offer online sign ups for cards during covid and kept it around, patrons just need to come into the library within 60 days with proof of residency or else they lose access. For most of the big public library eLending services, patrons can't get in without a card number, so it really doesn't matter with them if you're using a VPN as long as your card works, and a permanent library card requires human intervention somewhere along the series of steps. Right. This all makes sense. I don't know how Tippecanoe's library system could use IP addresses to verify location, given how this stuff works nowadays.
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Jan 17, 2023 21:37
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DicktheCat posted:Literally every basic cybersecurity thing is "staff will not ask you for your password, keep up with your password". Research showed that people could remember 7 digits pretty well but 8+ more difficultly, and passwords requiring alphanumeric+ have a much larger range. At work I have about six passwords and five of them are forced to change regularly, but all five on different cadences, and all six have different requirements, and all of them remember your last few so you can't keep using them; but using a password manager is forbidden. So of course everyone has to write down their passwords! I still remember phone numbers from when I was a teenager and had a bunch memorized. I remember my stepdad's PO box number, the phone number at the first job I worked, my SSN and my bank account number and my previous bank account number and my medical plan number and so on. I can't remember someone's name ten minutes after they introduce themselves. There's something special and different about numbers.
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Feb 24, 2023 18:58
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I had a site last week that was rejecting my passwords until I realized that when it said "one special character" it meant exactly one, not two or more. Instead of implementing two-factor authentication, websites are just making it so you reset your password and verify via a second factor manually once every six months when you need to log in and can't remember what bullshit they made you jump through last time.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:17
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Midjack posted:Sure you can. There is almost never a minimum time enforced between password changes, so if you want to keep using the same one but it remembers the last six then just change your password seven times in a row and make the last one the one you started with. Now this kind of supposes that you have a good strong password and are doing everything else right but just have an asinine password expiration policy, so it may be a terrible idea depending on the circumstances. yeah, but we have a centralized system for changing passwords that goes through some kind of semi-automated approval process (there's even a "justification" field) because it's the same system used for requesting/granting access to things; so each password reset takes a bit to go through, and generates an email. I haven't tested it but I suspect it also tries to prevent you from changing the same password seven times in a day. Maybe I'll try that out.
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Feb 24, 2023 22:02
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ExcessBLarg! posted:In my experience Half Price Books will take all your outdated, niche-interest textbooks and such. You won't actually get value of out them, but you at least don't have to pay for them to get recycled. yeah they just recycle them for you, like, there's bins and you can see them tossing 80% of the books straight in them from every donor. When I sell books to them I try not to look because it really sucks to see them tossing books that I know are really good books in good shape, but they just go by what the computer says basically that said, why would you have to pay to recycle paper and cardboard? you can just put it in the blue bin
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Mar 4, 2024 18:57
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ah, OK. I mean we put basically anything made of card or paper into the blue bin, and a ton of what people put in their bins has tape, glue, wax, etc. on it. But I bet a lot of that winds up weeded out and trashed at the local sorting facility. Maybe they're pulling old books out too.
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Mar 5, 2024 03:17
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I'm in the SF bay area and some of our recyclers are going well beyond the average. It's still a dire situation, for sure, but not quite at the "literally only valuable metals are recycled" stage here. https://calrecycle.ca.gov/reports/stateof/ (The state issues a new report every other year right now, so this is for calendar year 2022) CA has its CRV system for bottles & cans, and the state can use the money in vs. money out balance to infer remittance and therefore recycle rates which are not too bad, although exactly what's done with those bottles & cans after they're remitted is not as clear. We do still ship an enormous amount of recyclables to other countries - shipping to China is way way down (just half a million tons), but we send over a million tons annually to each of korea, thailand, vietnam, and taiwan, and nearly a million tons to malaysia I got no data or info on books as paper recycling tho, hence the surprise at paying to recycle what I assumed was way cleaner than your usual food-encrusted pizza boxes and waxed card milk cartons that are actually not recyclable at all
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Mar 8, 2024 01:45
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