ndguardian

Full disclosure: Haven't read the article yet.

Working in corporate IT, this most likely is targeted toward enterprise customers who either take a long time to roll out OS upgrades or can't due to technical limitations within their environment. In those cases, paying the cost of extended support is more palatable to troubleshooting or rushing mass OS upgrades. This is a fairly common practice with enterprise software vendors.

Edit: Okay, just skimmed it. Looks like this is actually a new program for non-enterprise consumers, which is interesting. First I've heard of that.

I watched it all the way through since I'm a Halo fan, but I'll wait and see what people say about season 2. On its own, season 1 was...fine. I think if they didn't have any references to Halo and called it something else, basically left it intact but not Halo, people probably would have said it's okay. Not great, but okay. It definitely doesn't feel like Halo though, and so much of the show conflicts with established Halo lore.

Agreed, I think this is what is being suggested.

Flaming poisoning raging sword of doom.

I am just now starting through Fallout 4. I’ve had it in my library for a while but never got around to it.

I’m not sure that this is a “game” idea so much, but I’ve had this idea I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the implementation of.

Think a digital audio workstation such as Ableton Live or Logic, but gamified. Complete various musical objectives to pass levels, have a creative mode for just making music and maybe even a multiplayer mode for collaborative or competitive music making.

I tend to go back and forth between Go and Python. Typically for work stuff I am writing AWS automation utilities though so I'll opt for Python because Boto3 is lovely. Go is typically for my personal projects.

I've also been itching to try my hand at Rust, but haven't brought myself to start yet.

My SO just had something similar pop up yesterday. She was running into weird errors on her Chromebook, so I had her change her user agent to Chrome on Windows. Everything magically worked. Hmm…

Apologies in advance for the novel!

I'm a little late to the party here, but here is my story. Nothing too glamorous, and admittedly I'm still very much an amateur.

In high school, I wanted to be in band. Always loved music, loved listening to it and wanted to make it. Unfortunately I came from a pretty poor household and we couldn't afford an instrument.

Five years ago (wow, it's already been five years?!) I decided "hey I'm making decent money now, maybe it's time to learn to play something." So I went to my local music store knowing NOTHING about how to actually play an instrument. But I decided to walk around and see if something called out to me.

I walk by the keyboards section, which is having a pretty slow day, and one of the guys there is just rocking out on this Korg Minilogue. It sounded phenomenal, and I just knew the synthesizer was for me. Admittedly up until that point, if you happened to ask me what a synthesizer was, I would have just said something like "it's a fancy electric piano." Yeah...real informed decision there. But I left with a lighter wallet and a brand new synthesizer.

Well, having a synthesizer is nice, but it's not conducive to making a full song, especially if you know little about making music, but at this point I am just devouring all of the synth YouTube content I can find, and stumble onto the wonderful world of grooveboxes.

"Wow, I can make full songs on a little box that I can just take with me? Sign me up!" Now, in case you don't know, my background is in tech. As such this scratched two itches for me, which are my love of music and my equally strong love of gadgets and gizmos. I may or may not occasionally be referred to as the little mermaid by my friends.

So I went down that rabbit hole. Mind you, at this point I still BARELY know anything about actually making music, and do I really have to learn about chords and scales? Where's the fun in that. So I took the "more dollars than sense" approach and tried to supplement my lack of skill with more gear. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Eventually I decided "I've got way too much gear and nothing to really show for it, and that needs to change." I went through all my gear and decided "this fills a practical use case, and this does not," and sold anything in the latter category. It was a huge relief.

Around that time I also ended up signing up for a couple online courses on music production, like Andrew Huang's on that site that used to be called Monthly. It wasn't bad...helped me get a better idea of how to think about music production overall, and I finally forced myself to put out my first track. It wasn't particularly good, and I've only officially released one song since then, but I'm still slightly proud of it.

Since then I've only ever officially released one other track and have worked on others off and on. I have no visions of making a career out of it, but I enjoy having fun and just noodling something out. Maybe I'll release more, maybe not, but at the end of the day I'm at a point where I enjoy what I'm doing with it all.

In regard to what made it all click for me - I naturally fell into the technical aspects of it (like how MIDI works, how to use a mixer, etc), due to the fact that I troubleshoot tech for a living and that felt like an extension. As for the more musical parts, I think what really did it for me was learning that musical inspiration is exactly that - inspiration. It doesn't have to follow a specific formula. You can start from complete randomness, and if you like it, great. If you don't, you can always build up from there or start again.

I’m lucky in that my employer went the opposite direction. Downsizing our local office and just letting us all be 100% remote. We’re a geographically distributed group so it doesn’t make sense to enforce office requirements.

Wait. I can automate my meetings too? I dig it.

Yeah, I was reading some posts about that. Fortunately I had work so I happened to not be online when all that was going on. Extremely unfortunate, but you do what you gotta do. Hopefully the assholes that did that get the boot and worse.