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frog fractions

…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…

…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

…hey, willem dafoe is an accomplished thespian; show some respect…

…that’s the POWER model: the unit posted above is the consumer version with the SX chip, no math coprocessor and fewer function keys…

…i don’t know that i shouldn’t’ve seen it, but the 1978 invasion of the body snatchers was my introduction to existential horror at the ripe age of seven years…

…what shouldn’t i have seen?..about a year earlier, a family friend handed-down a big brown grocery bag stacked to the rim with pre-code EC horror comics: that was some teeth-gnashingly gruesome stuff…

…we have a couple of industrial fans but the sound’s not quite right by comparison to cross-flow impellers…

…at some level i secretly suspect that sleeping under omnipresent white noise has only made my tinnitus worse over time, but that could also be a natural consequence of my ears aging-out…

(could also come from driving a convertible at speed while blasting music on a three-hour commute every day, if i’m honest)

…dark mode text while lying in repose on my side usually does the trick for me, but then i wake up later with a drained ipad propped against the wall…

…white noise drowns out the ringing in my ears and calms the voices in my head…

…my fan broke earlier this year; i’m shopping for a mechanical white-noise generator…

…when our central air conditioner failed during this summer’s hundred-degree spell, i installed a temporary window-box unit and sleeping was BLISS: tinnitus gang needs fans…

…not entirely sure; possibly a proxy for snapping in real life?..

OSI - Stockholm

…i’ve been carrying a lot of pent-up rage…

…that’d take a deep dive into obsolete building codes to identify exactly when the concept was first introduced: BOCA, southern/standard, and uniform building codes all merged into IBC about twenty-five years ago so we’re talking about old paper code books from twentieth century…

…areas of refuge are closely tied to modern accessibility standards which arose from the ADA in 1990; i’m guessing they were widely introduced sometime in that decade, possibly earlier for high-rises or hazardous occupancies, but they were definitely part of 1997 UBC (which most of california enforced) and 2000 IBC…

(i started working professionally in 1993 and every project i worked on was fully accessible, but adoption varied across different jurisdictions and when i worked in california a decade later they were waaaay less accessible than texas)

…we used unpowered dollies of similar design for moving large appliances back when i was a groundskeeper…

…i have a paraplegic friend who’s surprisingly adept at wheely-ing his own chair down fire stairs and a quadriplegic friend who we just hodor outside during fire drills, even though they’re both supposed to shelter-in-place…

…exit slides were common fire escapes in the 1950s and you can still find abandoned hatches in some older buildings, but in my experiences renovating aged facilities they’ve all been sealed-off (and signs removed) during life-safety modernisations over the past seventy years…

…they’re pretty dangerous by modern standards so alternatives are always preferred, similar to old abandoned exterior fire escapes…

…architect here: we design protected areas of refuge where mobilty-impared occupants can shelter in place until emergency services arrive to evacuate them from the facility…

…you’ll often see areas of refuge identified near elevator lobbies and equipped with hardened callboxes for emergency communication, or marked on the evacuation plan if they’re in a remote location…sometimes areas of refuge are pretty subtle if you don’t know to look for them: we design protected firewalls, structure, and building systems integrated into the facility so the biggest tells are usually callboxes, magnetic door hold-opens, or tracks for automatic fire curtains…

…when renovating older facilities, we do the best we can to modernise life safety within the limitations of existing infrastructure, but the general rule of thumb is that as long as you’ve improved upon what originally previously existed, you’ve satisfied your obligation even if it’s not at parity with new construction…

(it’s not uncommon for old facilities to have gone through a dozen or more life-safety modernisations since the advent of modern building codes, just palimpsested one-over-the-other as standards progressed)

…catastrophically hostile UI + overrun with bots…

…NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i’m unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround…

…i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended…

edit: …is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..