My BIL still gives his weight in “stone”. As in, “I’m 12 stone, 7 lbs and 3 ounces”.

I joke with him that only makes sense to people who are comfortable with Pounds, Shillings and Pence, too.

I’m guessing that the “cheese” component wasn’t actually what anyone outside of the USA would call cheese.

I don’t think so. The mail is delivered to the Proton mail server via unencrypted SMTP and then sent on to the client encrypted. The secure layer is between the client and the server. It might also be stored on the server encrypted.

Email is unsecure as hell in any event, but I think the idea is that once it’s delivered, it’s secured.

Isn’t Proton supposed to be end to end encryption between crient and server? And wouldn’t that rule out IMAP?

To explain for those not in Canada… It is usual in Canada for a job to start with a low level of PTO an then add a week every few years that you stay with the company. This usually is capped at 6 weeks.

You can, of course negotiate an amount of PTO when you accept a job. Someone coming into a more senior position wouldn’t expect to start with just two weeks of PTO.

I cannot express adequately how different blades are from each other. Some are smoother than others, some are sharper and some improve after a few uses. Some last longer.

I have fairly fine whiskers, so I don’t need a crazy sharp blade like Feather. My skin is also a bit sensitive, so a smooth blade is best.

For me Big Ben, blades made by Lord in Egypt are really good. One of the versions of Shark, also made by Lord are pretty good too.

I find Wilkenson Sword blades to be horribly scratchy, and the name for some of the Gillette blades. Voskhod aren’t bad, except they are Russian.

You don’t realize how different they are until you try.

Religion. Ruins. Everything. Every. Time.

Blades vary greatly between brands. Get a sampler pack from eBay to find ones you like. Then buy them in bulk. 100 blades will generally cost from $8-$14, depending on the brand. Some, like Feather, are more expensive.

Wait til the OP learns about the Easy Bake Oven.

20.5 in winter and 21.5 in the summer.

L’esprit de l’escalier

I call BS.

I’m Canadian and my parents immigrated here from England before I was born. I have a UK passport as well as a Canadian passport.

I’m not English-Canadian, I’m just Canadian. No one hyphenates in Canada, and you cannot say that Canada has any more unifying cultural heritage than the USA.

Petrichor?

This article is over one month old. No much has happened since then, including Trump’s newest tarrifs against all foreign autos.

In the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.

It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn’t standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don’t come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.

Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that’s already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that’s down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it’s going to someday become an urgent priority that can’t wait any more.

So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn’t understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.

The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, “to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs”. It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.

You can’t just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It’s going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.

And that’s all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can’t meaningfully add resources, scope’s already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.

And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can’t you just go faster? Can’t you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?

93= Four score and a baker’s dozen.

I spent 30 years working with derivatives of the Pick Operating System and its integrated DBMS. Notably Universe and Ultimate. Back in the day, it was very, very difficult to even explain how they worked to others because the idea of key/value wasn’t commonly understood, at least as it is today.

I was surprised at how similar MongoDB is to Pick in many many respects. Basically, key/value with variant record structures. MongoDB uses something very close to JSON, while Pick uses variable length delimited records. In either case, access to a particular record in near instantaneous give the record key, regardless of how large the file is. Back in the 1980’s and earlier, this was a huge advantage over most of the RDBMS systems available, as storage was much slower than today. We could implement a system that would otherwise take a huge IBM mainframe, on hardware that cost 1/10 the price.

From a programming perspective, everything revolves around acquiring and managing keys. Even index files, if you had them (and in the early days we didn’t so we maintained our own cross-reference files) were just files keyed on some value from inside records from the main data file. Each record in an index file was just a list of record keys to the main data file.

Yes, you can (and we did) nest data that would be multiple tables in an SQL database into a single record. This was something called “Associated Multivalues”. Alternatively, you could store a list of keys to a second file in a single field in the first file. We did both.

One thing that became very time/disk/cpu expensive was traversing an entire file. 99% of the time we were able to architect our systems so that this never happened in day to day processing.

A lot of stuff we did would horrify programmers used to SQL, but it was just a very different paradigm. Back in a time when storage and computing power were limited and expensive, the systems we built stored otherwise unthinkable amounts of data and accessed it with lightening speed on cheap hardware.

To this day, the SQL concepts of joins and normalization just seems like a huge waste of space and power to me.

“My nipples explode with orgasmic delight”.

That’s a little confused. From what I remember, it’s the server that matters, not the domain when being blocked. If you self-host this is a problem, but not if you use your own domain on a commercial service.

The “MX records and such” are all a function of domain management. You’ll have to do this whether or not you self-host.

Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.