I started my career as a plumber (exterior - digging up water mains), and currently I am a corporate IT security engineer.

While the plumbing part was absolutely harder physically, the work was overall more enjoyable and much less stressful. I was outside a lot of the time, I got to play with heavy equipment, and most of the time there wasn’t much urgency to the tasks. I never stared at the ceiling at 2 am worrying what tomorrow would bring.

In corporate IT security? There are days I don’t leave my desk for 6-8 hours straight. I feel a constant need to be connected, and I’m always planning, strategizing and worrying about the next project.

Everyone talks about the sitting at the desk thing, which is an issue, but corporate life is also much more mentally taxing. And that crap adds up over 10-20 years.

I traveled with General Brown as part of a diplomatic engagement while I was stationed at central command in Tampa Florida back in 2017. I even got to sit in on a meeting with him and a foreign minister of defense.

I found him to be level headed, calm and very intelligent. He handled himself well and was everything you would want a general to be. I’m glad to see he’s risen to the position of chief of staff

This hurt my brain so badly I had to walk over to my microwave to figure it out.

You would definitely feel the bass

VS code is pretty amazing though

I think a lot of people got a bad taste in their mouth with episode 1 and they couldn’t look past it. I saw all three in the theater and I enjoyed them all, but the whole Gungan / Jar Jar thing makes episode 1 the weakest for me by far. The whole tone of the movie feels like it was aimed at a much younger audience, even compared to episodes 2 and 3.

Which is bizarre to me, since you have to imagine the core audience for those movies were middle aged people who saw the originals as kids.

Still, nothing is worse to me than episode IX. I’d watch a Jar Jar spinoff before I’d watch that again.

I hate it when I get chocolate all up in my vanilla.

This is the problem with all modern media. It’s all profit based. It’s all a manipulation scheme to get you to fork over money.

Freedom of the press has evolved into press for sale. It is ironic that we live in a world that is more interconnected than ever before, with anyone able to speak their mind to people across the globe, yet the rich still control the flow of information.

I read the first few and I really enjoyed them. After that I think the format got old to me so I didn’t keep it up.

Dean Koontz is very light reading. If you’ve read a few of his books you’ve read them all, but if you want an entertaining story that usually has a reasonably positive outcome, you could do worse.

If you don’t like golden retrievers, art deco or California though, you may want to pass. 😀

Lol, wasn’t trying to advocate for the government at all. And don’t really care if it’s believed. Just saying I met the dude and he seemed like a pretty good guy to me.

At the time I was a low level USAF officer (Captain) assigned to be the US liaison at Central Command for the US embassy in Turkmenistan. It was a temporary, normally very sleepy assignment, since we don’t normally do squat with Turkmenistan, but at that particular moment in time the US decided to do a diplomatic engagement, and I got to travel with the team. It was a fun and somewhat surreal experience. I even got to meet the US ambassador.