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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I lived in Louisiana for a few years. I’m a white yankee and I used to dread situations where I’d end up in a room full of white native Louisiana dudes that I didn’t know very well. Absolutely guaranteed that within ten minutes somebody would throw out the N-word and then everybody would be laughing and saying racist shit.

    The worst was when I was a member at the local YMCA. Fat old white dudes that worked at the courthouse (like judges and prosecutors) would sit around naked on nasty old leather couches in the locker room literally making jokes about sending innocent black men to Angola prison.

    The only reason I can’t say Louisiana is the worst state in the country is that I also lived in Mississippi.



  • I used to work for a company that wrote the software used by Clerks of Court in Louisiana. It was niche software because Louisiana is the only US state whose legal system is derived from the French, so the companies that write software that can handle all the other states don’t bother accommodating Louisiana. Clerks of Court in most of the LA parishes made $60K to $70K per year (which was actually a pretty astronomical salary there) but they controlled budgets that could afford the $100K per month cost of the software. The owner of the company would wine and dine the Clerks and pay for their house renovations and driveway pavings etc. and vacations and whatnot, and meanwhile he raked in fucking enormous profits (64 parishes X $100K per month, with a team of about 5 programmers). Nobody batted an eye at this shit.



  • I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB’s On Error Resume Next “solution” to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

    BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn’t actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.