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figuring stuff out
Congratulations! You won the election, and you're being sworn in! Unfortunately, you live in a GAMER NATION, and you must be sworn in with your hand on a VIDEO GAME. What VIDEO GAME do you choose?
Happy New Year #VintageComputing / #RetroComputing / #RetroGaming friends!
Frankly I'm not at all convinced that we're not still stuck in the event horizon of December 2012.

Greetings. Once upon a time long ago, I was sitting alone in the UCLA ARPANET site #1 computer room late one night when the high Santa Ana winds outside started disrupting power. Hit after hit, very dangerous for the minicomputers, disk drives, and other equipment in that room, since we didn't have uninterruptible power supplies back then.

I made some calls and it was decided I should shut everything in the room down. Everything. I phoned the ARPANET NOC (Network Operations Center) at BBN and explained the situation, since I was about to shut down IMP #1 (essentially, a refrigerator-sized router) on ARPANET which sat in a corner of the room, and doing this could cause disruptions if done in an unplanned manner. The IMP was *always* running -- I had never seen it powered down.

I worked my way around the room, powering down terminals and disks, and printers, and the power supplies on the 11/45 (ARPANET Host #1 - UCLA-ATS) and the 11/70 (Host #129 [1+128 on IMP #1] - UCLA-SECURITY. Back then my email addresses were LAUREN@UCLA-ATS and LAUREN@UCLA-SECURITY -- no domains yet.

The usual roar of the many machines' fans and motors gradually got quieter and quieter, until only the IMP was left. I pulled down the power switch. Now there was dead silence except the hum of the lights, a situation I'd never experienced in that room before. Very odd feeling.

Suddenly I heard a click -- the IMP was powering back up by itself. Damn. I pulled down the switch again. Quiet for a time, then click and it came back up yet again. Before I started thinking about screwing around with its power cables or turning off breakers that could have unexpected effects, I called the NOC again to ask them if they had any ideas.

"Oh yeah. We should have told you! There's a little switch that controls auto-restart. Surprise!"

So I found and flipped that little toggle switch, powered down the IMP again, and this time it stayed down. I had turned off the ARPANET -- at least at UCLA. -L

Every time I think Iโ€™ve found a new hobby it turns out I just like to buy stuff

IN CASE OF FIRE:

1) If someone is on fire, punch them in the face.

2) Cop a feel off the person behind you, as these might be your last minutes on Earth.

3) Squeeze the junk of the person in front of you. It'll slow them down, allowing you to move ahead of them.

4) Exit.

I've managed to get fully and wholly locked out of my discord account. I'll make a new one soon, but this sucks very much.
I gave a glib answer when my daughter asked what I wanted for #Christmas . I now have world peas.

10 Image #CaptionTips from a transcriptionist:

1. Any words are better than nothing.
2. You don't need to say it's "a picture ofโ€ฆ" screen readers will already say it's an image.
3. Start with the framing or format (i.e. close up, landscape, meme, text).
4. Think about the reason you're posting the pic and describe that first, add background details if you have time.
5. Pretend you're talking to someone on the phone and want to tell them about this cool thing you're looking at.
6. Transcribe any and all text in the image, even if it's the only thing you do.
7. If you've described the image in your post, you don't need to copy and paste it again in the caption. But again, don't leave it blank, just put something like "as described."
8. You can add small subjective notes, but don't give too much interpretation of the image in your own opinion.
9. Caption jokes are fun, as long as they still describe the image objectively.
10. Use punctuation, and capitalize words properly. A lot of us have interacted with this tech when calling customer service or talking to Siri, so keep in mind that you're writing for a computer to read, and it needs all the help it can get.