Me too. To this Day our national Electric invoice standard uses ISO-8859-15. An that's just fine until somebody feels the need to have a look with Notepad, add a random space and save the file.
Notepad then helpfully changes the encoding to UTF-16 and the whole patch errors out somewhere down the chain.
I don't want to be too much of an asshole. In any case, I'd like more Germans being the meme Germans and less of them being the fax using, sending random pictures as Excel files and demanding answer in snail mail.
And yeah, I do work with quite a lot of legacy German industrial machinery. The average German I interact with is quite possibly closer to the end of their career than to the beginning. But on this particular lemming said experience is taxing.
I do live in a bit of a different part of the globe. It is a losing battle here on side of humans. Trees pop up and every year there are less people around.
I like it here, may it make me a hillbilly on a flat ground or not.
It's not like Finland is a perfect country. It's just least shit one.
On the last paragraph: it is quite common for a horse to be perfectly comfortable on a particular route. Be it from stable to field or on regular riding track. And after half a decade something that has always been there is just unbearably scary for them. A rock, a fence post, a post box, literally anything.
And on those kittens - horses are quite elaborate on their body language. That cat had made her nest behind the wall of said horses stall. Behind that stall was an area mostly relegated to tools - wheelbarrows and shovels and such. Said mare was also extremely interested in food, when something is more important than evening meal it raises eyebrows. First thing that comes in mind on situation like that is illness.
But that time she was clearly healthy and happy. Every time we'd get close by she was neighing and pointing with with her head. And sure enough, there was a nest behind the wall and sure enough the cat and those kittens needed a bit of help.
Some animals are truly more equal than others. Years ago we had a really smart horse. (And those of you who have been around horses much do know what an oxymoron that is.)
So this cat moves in. She was one of those that just moved in, no chip and no other luck finding her home. And she was pregnant and made a little nest and had her kittens.
And the smart cookie of a mare that I began this with made sure that we knew where the kittens were.
Then there's the normal horse experience where there's been a rock close to road for years. Then on one random occasion the rock is an apex predator.
It's really not that hard. I'm the IT department for a medium sized bakery operation. Around 200 employees. This just means that I'm available when it really is necessary. I'm in situ or on call when orders come in and when shipments go out.
In the end I'm cheaper than outsourcing all the in house software and hardware. And I'm available at 3am when the bakers do their thing.
And yeah, I do have somebody somewhat trained in every bakery. When they're at end of their wit I'm the person they call.
In the end, I'm around 1% of the payroll. IT is not that special.
I'm ancient, websites with little to no CSS (and absolutely no client side scripts) are refreshing. I don't know if I'd like all of web to be like that, but there's something to be said for the absolute individuality of everybody writing their sites from scratch.
It's way too easy to spin up a Wordpress installation and be done with it.
Salute!
It's really great to be able to browse via all - these days it's very easy to bubble up in some echo chamber. I've been here since the great API apocalypse and you all have made me research so many topics I'd never looked up on my own.
In Finnish there's a similar term, kuningaspultti or king bolt. Used for things like bolt retaining timing gear on a crank shaft of an engine.
How about other languages?
Find something middle sized. I work in a bakery, around 200 employees. I do some industrial automation, in house IT support and I ended up writing ERP for the joint. I think I could get 20 to 30 percent more at a larger company but here I do what I want and not what I'm told to.
At work I have to use Windows, Notepad++ is my safe place. It is fast, there's plugins for years, and it handles (with some wait time) 100 000 line long documents.