That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.

The most bang for buck "employee benefit" I ever offered to my guys back in the earl 00's was a T1 line to their home for free.

We could do this since local loops to most folks were about $150-200/mo, and we already had a channelized DS3 terminated at our rack at a local datacenter for our phone banks. If you bought your own DS1 retail you'd be paying upwards of $1k/mo back then to a provider.

It was by far the best "stickiness for dollar" investment into employee benefits I've ever found back then or since.

I worked for an ISP back in around '98, and they offered to let me terminate a T1 there if I covered the line. I got a contract from the phone company for $205/mo for the T1 and got it all set up, but they were billing me $250/mo for the line. A couple months in DSL dropped, and I got out of the T1 contract because they said they couldn't honor the contract they wrote because $250/mo was the regulated minimum price, and I got 768K DSL for $70/mo. At the time everyone was speculating that DSL wouldn't work (crosstalk across pairs as multiple people in a bundle use DSL will cause it to fail), but they were quickly proven wrong.

I worked at an ISP that gave dedicated ISDN and 56k frame relay lines as a benefit in the late 90's. T1 would've been amazing!

I had 1.5 Mbps DSL in 1999, and I think nearly all of my co-workers either had that or a cable modem with similar speed. I think T1s were like 5x the price for the same download speed.

What market did you have 1.5mbit dsl in, in 1999? GTE in LA county offered 768k/768k symmetric. In 1999. I can't remember when that was increased, but it was after GTE got bought out.

Calgary. I remember it being asymmetric, probably 256 or 512 up.

Cadvision? 3mbps cable (sadly Rogers) wasn't impossible at the time.

Nucleus!

You know they're still around... somehow? :| The website makes their age clear: https://www.mynucleus.ca/

Back in the day people on forums would list T1 line in their signature. My ISDN line was not worthy!

I used to use 128Kbps bonded ISDN at home through BT Home Highway and an ISP called Red Hot Ant who had fixed price unmetered internet access.

And I accessed the heck out of that connection (until the ISP went bust, wonder why?), and was very much a Q3A LPB during that time.

I was one of those SAs, circa 1998-2000. We also had an on-call kit with a Nokia Communicator so we weren't completely stuck at home while on-call.

Fast-forward to 2025, and I now have dual 1Gbps symmetric fiber connections (AT&T, GFiber) into my home from opposite sides of the house. (It's totally gratuitous and I'll probably cancel GFiber in a few months, but I wanted to have it wired up so I could more quickly start service in the future.)

There was also that period of time when Ricochet was available in some places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

Wireless 56k baud. So you could take your luggable laptop circa 1994 with you and dial in to work... given you lived in SF.

Oh man I forgot about Ricochet. I remember they had service in NYC too, and it turns out also in a few other big markets. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/technology/ricochet-netwo...

Ha! My mom worked as a build engineer at BNR (later Nortel) in the 1990s and we got a free 2nd phone line for her to dial into work (99% used by me and my brother for internet). She could have gotten ISDN had it been available in our small town, but alas...

> All paid for by the company they worked for.

One of my internships in college was at Sun Microsystems in the org that provided this connectivity to employees. My job was to automate pushing updates to connection software and modem firmware down to clients, but I ended up doing a lot of technical support as well.

I had one for work as well in the late 90s.

The other (often overlooked) benefit that ISDN provided was 24/7 connectivity in an age of dialup.

Oh and you could spoof your outgoing phone number for caller ID ]:D

Yes but with channel bundling you also had to pay twice. One channel was only 64k.

Does that matter? I would think it's whoever wants to sell to European consumers that matters.

I've been that developer making a single-threaded app multi-threaded. Best way to learn though!

In other news, old man yells at cloud. I don't care how many days he fucking works in the office.

Seriously though, if he's working 7 days a week in the office and can't get a hold of someone, I hope he's planning on paying them his salary. Hell, I'd come in the office 7 days a week for the multi millions of dollars he's worth. I'd do it for a year, retire, and live happily ever after.

Same. Lost both smell and taste for a few days after I got COVID in 2021. My taste came back quickly, but my sense of smell took longer to come back and is still probably about 50% diminished. I can't smell things from a distance, only up-close or if it's really strong. Like I can't tell if my house stinks because my garbage needs to be taken out, but I can smell it up close. I've just relegated myself to not being able to smell much anymore which I guess is better than some of the other Long COVID symptoms out there. I do miss smelling things though.

That's interesting. I use BBEdit for that purpose and VSCode for code editing. I really don't like BBEdit's layout except for log viewing and unsaved snipets/notes. I might have to try Sublime now...

As a DevSecOps/SRE whatever, I just gotta give props to the Subaru team for getting it patched within 24 hours. While it's just a small internal admin dashboard without real customer usage, the fact they acknowledged and fixed the issue so quickly speaks well of at least that part of Subaru IT.

Dang, where's MythBusters when you need them (RIP Grant Imahara)

I have queries and doubts on the proposed union. See attached ticket. Please do the needful.

You joke, but I know an actual couple that has a “family” Jira instance. They have tickets for household todo items like “Paint fence”.

I’m not sure about performance reporting but I think overall velocity has gone down despite their team size growing in recent years. I think the new members aren’t contributing much yet in the way of story points.

I worked with a sysadmin that did this for his kids, and even moved chore assignments around automatically based on grades (which he scraped from some school portal). Get a D and you'll have to do your sister's chores!

I find in this situation that new member onboarding can unfortunately take years

My wife and I use Trello for stuff like this. Though the main use case is as the world's most reliable checklist-syncing program for grocery shopping. The task tracking is also nice

Does that couple also work at the same company as product managers?

Digital list with checkbox is not inherently evil

Your questions around why we need sleep make me wonder if we could develop a drug cocktail to do that work for us while we're awake. Similar to Iain M. Banks' "Culture" book series where humans can inject themselves with their "drug glands" to improve their capabilities.