I’ve never really had a “desk job” where my job was to sit at a desk 9 to 5. But a few of my past occupations included at least some desk time, such as:

• Flight instructor. Most of my day was spent either in the classroom briefing/instructing, or in the plane instructing/overseeing. I spent a significant portion at a desk creating lesson plans, updating logbooks, communicating with students, grading assignments, communicating with other instructors, communicating with our Designated Pilot Examiner, filling out FAA paperwork, that sort of thing.
• Aviation mechanic. This is more of an administrative job than the posters at your local trade school would lead you to believe. An owner/operator/pilot/plane haver guy brings you a plane for an annual inspection, now you have a research project. What exact make and model is this thing? What modifications has it had during the 50 years it’s existed? Under what authority were those modifications made? Is it still in original or correctly modified condition? Are there any manufacturer service bulletins or FAA airworthiness directives issued for this aircraft, and I mean THIS aircraft, or its components? Like, they’ll call out ranges of hull numbers in these things. Then there’s recording all the shit YOU did to the plane while it’s here.
• Project manager of a short-run job shop. First up: Meet with the customer and massage the idea they have out of their brain. 3 times out of 10 tell them which aisle in Wal-Mart they can find what they want, 1 time out of 10 explain why what they want isn’t physically or technologically possible. Once I’ve got a good idea of what the customer wants, it’s time to do some preliminary design work, research materials and prepare an estimate, deliver this to the customer. 7 in 10 times we hear back from that, get the okay to build, now it’s time to order materials, do any of the design work which may include CAD design, electrical design, computer programming, whatever. Scheduling and directing my team, contracting with any talent I don’t have in-house, the all important staring at a wall visualizing fourteen different variations on some little yet pivotal detail, and then I’d end up in the shop running laser cutters or lathes or table saws or whatever to get it built. Then the most important part: Invoicing the customer.

Who else is talking to them?

Okay wait let me do the math here, 10x26x26x26x10x10x10 = 175,760,000. The article says that commercial trucks get a different pattern of plate. So you’re telling me there’s 175 million passenger cars on the road in California? For scale, there’s approximately 350 million American citizens. For every two Americans, there’s a car registered in California? Not counting vanity plates or commercial vehicles.

What the intern fuck is going on there bud?

I’ve driven a pickup truck for 20 years and never once had anything stolen out of it. “Safest big city” as a phrase strikes me similarly to “most comfortable chest wound.”

What’s the limiting factor?

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

Dammit I had one of those.

I forget why, but Picard and Riker are away, Data is in command with Worf as his first officer. Data wants to be analytical and consider all options, Worf wants to fire all phasers and die in glorious battle. Data comes to a decision and gives orders, and Worf says “Finally!”

Data asks to see him in the ready room, and then dresses him down for talking back to him in front of the crew. They hash out what they expect the role of second in command is supposed to be, and with the military shit out of the way, Data then acknowledges that this dressing down may have damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that no, he was out of line so it was his fault, that he acknowledges that he was out of line and if we can overlook this incident he’d like to continue being friends.

Stated problems, voiced objections, addrressed objections, no personal slights, no raised voices, actual accountability expected and accepted…manliest conversation ever filmed.

I will FEED HIM.

Okay so let’s strike a couple out of that list:

• LibreCAD is a 2D-only DXF editor. I think it’s a fork of an old version of QCAD, which is also a 2D-only DXF editor. Not very helpful for 3D printing.
• Sketchup is kinda useful for going “what would my room look like if I laid out the furniture like this?” It produces horrible 3D models. When I used to work at the job shop, I could tell the model had been designed in Sketchup because it had holes and reversed normals and other shit that wouldn’t print.
• Blender. Blender is a 3D sculpting and animation program; Be your own little Pixar, just add talent. It can be used to make models for 3D printing but it isn’t very good as an engineering CAD package.

I would also rule out AutoCAD because isn’t it like, architectural software? And like, OLD? AutoDesk’s engineering CAD was Inventor for the longest time, and they’ve been working on replacing Inventor with Fusion360. I’m personally done with AutoDesk, they’ve chafed my taint a few too many times so I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

OnShape is actually cool tech, but it’s drawbackware. In the words of Lando Calrissian, this deal’s getting worse all the time.

I personally use FreeCAD, it could be better in a lot of ways but it’s not commercial. It’s made by the kind of people who are very good at programming computers, but they get full body diaper rash from cornhole to corneas if they try to think about software usability. It’s why every concept is replicated 2-4 times in various forms of incompatibility. May the dread god Nyalathotep smite thee should thou chooseth to make a Clone instead of a Link. It’s also developed in English by mostly non-English speakers. So you go to their forums and ask “If I need to make two mirror images of a part, what is the correct way to model the left one and then mirror it to get the right one” and they can’t get past the grammatical puzzle you just spun for them to answer the technical question.

In conclusion, learn to use a pencil.

Kyle.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Wait a minute! What tools? You’re supposed to be doing theory! You’re a field psycho-ornithologist, aren’t you?

Yeah, see: when you’re looking at these highly ornate antiques, it’s not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it’s the wealth of his customer.

Are you yourself a craftsman?