Question of the Day!

Do clementines count as oranges? If so, I chose those.

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Yeah, while I prefer apples, clementines are just easier to deal with as they don’t trigger my jaw issues. :unamused: (And clementines are so much easier to eat than oranges. :wink: )

I find pears to be a pain to catch at the right ripeness… :confused:

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Of the three, pears are my favorite, but not by a large margin. I agree that they’re hard to get the right ripeness on.

QotD #112 Reply: Pear, with apple not far behind.

Question of the Day #113: The power to control all sea life or the power to control all avian life?

Birds, duh. Even apart from the fact that I’m a thousand miles from any ocean, I just plain like birds way better, and could get a lot done with my flock of loyal minions. Their first mission, should they choose to accept it - find the individual who has covered several of our downtown buildings with spikes, so that birds who land on the ledges will have their feet sliced off, and peck off both of that person’s hands. We’ll see where it goes from there.

QotD #113 Reply: Well, I suppose this comes down to Aquaman versus The Harpy. I think I’d choose sea life, and use it as a package delivery system to make myself rich, then spend the majority of those riches on things to deliver via my controlled animals to impoverished parts of the world.

Question of the Day #114: Why haven’t you posted in this thread I made?

Okay, I guess that’s what I get for plugging one of my threads.

Question of the Day #115: Have you ever tried your hand at computer coding or programming? (No, I don’t know the difference.)

Yes. I was a computer science major in undergrad and while I’ve never had a job where writing software was a explicit job duty, I have found it to be a useful skill here and there in addition to the occasional coding project in my free time.

After getting a mechanical engineering degree (where we coded in all kinds of languages for different purposes) where I was interested in processes and improving them, I quickly moved into a role in IT where I coded a variety of systems and websites. I worked for different companies for quite a few years as a developer and then as an analyst doing coding on the side. (Even volunteered for a non-profit to create and manage their website for a couple years.)

My current role involves writing business rules in a type of pseudo-code in an environment with an engine that translates my rule into Java. :slight_smile:

Way back when dinosaurs walked the earth, I spent my last trimester in high school learning Visual Basic. The rest of the class gradually walked through the process of writing like 6 programs over the three-month timeframe, while I sat alone in the back of the room with an instruction book, writing several dozen programs to amuse myself (I still have the floppy somewhere, although I don’t know where I’d find a computer capable of running the programs). In retrospect, I wish I’d done nothing but study programming from the beginning of high school on, but after I graduated I wanted nothing to do with any Educational Institution (think Mental) ever again. So I never further developed those skills, and now computer programming is such a fast-evolving field that I would never even try to update my skills, knowing that I’d spend 9 months learning a skill which would be obsoleted 6 months after I started studying it.

It really doesn’t change that fast, @The_Justifier. Many core concepts stay the same for decades.

I’ve done a lot of programming in various technical computing languages over my career. Every few years I learn a new one; I keep looking for an excuse to pick up Python.

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I agree with this sentiment. My CS program had me learn Java and C++ in order to do coursework (like, the classes weren’t so much “learn these languages” but “here are the concepts we’re learning for this course - in order to show that you’ve understood these concepts you will be by necessity writing actual code in these languages”) in addition to a few other more obscure ones as part of specific courses on programming languages generally. The mode of thinking necessary to write code doesn’t really change, just the specific syntax of whatever language that you’re using to make your program exist in the world.

I finally got around to playing around with Python a few months ago in order to write up a Discord bot.

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I stopped doing full-time dev work because I was having to keep up with the changes in technology on my own time, and I wasn’t willing to do that. Also, I was working in an enterprise environment where the changes/concerns were more than just syntax. Learning and retaining the way different frameworks, services, pattern implementations, and technologies work and relate to each other was enough to turn me off. :confused:

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QotD #115 Reply: Well, the reason I asked this question is because I’m currently learning coding (Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), and wow am I late to the party here!

I wonder what the correlation is betwixt computer science and tabletop gaming?

Question of the Day #116: Would you rather be The Chosen One or that person’s loyal sidekick?

I mean, my college RP group had 5 CS students in it, making up about half the group with the remaining regulars spread out in as many different majors.

And that group got formed around most of us being on the same dorm floor, so it’s not like we met in class or anything.

Also: sidekick. Coming back to the RP stuff, I was always happy to have the story be somebody else’s plot with me just around to lend a hand.

Definitely the sidekick! :grin: I’m not interested in being in the limelight. I love helping others who need it, being someone behind the people who matter. (It’s why I love playing support characters. :slight_smile: )

(Similarly, I’ve had situations where I was hanging out with someone who offered to introduce me to some (minor/geek) celebrity or I otherwise had an opportunity to meet one, and my answer is always “no”. I don’t see any reason to insert myself into their day… and it’s not like there’s much we could talk about, anyway. :wink: )

I’m definitely The Chosen One. You two can fight to the death to decide which one is worthy of being my sidekick. :slight_smile:

Given this predilection, it’s a bit odd that my usual go-to D&D characters are some variation of Clerics.

As to meeting celebrities, I definitely wouldn’t avoid such encounters, as a part of me is still convinced that if I said the right word to the right rich asshole at the right time, he’d hire me to some cushy job and my life would finally turn around. The best experience along these lines I’ve ever had was getting to have a brief conversation and even a hug with a certain woman, ahehm, whose artistic works I have, er um, appreciated. PM me if you want details and are over 18.

Depends on what type of sidekick. If it is the type that actual does stuff and helps out, then I would prefer to be the sidekick. Let someone else take the credit and be famous. If by sidekick you mean comic relief that is just there to get kidnapped and be rescued, then I would prefer the chosen one.

QotD #116 Reply: Well, I’d really prefer to be the person who goes and does an important cool thing off-screen/panel that is necessary for the Chosen One’s mission to succeed.

Question of the Day #117: What is the best field of Science?

Physics (note that Mathematics isn’t a science).

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