Happens for me too. link

Could have Clippy resurrected. It looks like you are trying to write a program...

Don't bother with Stardock's Groupy. It causes far more problems with Excel than it ever solves. Could be a good product, but low levels of service and denial of the problem means updates don't exist

Back in the '90s I had some involvement in safety critical hardware and (less so) software. I did a lot of work looking at potential failures of the hardware, including IC pins stuck at 0, 1, open circuit, shorted, and what would happen if a 5mm piece of swarf happened to short between two pins. Taking the drawings for PCBs and then putting 5mm radius circles around every pin was a delightful experience. For the four boards I worked on, I produced a pile of paper about 10" high. The requirement was that no single failure could cause loss of mission. Everything was dual channel and the loss of a channel was OK to an extent. I didn't work on it, by my company at the time did write the software to control a plane (probably many more since). Took me more than 20 years before I plucked up the courage to fly on one such make of plane.

You get used to yyyyMMdd. this is often what gets spat out of systems like SAP in text files. It's consistency. I like it as it is readily sortable when held as a string (Not that we should, but it does happen). In particular if I have a bunch of folders, putting yyyyMMdd enables them to be sorted. Trying to find notes embedded in a list of folders formatted either of the other two ways is difficult. Also, the Japanese use yyyy/MM/dd as their standard format - I am in Japan right now, so I see it all the time. I have it in mind that South Africa does as well.

I got invited a couple of years ago, when it was called Branded.Me (I think). It got changed to Remote.com and my login ceased to work unless I integrated it with Facebook or Linked In, neither of which I was willing to do. But, yes, it seemed to be another job site of some kind and wasn't much use.

Used it 20 years ago to edit a DLL where someone had hard coded a serial number in an expected response from a signal generator. Changed it to the customer's signal generator and was up and running. Turns out that a few months prior to this, I saw a colleague scrabbling around on various computers looking for some code and this was it. He had encountered the same problem but didn't own up and had left by the time I found the issue.

I played about with a Sinclair ZX80 with 1k memory including the video. Then I moved into a Compukit UK101 which had 8k memory and was an absolute s** to get anything to load or save. I did my degree using an Amstrad CPC6128 and had an external ROM box, which I had an Assembler, and possibly a word processor. I also built an emulator adaptor which I plugged into what would eventually become a standalone computer and I used the emulator to debug the program on the device. Eventually after 10 years, the Amstrad sort of let go - just the rubber band to drive the 3.5" floppy and a replacement was going to cost a fortune. One of these days, I will get it back out and see if I can make it live again.

I have to agree on iTunes. It is not good. It was always buggy on Windows and wireless syncing very hit and miss. If all devices, the PC and the router (was Netgear, now Draytek) were rebooted, then a sync might happen. I moved to a MacBook, thinking that I will start to develop some apps and iTunes seems to be just as bad. I did once have four devices showing and being willing to sync wirelessly, but now I am lucky if one or two show. Again, multiple reboots sometimes solve the problem. So yes, "It doesn't just work". I'm probably holding them wrong.

I can remember the time when I was more into hardware than software and used to use 286 PCs for CAD and the like. Entirely DOS based. We asked for a word processor or text editor and the sysadmin asked "What do engineers need an editor for? What's wrong with Edlin?" Needless to say when we heard that one, we went and found some piece of freeware off the front of a magazine...

Hmmm. Did something similar a while ago when I wrote my first multithreading application. It was getting three datasets from a database and needed all three to finish before moving on. Initially, I had the sleep before I got the threads to synchronise properly. However, I forgot to take the sleep out. Application went into Production and only after a complaint a few months later did I investigate and find the gem. Good thing was that I looked like a hero because I made the application so much quicker. One of these days I'll own up!

ZX80 - 1k RAM. Could do a lot with that then. UK101 - Kit built machine in the UK. 6502, 8k RAM, 1k Video memory - still got it after 25+ years! Amstrad CPC 6128 - Z80 with 128k and a 3" floppy built in. Did my final year thesis on that, including write the firmware etc for a couple of standalone processor boards. Actually broke out the expansion port on the back of it to make a Z80 emulator. Computer died after 10 years for want of an elastic band to drive the floppy disk. The old one perished and wouldn't grip :(. Still got it in the hope that I will get round to fixing it one day. Then just PC after PC after PC......