I just spent the morning doing this with my help desk team, although we just do it via command prompt at the recovery screen. We’ve had a 100% success rate so far at 93 devices and counting. I’m glad our organization practices read only Friday, at least.

2k3 walked so that 2k4 could run. I remember being so pissed when 2k4 was announced as a separate game from 2k3. I refused to buy it until they released the DVD Editor’s Choice edition, but from there I was hooked. So many awesome mods, like Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, Deathball, SAS Into the Lions Den, Frag.Ops, Air Buccaneers, Jailbreak, NeoTokyo, and Strike Force are the ones I remember the most. That game was the biggest one during our LAN party days because everyone had it, including our Linux brethren. It’s hard to believe it’s been over 20 years since we took that first step with 2k3.

I got a HON Ignition 2.0 a few years back for about $300. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s not a gaming chair. It’s one of the best cheap ergonomic chairs I’ve ever used. You can get them lightly used from Amazon for about $360 nowadays, or $425 new. Between working from home and sitting in front of my computer gaming, I spend probably 8+ hours a day sitting in that chair, and have for the last 3 years. It’s still in great shape and shows almost no wear and tear.

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One of them is even named Gary!

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This list obviously isn’t everything, but there’s a lot available. I kept it pretty broad although there’s a ton of niche and specialized software available too.

OpenTracks - Keep track of how many steps you take throughout the day without a smart watch.

K9Mail - A privacy oriented mail client alternative to the Gmail app.

Diaguard - A diabetes diary app to track your blood sugar.

Drinkable - List a few ingredients and what liquor you have at home and it gives you a list of drinks you can make.

Newpipe - A YouTube client without ads.

Libretube - Another YouTube client without ads.

Blood Pressure Monitor - Same thing as the diabetes, but great if you have high blood pressure you need to track.

ChordReader 2 - Get guitar chords to learn how to play songs.

Fennic - A web browser based on Firefox that’s privacy oriented.

Red Moon - Makes looking at your phone easier on your eyes at night.

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It was work in '04. I’ve since pivoted to IT. It’s mostly safer.

First time I got shot my heart allegedly stopped for about a minute. My vision was getting blurry, I was getting dizzy, and I had a hard time breathing, but for the last few seconds or so of consciousness I lost all physical sensation. No pain, couldn’t feel the wind, the deep in your chest vibration from all the shots around me, nothing. I thought I was paralyzed for a second, but then the lights went out. When I came to, I had been pulled back behind cover, and I felt like I was just waking up from a very deep sleep. Then the pain kicked back in almost immediately. I was told they lost my pulse for a bit. Maybe it did, maybe the hectic situation made it harder to find it, so maybe I didn’t really die and just came close. Either way, I don’t recommend it.

Same, except with raccoons.

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Right, and generally they are for all but the specialized or large scale software, but it’s still the typical “hurry up and wait” scenario. The manager that needs to approve the business use case could be in meetings all day, then legal may be buried in a case taking all their attention so they won’t be able to review the license for a day or two, maybe the IT ops team didn’t get the request until 4:55 on a Friday afternoon, but no step can be done in the process without completing all the prior steps, and even the smallest piece of software still goes through the process in some form. The main point I was trying to get across is that it’s not an assembly line, and even if only one person is needed to approve it you still have to wait for that person to have time to do it.

There’s usually an entire approval process every software request goes through. First it needs a legit business use case that one of our current approved pieces of software cannot do. For example, they may not let you install Chrome because they officially support Edge since it’s heavily tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore don’t want to deal with managing Chrome in the environment.

If it’s a new piece of software, then it goes through a security review through the security team. Verify there’s nothing in it that oversteps it’s bounds, has no known security vulnerabilities, comes from a respectfully company that hasn’t done things like tax evasion, things like that. After security approves it then legal has to review the EULA or any licensing agreements. Company lawyers don’t really like doing this because it can be time consuming and low on their priority list.

After it’s approved, including any potential costs that the responsible parties accept, the operations team has a go at it. They don’t want to have to manually install it and maintain it on your computer, so they package it up and test it in a testing environment. After verifying the package can be deployed, configured, and kept up to date, or even completely removed remotely, then it gets put in to the production deployment, and finally sent to install on your machine.

Keep in mind that these employees are also doing all their other daily tasks. They’re not sitting there churning out app deployment packages. Maybe they only meet once a week for 30 minutes to approve software, and maybe they ran out of time before your request made the agenda. Maybe the security team held up on it because they had to deal with an emergency.

This is why some big companies can take a lot longer to get software approvals compared to places with one or two techs in the IT department.