Cowboy Who?

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
There's a good ten trillion word thinkpiece to be written about how all conspiracy theories are at their core delusions of grandeur.

Apple still won't say when the new Mac Pro will ship besides "this fall," but one of its early adopters might have hinted that it's getting close. DJ Calvin Harris has posted multiple Instagram Stories showing that he already has Apple's workstation as part of his music production setup. He didn't talk about it, to no one's surprise, but this suggests Apple is comfortable enough with the state of the Mac Pro to seed it to big-name creators.

The sighting came just days after Apple held a Final Cut Pro X summit where it teased "surprises from the Apple product team." It's not clear if that involved Mac Pro demos or news, but the timing is hard to ignore. The Mac Pro recently received FCC approval, so there's not much holding it back.

It wouldn't be shocking for Apple to do something like this. The new Mac Pro and matching Pro Display XDR are effectively Apple's mea culpa to the creative world. They're an acknowledgment that the 2013 Mac Pro and other decisions alienated professionals who thrive on desktops with ample expansion and easy-to-swap parts. If Apple is going to win those people back, it needs to show that the Mac Pro is viable in real-world situations -- including dance music studios.

Source: Calvin Harris (Instagram), 9to5Mac

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I wonder how long until you just shout Fried Cheese and a drone gently places it into your face.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I was behaving like a man-child even before I was a man!

A reader writes:

I made a mistake and a coworker saw the Excel sheet that I was using to track his repeated absences.

I’m not his supervisor, but I’ve been flabbergasted at the amount of sick days he takes. It started immediately when I started working here 14 months ago, but I started tracking it in January to see how many he takes in 2019. It’s always “I have a migraine” or “I have food poisoning” or “I have a fever and chills.” They are all one-day absences, he’s back the next day, so it’s not like he’s getting cancer treatments or something. It always sounds fake to me. But whatever, right? He gets sick days, so use them, right?

The thing is, I think he’s used more sick days since I’ve worked at this job than I’ve ever used in the 20 years I’ve been in the workforce. Am I a sucker? Is this what people do when they are super healthy and don’t use sick time for actual sicknesses? I don’t have any kids and likely never will, so I don’t save them up for their doctor’s appointments like my coworkers do. Half the reason I’ve been tracking is to see what the pattern is and what I can get away with. I’d like an extra 12 days off a year! (He takes one off every month, exactly the amount we are allocated.)

So I guess my question is twofold: (1) Should I just ignore the fact that I’m sure he saw the tracking? It’s not like it had his name on it or anything, but I think he can put two and two together. He saw it while looking over my shoulder at my computer and I brought up Excel and it was the last thing that was open so, yeah, there ya go. (2) After 14 months of him doing this, it doesn’t seem like an issue with my supervisors. As a matter of fact, he seems to get special treatment and extra projects, which I would also love. This job is so slow! I’ve specifically asked for more to do but they only give it to him (not the other two I work with, either).

I talk with my two other coworkers and we all kind of trash-talk about how much he calls in sick, so I’m not the only one who notices. I’m thinking about calling in sick once a month. If I get talked to, I was thinking of bringing up what I’ve witnessed the past 14 months, so I thought it was okay. Is this what other people do and I’m missing out?

So … it’s not a good idea to track your coworker’s sick time and you should stop doing that immediately.

It’s one thing to discreetly track something that impacts you directly, like the times you’ve had to cover for him or do his work in addition to your own, but in that case you’d be logging those specific impacts, not his attendance overall. And you’d only do that to give yourself data to eventually take to your manager, or maybe to verify for yourself that it’s happening as much as it feels like.

But just tracking a coworker’s sick days to see how much sick time he’s using will come across as a huge and inappropriate overstep if anyone finds out about it. It’s not your business, and it risks making you look to your manager as if you’re not clear on the boundaries of your role and aren’t respectful of your colleagues.

And the thing is, your conclusion that he’s lying might be wrong. He could have a chronic illness he’s dealing with, your manager could be in the loop, he could have formal medical accommodations in place — who knows. It sounds like you’re thinking that since he uses a different excuse every time, he’s clearly BSing, but not everyone wants to share the details of a medical condition with coworkers, and he could be using cover stories with you and your coworkers in order to protect his privacy. Which he’s allowed to do. And if he is struggling with something real, then glimpsing your tracking sheet was a really, really crappy experience for him.

If his absences affect your own work in some way, that’s something you can speak to your manager about. But otherwise, leave this alone.

To answer your questions:

I don’t think you should say anything to him about the sheet he saw. There’s nothing you can say here that would make him feel better. Resolve to do better in the future, and move on.

As for your own sick time … if you hardly ever take any, then yes, go ahead and be a bit more relaxed about your use of it. That doesn’t mean you should use each sick day as it accrues — both because of how you’ve seen that looks and because you need to have some saved up as a safety net in case you do need it at some point. But feel free to use it for medical appointments and an occasional mental health day (meaning like once or twice a year if you’re not taking a lot of sick time otherwise).

But seriously, get rid of the tracking sheet. And stop gossiping with your coworkers about his absence patterns. It’s unkind and it’s pretty toxic.

my coworker saw the Excel sheet I use to track his sick days was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Really, you should just have a roll of these printed, just in case.

Tonight's comic wants to know where you get your ideas.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you ever want to see some sheer brutality, watch an ecologist come across a nest of invasives.

Tonight's comic has some pretty profitable ideas for game shows.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I think I now have enough to do an entire compendium of damaging sex talks. Hooray?

TIRED: Comedy murder podcasts.

WIRED: Comedian murderer podcasts.

Yay

Movie studios archive thousands of movies in their warehouses. But celluloid, the medium onto which master copies are printed, isn't the most stable storage format; it's prone to decay and is highly flammable. Yet, switching to hard drives wouldn't be helpful, since they're so prone to failure. Microsoft's new glass-based storage medium could do the trick. As reported by Variety, Warner Bros. has saved the 1978 version of Superman onto one of Microsoft's Project Silica glass plates, which will supposedly last for centuries.

The goal of Project Silica, which began in 2016, is to create a solution ideal for cold storage -- data that needs to be stored but rarely accessed for long periods of time. Archived master copies of films are usually only taken out of storage for remastering projects. Between their infrequent use and the volatility of celluloid, old movies sitting in studio warehouses are a reasonable use case for Microsoft's glass storage.

Project Silica's glass square that contains Superman measures 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm and holds 75.6 GB of data. That may not sound so impressive given that a dual-layer Blu-ray holds 50 GB on 12 cm disc. But as Microsoft develops the technology, the company is creating discs with higher and higher capacities. Plus, the main benefit of this new medium is longevity and stability, not capacity. Research teams have put the square discs through their paces, ensuring the data is still readable even after baking them in ovens, dunking them in boiling water, heating them in microwaves and scratching them with steel wool.

Brad Collar, Senior Vice President of Global Archives & Media Engineering at Warner Bros. explained to Variety why the studio chose Superman to test Microsoft's technology. Years ago, Collar and his team found audio recordings of a Superman radio play stored on glass discs, but had to find the right playback devices in order to digitize the audio. So when he heard of Project Silica, which also uses glass, he thought of it as "a beautiful full circle."

Project Silica uses lasers similar to the ones used in Lasik eye surgery to burn shapes called voxels into glass. These voxels hold multiple bits of information, unlike the pits and lands on an optical disc, which only hold a zero or one. Additionally, the glass discs can hold many layers; CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays have a maximum of two layers, but Microsoft squeezed 74 layers into the disc that holds Superman. According to Variety, newer discs have even more layers. The data can be accessed by shining a light through the glass and analyzing the reflections with microscope-like readers. A bit-by-bit verification proved that the movie was perfectly written to the medium.

This collaboration between Microsoft and Warner Bros. is just a pilot test. The technology still needs to mature and engineers need to create a unified read/write device similar to today's optical disc burners. Plus, studios aren't about to toss out their millions of film canisters; the original analog versions are arguably a more ideal source material for creating new prints or remastered videos.

Source: Variety

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
We're going to keep giving you busywork until you achieve a state of pure transcendence as you move beyond Self.

Last day to buy the new book and have it count toward the first-week sales total. Thanks, geeks!

Tonight's comic is mad about how early it gets dark.