The misanthrope in me has almost completely taken over when dealing with incoming sales calls, and I've almost completely abandoned the idea that anyone calling me to sell anything is worthy of the "humanity" label.
The moment it's clear they are selling something (it's usually pretty quick) the reply is "fuck off, never call this number again, and go fuck yourself" then I hang up and block the number. I only wish I could be vengeful in response and actually retaliate in some meaningful way to those that are particularly annoying or persistent.
The same applies to door-to-door sales people, moreso to door-to-door missionaries.
Also came here to say the same thing. IIRC, it was also free-form data, so it was NoSQL before it was cool.
begins trailing off... I wonder if I still have any old PalmOS app code laying around on an old hard drive somewhere. Would be fun to have a look at that. I think that was the last time I did C++.
Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV-AFnCkRLY) was inspiration for a series of scripts I now use for clients and my own entertainment purposes (for some loose definition of "entertainment").
It's a series of shell scripts I use that screencap videos of coding and set them to music (so, for example, rendering a 48-hour coding competition to a 5-minute song, or as I more typically do for clients, render the development process down to a few minutes for them to watch in fast-time how their development was done).
The moment it's clear they are selling something (it's usually pretty quick) the reply is "fuck off, never call this number again, and go fuck yourself" then I hang up and block the number. I only wish I could be vengeful in response and actually retaliate in some meaningful way to those that are particularly annoying or persistent.
The same applies to door-to-door sales people, moreso to door-to-door missionaries.