09:19 – It was 57F (14C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, sunny and with a slight breeze. Rain and thunderstorms are to move in this afternoon.
This is a slow time of year for kit sales. We can go a week or more without a single order, and then get a small flurry of orders over a day or two. Yesterday, for example, we shipped three kits and got orders for five more, including four to Canada. I just hope those don’t take a detour through Paris, France like the kit we shipped to Canada late last month.
We’ve been watching various stuff on Netflix and Amazon streaming, including Roman Empire: Reign of Blood and Father Brown on Netflix and The First World War on Amazon. All of those are reasonably well done, although the Roman one, set during the reign of Commodus, is rather odd. I suppose it would be classed as a docu-drama, with costumed actors playing the Romans, interspersed with short talking-head interviews with various Classics professors to explain what’s going on. I must say I’m a bit disappointed with those professors, all of whom apparently learned Church Latin rather than Classic Latin. It’s a bit jarring to hear them (mis)pronounce most Latin names: lew-sill-uh rather than luh-kill-uh, mar-see-uh rather than mar-kee-uh, and so on. Guys (and girl), the Romans ALWAYS pronounced the letter C hard, as in K. If they wanted a modern soft C, they used S. Same problem with the classic Roman I, which in short form was pronounced “ih” and in long form was pronounced “ee”. Almost without exception, a terminal “i” was pronounced “ee” and never “eye”. For the long eye sound, the Romans used “ae”. I wonder if anyone still teaches Classic Latin nowadays.
* * * * *
Subbed yesterday, subbing today, subbing tomorrow. Something to do and brings in a few bucks. Small school so it is not too bad, mostly boring.
It does strike me how far backwards the education has progressed. Stuff I learned as a freshman is now being taught to seniors. Basic math skills seem to be lacking, or rather the ability to estimate.
I also think it is a shame that they have eliminated most of the vocational education classes. The push to get everyone to go to college is nothing more than the colleges looking to suck more money from people. Some of these kids are very talented with the hands and the ability to make things. That should be encouraged for those students and endorsed. Sending them to college would be a waste of time and money. Nothing wrong with a career as a carpenter, electrician, plumber, heavy equipment operator, etc. A good, honest decent living that is well suited for many of these students.
What strikes me as strange is the dependence on phones. Good thing or bad? Several of the classes require the use of phones for research and one class actually needs access to a website for Spanish lessons. The world is basically at your fingertips when you have access to the web.
Phones are not allowed during tests. Strictly enforced. When I see a glimpse of a phone I take the phone and send it to the office. Parents must retrieve the phone. I have done this a couple of times this year and the kids know it. I give them a warning before class starts, “if I see a cell phone it is mine” and they now know it.
Generally the teacher leaves instructions if they know they are going to be out. It gets tougher when the teacher becomes ill and does not provide instructions. Then finding something to keep the students occupied is a problem.
Yesterday I was the health/PE teacher having done his class many times. I generally participate in their activities (basketball, volleyball or dodgeball). Not a bad class to sub for. Some of the other classes not so much. Today I have biology and tomorrow I have English/Drama.
I seriously don’t know how teachers do this day after day. Add in all the paperwork, state requirements, annoying kids, having to teach so the students can pass the state mandated tests, etc. takes a special kind of person. And I don’t fall into that category.
My wife and I are the favorite subs of the teachers. We can get here in 15 minutes and generally one of us can take the job. We have on occasion split the job when one of us has an appointment. One teacher will only use my wife, no one else. A couple of teachers will only use me for a sub. Today and tomorrow both of us are at the school.
Subbing is not a living wage, makes about a tenth of what I did working. But it is something to do, brings a little extra cash, and is a small way to return something to the school system. I wanted a part time job when I quit full time but that has a schedule. This does not. If I don’t want to work that day I don’t have to with no repercussions.
I had proper Latin pronunciation beaten into me by the Jesuits. O tempora, o mores!
@Ray Some of these kids are very talented with the hands and the ability to make things. That should be encouraged for those students and endorsed. Sending them to college would be a waste of time and money. Nothing wrong with a career as a carpenter, electrician, plumber, heavy equipment operator, etc. A good, honest decent living that is well suited for many of these students.
Of course many of the best carpenters, electricians etc. are college material. They just went to the trades probably because they preferred it. I’ve known many.
Of course many of the best carpenters, electricians etc. are college material.
Of that I have no doubt. I suspect some of the kids in this school that go on to college will wind up in the trade fields. It is just that several of the kids are not college material, some have no desire for college, yet are being forced by the school system/state/feds to apply for college, even if community college, so that the school, county and state will have high numbers in some arbitrary metric.
In addition the state has a lottery that funds tuition for college. The state wants as many people as possible to attend college for at least two years. Thus the state can justify the lottery and the schools have more students and thus funding from the state. The primary beneficiary is the community college, college, or university that benefits by getting more money from the state. The colleges have little interest in actually educating some of these people, they just want warm bodies.
College is not for everyone and the school system, which includes the county, state, and federal level need to realize such. Money would be better spent to send some of these kids to trade school. That scholarship money that the colleges receive for two years would pay for a complete technical school. But technical schools are not the darlings of the system.
I’ve always said that at most 5% of high school students should go to college, and even that is probably far too many.
Speaking of Latin, I attempted to post this a couple of days ago but couldn’t find a link that didn’t ultimately point back to the original WSJ article, which is behind a paywall: Black Men Speaking Latin.
Those of you with a WSJ digital subscription might enjoy the article, esp. our own Dave Hardy, who is a namefellow of the school’s CEO.
Yesterday I was the health/PE teacher having done his class many times.
Do you know what the first name of every history teacher in Texas is ? Coach.
“Camille Paglia: Trump Already Headed Towards Reelection, Democrats Have Overplayed Their Hand”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/04/19/camile_paglia_trump_already_headed_towards_reelection_democrats_have_overplayed_their_hand.html
Interesting. I am fairly sure that he will run for reelection, absent any health issues. He seems to be enjoying the White House and makes it look like he was born for the job.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/palin-i-had-a-great-night-at-the-white-house/article/2620757
Trump 2020 !
WSJ is a worthless neocon/prog publication anyway. May their paywall stop as many potential readers as possible.
The wife is now reporting my Father-in-law’s attempted mail forwarding and identity theft to our local County Sheriff. She has been monitoring his credit report daily for new additional credit cards and bogus charges. The Sheriff’s dispatcher is sending a deputy to our home to for her to file a report today. We did not get any mail for my FIL yesterday which has me worried. We did not know which Sheriff to report the identity theft to since my FIL is in another county, so she is starting here since the identity theft is from our house.
My dad advocated signing up my FIL for Lifelock. The $10/month charge is cheap for them renewing the various credit locks every 90 days. My wife is overwhelmed by this nonsense and needs any help that she can get. She talked to her dad yesterday about Lifelock and gave his blessing.
The problem is that there are so many things to do in the case of identity theft. And the forwarding of someone’s mail can be done over the internet which is so wrong ! You should have to show up at a post office and give your identity in order to forward somebody’s mail. Supposedly the Post Office has locked her father’s mail to our house but I have no idea how long this will be enforced.
ADDED: I think that she should not have told her father now. When she talked to him yesterday, he was worried that he did not have enough for the nursing home and wanted to quit the rehab to save money. She had to tell him again that he is fine financially and that he needs the rehab thrice a week to keep his strength up. I doubt that he will remember this as he reboots every five minutes or so now.
Biggest item you can accomplish is to put a freeze at all three credit reporting agencies. Your FIL has been a victim of identity theft and the agencies are required by law to allow the reporting accounts to be frozen. Also contact the any credit cards that are currently open and have the account blocked and new cards issued. The post office has already locked his address from any forwarding or address change requests. Check all bank accounts for any transactions that are not his and if any exist have the bank reverse the charges. For a checking account you will need the police report. Check with the Social Security office for any suspicious activity such as having the direct deposit changed. Do the same for an VA benefits.
It does not sound like any major damage has been done, yet. However, it is possible that some new card may show up in his credit report. It may take a couple of months so monitor those accounts weekly.
Lifelock does not find out about a problem except after the fact. They only know when an account has already been opened. Which is too late. You can do the monitoring yourself. What Lifelock will offer is financial assistance to resolve the issues which in itself may be worth the $10 a month. Sometimes peace of mind is worth a few bucks.
It might also be a good idea to monitor his physical mail. My aunt had some scam offers that she was prepared to sign up. We stopped that fairly quickly. But with the wife and I it was not difficult as we monitored he mail at the facility. It was never delivered directly to her but instead was held for my wife and I to deliver every couple of days.
Biggest item you can accomplish is to put a freeze at all three credit reporting agencies. Your FIL has been a victim of identity theft and the agencies are required by law to allow the reporting accounts to be frozen.
She did this on the day that she got the letter from the Post Office about forwarding his mail from our house to an unnamed location. But, the freeze on the credit agencies is only good for 90 days. They will not lock them longer than that without someone calling them every 90 days to renew the locks.
There were three new credit card accounts opened. None of them have been activated or charged yet.
The post office has already locked his address from any forwarding or address change requests.
She did this the day she got the forwarding letter. Four hours on the phone jumping from person to person ! And she wrote a letter to our mailman yesterday and left it for him. Our mailman has been servicing our neighborhood for over a decade and is very friendly.
Check all bank accounts for any transactions that are not his and if any exist have the bank reverse the charges. For a checking account you will need the police report. Check with the Social Security office for any suspicious activity such as having the direct deposit changed. Do the same for an VA benefits.
Sigh. More things to do. And we do not have police, we live (and work) out in the county and have the Sheriff.
Lifelock does not find out about a problem except after the fact. They only know when an account has already been opened. Which is too late. You can do the monitoring yourself. What Lifelock will offer is financial assistance to resolve the issues which in itself may be worth the $10 a month. Sometimes peace of mind is worth a few buck.
Supposedly Lifelock will put a 90 day credit lock on my FIL accounts ?
They will not lock them longer than that without someone calling them every 90 days to renew the locks.
Bullshit. I have a freeze on all my accounts and have for years at all the credit reporting agencies. It may not be called a freeze, but it blocks anyone from accessing my accounts for the purpose of opening a credit account. It caused me problems when I bought my truck as they could not pull my credit for the loan. I had to have the freeze (or whatever) temporarily removed.
http://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/preventing-fraud/security-freeze/texas
I see nothing about 90 days.
And we do not have police, we live (and work) out in the county and have the Sheriff.
Terminology. A report from any law enforcement agency is what is needed.
I believe I have brought this up before, LifeLock is worthless and their basic $10/month plan is even more worthless. Their alerts are at best days, usually weeks after an event has happened. Read the fine print, their “guarantee” is meaningless.
You can accomplish the same thing with daily checking into your accounts. All of your accounts should have a way to sign up for alerts of all activity. If they don’t you should cancel those accounts immediately.
I am for stoning in the public square of all scum that are caught stealing identities. People 50 and above need to realize that 99.9% of all snail mail, email, texts, and phone calls are only out to cheat you. You cannot even trust stuff from AARP or AAA.
My understanding is that a credit freeze with the three national credit bureaus remains intact until you request it to be unfrozen. In some states (Kentucky, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and South Dakota) there is a maximum of 7 years. Clark Howard, who has been a consumer advocate for many years, provides this information in the link below:
http://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/credit-freeze-and-thaw-guide/
You can accomplish the same thing with daily checking into your accounts.
I do that for all my accounts.
Credit card accounts send me a text message anytime a transaction is attempted (you know, the $1.00 charge) and when the transaction is completed. Thus when I buy gas I get two text messages. Helped one time as I got three text message about someone trying to buy something in Mexico using my card. Last place it had been used was Applebees and I suspect some scum stole the number.
Bank accounts are checked daily after the nightly postings.
People 50 and above need to realize that 99.9% of all snail mail, email, texts, and phone calls are only out to cheat you.
It goes further than that. When we cleaned out my aunt’s place we found thousands of dollars of Avon products. Turns out what the Avon lady was doing was visiting my aunt once a week and convincing her she needed all these products. There was even an air cleaner that was priced by Avon at $400.00. The agent had the balls (she was female) to ask for the air cleaner back because my aunt had not paid for the item. I contacted Avon HQ and explained what happened and that my aunt had been taken advantage. Avon HQ said keep the air cleaner, will send a check for a couple hundred dollars in compensation for unneeded stuff, and the rep was immediately terminated.
MIL got scammed by someone that called and said he was her grandson. Even knew some personal information about the grandson. She went to Walmart and wired $1200.00 to get him out of a Mexican jail. She was mortified when she found out. We also complained to the manager at Walmart that they should have strongly discouraged the transaction. Nothing became of that as Walmart only wants the commission.
Now that I have retired I get crap in the mail all the time. Who sells my information? The SS office? I also get phone calls daily, usually more than one, offering me something. Diapers, catheters, back braces, knee braces, etc. Hell they must think I am OFD.
Older folks sometimes need someone to look after their interests. Difficult for the older folks to realize and I understand why.
“I wonder if anyone still teaches Classic Latin nowadays.”
I learnt Latin for the first time at the Australian National University in Canberra in the late EIghties, they taught it correctly. That is where I learnt traditional grammar as well. I either wasn’t paying attention in the Sixties when I should have learnt it, or it wasn’t taught. At work I’d hear immigrant Vietnamese women discussing in detail grammar terminology I was just learning.
All hail Marcus Tullius Cicero!
“I’ve always said that at most 5% of high school students should go to college, and even that is probably far too many.”
That would have cut me out. I would have been bored rigid by an assembly line type job, and I’m too clumsy for a trade job. Thought of going in to teaching, but glad I dodged that bullet. Computer programming was a wonderful career, and I didn’t have to deal with people, kids, parents, etc. And the pay wasn’t bad.
You can accomplish the same thing with daily checking into your accounts. All of your accounts should have a way to sign up for alerts of all activity. If they don’t you should cancel those accounts immediately.
My FIL has seven accounts at four banks. The wife has checked them all and they are ok. And his SS payment funded yesterday.
I am for stoning in the public square of all scum that are caught stealing identities. People 50 and above need to realize that 99.9% of all snail mail, email, texts, and phone calls are only out to cheat you. You cannot even trust stuff from AARP or AAA.
We need to bring back the stocks. Nothing like an tomato or an apple in the face to get across people’s opinion of you. And if you expire in the stocks, oh well.
Of course, the Post Office won’t tell us where his mail was forwarded to. I guess that they are afraid that I will show up at the thief’s house with a shotgun.
It looks like the weak link in all this is the Post Office. When my wife forwarded his mail to us back in December, she went to the Post Office to make the change. They told her to go to the USPS website and make the change there. No verification, no nothing, just an online form to fill out.
Older folks sometimes need someone to look after their interests. Difficult for the older folks to realize and I understand why.
My FIL has been going downhill since my BIL was murdered 35 years ago. That really rocked his world. My MIL handled all the books until she passed away in 1995. After that he got by until about five years ago when we found out that he had not filed his income tax return in three years. The wife and I got his stuff organized and then his girlfriend took the folders over to her tax person. That worked until the girlfriend said that she had had it with all of his financial nightmares last year.
YUUUP, out here, particularly the LAUSD, it’s all statistical fraud.
1. They want to increase the HS graduation rate.
2. Firstly, they diminish the dropout rate by only suspending those committing the most atrocious and violent acts of misbehavior.
3. Consequently, in senior year of HS, there are even more non-qualified for graduation and fail tests needed to graduate.
4. These get sent to online classes of dubious value and at the completion of such, there are no pass/fail tests to demonstrate sufficiency for graduation.
Worse yet, with phony diplomas in hand, they cannot be denied entry to the community colleges. (Which is where the dropout stats go ↑↑↑.)
Outside of that, our tax dollars are at waste.
Then the anti tRumpeters complain about the appointment of Betsy DeVos because she has no experience in education. Which is evidence that she never screwed the system up through politically correct mistakenry!!!
” The wife and I got his stuff organized and then his girlfriend took the folders over to her tax person. That worked until the girlfriend said that she had had it with all of his financial nightmares last year.”
Hey, that almost hits home. My wife passed away Nov. 2015. Of course, my tax accountants were aware of that. So, when I brought them my papers this year, they asked me if I was interested in meeting single ladies (infer widows or spinsters). You won’t believe how difficult it was to be polite I was while declining the offer.
Now, do not think that I don’t like to dance with girls at honky-tonks with country bands. Ask Mr. Atoz when I’ve been in LV and have bought him some PBRs here:
https://snssaloon.com/
“…our own Dave Hardy, who is a namefellow of the school’s CEO.”
He’s David P. and I am David R. Good work being done there; makes the haht glad.
“WSJ is a worthless neocon/prog publication anyway. May their paywall stop as many potential readers as possible.”
True dat. Down the toilet, like the NYT-Boston Glob-WAPO Axis. Disciples of the very late Joseph Goebbels and the geniuses behind Pravda and Izvestia.
“…Diapers, catheters, back braces, knee braces, etc. Hell they must think I am OFD…”
So fah I don’t need any of that stuff. I’m losing weight and getting outdoors as often as I can. Also taking double doses of Aleve (I’m still a big boy) and that seems to help, too. Gonna put the bike together this weekend and also the wagon for toting heavy chit around here, like firewood. So long as it’s not raining cats and dawgs and the wind howling like yesterday. Still can’t see the pier.
Back from the vets group; our oldest ‘Nam vet’s (early days, with Army Airborne/special forces in Laos) wife died last Friday while having open heart surgery and he’s not doing very well; dealing with his own cancer and hearing loss but otherwise has been pretty spry.
People are dropping like flies; another one of our group also died a week ago, after struggling with cancer for years.
And weaponsman is gone, too; he had a great blog on all things war guns. Former Green Beret dead of a heart attack in his 50s.
J. Geils is gone at 71.
Like I told the other guys today; grab somebody you love/care about and tell them you love them while you and they still have the chance, as Mr. Nick also said recently. Ya never know when the Reaper knocks on the door.
The treadmill never stops. Just had a customer ask for support for dekatherm energy units in our software. Was a new dimensional unit for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatherm
Meanwhile, I am having to rewrite some of our Inline Fortran microcode for complex instruction support in the interpreter when called by our Case Study feature. I am definitely in over my head as this has been kicking my butt for two weeks now.
Hey, that almost hits home. My wife passed away Nov. 2015. Of course, my tax accountants were aware of that. So, when I brought them my papers this year, they asked me if I was interested in meeting single ladies (infer widows or spinsters). You won’t believe how difficult it was to be polite I was while declining the offer.
My FIL has buried two wives and has had a girlfriend for the last 15 ??? years. She refused to marry him as she “did not want to bury another old man”. Plus she gets a pension from American from her husband who was a Captain (he was a WWII B-17 pilot with 35 missions into Germany) that she loses if she gets remarried. But she visits my FIL every day in the nursing home XXXXXX XXXX rehab center. She is 92 and still works 20 hours a week at Dillards selling perfume.
Aww Shit, weapons man is on my daily read list.
Get your digital life in order too. Have at least someone who can log on and post the obit. Decide if you want it to stay up.
Nick
Good point; weaponsman’s brother at least got on the site and wrote up what had happened. Last I knew, he didn’t have the password or any other info.
I’ve just recently started writing up all my usernames and passwords for Mrs. OFD if I check out first. I need to also write up the exact procedures for logging into the credit card and utility billing sites. And show her where important files, pics and vids have been backed up. Trouble is, she’s not here that often, when she first gets back, she’s exhausted, and then she gets busy with the jewelry-making and related stuff or MIL and Princess demands. I gotta nab her at some point and go over all this.
Plus whatever will to be made out and medical directives. (If there’s a reasonable chance they can save my worthless ass w/o any heroics or time lost from golf games or taking selfies, go for it. Otherwise, shut me down and out.).
The school my daughter will attend next year uses classical Latin pronunciation. They have the kids start with Latin in 4th grade.
Agreed that very few need — or “need” — college. Miles_Teg’s point about programming is a bit off point. There’s no real reason to attend college, per se, to learn programming. Trade school, an apprenticeship, or learning on your own should cover what you need to know. There’s no need for a CS major to need to take the “rounding” classes, like history; if he’s interested he can learn on his own.
If you favor the death penalty for identity theft, have the honesty and courage to admit it up front rather than sneaking it in under “shaming”.
Public shaming punishments ought to come back, like the aforementioned stocks, a few floggings here and there. And we all know who should be subjected to that stuff, on the local scene and national levels.
My high skool and grad skool Latin was the classical, but in my head sometimes, because I go to Latin masses, it can get mixed up. I’m not too broken up about it, though, and also like to play around with other medieval languages when I have time and motivation. I’m just a harmless old eccentric guy, no threat to anyone.
Re; digital info and passing and passing it on.
That was the impetus for my creation of the http://www.NotHereAnymore.com site, mentioned here before.
Don’t think it’s something that is easily available elsewhere. But, publicity is the hard part.
Have neglected the site a bit as I work on the new Roberta Pournelle Reading Lessons site. I’m aiming for beta testing on May 1st. Some minor things to finish up, including the ‘running’ of the place.
Cowboy Slim wrote:
“Now, do not think that I don’t like to dance with girls at honky-tonks with country bands. Ask Mr. Atoz when I’ve been in LV and have bought him some PBRs here:
https://snssaloon.com/”
Professional Bull Riders?
If you favor the death penalty for identity theft, have the honesty and courage to admit it up front rather than sneaking it in under “shaming”.
Why can’t I have both ?
Re; digital info and passing and passing it on.
That was the impetus for my creation of the http://www.NotHereAnymore.com site, mentioned here before.
Don’t think it’s something that is easily available elsewhere. But, publicity is the hard part.
My dad is trying to get me onto LifeLinker. Looks to be similar. I’m not ready for that.
https://lifelinker.com/
Lynn wrote:
“Meanwhile, I am having to rewrite some of our Inline Fortran microcode…”
I think we use the term microcode in different ways. I thought it was below machine language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode
I never considered going to university until the end of Year 10. Then I decided I wanted to be a high school teacher (maths, physics, chemistry, history) and that required university or college. Then I switched to CS part way through. Getting a job in CS was almost impossible unless you were old and experienced or had a CS degree.
I knew a guy who went straight from high school into a MCSE and then went to work for Evil Doers in Suits. Dunno what he’s doing now but that was 20 years after I went through. Plus I liked being at uni.
“…if he’s interested he can learn on his own.”
Some people are good at that. I’m not. I had a boss who failed HS but was brilliant at working stuff out for himself, with or without the manual. He was a bit of an arsehole, to put it mildly.
“Meanwhile, I am having to rewrite some of our Inline Fortran microcode…”
I think we use the term microcode in different ways. I thought it was below machine language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode
Quite possibly. We have a Fortran compiler built into our software. It produces a stream of commands to be run through our builtin Fortran interpreter. One might also call these tokenizing and tokens. But, the process is more similar to microcode as the instructions are a horrible little internal numeric language to be executed in a continuous stream.
I don’t know why they used Fortran when Basic was quite popular at the time. And it is Fortran 66, not even Fortran 77 with the structured commands (if … then … else … endif). I have seen people write up to 10,000 statements in it with many subroutines and code libraries in it to calculate extremely specialized chemical processes.
My daughter took high school Latin a while back. They used classical pronunciation in oral communications. She placed at the top in state on oratory (doing one of Cicero’s speeches), and 2nd nationally in vocabulary for 1st year students.
The talking heads in the show OGH mentioned undoubtedly used church pronunciation since that is what the general public knows. IIRC, a show I saw on the late Republic had a quick note at the beginning that they were using popular naming (e.g. Marc Antony) and pronunciation to promote understanding. Which I concur with.
I’d sooner the dialog had been in Classical Latin with English subtitles.
I use popular pronunciation in English but correct pronunciation in Latin. No one would know what I was talking about if I pronounced Cicero (may peace and blessings be upon him) correctly.
“I’d sooner the dialog had been in Classical Latin with English subtitles.”
Amen bro. Our host wins the Internet for the day.
I remember a discussion in Mrs. Shreffler’s class in 8th or 9th grade as to whether Cicero was properly pronounced Keek-ur-oh or Kick-ur-oh. Apparently, there’s no way to know for sure.
Besides Cicero, the Romans boasted a number of other interesting writers. I, of course, liked/like the poets, esp. Horace and his satires, and Catullus. When I was much younger I also enjoyed reading Tacitus and Procopius.
But in the wunnerful world of academic medieval studies, it was Boethius and Dante.
IIRC, it was Horace who came up with the City Mouse versus the Country Mouse, too.
A further note: OFD is glad that he studied Latin instead of Fortran or COBOL or C# or .NET.
Meanwhile, I am having to rewrite some of our Inline Fortran microcode for complex instruction support in the interpreter when called by our Case Study feature. I am definitely in over my head as this has been kicking my butt for two weeks now.
Whatever happened to the LLVM Fortran compiler that Nvidia was working on with one of the government labs. They promised to open source it IIRC.
I don’t know why they used Fortran when Basic was quite popular at the time.
Microsoft royalty payments?
My classical Latin was never particularly good, but it was good enough to get me into a heated discussion or two with fellow Biologists.
I don’t know why they used Fortran when Basic was quite popular at the time.
Microsoft royalty payments?
The Basic language was not invented by Microsoft. They just built a compiler and interpreter for the Altair 8800.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC
For a given value of “for sure”. A fair amount can be reverse engineered from poetry and formulaic prose. Same with changes in pronunciation of English from before audio recordings — you can tell that waite was pronounced like “white” rather than like “wait”. (At least in the regional dialect of that author in that decade.)
Ah, Fortran, straight-forward top down programming. I miss that in this OOP era.
I was using gFortran earlier in the year to debug an early 70’s routine. Free and all that – really a front end to g++.
It seems that Hollerith comments and assigned goto’s are not supported any more…. on the other hand it supports “tape units” past 99, which turned out to be the actual issue.
Meanwhile, I am having to rewrite some of our Inline Fortran microcode for complex instruction support in the interpreter when called by our Case Study feature. I am definitely in over my head as this has been kicking my butt for two weeks now.
Aren’t all the kewl kidz using Python nowadays? 🙂
All hail Titus Maccius Plautus!
I loved Bacchides and Aulularia, and Cicero’s court speeches In Verrem and In Catilinam.
I’m afraid I’m not much of a fan of poetry.
OFD wrote:
“A further note: OFD is glad that he studied Latin instead of Fortran or COBOL or C# or .NET.”
That’s called the fallacy of the excluded middle. You can study both the language of heaven and one of the (computer) languages of heaven (Fortran.) For your sins you probably don’t deserve to learn Pascal and COMPASS.
You’re way behind the times. All the cool kids are using Go or Lua or Haskall. Muh functional programming, man! And they don’t use Oracle or any other relational database. Even MongoDB and other nosql databases aren’t cool any more. What you want is a graph database. And if anyone points out that an graph database is nothing more than a gussied-up hierarchical or node database from the 1960s, scream invective. Because you’re one of the cool kids and nothing older than last year is worth knowing.
It seems that Hollerith comments and assigned goto’s are not supported any more…. on the other hand it supports “tape units” past 99, which turned out to be the actual issue.
Ugh, tape drives. I don’t miss those at all. I once made a 9-track tape for the company president to take to the UK. I jumped on Southwest at Hobby, flew up to Dallas, took a cab to the processing center, grabbed the tape, took same cab back to Love Field, jumped on next Southwest plane (it had pushed back but they let me jump across the three foot from the jetway to the plane), and back to Hobby Field. No security in those days and the tickets were $15 each. And the stewardesses wore hot pants which were appreciated by this 16 year old.
The pres jumped on a 747 in the morning to Heathrow (before Gatwick), took the tube to the customers business, and presented the tape to them for loading the latest version of our software on their mainframe. The tape was blank. We never did figure out what happened but I think the sys/op screwed us. The head programmer made a new tape using my JCL, did the Dallas jump and back, and jumped on the 747 to Heathrow in the morning. That tape worked.
BTW, if you are on Windows, you can use the Open Watcom F77, C, and C++ compiler / linker / debugger. Hollerith and assigned goto’s are supported.
http://www.openwatcom.org/
SteveF wrote:
“A fair amount can be reverse engineered from poetry and formulaic prose.”
When some Roman guy was leaving on campaign there was a fruit vendor dockside selling figs: “Figs! Figs!” When he didn’t return Cicero remarked that the deceased should have heeded the warning of the fruit seller, whose call could have been interpreted as “Beware lest you go.” This has helped with some obscure Latin pronunciations.
I’ve forgotten the details, “getting old is hell” ™.
You’re way behind the times. All the cool kids are using Go or Lua or Haskall.
My son thinks that we should convert our user interface and calculation engine to Go. He is very impressed with the builtin multi-processing. Me, I am scared of anything that is not C++.
https://golang.org/
And if anyone points out that an graph database is nothing more than a gussied-up hierarchical or node database from the 1960s, scream invective. Because you’re one of the cool kids and nothing older than last year is worth knowing.
Hierarchical databases are fast ! And unmaintainable.
“Even MongoDB and other nosql databases aren’t cool any more.”
Does that mean I should give up on Adabas/Natural?
“And the stewardesses wore hot pants which were appreciated by this 16 year old.”
Miniskirts RULE!
“My son thinks that we should convert our user interface and calculation engine…”
NEVER convert anything.
What is this latest crap on Amazon where they wont let you buy stuff that is “Exclusively for Prime Members. This item at $49.00 is reserved for Prime members.” ? Reminds me of buying Safeway Green Beans in cans at Safeway. Once you got past the stems and whatnot, it still sucked. And so does “Exclusively for Prime”.
Select the White shirt in the 2XT size if you want to see the message.
https://www.amazon.com/Columbia-Bonehead-Sleeve-Mountain-X-Large/dp/B0013BNSW2/
You’re way behind the times. All the cool kids are using Go or Lua or Haskall.
AAMOF, I actually use Lua to automate my backups, and am in the process of dusting off my Haskell skills in reaction to attempting to learn C++ which, when compared to Haskell, is, shall we say, more than a little baroque?
I probably should’ve included a <snark> tag when I mentioned Python earlier.
Yes, that’s part of what I remember about them. Though I was just starting my career as they were being phased out in favor of the newest cool thing, relational DBs.
Not that I recall. IIRC, so long as you used some discipline in updating the downstream records to make sure they matched what was in the upstream, it worked fine. This was essentially putting the effort of maintaining foreign key constraints on every program, which was why relational database engines took over.
Inherent parallelization (ie, multithreading) is great … for the 1% of problems which can benefit from it. Computation engine, probably yes, though you’ll likely have to rewrite everything from the ground up to make use of parallelization. User interface, not so much, not unless you have the UI doing a lot of work.
Nah. Write as you did, then when anyone takes you literally and seriously, call them fascists.
My son thinks that we should convert our user interface and calculation engine to Go. He is very impressed with the builtin multi-processing. Me, I am scared of anything that is not C++.
C++11 has support for threads among other improvements.
And Microsoft has excellent compiler tech.
What reasons are there to not use Go (programming language)?
Me, I am scared of anything that is not C++.
Your best bet is to stick with what you know, although you might benefit from interfacing to a third-party Fortran compiler rather than your home-grown interpreter.
Like I told the other guys today; grab somebody you love/care about and tell them you love them while you and they still have the chance, as Mr. Nick also said recently. Ya never know when the Reaper knocks on the door.
Learned late this afternoon that one of my former coworkers, a woman now in her mid-fifties and one of the sanest and kindest people I’ve ever met, has begun acting paranoid both at home and at work. Conjectures as to why include both a brain tumor, which is at least treatable, and also early-onset Alzheimer’s. Fortunately her current (and my former) employer is a large hospital, so there’s no shortage of treatment options.
My best wishes and prayers for her, as my dad got early-onset Alzheimer’s in his late 50s and was gone by 71. Not much fun in between. I sure hope there is better treatment now since he left us in 1998.
I’d consider contacting her and saying whatever you feel is appropriate; if people recognize what is happening to them and know that others care about them, in their moments of lucidity, it means a lot and probably more than we know.
“Write as you did, then when anyone takes you literally and seriously, call them fascists.”
Good to see you’re keeping up. Yes, it’s the insult du jour now. Instead of rayciss, even. Not replacing “rayciss,” but moving fast beyond it. Like the good old days of the 1930s, as it maybe escalates this summer. I figure if they can call us fascists, we ought to start calling them commies. That’s sure as fuck what they are.
We should remember, however, that if it does escalate to 1930s German city levels, there will be heavier and more frequent violence, often lethal. No idea how that will turn out; Normals and “facists” have by far the superior firepower, but if cops stood down in Berkeley, how would they then react?
[snip] And Microsoft has excellent compiler tech. [snip]
That’s nice to know, should I ever get around to re-learning everything I’ve lost. Back when I took C in college, Microsoft’s C compiler was absolutely the worst. QuickC was completely unusable, the regular C only slightly better. I bought a copy of TurboC and away I went, except for the professor deducting points because my variable names were too long. Silly me, I thought readloop made perfect sense, instead of just r.
You know, I’ve been developing software for over 40 years now. Even in the bad old days when variables and subroutine names were limited to 6 characters. I have never chided anyone for making their variable names long enough to set the context as to what is going on. And, my programmers occasionally get together and taunt me for variable names over 30 characters.
Btw, I learned C with the first version of Turbo C in 1986 ??? It was buggy, nothing like the ultra polished Turbo Pascal. If I remember correctly, the first Turbo C had a patch floating around the bulletin boards within two weeks after the release to fix an inversion problem with dividing two floating point constants.
Huh, I tried the C++11 threads last year. I’ll pass. You really need to understand threading before using that feature.
On our internal fortran compiler and interpreter, we will stay with it. It gives us platform flexibility as we have used it from mainframes to Vaxes to Unix boxes to PCs. Plus we allow users to add fortran code to their calculations all over the place and they love it. Even if we are USA dimensional units specific, psia, R, lbmol, etc.
Btw, in our software, we have a lot of single variable names. V usually means vapor. X usually means liquid (L is an integer). H means enthalpy. S means entropy. T means temperature in R. P means pressure in psia.
Except when they do not.
“You know, I’ve been developing software for over 40 years now.”
Excellent!
I’ve been developing a bad attitude for even longer than that, probably 60 years now.
Pax vobiscum, fratres et sorores; semper paratus; tempus fugit irreparabile
Lynn wrote:
” X usually means liquid (L is an integer)”
Not if you declare it as Real or Double or whatever.
You *do* declare your variables, don’t you?
I’ve been developing a bad attitude for even longer than that, probably 60 years now.
I wish my code had been as successful as you have been in developing your attitude. I could have coded Windows in 287.35 lines of code. But in my defense I only coded 42 for years. My coding career could have been longer but five years was spent in management, a position in which I sucked and disliked.
You *do* declare your variables, don’t you?
Wimp.
I worked my last 16 years doing applications in ColdFusion. A strange bird that works extremely well with web pages as it integrates with HTML quite nicely. However, you never declared a variable, you just assigned something to the variable. The CF engine determined the data type by the variable’s content.
[cfset V1=”01.00″]
[cfset V2=1]
[cfif V1 EQ V2]
“stuff is equal”
[cfelse]
“stuff is not equal”
[/cfif]
would actually output “stuff is equal”. Once you understood the concept it was actually OK.
Note: Square brackets are actually angle brackets.
Huh, I tried the C++11 threads last year. I’ll pass. You really need to understand threading before using that feature.
The C++ features I like are closures and smart pointers. Out of habit, I still use the C PThreads API if I’m going to do multiprocessing. Back when I developed on Windows and Linux simultaneously, I developed a library that wrapped PThreads in the Microsoft threading API.
The most interesting multi-processing tech I’ve seen lately is Grand Central Dispatch on Apple platforms. I think the company is playing a long game with their C/C++/Objective C runtimes which will start to accelerate this Summer once they obsolete all of their hardware which does not support 64 bit integers.
After having a friend file bankruptcy as the way to deal with having his identity stolen, I signed up for Zander Insurance’s Identity Theft Protection. They claim that they will work to fix things if your identity is stolen.
I understand how that goes. Was fine with getting my mother moved into assisted living until she found out that she would be spending $1K per month more than her income. She didn’t grasp that assisted living meant keeping her out of a nursing home. The nursing home was much less desirable, and much more expensive. She couldn’t understand that at $1K per month she would make the Guinness Book of World Records as the worlds oldest woman before she ran out of money. Especially since the VA would have provided an extra $1100 per month if her assets dropped below $80,000.
Especially since the VA would have provided an extra $1100 per month if her assets dropped below $80,000.
When my aunt went into assisted living I had hidden most of her assets as they were no longer in her name. The VA did not have a look back like Medicaid so I was able to get her the money from the VA. In 6.5 years she went through $300K of her money. Even though it was hidden, I spent the money for her benefit. The plan was to hide the money from the government as that time they had a three year lookback. But as long as she had the money, which was still hers as far as I was concerned, the money was spent for her care.
Eventually the money ran out and I was forced to put her on Medicaid and that requires a nursing home. When she went on Medicaid the VA money dropped to $90 a month. The state said they were entitled to that money along with SS and retirement. I said no, the VA money was not allowed to be taken by the state. I had to get the VA to write a letter stating such to the state.
While on Medicaid she was allowed to keep $50 a month from her retirement and the VA money. I had to pay the rest to the nursing home with the state making up the difference. That lasted for 4.5 years before she died.
The money from the VA while she was in assisted living extended that time by a year. She was better in assisted living where they attempted to get her moving. In the nursing home it was nothing more than clean yesterday’s food off her bottom, shove today’s in her mouth, and keep her planted in a wheelchair.
They will not lock them longer than that without someone calling them every 90 days to renew the locks.
Bulls***. I have a freeze on all my accounts and have for years at all the credit reporting agencies. It may not be called a freeze, but it blocks anyone from accessing my accounts for the purpose of opening a credit account. It caused me problems when I bought my truck as they could not pull my credit for the loan. I had to have the freeze (or whatever) temporarily removed.
http://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/preventing-fraud/security-freeze/texas
I see nothing about 90 days.
Thanks for the link ! The wife and I talked about this last night. She has about 40 hours in this since last Friday when the letter from the Post Office and the first credit cards showed up. She is totally overwhelmed at this point.
Basically, Experian has a fraud alert that they will do for free. The fraud alert expires in 90 days. They forward the fraud alert to the other credit agencies. This is her understanding after spending countless hours on the phone with them.
Experian also has a credit freeze that the link above explains. They charge for this. My wife is torqued that she has to pay for it since my FIL has yet to experience an actual loss. But, she probably will. She is also hampered by the fact that she is a dutiful daughter and talks EVERYTHING over with her father over the phone. It takes forever to explain things to him and every day is a new day to him unless it happened thirty years ago. I have told her that she should drop him out the loop but she is not willing to do that. Yet.
The sheriff’s deputy said that they are the proper place to file the report. The terminology that he used is “mail fraud”. The location of the crime is our home since that is where the mail was attempted to be forwarded from. The deputy said a detective will probably get in touch with her soon. I’ve got a bad feeling that they are overwhelmed also.
They charge for this.
Not with a report from law enforcement indicating fraud and attempt to steal the personal information. Stand your ground, refuse to pay, and if they balk indicate that you will be filing a complaint with the attorney general in their home state. The fee will quickly drop to zero. By law they cannot charge if you are the victim of identity theft.
I have told her that she should drop him out the loop but she is not willing to do that.
Just do it. We discussed nothing with my aunt, even using deception to put her in an assisted living facility, a relocation of about 2,000 miles. The spousal unit needs to understand that what she is doing is best for her father and be done with it. Your wife is not the kind of person to do otherwise. Including her father only upsets him and makes the tasks more difficult.
Lynn wrote:
” X usually means liquid (L is an integer)”
Not if you declare it as Real or Double or whatever.
You *do* declare your variables, don’t you?
Real Fortran programmers never declare their scalar variables. They just use the Fortran implicit rules that variables starting with an I through N are integers. Everything else is a real (float).
And the above philosophy gives you some interesting errors when you use FO one place and F0 another place (an O the first time and a zero the second time). Automatic declaration gives you two variables instead of one variable and it is a bear to find the resulting bug.
I finally had it with these types of errors in 2001 ??? and hired a contractor to convert all of our Fortran code to “implicit none”. I also had to convince the senior programmer that it was time (that took a few years). At the same time, we converted all of our code from single precision to double precision using a C program that I wrote. It was basically a hike around the world since we so casually used data types since reals and integers were the same size in bits.
pcb_duffer:
lynn:
Those who can, do…
Lynn – Watcom is still around? I’ll take a look.
Mostly I’ve been using Objective-C for app programming lately. About 1% brilliant, 2% abysmally stupid, the rest….meh.
But I don’t see evidence of a grand plan on Apples part, I see a rather capricious addition and deletion of features to iOS, and more annoyingly, a neglect of and/or a total disdain for the independent developers time and resources.
I am trying to come up to speed on C++, I was doing some work with FreeCAD and it’s C++ and Python based.
That’s been Apple’s SOP for 30 years or more. Collect annual “super special developers’ club” fees, charge the independents for tests to certify their apps (or applications or drivers), violate their own guidelines arbitrarily, change the guidelines and the APIs arbitrarily, decertify apps arbitrarily, and impose gags on anyone with a “relationship” with Apple preventing revelation of Apple’s super-secret secrets or even badmouthing Apple.
I’ve had a couple developer acquaintances who’d deeply quaffed of the Apple kool-aid, who shifted over to the “fuck Apple” camp after being shafted by Apple.
I like Apple, sniff. Can it be any worse than M$? Seems to be plenty of top quality macOS apps plus millions of iOS apps. Tim Cook is a dick, though. So was Jobs. In fact I hate Apple, but not really. lol!
Lynn – Watcom is still around? I’ll take a look.
Kinda. It was passed around and beaten up for a while by various owners and then open sourced. It is two million lines of horribly documented code. I have fixed 4 or 5 bugs in the fortran runtime library (written in C) with help from others.
I am trying to come up to speed on C++, I was doing some work with FreeCAD and it’s C++ and Python based.
I’ve been programming in C++ for about 20 years now. I plan on learning it some day as it has become my go to language.
WRT Apple and its products; so long as our iPhones work OK and my apps work OK and the updates don’t screw anything, I’m OK with them. iTunes and the password hoop-jumping sucks and many other things about them suck, however, including the management and the decisions they make.
I hate M$ worse, though. Except Server-level stuff is OK.
And certain Linux fanboy types piss me off.
Gimme back OpenVMS and port it to x86. Coming by the end of this year or early next, so I’m told.
All hail Ken Olsen, Gordon Bell and Dave Cutler!
And the guys porting it currently, down in Maffachufetts.
I suppose Apples not *worse* than MS or Google, just…different. The three big players in OS land are all awful in their own ways.
The self importance gets to me – getting an invite to enter a lottery to get a chance pay $1600 of my *own money* to go to WWDC, for example.
Right now my MS developer account is messed up. Can’t log in. No such person, though they continue to email me at my user name. No ongoing projects there so I don’t care.
My old C++ books dated from around 1990, 2000, 2007 respectively. A bit dated. I tend to be a jack of all trades and master of none, picking things up as needed.
I remember Fortrans ‘implicit none’, and hand rolling pseudo allocate able arrays from one big array for Real and Integer as needed. Good times.
My brother, the professional programmer thought it hysterical. But as a result things scoped globally don’t instill the fear in me that the professionals seem to experience.
OFD don’t code. (other than shell scripting crap that 2nd-graders do routinely now).
But I will point out that a lot of “professions” have their own “codes” anyway, like being in the academic English teaching thing at the college and grad skool levels. One of the profs I knew had been a jarhead infantry captain in ‘Nam and told me I gotta get to know the “code.” Which by that time was transitioning from one form of literary criticism to others derived from Continental Marxism. We also had a laugh together about the university’s loudly trumpeted affirmative action and diversity objectives and how they never included veterans.
Code is language, and the trades have theirs and so do the “professions.”
Your Fortran was my New Criticism or my New Historicism, etc., etc.
Mrs. OFD just called from Magdalena, NM, and will be hiking a nearby canyon tomorrow with her AirBnB hostess and their German shepherd, looking for minerals and crystals for her jewelery stuff, which means she’ll be bringing back yet another bag of rocks at the airport. Then Sunday another trip out to the Large-Array Telescope thing and some landscape painting up in the mountains. (yeah, wifey gets around and does interesting chit; I sit here and do diddly).
Says her class full of cops and correctional officers and ex-mil-spec were great, all family people, and mostly Roman Catholics; they gave her a nice rosary for her birthday. They all want me to come out, being ex-cop, ex-mil-spec and RC myself. I might just do that, get away from the usual old mean-ass vets around here, for a change.
My first Planning Commission meeting as a member of same is coming up Tuesday night but they don’t have a name plate for me yet; asked me if I prefer “Dave” or “David” and I said it’s “David” when wifey is mad at me, so make it “Dave.” (and not to be confused with the thirty or forty other “Dave’s” on this board.)
Mrs. OFD will be back next Friday night and then has two gigs in May and one in early June so fah.
I guess I’ll be point man out in the local community’s meatspace.
Hey, that’s my name!