08:57 – It was 61.1F (16C) when I took Colin out at 0630, clear and calm. The little dog was nowhere to be seen, although Colin did a lot of sniffing and peeing.
We got a bunch of kit subassemblies built yesterday. Barbara is volunteering from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, so I’ll probably just make up more chemicals while she’s gone. She had a big pile of mulch delivered yesterday. The truck dumped it where she specified, in the driveway. I’m guessing she’ll spend some time this afternoon getting it moved where she wants it.
Grace’s aunt and uncle close on Bonnie’s former house today, so my guess is Grace will probably start moving in later today or over the weekend. I’m sure Barbara and I will drop by at some point to help her with the move. I’m sure we’ll exchange phone numbers and probably house keys, as neighbors do.
I ran out of coffee this morning, so I needed to open a new can. In the past, Barbara had bought Costco Kirkland house-brand coffee in 2.5-pound (1.14-kilo) retort bags, which are about as good as cans for LTS. Lately, she’s been buying it in 3-pound #10 cans, which is what I opened this morning.
I’d pulled out a can opener, but as it turned out that wasn’t needed. When I popped the plastic lid off the can, I saw that it was sealed with aluminum foil with a pull tab. Easier to deal with, and as good as a standard metal can as far as LTS storage goes.
Until I was in my mid-20’s, I drank Pepsi by preference. Then, for some reason, I started drinking Coke, which I’ve been drinking for about 40 years now. But I find annoying the pricing games soft-drink companies and supermarkets play with their fizzy flavored water, so I decided to opt out of their games. A couple of months ago, the best price locally on 2-liter Cokes was something like $1.50 each, while 2-liter Pepsi was on sale for $0.89. Screw Coke. I told Barbara to pick me up whichever was on sale for $0.89 or $0.99 per bottle, and that’s what she’s been doing ever since. Either type of bottle is fine for LTS food repackaging.
But I learn something new every day. I’d assumed that Coke and Pepsi bottles were pretty much identical until I was repackaging cornmeal the other day. I put all but one bottle’s worth of the cornmeal in Pepsi bottles, but had to use a Coke bottle for the final 3.5 pounds. They were sitting on the dining room table, near my desk, awaiting oxygen absorbers when I happened to notice that the Coke bottle was noticeably taller than the Pepsi bottles, by maybe 1.25″.
No big deal, obviously, unless you happen to have built LTS shelves with spacing intended to fit Pepsi bottles and then find that you need to shelve a bunch of Coke bottles.
09:29 – And I see that Google has completely jumped the shark with YouTube and joined the dark side.
YouTube Takes Controversial Steps To Censor Non-Leftists
FTA:
Stating that the content is “controversial,” not the censorship itself, YouTube has taken the first few steps to censor dissenting views. But it gets worse. YouTube will also begin to censor your searches and fill the results with propaganda while on its website.
Last night, YouTube took to its “Official Blog” to more or less announce that they would be taking steps to censor content they determined to be “controversial,” even if that content didn’t break any laws or violate the site’s user agreement. The message made a pledge to be part of an effort to “fight terror content online.” But the move was rightly met with widespread skepticism among YouTuber’s as nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to censor conservative speech.
It’s not just “controversial” content creators that will be impacted as anyone who merely searches for keywords that YouTube deems ‘questionable’, for whatever reason, will be promptly redirected to propaganda videos intended to “directly confront and debunk” whatever questionable content that user was looking for. Meaning, you’ll be bombarded with the right kind of propaganda approved by YouTube designed to get you thinking the way YouTube insists upon.
So, in addition to “demonetizing” such content and removing it from search results, YouTube will actively redirect searches for such material to propaganda videos designed to reeducate us Deplorables.
Fuck Google and YouTube.
Are the caps interchangeable? I never paid much attention to the 2L bottles and caps I’ve scrounged. Never noticed any problem with putting a random cap on a random bottle, but that may have been happenstance, sole-sourced bottles, or obliviousness.
Are the caps interchangeable?
Yes. They all use fairly standard bottling equipment. I have put caps from all manner of soft drinks on other brands without an issue that I can tell. But I also did not invert the bottles or store them for months. I just know the carbonation did not dissipate over the course of a few days.
I haven’t checked, but for various reasons the necks should be standard as should the caps.
No big deal, obviously, unless you happen to have built LTS shelves with spacing intended to fit Pepsi bottles and then find that you need to shelve a bunch of Coke bottles.
It may vary from bottler to bottler. IIRC, Coke bottlers are more independent than Pepsi’s, either franchises or a separate corporate entity from the parent, and, from what I saw moving cross country twice, the packaging designs are less uniform.
I didn’t see any 3 L Coke products in the Northwest, but the attitudes on the West Coast about soda are beyond bizarre (at least they seemed that way to this redneck). WA State’s new “distracted driving” law goes way beyond cell phones and allows the police to pull you over if they have concerns about your Big Gulp being too much of a distraction.
The Nanny State rolls on.
About 20 years ago Schenectady, NY, police dept put out a “ruling” that they can pull you over if they see anything in your hand — it’s probable cause to pull you over and see if you’ve been using a cell phone and incidentally check for anything else to write a ticket on.
It’s sheer coincidence that Schenectady was having serious budget problems. It would be offensive to suggest that they were attempting to fill the gap by writing lots of traffic tickets for non-residents using the interstate that passed through the city. (Even though that’s exactly what happened. During the morning and evening rush hours, it was common to find 2/3 of the on-duty patrol cars on that three-mile stretch of road.)
It was 66f and thunder storms at 7AM in Memphis. We are looking forward to a weekend in the mid 80’s. Will take the grandkids to a drive-through Safari Park on Saturday. Never been to one, hope they enjoy it. As I get older I find I get most of my enjoyment from providing enjoyment and opportunities to the kids. I do very little for myself.
Still no relief in sight from the 100+ degreeF heat and heavy smoke. The Air Quality Alert has been extended to next Wednesday, at least. My Wife’s asthma is real bad right now. She is at maximum dosage on her rescue inhalers. Our tight house is not tight enough, sad.
Weather is just like politics, we can’t do a thing about it; more correctly we don’t seem to want to do anything about politics.
Rush Limbaugh had a real good and educational segment on the Statue of Liberty yesterday. Please consider reading it.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/08/03/the-true-history-of-the-statue-of-liberty/
And for those looking for a Frankenstein style light switch, an entrepreneur with a 3D printer has what need:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/232121725/frankenstein-style-light-switch-plate
It’s sheer coincidence that Schenectady was having serious budget problems. It would be offensive to suggest that they were attempting to fill the gap by writing lots of traffic tickets for non-residents using the interstate that passed through the city.
In WA State, local option sales taxes are huge revenue generators, and the new trend is soda taxes on top of the sales tax. Like I stated earlier, they already have strange attitudes towards soda so local police staging “pop traps” with the full support of the citizenry is not hard to imagine.
By the way, Schenectady’s budget problems were caused in large part by the out-of-control police department. When a city of about 60,000, of whom nearly a third are on public assistance of one form or another, has multiple six- and seven-figure judgements or settlements every year for police brutality and other police abuses, and the city has to self-insure because they can’t get insurance any longer, that tends to turn the bottom line red.
Wow, what a load of bad nooz this morning, between the nanny state stuff, the taxes, and the recent Big Brother directive at Google/YouTube. I had started to divest myself of gmail and Google anyway and will now go ahead and wrap it up accordingly. I’ll take one last pass around the Toob and download a selected group of useful videos and call it a day. I already have a bunch.
I doubt Mrs. OFD will follow suit and she won’t care about that stuff anyway and is apparently also gonna stay on FaceBerg. All I can do is secure the machines and home net here as best as I can and stop using all that junk myself (I got off FB quite a while ago).
Best wishes and hopes that the situation out there for Mr. DadCooks and family improves dramatically ASAP.
I had started to divest myself of gmail and Google anyway and will now go ahead and wrap it up accordingly. I’ll take one last pass around the Toob and download a selected group of useful videos and call it a day. I already have a bunch.
If you want to run Google-free Android, the Moto G4 Play has LineageOS support currently, but I’m waiting for the support to show up on the Moto E4 since the G4 hardware is a bit dated.
Pure LineageOS with IceCat and K9-mail from FDroid work pretty well as a mobile data solution on my first gen Moto E. However, as I’ve stated before, I accept the privacy problems with an iPhone 5 to use it as my daily carry phone.
I have to carry an iPhone for work but use an old Blackberry as my personal phone. As an IT security guy, I have been through too many seminars that show how freking easy it is to break into a smart phone and hijack it to do almost anything.
Thanks @OFD. We may be at the mercy of the weather but we do what we can and we are survivors.
Here is an idea for growing your own protein, crickets:
http://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/lifestyle/farm-to-fork/how-to-raise-edible-crickets/
WRT the libturdation of WA State:
It is only a matter of a couple more years and the State is lost. Really only our little area in the Tri-Cities (SE WA) show any signs of Constitutionalism/Capitalism/Conservatism. But that is not for long as the californicators come up here with their pockets full of cash and proceed to recreate the libturd cesspool they left.
Recently the Richland City Council ignored 3 no votes of the residents and levied an additional sales tax to pay for a bridge and a road.
Pasco is about to pull the same stunt to build a water-slide and aqua-center.
And not be be outdone Kennewick is going to do the same for an overpass that should have been paid for by the carpet-bagging developers that created what is called the Southridge Area (CA style condos and multiplexes that start at $500,000.00).
People do not realize that We The People can recall the gooberment oligarchs. The few of us that attend city council meetings are ignored and it takes all my Parliamentary Procedure skills to get to the floor.
Sure, we could move, but where? I choose to stand and fight. This is my hill.
The libturd cancer is metastasizing across the country. Don’t take comfort that the vast majority of the States have republicrat goobernors and legislaughters. Our salvation is not in any current political party/joke. And it is not in a “supreme being” either. We were given this planet and free will and it is expected that we will do what is right. The trouble is “right” is no longer taught or experienced except in very isolated cases and even then these people will not stand up and be counted.
No, a raving tRump rally does not mean anything. These folks make a lot of noise then go home and do nothing to move forward. Get out of the bar and diner.
The libturd cancer is metastasizing across the country. Don’t take comfort that the vast majority of the States have republicrat goobernors and legislaughters.
We’re learning that in Texas in a huge way.
Florida will probably return a RINO to the Governor’s Mansion next year. Adam “Opie” Putnam was the point man for “W” on the immigration bill 10 years ago, and, four years behind schedule, Governor Opie has been a done deal in FL Republican politics for 20 years.
I can’t improve on what Mr. DadCooks just said.
Only to say that as he mentions, the powers-that-be are now simply ignoring votes and referendums and doing what they want anyway. And if it is getting to the stage where we’re simply also ignored at town and city council and board and committee meetings or otherwise blocked, then further steps will become necessary.
WRT all that sorta thing, this guy is doing some good work:
http://leechcity.online/
” I accept the privacy problems with an iPhone 5 to use it as my daily carry phone.”
Ditto, and I have something else for other stuff. Any “interested” parties can see me be-bopping around the AO here and probably listen to and watch me also. They would have got an earful yesterday at the vets group meeting. (some talk about fragging officers included). But I doubt little ol’ OFD is of sufficient interest to anybody; I’m a harmless old nutty coot not long for this world.
If you are involved in other activities you already know where to go and what to use to enable those things relatively securely. And I also believe in making the buggers work for their daily bread.
WRT the start of computing at home: Atari 400.
Sorry to hear You Tube (sort of the samizdat of video) is going to try and be Big Brother. It seems to me that unless the powers that be vis a vis the Internet sign on to this there are too many alternative ways to put video out there. In the short run, though, I fear for channels like “the Yankee Marshall” that take, you might say, the dramedy view of news and reviews in the world of firearms.
Ima gon just assume that they’ll widen the net eventually and put the boots to The Yankee Marshall, Hickock45, and Paul Joseph Watson, probably Jimmy Dore, too, as he and his cohorts clearly loathe and despise the DNC and Evil Half of the Party (in favor of their prog hero, Sanders), of course, but maybe he’ll skate. And they’ll tighten up on any perceived “conservative” POVs; the bit about also clamping down on searches, too, and shoving agitprop in our faces is a new twist from them, though.
I’m in the process of doing the opposite with my google email accounts (and running into Google-related roadblocks so far) and as soon as I grab a few more vids from the Toob, I’m done with them, too. Pretty sure I got most of everything I need here already. And then some.
I am wondering if this is either the continued neo-Marxist Long March through everything, or if it’s a last-gasp concerted effort to line up all their ducks and have a better position for themselves once it all falls apart or blows up here, via SHTF. It would certainly fit in with them all being on the same page all the time, even instinctively, whereas us Normals are not, not by a long shot.
And I see that Google has completely jumped the shark with YouTube and joined the dark side.
I have noticed this lately about Google. I moved to DuckDuckGo in July to see how their search results measure up. So far, it is ok but not as good as Google’s search results. I will continue to investigate this.
https://duckduckgo.com/
The bad / good thing is that I moved our mail record from our main domain to Google Mail a decade ago. In fact, we are still grandfathered in for free and don’t even pay for it. I have to say that their email processing is still totally awesome. So, Google has not completed the transition to evil. Yet.
EDIT: I do have to mention that DuckDuckGo puts my website on the first page of results when searching for process simulation. DuckDuckGo is a bunch of old Google employees and they use the old inverse search ranking algorithm to display search results. On Google, my website is on the fourth page which makes me and my partners very unhappy.
Just providing a free service you use does not make them any less evil.
Just providing a free service you use does not make them any less evil.
Nah, the spam and joe jobbing rejection from their Postini based Gmail software is still totally awesome. That makes them less evil.
BTW, DuckDuckGo’s motto is “The search engine that doesn’t track you”. Nice.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Trust but verify.
I don’t trust anyone anymore because you can no longer trust the “verification”.
We got some good news today that we were not expecting. We have a lady who comes to our home one afternoon per week and helps us clean our crap up. She has been working for us for over ten years and is invaluable since my wife’s right arm is crippled due to the mastectomy and subsequent surgical operations in 2005. Anyway, she told my wife this morning that she came here in 1989 as a refugee from El Salvador. She came here by herself as a teenager ! We had no idea.
She met her husband at church here in Fort Bend County and married him. He is a permanent resident (green card ?) but he could not sponsor her for some reason. He works full time in construction. They have four kids, 22 to 16, all born here and are US citizens. Their son works at concrete firm in Houston and just got promoted to a line manager. Her two older daughters both have jobs and work full time. She and her husband own a home not very far from here.
The INS just notified her that her refugee visa is not going to be extended since the civil war in El Salvador is “over”. So her son is going to sponsor her for a permanent visa which was accepted yesterday. Wow.
This is the kind of people that I like coming to the USA. They all work hard and take care of themselves. I have met her three daughters over the years (help Mom out) and they are all multilingual, speaking excellent English. They are a blessing to the USA.
Our tight house is not tight enough, sad.
I am assuming that you have put high MERV air filters into your A/C system. I put these in the house and the office both, really cuts down on the sneezing. My house was built in 2003 and the office in 2004, both are tight with all cracks sealed with Great Stuff before the sheetrock was added. Very difficult to add after the fact though.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/GREAT-STUFF-16-oz-Gaps-and-Cracks-Insulating-Foam-Sealant-with-Quick-Stop-Straw-99053937/206977048
I doubt Mrs. OFD will follow suit and she won’t care about that stuff anyway and is apparently also gonna stay on FaceBerg.
Have you told her that the Zuck is going to run for Prez in 2020 ? His personal charity hired Hillary’s pollster. Shades of the Clinton Foundation paying for Hillary’s stuff.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/03/technology/business/mark-zuckerberg-politics/index.html
WRT first computer:
IBM PC Model 5150 (original model), 16K RAM, Operating system was Cassette Basic. Later upgraded to 160K floppy and DOS 1.0, then later I splurged and got 384K RAM card, and a 10MB hard disk.
My first was a breadboarded unit with either an 8080A or a Z80, 256 bytes (not KB) of RAM, toggle switches for input and LED’s for output.
It will be fun to watch the outcry when the Marxist-Maoist-Leninists at Google censor the Leninist-Maoist-Marxist rhetoric as being too controversial. Then there will be the scrambling when the ads of BigCorp are pulled because the political rants of the Maoist-Leninist-Marxist CEO pop up in a search after the political rants of the RivalCorp’s Maoist-Marxist-Leninist CEO.
Have these people thought this through all the way to the end?
If anyone cares, my first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer sometime in 1981. 4K memory until my birthday when I got a set of 64K chips. Installing them required surgery on the motherboard.
My first computer was a CDC 6400 in 1977. All hail Seymour Cray!
First computer at home: Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1986. Nearly paid AUD3200 for it but held off. Then the price was cut overnight to AUD1600.
My first “computer” was a breadboard unit with some toggle switches for input and some LED’s for output. Based on the 8008. Never did get it to work properly so the term computer is used loosely.
First real computer was a Heathkit H-89 courtesy of the VA and one of the home education programs. I had been through the electronics course to get the 25″ TV. Decided to go for the computer course so I could get the H-89.
Started with 16K of memory. Increased the serial speed between the motherboard and display board to 19,200 with some different chips. Upped the memory to 64K and had to use a modded chip I purchased to map out the 16K of rom upon boot so I could run CP/M. Then added a soft sector controller to get 180K per floppy as opposed to the 100K of the hard sector. Upgraded to dual sided disks to double the disk storage. I could run HDOS or CP/M on the machine.
Then I got a real PC, as in running DOS and windows 3.0. A Gateway 2000 386DX running at 25mhz. An internal 100 meg hard drive that I thought I would never fill. Booted DOS 5.0 then started WIN 3.1. Ordered with a whopping 4 meg of memory that cost me a bundle.
My first computer was a CDC 6400 in 1977. All hail Seymour Cray!
My first computer was a Univac 1108 in 1972 ?. I got to to play Lunar Lander on the operator console for hours, going through half a roll of teletype paper. I started writing software on it in 1975 using punch cards. I was 15.
Just providing a free service you use does not make them any less evil.
Free service simply means that YOU are the product not the customer.
Senators move to protect Mueller inquiry from Trump interference
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article165350262.html
If you hire a witch hunter, they will find witches. Looks Like Mueller will be dunking the Trump kids in the White House swimming pool in short order.
Seriously though, this is how a constitutional crisis is created. And, at the extreme, I can see this constitutional crisis moving into a full blown civil war.
“Have these people thought this through all the way to the end?”
Evidently not. But it will be fun to watch the Revolution eat its own. Like they always do.
And our boyz and grrls running the DOD, CIA, etc., down in Mordor and their jingo warmongering cheerleaders there and in Manhattan aren’t thinking things through to the end, either. They keep poking hard at the Russians, Chicoms and Iranians and sooner or later one of them is gonna poke back hard. These things have a tendency to escalate. I am given to understand that the wacky blivit running the mass concentration camp known as North Korea probably can’t hit CONUS targets, probably not even AK or Hawaii, but he can still cause plenty of serious mischief.
I worry when I realize the cretins running our national defense/offense are the same type of cretins who’ve screwed up our last 70 years of wars and those who’ve done their best to run our economy into the toilet, destroyed our education system, and let our national infrastructure literally rot and fall apart.
WRT first computer: IBM PC Model 5150
That reminds me. Back a while, maybe a decade or two, there was a fellow on the internet (and I think on Coast-To-Coast radio) that claimed he had returned from the future to take back a IBM 5150 because of some special feature of it’s OS. He described a post apocolyptic future where the US had a secod civil war and then Russia dropped a few nukes. He also posted photos of his car mounted time machine (with RCA manufacture plates and serial #s) showing how a laser beam was bent by the controled singularity as it passed. All wonderful nonsense and so unbelievable as to sound almost plausable.
I’m not convinced the norks have even a fission bomb. A device, yes, but probably not a deliverable bomb, and almost certainly not a warhead that would survive an ICBM launch, let alone re-entry.
It’s necessary for the feds to produce a constant series of bogeymen to keep the citizenry frightened of something at all times. They’ve been doing this for at least 200 years, and arguably before the country itself formally existed.
Incidentally, I’m repurposing my novel. It now centers around a group of rural Deplorables who are privileged by their whiteness, middle-class assets, intelligence, and work ethic, but who are gradually re-educated by compassionate progs to understand the error of their ways and being. At the end, all of them commit suicide after realizing that they are not just Deplorables, but Irredeemables, willing all of their unjustly obtained assets–including their unspeakably large horde of food and other supplies–to Black Lives Matter and Lena Dunham.
You’ll never sell a copy. I mean, suspension of disbelief is one thing. But come on!
Irredeemables, willing all of their unjustly obtained assets–including their unspeakably large horde of food and other supplies–to Black Lives Matter and Lena Dunham.
A decade from now, Lena Dunham will be broke, addicted to alcohol or drugs, and living in a stucco cr*p shack in Florida.
I’d say “living in a trailer park”, but those are disappearing, replaced by subdivisions full of overpriced construction which won’t fare nearly as well as a mobile home in a hurricane.
“You’ll never sell a copy. I mean, suspension of disbelief is one thing. But come on!”
I know, I know. It’s just so hard to telling if I’m serious or kidding.
“I’m not convinced the norks have even a fission bomb. A device, yes, but probably not a deliverable bomb…”
Agreed. I’m thinking of other, more localized mischief; lobbing a SCUD-type rocket into Seoul or our DMZ with nuke material on it, or at one of our naval vessels in the area, or into Japan or the Philippines.
“…to Black Lives Matter and Lena Dunham.”
If you can make it of high-quality satire, you may do quite well with it, along the lines of A Modest Proposal and Directions to Servants.
For a quick laff:
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/swift/servant.htm
That guy Swift was pretty mean. I love him to death! They don’t kick ass like he did anymore.
@lynn said:
“I am assuming that you have put high MERV air filters into your A/C system. “
We sure do, plus an electrostatic precipitator. We also have several self standing room electrostatic precipitators. The house is so tight that there is virtually no air infiltration or exhalation (actually tested). We also have an outside to inside air exchanger that also has an electrostatic precipitator. The only thing more dust free is a microchip factory 😉
I just went and got my Shingles vaccination shot this afternoon at Walgreens. The place was busy and somewhat crowded. Surprise, it was free with my BCBS health insurance. Last year, it was going to be $265.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles
I had severe chicken pox when I was 7 or 8. My mother remembers it as the month of hell as I had it, then my middle brother, then my littlest brother. They put me in the dining room and hung blankets over the windows as I had it in my eyes also. Any sunlight was like fire in my eyes for a week.
I already have an auto-immune disease that has given me grief for the last 12 years. I really don’t want another.
I’m not convinced the norks have even a fission bomb. A device, yes, but probably not a deliverable bomb, and almost certainly not a warhead that would survive an ICBM launch, let alone re-entry.
“Will Trump avoid military action against North Korean ICBMs?”
http://www.cringely.com/2017/08/01/15446/
I don’t want to find out the hard way.
My first computer was a Univac 1108 in 1972
In my case I was talking about MY first computer, as in my possession. If you want to talk career then my first computer that I ever accessed was an IBM 1401 with only a card reader/punch and a printer for peripherals. It had a whopping 8K of memory (had the expansion cabinet), lots of switches and blinking lights. Physical transistors on circuit cards with lots of discrete components.
For first “career,” i.e., machine operator drone job, use of a computer (for pay) was a DEC PDP-11 running the RSX CAD/CAM program and a DEC MicroVAX. Basically did backups, kept the machines up, and distributed their listings to, and hobnobbed with, the engineers. The guy who got me up to speed on that stuff initially still works for them and we’ve had fairly recent contact via Linked-In email. Simplex Time Recorder, Gardner, MA.
Prior to that I’d also played Adventure on some prolecube office drone’s terminal connected to an HP-3000 upstairs in the server room that my next-younger brother managed. Bose Corporation, Framingham, MA.
Late 1970s and mid-1980s, until I went over to DEC itself.
My first computer was a Univac 1108 in 1972
In my case I was talking about MY first computer, as in my possession. If you want to talk career then my first computer that I ever accessed was an IBM 1401 with only a card reader/punch and a printer for peripherals.
Not career. Dad used to drive home 50 miles for supper with us and then would drive back to work for a few more hours to see how his jobs went. We were living with my grandparents in Lake Jackson, TX at the time. If it was not a school night then I was allowed to go with him occasionally. One night the operator showed me how to play lunar lander on the console teletype and that was freaking awesome. And then UCC (University Computing Company) moved the Univac 1108 up to Dallas from Houston so I could not play on the operator console anymore. I was 11 or 12.
We were living with my grandparents in Lake Jackson, TX at the time.
Home of Buc-ee’s!
I had a professor in Florida, Tom Tsien, who received his PhD from Rice in the early 70s. He talked about his full time graduate assistant job as the driver who hauled van loads of punchcards from Houston to Austin to College Station back to Houston every day.
I guess it was faster than 300 baud.
My first personal computer was an AST Premium 286, late 1980’s, can’t quite remember the year.
My first work computer was an IBM 1620 in 1968. Card reader input, punched card output. Ran Fortran II compiler. An object deck was punched after compilation which had to be put in the card reader again, and, if the program ran, and output card deck was produced. Needed to put the output card deck through an IBM 407 accounting machine, which printed the output card deck contents on wide green bar paper.
From the Unreported Nooz of the Year Department:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/08/chuck-baldwin/10-underreported-stories/
I happened to know about these, but the vast, vast majority have no clue whatsoever. A shit-ton of evil mischief is done in our name by the Party and its DOD and that is gonna bite us in the ass someday.
My first work computer was an IBM 1620 in 1968. Card reader input, punched card output. Ran Fortran II compiler. An object deck was punched after compilation which had to be put in the card reader again, and, if the program ran, and output card deck was produced. Needed to put the output card deck through an IBM 407 accounting machine, which printed the output card deck contents on wide green bar paper.
Good night ! I’ll bet ya’ll ran through millions of computer cards.
“We sure do, plus an electrostatic precipitator.”
DadCooks: be careful that it is not making ozone. This can happen with some or all if they are dirty and sparking. Ozone can be very bad for people with asthma. I have always had trouble with that and even a copy machine can set if off if it is emitting ozone. It is a really bad substance for some people and commonly emitted by electrostatic air cleaners. New carpet also can tear me up…
“For first “career,” i.e., machine operator drone job, use of a computer (for pay) was a DEC PDP-11 running the RSX CAD/CAM program and a DEC MicroVAX.”
My first real job (after college) was wire line in the oil field (1982). It was all analog, but after a few years, I was picked to get the first digital setup in the Rocky Mountain Region. It was a PDP 1134 with a 36″ COLOR CRT and 2 big hard drives (I recall they were 10 MB each). Also 1/2″ tape drive and a optical 12″ wide strip chart recorder. It was mounted in a sweet new Mack cabover with a twin stick and whistling turbo. I was the engineer but usually insisted to drive the big truck to the jobs. I was in heaven!
I had a few used AST computers gifted to me. Considered trash by the Swedish version of Deathstar Telecom. It just had to go into the dumpster. Didn’t have to be tossed in, and no problem with dumpster diving. Solid stuff. I’m still using an AST keyboard. I don’t care about having a Win key.
Anyway.
What the hell is going on with my smartypants phone with apps that have to update almost weekly? To load fresh ads?
It’s not like the web browser or the e-mail or messaging programs EVER update. I can see why Frost and Bank of America updating would be a good thing. Google Play updates weekly for no apparent reason.
Perhaps I’m blind to a setting somewhere.
I would edit that last post to change “a optical” to “an optical” but it is not giving me permission 🙂
I read “an optical”.
You get about an hour to edit. But if you close your browser, time’s up.
edit….
Perhaps it is a cookie thing.
could be a “grey matter” issue. When I post late at night – I always see a need to edit right after I post…
It has been a long day – should not be on the interwebs at this point… Hey! I see my DVR has 2 episodes of “Bering Sea Gold”! I’m going to veg out on reality TV! Signing off to all – Good Night!
Oh my goodness, midnight draweth near; it’s too warm and humid for me; hoping for a big boomer t-storm to clear the air overnight. I sleep through those but Mrs. OFD wakes up to a leaf dropping in the woods three miles away and then can’t get back to sleep.
Off to a gun store an hour southeast of here, see what new chit Ruger has to talk about, make sure my ex-Army boy is OK if I see him there; he lost his shit pretty good the other day at the vets group meeting; obviously been simmering for quite a while. Ditto another guy, former tunnel rat and combat medic who had around forty guys die on him over there.
Then back here to do some cleanup operations and then an hour’s drive into Quebec to get Mrs. OFD back for a night.
Pax vobiscum, fratres; semper paratus
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/russiatosis/
One more, for the morning coffee or last call at the C&W shitkicker bah you’re at…..
I’ll bet ya’ll ran through millions of computer cards
Several millions of cards. About the same operation on the IBM 1401 except we could actually print to the printer. Lots of card sorting machines and various other card manipulation apparatus in the room.
And the chad was a very real problem. Those little pieces of card could get everywhere and were almost impossible to get completely cleaned up. Drop a bin of chad from the keypunch machine and you were facing a lot of cleanup.
Source code for the Burroughs 3500 and the Honeywell 800 systems were on punched cards. It was necessary to fill out coding sheets, send them to keypunch, wait a couple of days, get the cards back, merge them into your source deck, transport it to the computer center, wait a day for the compile listing, fix the errors, try again. We had one program that about 14,000 cards, took seven trays of cards.
The day that maintaining source code on disk with an online editor became a reality was a watershed moment. My office only had one terminal shared among 10 people. But it was still much faster than the old method.
“The day that maintaining source code on disk with an online editor became a reality was a watershed moment. My office only had one terminal shared among 10 people. But it was still much faster than the old method.”
Yes, at that point dropping a box of cards (2000 when full) and getting them all back in order went away.* Also, the annoying “pick failure” from the card reader when it could not read a card (sometimes because of chads), and the occasional mangling of cards went away. Sometimes operators would drop a deck of cards and put it through anyway, and return the results that way.
However, with that vast improvement did come tape and disk failures, which could wipe away a program instantly.
*Of course, if you were programming in Fortran and if you used columns 73-80 for sequence numbers as intended (most programmers I worked with did not), you could run the deck through a card sorter, if you had one. We did not.
@BillF said:
Very well aware of the potential ozone problems. Properly designed and meticulously maintained equipment is key.
I had my first experience with electrostatic precipitators in the mid-60s with our home HVAC system. Then when I was a Nuclear Electricians Mate in the U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine Service I became a system expert. Unfortunately people are lazy and do not keep them maintained and there are a lot of poorly designed cheap but expensive systems out there.
For whole home systems I am a big fan of all things Lennox. But you have to be careful as some Lennox dealers sell third-party crap to hit a price point.
[snip] who hauled van loads of punchcards from Houston to Austin to College Station back to Houston every day. [snip]
The mind chortles at the notion of a bad, rollover accident. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to get injured, but the card chaos would be a lot of fun. I’m just young enough to have never actually used a Hollerith card, but I heard about them all the time from upperclassmen. The slowest modem I’ve ever had was 300 baud, and again the slightly older students sang their praises as opposed to the 110 baud ones. I can also remember when the monthly phone bill came with an enclosed punch card to return with payment.