75 and wet here.
Hurricane Florence now downgraded a bit, and due late in the day. Still nasty though. Remember, it’s a GOOD THING when it comes in at less than predicted (although it has real costs when they get it wrong.)
I’ll be traveling this afternoon and evening, wish me luck.
Naturally, as soon as my ebay sales are picking up, I need to put them on hold for a few days….
Oh, and Friday the Thirteenth is on a Thursday this week…..
n
This store was one hurled insult, one shove, away from a riot over bottled water, while water is still coming out of the TAPS and power is still on.
This is why we prep. THIS is why we will be secure in our homes while the world erupts in chaos.
If the lights had been out for three days, anyone here think there wouldn’t be guns drawn in this scene??
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162315/Chaos-erupts-North-Carolina-Walmart-residents-stock-supplies.html
n
When you can’t work for private companies, go get in line at the piggy trough–
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162525/Cyclist-fired-job-flipping-Trumps-motorcade-running-public-office.html
n
What is wrong with bottling your own water? Certainly cheaper than store bought.
I also think this hyped predictions are to keep people scared and more dependent on the government. A scared citicenzry is more easily manipulated.
My sister in Charlotte took over two hours to get home yesterday evening, a trip that normally takes 20 minutes. Apparently the road she takes, from the city itself to a suburb, is an evacuation route and a lot of people were evacuating.
That’s quite cynical of you, Ray.
I approve!
There’s nothing wrong with being cynical.
There’s also nothing wrong with being optimistic.
Optimists have more fun.
Optimists have more fun.
But optimists are more often disappointed.
I’m a paranoid cynic. All my surprises are good ones.
” a lot of people were evacuating. ”
–but sis decided to stay?
n
I have seen this more than a few times from the government predictors. It is going to be a big disaster, no one will survive unless you go to a government shelter. Where you can register and be counted. Where tax dollars are wasted. Where officials can grandstand about how they saved the day.
And most annoying is the news stations that claim to be the first, with the most accurate, and the best reporting. Our local news stations are all over themselves looking for relatives of people in the path of the hurricane, interviewing local shelters staffed with no one using the facility. Anything to get their faces on the news. Visions of CNN dancing in their pee sized brains.
I was in Hampton VA when hurricane Camille made landfall. I walked in the storm because I had to get places. Place was about 3 feet above sea level. Lots of water came ashore. But I survived along with a whole lot of other people because we were prepared. We knew what to do. We did not depend on the government for help, instructions, guidance. We were thinking individuals that were not afraid of our own shadow.
We knew where not to be when the surge came. Unlike New Orleans whose almost entire population is dependent on government dole. Those people cannot, and will not do anything (unless illegal) without the government telling them what to do. There were ways to get out yet since the government did not put the notice in their welfare checks they just sat around with their thumbs up their waterlogged asses.
People need to learn to think, be rational, be cynical of any prediction from the government. Y2K was a perfect example. I was one of the few that told everyone it was not going to be a big deal. I was quickly, and strongly, told I was an idiot. Turned out I was correct.
In fairness wrt y2k, it wasn’t a big deal because of the tremendous effort expended before hand. Even despite all the work, some things were affected, there were some checks that were late, and some drivers licenses that didn’t get issued. NOT life threatening, but inconvenient.
LOTS of work went into fixing the issues before they became issues.
n
Quote of the day:
Well said!
Nowadays, it’s the pixels because they don’t get checks anymore. It’s the EBT card because there is no such stigma with using a card.
^^ I won’t edit that. Take it as an example of someone who lets his thoughts wander in the middle of a sentence. I usually edit it before posting, but I need to get back to work.
Turned out I was correct.
I don’t unnerstan. Are you still an ijiot? Asking for a freend.
I have my days.
There were still people panicked because they thought their cars would not work. Bought generators because the grid was going to go down. Hoarded cash because ATM’s would not work. In spite of the preparation the panic was still spread.
A lot of consultants made a lot of money on the fear factor. Lot of unnecessary work that paid big bucks. I made a few dollars off the fear of civilization coming to an end.
When I was in the USAF we knew Y2K was going to be an issue way back in 1973. We fixed the problem in code. Why other companies were so short sighted is beyond comprehension or they were just plain lazy.
At the CU where I was the IT manager I had to do a full blown test of everything including the network routers. The auditor had concerns the logs would be incorrect and indecipherable. Cost me a couple of days work for the staff. Even the thermostats which knew the day of the week only, no date, were demanded to be tested by auditor. Anything with a clock or computer had to be tested, certified, reported, logged, etc. Even though common sense would tell someone it was not going to be an issue.
People would ask me if their car was going to work come January 1, 2000. They were afraid they would no longer have a vehicle that worked because it had a computer. This information was reported on the news that cars may not work come 1/1/2000. I just asked the people when was the last time they entered the date into their car’s computer. I also posed that question to one of the reporters. Their response was “it has a computer so it may not work” without ever realizing what they were dealing with.
Yes, striking fear into the minds of the sheep is a way to control the sheep. The government does this on purpose so they can control the people. The news stations exaggerate the problem with clueless reporters who are incapable of thinking. Just spread the government mantra of fear how the government will save the day.
This latest hurricane, while serious, should not be a problem for people that are prepared. To listen to the government “were all going to die” unless we follow the government’s instructions.
Hhhhrrrmmmmppppphhhh.
You have friends?
As the wise man always says, cynicism is just another word for experience.
I’d call out the typo, but I suspect it’s not a typo.
re my sister, she’s staying put, SFAIK. Charlotte’s not at any especial risk, being well off the coast. I think the evacuees were from the cities closer to the coast.
re Y2K both Nick and Ray are correct. There had been a whole pile of problems in the COBOL code older than I, and the paychecks went out on time in January because a lot of programmers spent a lot of time (and got paid a lot of money) fixing the problems. However, government scumbags (redundancy alert) and media scumbags (likewise) sure hyped the hell out of the issue. “We’re all gonna dieeeee!!!!!!! Women, minorities hurt worst.”
I wasn’t one of those who cashed in big on fixing COBOL code for Y2K. I worked on power plant software — paychecks going out late or with screwed-up amounts would be annoying but probably not fatal. The power going off up North on January 1 would kill people. The power control software was a devil’s brew of FORTRAN, PLC logic usually written in C, spreadsheets, and I don’t know what else. IIRC there were some problems found, but only in code which generated reports and such. There was nothing that would kick an emergency shutoff of a coal feed or anything like that, mostly because all of the devices were too dumb to care what year it was, or even what day. Oh, and 2000 being a leap year was a bigger problem than 99 going to 00; not everyone had gotten the word that the 2000-year cycle trumps the 100-year cycle.
I always get the feeling that deep down the MSM really wants Katrina 2.0. You can almost feel them hoping for it every time a large hurricane is heading toward the US mainland.
@SteveF – that’s the “400 year cycle”, not the “2000 year cycle”.
I’d make a crack about your intelligence, but you scare the pea out of me.
There is some code I rewrote in about 1979 that was going to break in 2000. It would calculate 2000 as being a leap year. I asked my boss about doing a year 2000 check in the code and he said no, this system won’t be running in 2000 and we can’t afford the cpu cycles to do that. The routine was a very heavily used one that turned dates that were stored as the number of days since 1st January 1841 into calendar information (i.e. 9/13/2018 for today).
In all probability, it wasn’t running then as the hardware it ran on (PDP-11) was out of production by 1997, and the language (MUMPS-11) was replaced by ANSI Standard MUMPS in the late 80s.
Pee pea jokes! lol!
As I explained to many people, some that would not hear it, control system computers are just that. They take input, make decisions, send some output. They don’t care what day it is as they are only concerned with managing the process. Someone pointed out the traffic signals sometimes change their patterns depending on the day of the week. My response was so what? Some intersection may be a little more convenient than normal. Besides such traffic signals are controlled remotely based on traffic volume. No one is going to die.
Indeed. Should be the 400 year cycle. Some systems did not consider that scenario. One of the companies that I interviewed for to do the repairs in COBOL code had not considered that. When I was interviewing explaining how I would resolve the date issues I posed the question. “You do realize that year 2000 is a leap year?” I was soundly told I was mistaken as it was divisible by 100 and thus was not and because of that I did not get the job. Yep, their new “consultant” screwed their system up because of not realizing it was a leap year.
MSM always enjoys a disaster. Their reporters drool at the thought. They want their pee brain faces on TV, live reporting. First with the most so they can flaunt it. Find anyway to find a local connection. The brother of an aunt who has a cousin lives in Puerto Rico and they get interviewed. Or they local stations find someone who lived in the area 40 years ago to describe their feelings about the event. These people either contact the station or the station search hard to find them.
” as the hardware it ran on (PDP-11) was ”
I still see ads soliciting DEC equipment. Someone is keeping all sorts of old gear up…
n
Ah yes, Y2K. Made a HUGE income for some of my COBOL coder friends. One fellow did 2 whole years of Y2K “EMERGENCY” code review for airlines. Found a few small issues with calculating dates on reports but nothing to cause airliners to fall from the sky on midnight.
I was running MCI EU Server operations and we were concerned that something in our many systems would go awry. So my team worked through the night monitoring. We were in touch with our offices in New Zealand as the date changed there then followed it to AU and Singapore, Hong Kong, India, etc. No one reported any issues. So by the time it was midnight in London we were all up on the roof watching the fireworks over the Thames. Got a week off for pulling that duty. But hey, working in the UK you get more time off than you can manage anyway.
UPDATE: I recall as a Jr. Programmer at a life insurance firm in 73 writing date routines I knew would break in 2000. But, my manager said, don’t bother fixing them they won’t be running then anyway. And he was right. That Insurance company is long gone.
My best “idiot interviewer” story involves a C++ quiz — what is the difference between this and that, what is the purpose of this feature, and so on. The quiz looked awfully familiar when they handed it to me. As it should, as it had been retyped from a Dr Dobbs Journal (IIRC*) from a couple months before. And also as it should, because I had written that article.
I pointed out that I’d written it and that whoever had retyped the questions had made some mistakes. No matter, they said, just take the test. And whoever had retyped the answer sheet had also made some mistakes.** No, we’re sure it’s right, they said. I didn’t get that job, and on the whole I think I’m just as glad about it.
* It was definitely one of the CMP magazines, but they a couple times they’d buy an article for one magazine and then run it in a different mag. Didn’t matter to me, as the pay was the same.
** Though to be fair, the junior editors who knew nothing about programming had also introduced several mistakes and ignored my corrections. That ignorant interference was why I stopped writing for those magazines.
MSM always enjoys a disaster. Their reporters drool at the thought.
Don’t forget the Celbriturds like Sean Penn: “The boats, where are all the boats!”
We ran into the problem in the USAF as we had to predict dates 30 years into the future. We were writing a new personnel system as the old one had become inadequate. Plus that system did not support dates that far into the future. The new system had to have that capability. We used serial dates, number of days since a fixed point in time. Made date math, comparison, and sorting really easy. Just needed some conversion routines.
Unfortunately the system, Burroughs Medium Systems, would not be around come Y2K. Burroughs officially stated in 1990 that the medium systems line would not get any modifications to accommodate four digit years and thus would not be supported after 12/31/1999. The USAF, Navy, and Army had to adapt to new systems and Sperry Rand, who eventually got purchased by Burroughs, got the contract.
At that time I was working for Burroughs as a software support engineer. I interviewed with a company in Florida that was bidding on the contract to convert the existing system to work on the Sperry system. I first accepted the offer but on the flight home decided against the job and rescinded the offer. The company was not happy. The president, some big wig in Chicago, personally called me to make another offer. I have no idea what he would have offered as I just told him I had no desire to move to Florida for anything short of $500K a year. Naturally he never counter offered. Yeh, I was an asshole for suggesting such.
The company did not get the contract. Three other people, mostly personnel people, from the the USAF that worked on the original project had already been hired. They needed software people that had worked on the system. There were only a few of us available, about six I think. No one wanted to go to Florida for a contract that was only being bid and had not been awarded. If the bid fell through we would have been stuck in Florida without a job. Thus the reason I turned it down.
I’ve been out of coding for quite a few years. Have we been addressing the 2038 problem?
“The Year 2038 problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit binary integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Just like the Y2K problem, the Year 2038 problem is caused by insufficient capacity of the chosen storage unit.”
I always get the feeling that deep down the MSM really wants Katrina 2.0. You can almost feel them hoping for it every time a large hurricane is heading toward the US mainland.
Katrina is the kind of event that makes careers, and nearly a whole generation of newsmuppets have come up from “journalism” schools since then.
I’ve been out of coding for quite a few years. Have we been addressing the 2038 problem?
Not really. Modern systems use unsigned 64 bit integers for time_t, but there are a lot of legacy systems out there.
I speak from experience — when the last Sears store closes (note — I did not say ‘if’) they’ll pull working Windows for Workgroups 3.11 machines out of the back room.
I will have been retired for quite a number of years by 2038. I am expecting lucrative consulting contracts sometime in 2037 to supplement my income.
I was at GE for the Y2K event. We did a lot of prep for it in 1999, and avoided almost all problems, but we did encounter an issue with a 3rd party firewall product. It was mostly dull, boring work reading piles of old code.
And back in 1974, no one was concerned with the “impending” Y2K situation. I was at an environmental company, and most of our data was still on punched cards. Each card with 80 columns had to store 24 hourly values. So with three digits for each data value, 72 columns were consumed, leaving just 2 columns for a site identifier, and 6 columns for the date (YYMMDD). No one was worried about what would happen 24 years later. We knew that the correct date could be inferred from the context (i.e., “99” could not be 1899 and “00” could not be 1900.). The cards were later backed up on 9-channel 800 BPI magtape, which had a limitation on file names to the 8.3 standard.
Funny the stuff that gets “baked in” to the infrastructure.
qwerty keyboards, even though they were designed to slow typists down
33 1/3 RPM for records, as that matched the length of one reel of film (which was probably limited by some previous arbitrary factor)
the hole in a cd being pfenig sized, as that was what the designer had in his pocket
8.3 naming systems
And if these bigger things are just legacy, what sort of things get baked in to business processes that don’t need to be there?
(bigcorp where I used to work had an automated workflow that involved generating a pdf and routing it thru ONE PERSON, because back in the day, all the paper forms had to cross her desk, so she could then get them to the person responsible. They just automated the inefficient and outdated process.)
n
quick reco needed. Firefox for android won’t work on my older tablet, and the play store is full of browsers of ill repute. anyone got a good browser for android that won’t spy on me?
(the samsung one no longer displays ttgnet)
n
They just automated the inefficient and outdated process
Reminds me that when I joined MCI in London everyone was working for that “golden” ISO 9000 accreditation which was all the rage at the time. I went through ISO-9000 training and quickly saw that it was all about documenting processes not improving them. So we spent lots of time and money documenting bad processes instead of fixing them.
to be redundant, and complete.
Leap every 4
Unless divisible by 100
unless divisible by 400
so 1896 yes; 1900 no, 1996 yes, 2000 yes, 2100 no
the hole in a cd being pfenig sized, as that was what the designer had in his pocket
That’s a new one on me. I’ll have to check it when I get home.
Yes, I have several pfennig pieces at home. Pfennig checks got me a lot of free beer back in the day. My oldest was from the ’60s, which was pretty good at that place & time.
From Wikipedia:
Over The Hedge: Wind Power
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2018/09/13
@Nick, essentially everything Android spies on you in one way or many others. It seems to me that Firefox has several flavors on Android.
Have you tried Firefox Focus?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.focus&rdid=org.mozilla.focus
We did that at a past employer too. We documented a lot of things, which was good in case the one person left who actually knew how something worked. It was sold as making a company “better” in vague and unspecified ways, and some companies allegedly even refused to do business with non-certified companies.
In retrospect I can see that this was one of the events that made me stop believing that management was intelligent. Obviously there are exceptions.
@lynn said:
Not far from the truth.
https://bigthink.com/design-for-good/this-is-how-you-turn-cow-fart-gas-into-energy
“VIDEO: Beto O’Rourke talks border security on Stephen Colbert show”
https://www.chron.com/news/politics/texas/article/VIDEO-Beto-O-Rourke-talks-border-security-on-13225419.php
Lynn’s translation of Beto (pronounced “berto”) wants, “open borders, cross the border as you want and work in the USA using someone else’s social security number”.
Yes, I have several pfennig pieces at home.
I still have some one Won coins somewhere. Made of aluminum, so they may have some actual value for scrap (you’d need a million of them lol!)
“by preventing jams.” — which it does by forcing the typist to use the same hand for common letters, and the left hand at that. This prevented the hammers from hitting each other when alternating between letters on the right and left sides of the keyboard.
So yeah, it does speed up typing on a typewriter, because you get fewer jams than layouts that alternate hands for common letters. And it accomplishes this feat by slowing down the wpm rate most people can type.
But we are stuck with it and the repetitive stress injuries it causes.
n
All versions of ffox on android newer than 4.2 fail to run on my tablet. Opera wants to read my contact list and monitor my open programs, so NO.
orfox claims to be a tor implementation which is beyond my need, but it does seem to at least run.
Chrome also fails to run.
n
added- orfox installs and runs, but orbot its proxy server does not, which causes orfox to fail
I’ve been out of coding for quite a few years. Have we been addressing the 2038 problem?
“The Year 2038 problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit binary integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Just like the Y2K problem, the Year 2038 problem is caused by insufficient capacity of the chosen storage unit.”
Kinda. The problem has been delayed from 2038 to 2106 by converting the value from a signed 32 bit integer to an unsigned 32 bit integer. The fix is twofold, operating system and then application software. Converting the operating system software on most platforms was trivial. Converting the application software is a disaster since there are so many occurrences in the millions of custom software applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
The real fix is to convert that value to a 64 bit integer, signed or unsigned. That is also proceeding.
Damn kids. Told one kid that was using shared Google DOCs to stop texting. He complied for the day. Today I found him doing the same thing again today. So I sent him to the office. I asked the office if there was a specific policy against using shared DOCs to text. The office said no. But there was a policy that if a teacher, substitute or not, tells a student to not do something and the student persists there will be disciplinary action.
Are these kids so stupid they think they will not get caught? Clever idea using shared DOCs to text. But to continue to do so after being caught, told not to do the texting, and then try again indicates some level of stupidity.
So now I am considered mean by the freshmen in this class. Well, too bad. I am not their friend, don’t want to be their friend.
And for the record, I would have tried the same crap with a sub. Nothing has changed over the years.
Give it a rest on Kavanaugh:
REAL OR STUNT? Sen. Dianne Feinstein refers secret letter on Brett Kavanaugh to the FBI
You’d think he’s the Devil incarnate.
h/t Twitchy
A real stunt.
@Nick: Try the Brave browser. It’s basically an older Chromium core with baked-in ad blocking. Some sites with lots of trackers and JavaScript don’t work, probably because Brave gets too aggressive with its blocking. But for most things, it’s fine. There’s a “payment concept” behind Brave, which has no chance of ever working, but this is easily ignored.
ISO-9000: Yep. Like almost anything in the QA world, the ideas could, theoretically, be used to drive improvement to processes, and to ensure that those improvements actually get implemented. However, like almost anything in the QA world, that doesn’t happen. Instead, stuff gets written down in lots of binders that are hauled out once a year or so for an audit. Meanwhile, life goes on as usual, crappy processes and all.
Just like software development methods – currency, Scrum and Agile – given a good team, the methods will work fine. Just as well as the methods they replaced. Given a bad team, the methods will fail, just as surely as any other methods. But pointy-haired managers don’t understand, so they pay consultants too much money, impose the latest trend from above, and wonder why nothing really changes.
I really wish managers would be seen for what they are: the grease that lets the cogs turn. But the cogs are more important. Most managers, with the possible exception of direct line supervisors, don’t know a thing about the activities they nominally supervise. They should be seen (and paid) as clerks, because that’s what they actually are.
A specific grumble: For stupid reasons, my school has decided to get accredited. They’ve brought in an accreditation organization that is causing all sorts of tracking to happen. Just as an example, even though we are a teaching-college, not a research university, suddenly we are expected to “publish or perish”, review papers, chair conferences, etc.. And all of this is being tracked seventeen different ways – which has the primary effect of requiring more management.
The January 2018 “State of the School” letter was classic: what a great job we teachers are doing, and although the school has no money to hire more teachers, they are sure that our steadily increasing class sizes will have no effect on our teaching quality. Funny, how the extra money from all those increased enrolment numbers has evaporated into overhead expenses. Of course, I’m oversimplifying the situation, but you get the idea.
heavy rain started here, and I’m headed to the airport….
n
Nice to see the action reversed…
https://abc13.com/4227747/
Y’all goin’ crazy down there. (we’re already there)
33 1/3 RPM for records, as that matched the length of one reel of film (which was probably limited by some previous arbitrary factor)
IIRC, the CD length is equal to the running time of the inventor’s favorite symphony.
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Definition of Insanity”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-definition-of-insanity/
“Obama says we should vote for Democrats to bring some sanity back to our politics. LOL. Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2018.”
The political caricatures are awesome. Cortez has more teeth than anyone that I have ever seen. Pelosi looks like an ancient cat lady.
The January 2018 “State of the School” letter was classic: what a great job we teachers are doing, and although the school has no money to hire more teachers, they are sure that our steadily increasing class sizes will have no effect on our teaching quality. Funny, how the extra money from all those increased enrolment numbers has evaporated into overhead expenses. Of course, I’m oversimplifying the situation, but you get the idea.
I saw this at my alma mater, Texas A&M, while I was going there (I graduated in 1982). It ruined the place. They steadily increased the gpa requirements in order to graduate. But Texas A&M was designed to graduate large numbers of farmers and engineers for the state. So the new gpa requirements suppressed the number of engineers that they graduated. Not good.
Love the trivia! The 33 1/3 makes me wonder how 78s came about? I have a vague notion it has something to do with 60 cycles per second on AC, because I think that was chosen to keep clocks on time.
@Nick
I’ve had trouble updating the Samsung browser on my Samsungs as well. not that I use it a lot, but I’ve found the most effective way is to open the browser and find the update tab from the settings.
Seems really weird that you can’t run Chrome, though.
A geeky view of Hurricane Florence :
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9fkxkh/not_mine/?st=JM146HJC&sh=8e346b4a
Stay safe out there!
From
The history of 78 RPM recordings
This would require the motor to have one tooth on it’s gear. The ratio is meaningless unless the number of teeth on each gear is specified.
Gears with 46 to 1 ration not 46 tooth gear. Badly written by someone.
I always figured the old records were at 78 RPM because of lack of amplification and yeah, cactus needles as styli. Edison etc rolls made flat. 45’s were for singles.
As I said, one tooth on the motor gear, probably made in Alabama.
@Nick – Have you tried IceCatMobile, available at F-droid?
“Bitter Senate fight to confirm Kavanaugh plunges deeper into chaos over letter”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/feinstein-says-she-referred-letter-concerning-kavanaugh-to-federal-investigators/2018/09/13/d99cfb1c-b775-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html
“Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) dismissed the controversy on Twitter.”
““Let me get this straight: this is [a] statement about [a] secret letter regarding a secret matter and an unidentified person. Right,” he tweeted sarcastically. “I will add: the FBI already performed and has reported on a background investigation on the nominee and this has been made available to all Senators on the Judiciary Committee.””
Give me a break. An anonymous person is accusing him of a sex crime in high school ? Really ? If you want to accuse a person of a crime, stand up and do it publicly.
This is nothing but a blatant attempt to shame the two female GOP senators into voting against Kavanaugh.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Well there goes any hopes of me having a career in politics. Does not even need to be anonymous. And it would be true. Back then it was just an adventure. Today it would be jail time.
I read that Kavanaugh and a girl hooked up in High School and had sex. Duh. The Dumbocrats are only showing how dumb they are to their base. That would be crimmigrants.
Wow, interesting scenario developing in Massachusetts. 70 incidents related to natural gas main problems in three cities: Lawrence, North Andover and Andover.
No idea when people in the affected areas will be allowed back into their homes. One local fire chief says it could be a week.
Problems started around 5pm this afternoon.
Here’s one link: https://whdh.com/news/as-many-as-70-gas-related-explosions-fires-rock-lawrence-andover-north-andover/
Fortunately I live far enough away to not be affected.
“Feds Collect Record Individual Income Taxes Through August; Still Run $898B Deficit”
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/feds-collect-record-individual-income-taxes-through-august-still-run
“The federal government has run a deficit of $882,112,000,000 in the first eleven months of fiscal 2018 because while bringing in $2,985,186,000,000 in total taxes, it turned around and spent $3,883,298,000,000.”
Good night ! The feddies have quite the spending problem.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Lynn’s translation of Beto (pronounced “berto”) wants, “open borders, cross the border as you want and work in the USA using someone else’s social security number”.
Robert Francis (I’m not going to use his nickname again until after the election) has pulled off selling himself as “The Mexican Bobby Kennedy”.
My wife got into it today at work with the *Hispanic* staff over Robert Francis’ ethnicity. “He’s one of us. Cruz is a geezer.”
IIRC, Robert Francis is only a couple of years younger than Cruz.
A pre-Y2K computer date foul up: When Florida computerized its driver’s license system, it would not accept February 29 as a date of birth. So a very small number of leap babies has to have incorrect dates on their licenses, and when they went to get them renewed a few years later had to bring their birth certificates with them to establish the wrong-ness of the situation.
I saw this at my alma mater, Texas A&M, while I was going there (I graduated in 1982). It ruined the place. They steadily increased the gpa requirements in order to graduate. But Texas A&M was designed to graduate large numbers of farmers and engineers for the state. So the new gpa requirements suppressed the number of engineers that they graduated. Not good.
In the 80s, University of South Florida suppressed the graduate count by goosing the Engineering program credit hours required to 140. I was so burned out by the time I graduated; I think I had 150+ in the end … for a Bachelors.
They’re back to the traditional 120 now. The quality metric, the passing rate for the EIT, actually got worse.
I passed the EIT. 83. And I Christmas treed the section on Fluids which was 15% of the exam. I never took Fluds — Merry Christmas!
After 3 different majors, I had something like 170 credits. When I finally graduated..
Made it to Chicago. Weird stuff in Boston.
N
I saw a one minute Robert Francis commercial on HGTV tonight. Was that a national buy or do they do regional commercials on DirecTV ?
I passed the EIT. 83. And I Christmas treed the section on Fluids which was 15% of the exam. I never took Fluds — Merry Christmas!
Christmas Treed ?
I passed the EIT back in 1981. I am old. Back then it was only pass / fail so I have no idea what my score was.
I graduated with 143 hours in Mechanical Engineering. I did get 4 hours of Fortran programming credit by taking a test. If I had not passed then John L. would have beaten me severely. I also took a course in IBM 370 assembly, CS 204.
I also graduated in four years. Started at age 17, finished at age 21. We aren’t going to talk about gpa. Got the last job in Texas as the engineering market was crashing in 1982. Was making $9.50/hr, working 60 to 80 hours per week and only getting paid for 40 of them since I was a “white hat”. But, I had a job.
IIRC, the CD length is equal to the running time of the inventor’s favorite symphony.
It was supposedly set by the chairman of Sony so that he could listen to Beethoven’s 9th without interruption.
I also graduated in four years. Started at age 17, finished at age 21. We aren’t going to talk about gpa.
My grades sucked. By my mid-20s, however, no one asked about GPA anymore.
I do put my 4.0 in grad school on my resume, but I don’t consider it to be a great accomplishment, just bait for HR droids. See my previous comments about my Masters program at [the only Texas school to graduate a President].
I saw a one minute Robert Francis commercial on HGTV tonight. Was that a national buy or do they do regional commercials on DirecTV ?
I think it is possible to buy regionally on DirecTV, similar to how the cable operators insert local commercials into their feeds. If you have a DVR, the service probably downloads the commercials via unused bandwidth and inserts the ads at the box level.
Someone has a lot of money going into Robert Francis and MJ Hegar (Round Rock Congressional race). I used to think it was just Gavin Newsom’s money people, but now that both actually have a shot a winning, it seems like other checks are starting to flow. That money comes with strings attached like impeachment.
(My read of Texas recall election law is that once everyone sobers up after the impeachment frenzy, we will be stuck Senor O’Rourke for the full term.)
Listen to how Robert Francis is pronouncing his nickname at the end of the commercials. “Buh-ito”. It reminds me of how the white locals will pronounce “tortilla” if they want to sound worldly.
The Mexican Bobby Kennedy. The irony is that there is a Hispanic individual in the race, born to immigrant parents, but it isn’t Robert Francis, a fourth-generation Irish-American.
I passed the EIT back in 1981.
I was serving in The Big Red One.
By the end of Summer 1981 I’d finished my first year of college, having dropped out of high school to start college early, and had gone through Army basic training. I’d have gone to Basic the summer before, but as a 17-year-old high school dropout they couldn’t take me, never mind that I was already in college.