Thur. Oct. 4, 2018 – another week zipping by…

By on October 4th, 2018 in Random Stuff

74F and wet. Yuck. We have been getting several hours a day of sunshine despite the rain. That is nice.

Well, as the week speeds by, now I’ve got a right arm with stitches in it, and limited use. Could have been worse. The urgent care system worked beautifully. Really no waiting that wasn’t filled with paperwork. The facility administrator chatted with me while I was waiting from my xrays to be read. Very pleasant and efficient visit. All of them should be that way. Funny what being in competition for you customers dollars will do.

Better get started on the day. Hungry kids waiting….

n

68 Comments and discussion on "Thur. Oct. 4, 2018 – another week zipping by…"

  1. Nick Flandrey says:

    Some event notices from my alma mater…. we truly live in a wealthy, decadent age…

    Networks of listening and sounding
    3 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 11

    Artist and researcher Doug Van Nort will discuss his approach to creating performative contexts using computational media that engender intersubjectivity and distributed creativity. His work integrates electroacoustic music and collective improvisation with machine agents, immersive sound, embodied listening and networked performance practices.

    Or how about this random collection of words??

    ” Virginia Grise
    7 p.m.,Tuesday, Oct. 9

    Join Performance in the Borderlands for a special book reading and signing with playwright and performer Virginia Grise, a 2018-19 Projecting All Voices fellow in ASU’s Herberger Institute. “Your Healing is Killing Me” is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. The reading will be followed by a talk by facilitated by Equality Arizona and Michael Soto.”

    The fact these parasites aren’t starving to death is sure proof that our society is too rich and soft to survive.

    n

  2. Ray Thompson says:

    The urgent care system worked beautifully

    Cost? My understanding is they don’t take insurance at all.

  3. Ray Thompson says:

    The fact these parasites aren’t starving to death is sure proof that our society is too rich and soft to survive.

    The fact that there are people that enjoy this crap is amazing. Most of them probably don’t understand any of it and just attend to be “hip”. I have met people like that. I ask what something like that means and the general comment is “if you don’t understand then you are too far gone to understand”. Gone where? I thought asking when you don’t understand is supposed to help you understand. Apparently not for these creatures who are also most certainly clueless.

    What annoys me is that tax money goes to support some of this crap. Cultural crap made up and then claimed to be art. So this snob noses without enough sense to come out of the rain can turn their noses up at the rest of us uncultured slobs. If their preferred form of self-centered egotistical nonsense cannot support itself, it should die. No tax dollars.

  4. Roger Ritter says:

    The urgent care system worked beautifully

    Cost? My understanding is they don’t take insurance at all.

    I had to use a private emergency room a couple of years ago, and they took my insurance with no problems.

  5. Nick Flandrey says:

    They are “in network” for my insurance. They also have a form for “self pay” and they do not take medicare.

    Because I never meet my deductible (F U obammma) I paid $140 for the diagnosis, $110 for the stitches, and I’m sure to be billed for the xray reading which was done at the semi-private ER storefront around the corner from Urgent Care in the strip mall.

    I think $110 for the stitches was very reasonable. I’d think $70 for the diagnosis was reasonable, but we really don’t have a free market for healthcare, despite having choices of which facilities to spend our insurance money in. I expect to get bent over on the xray reading, but that is a VERY high skill job.

    n

    added- staffing was 1 front office, 1 girl who cleaned my wound, a ‘med tech’ who did my vitals and the xrays, one DR (chinese with good english, but heavy accent), and one student with the Dr. (african by skin color, build, and accent- had worked his way up from EMT to paramedic, to nursing. Unclear if he was student nurse or student Dr. Accent but good english.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    I expect to get bent over on the xray reading, but that is a VERY high skill job.

    Radiology interpretation often gets outsourced to India. The modern electronic radiology transmission formats have a lot more detail than a GIF/JPEG. My friend’s brother helped develop the file standards.

  7. Greg Norton says:

    I think $110 for the stitches was very reasonable. I’d think $70 for the diagnosis was reasonable, but we really don’t have a free market for healthcare, despite having choices of which facilities to spend our insurance money in.

    The doctor doing the hands-on work probably saw $60 of the cost on the stitches pre tax. Maybe. That’s factoring 20 minutes of time and the typical locum ER rate in an urban area.

    Rural ER and surgery locum jobs pay more.

  8. MrAtoz says:

    I’m still under Tricare. They opened it up to many “Urgent Care” type places. Sort of like the old CHAMPÚS system.

  9. MrAtoz says:

    Looks like Kavanaugh will be confirmed. Dumbo rats are going crazy with wacky theories to rabble-rouse. Ow to replace the crone.

  10. Mark W says:

    Who supplies your servers? Supermicro?

    This sounds bogus to me. You can’t just add a chip to an existing board without a complete redesign of the board. And surely one of these new exfiltration prevention firewalls would detect something?

  11. JimL says:

    Who supplies your servers? Supermicro?

    This sounds bogus to me. You can’t just add a chip to an existing board without a complete redesign of the board. And surely one of these new exfiltration prevention firewalls would detect something?

    I wouldn’t bet on that. You don’t have to redesign the whole thing. You would only need to intercept some small portion of traffic and do a few (relatively) simple things to capture the machine. A chip the size of the pencil tip could have as many transistors as an 8088 (or more.)

    Edit: For the exfiltration firewall – I don’t know. A lot would depend on the traffic that’s allowed through. Capture on legitimate outside machine and you have C&C ready to go.

  12. lynn says:

    Who supplies your servers? Supermicro?
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

    There have been rumors of this for years in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan books.

  13. lynn says:

    Rural ER and surgery locum jobs pay more.

    Uh, this Texas redneck don’t know what “surgery locum” means ?

  14. lynn says:

    From yesterday, What I don’t understand if the hospital is making money at $16K based on the insurance agreement, charging someone without insurance $115K is price gouging at the highest level. An almost 800% markup is insane.

    Imagine going into a grocery store for a gallon of milk at $3.00 but because you don’t have a loyalty card the cost is now $24.00. The FTC, State, and local authorities would be all over the grocery store.

    Yup, I have been complaining about this for years. BTW, I am not sure that the hospital bill contains any of the human costs. I expect to get another $40K to $50K bill from the various entities. But, with this bill, my deductible and copays are maxed out (I think).

  15. JimL says:

    Apparently, China, Apple, and the other players are denying it.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/bloomberg-super-micro-motherboards-used-by-apple-amazon-contained-chinese-spy-chips/

    Imagine, if you will, what would happen if China were caught red-handed doing something like that, and further, that they got into the CIA. (Probably not, but if.)

    If Apple reported it to the FBI and was told to keep quiet, of COURSE, they would deny it. Everyone would.

    Now imagine what that would do to Trump’s negotiations with China.

    THAT could be the kind of thing that knocks over a lot of tables & chairs.

  16. Mark W says:

    I wouldn’t bet on that. You don’t have to redesign the whole thing. You would only need to intercept some small portion of traffic and do a few (relatively) simple things to capture the machine. A chip the size of the pencil tip could have as many transistors as an 8088 (or more.)

    I thought about it some more, and actually read the article! Since SuperMicro actually makes the boards, the backdoor could be designed in, or one of the contractors could have modified the design to add it. Intel had a secret backdoor in some of their chips that no-one knew about until recently.

    The article implies that an exfiltration device did catch the communications, but that it was infrequent.

  17. Harold Combs says:

    This problem has been around for decdes. When I lived in Hong Kong my local IT guys said that once Cisco began production in China, the Red Army had access to all designs and government backed fims began to produce knock-offs. We always assumed that these were all compromised.
    https://it.slashdot.org/story/08/05/09/164201/fbi-says-military-had-counterfeit-cisco-routers

  18. lynn says:

    From yesterday, My rule of thumb is about 10% of the population is capable of doing real development work. In my experience, that fraction cuts across all demographics and has nothing to do with race/gender. I’ve noticed higher percentage of LGBTQ, nudits, and other alternative lifestyles in tech, but I chalked it up to the job having to get done so management looks the other way as long as the kinks are legal, happen after hours, and involve consenting adults.

    I would guess 2% of the population at most. The amount of concentration and intense learning for programming is just not interesting to very many people IMHO.

    nudits == nudists ???

    OK, nudist programmers just freaks me out. I need some brain bleach just imagining that. I shudder to google it.

    BTW, junior programmer reports that the programmer environment at G is one of the worst that he has ever seen. 30 programmers in a room with no walls, no cubicles, just long tables with computers thrown on them. Sheer pandemonium and an incredible amount of noise. There were closed meeting rooms but no camping out in them.

    And the vaunted Sleeppods for napping are just 1960s plastic chairs with a plastic cover over them.
    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2016/07/nap-pods-unproductive-gimmick-or-lifeline-increasingly-sleep-deprived

    He did say the G cafeteria was awesome. A chef made sushi for him as he watched.

    He reports the prices in San Jose are simply amazing. He went to a Mexican restaurant for supper. The enchilada plate was $22.

  19. lynn says:

    Well, as the week speeds by, now I’ve got a right arm with stitches in it, and limited use.

    BTW, how many stitches ? And I am glad that you did not break it. The older we get, the less we bounce like the youngsters.

  20. lynn says:

    The wife and I got woken up in the very early morning by the stupid alarm panel in our bedroom chirping. We do not use the alarm system and do not have a monitoring service. I pushed a button and it stopped chirping.

    How do I permanently turn this junk off ? I was very worried that I was going to set off the 132 db air raid siren in the attic. But it did not activate.

  21. JimL says:

    I like wire cutters. The side-cutter type. Every wire, at each end.

  22. ech says:

    Radiology interpretation often gets outsourced to India.

    Many places won’t use anything but US board certified radiologists. There was/is a company that provided overnight coverage of radiology interpretation from Australia – they had US physicians staffing it and when it was night in the US, it was daytime there. They were prohibited from doing any work for Australian hospitals and the company was said to be using 25% of the internet bandwidth in Oz.

  23. Greg Norton says:

    The wife and I got woken up in the very early morning by the stupid alarm panel in our bedroom chirping. We do not use the alarm system and do not have a monitoring service. I pushed a button and it stopped chirping.

    The UPS battery is probably going. Those are usually located inside the control module hidden in a closet in your house. I replaced one once in FL. Google for the instructions for your hardware if you don’t have the installer’s manual from the builder.

    If the battery replacement doesn’t work, check the resistors on the terminals for the loops. Those will sometimes go bad if lightning strikes near your house.

  24. Greg Norton says:

    BTW, junior programmer reports that the programmer environment at G is one of the worst that he has ever seen. 30 programmers in a room with no walls, no cubicles, just long tables with computers thrown on them. Sheer pandemonium and an incredible amount of noise. There were closed meeting rooms but no camping out in them.

    That’s for the provenance of the synergy of the creative paradigm.

    Okay, they’re being cheap. The expectations of Millennials have been dialed way down since industry flushed most of the X-ers with layoffs or age discrimination.

    (Google around for the latest layoff news from Verizon. I never regretted blowing out of GTE after the merger. For the record, I voted ‘no’, and I cashed out my options at the equivalent of VZ being $70 today.)

    I have a cube at my current job, but the walls are about chest high. I have just enough space for my chair, two monitors, laptop, and a phone.

  25. Ray Thompson says:

    The UPS battery is probably going.

    Why do batteries for such devices almost always fail in the wee hours of the morning? Conspiracy? Or hacked by the Chinese?

  26. ITguy1998 says:

    One of the things that keeps me at my current employer is the office. I have a 12×14. With windows.

  27. JimL says:

    Mine is 6′ x 12′ with a fan, a whiteboard, and a door.

    But I’m getting bored.

  28. lynn says:

    I like wire cutters. The side-cutter type. Every wire, at each end.

    Me too. Nothing like air gapping stuff to have peace of mind. And the control module is in my master closet. I wonder if I can simply pull the plug on it.

    If I was going to use security system nowadays, I would use Simplisafe.
    https://simplisafe.com/

    I do have an ADT system at the office. It works and we set it all the time. I had to have it updated when we moved in here 6 years ago.

  29. paul says:

    After Lynn’s comment the other day about his temp folder, I looked at my windows/temp folder. Gee. 59 Gb of “something”.

    Sure, I have a 2 TB drive that is almost 1/4 full, but still. 59 Gb.

  30. Greg Norton says:

    Mine is 6′ x 12′ with a fan, a whiteboard, and a door.

    But I’m getting bored.

    I never stop looking anymore.

    Since the first phone interview for the job, my current management has sent a clear message that my skills are necessary for now but not part of the long term plan.

  31. dkreck says:

    Be sure to turn off hidden folders then go to
    C:/users/xxxxx/appdata/local/temp
    and clear that too
    xxxxx= username

    check all three folders under appdata for temps

    then remove any folder for applications you no longer have

    I played with it a couple of times but I cannot write a path with backslashes here. They just go away. So forward just to show it mostly right.

  32. hcombs says:

    BTW, junior programmer reports that the programmer environment at G is one of the worst that he has ever seen. 30 programmers in a room with no walls, no cubicles, just long tables with computers thrown on them. Sheer pandemonium and an incredible amount of noise. There were closed meeting rooms but no camping out in them.

    Back in 1972 I started as a Junior programmer at a life insurance co. in Oklahoma City. The company had purpose built annex for the IBM Mainframe (370/145 with a whopping 256 K or RAM) and support staff. I got a windowless office with a blackboard. I had offices most of my programming career. Stopped programming for a living in 1984 when I moved to communications R&D at Continental Airlines, then into networking and finally security. At my current company all IT (40+) sit in a large open area with 6 person cube modules. I don’t know how anyone can focus.

  33. JimL says:

    – easy. Sort of. “alt” + 0092

  34. JimL says:

    Sort of the same way I remembered “alt” + 0186 for º

  35. JimL says:

    shoot – forgot the angle brackets don’t work. Thats “alt” + 0092 and “alt” + 0186.

    And to hcombs point – they can’t focus. I left that kind of joint after I quit smoking. The nicotine was the only way to focus. When I lost that, I was screwed.

  36. mediumwave says:

    @DadCooks: Yesterday I made the rather quaint suggestion:

    Buy her a basic book on Java and let her study it and do the exercises in the evenings/weekends.

    I can’t imagine what I was thinking. Buy? A book? That she’d actually have to, you know, like read? Ew! Ew! Ewwww!

    Everything’s available online nowadays, including this:

    Java Programming – Lecture 1

    I assume your daughter has access to a desktop or laptop computer. If Java isn’t already on the machine, let her download and install it. Following that she can use notepad and the command line interface to do her homework,

    A way to get a taste of programming, all for free except for an investment of her time.

    Is she willing to make that investment?

  37. dkreck says:

    I used to use decimal entry for the degree sign. Now it’s just easier to enter 75F and we all know. The path wasn’t important enough to bother with putting that in. WordPress bs.

  38. lynn says:

    “Beto O’Rourke: Democrats dazzled by rising star in Texas”
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45674116

    So if Robert Francis loses by 2 points, the powers that be will run him again. If he loses by 10+ points, he will be forgotten.

    I am assuming that he will lose. And there is a Beto sign in my middle brothers front yard according to my father. My SIL.

  39. dkreck says:

    Lots of online tutorials and documentation for every programming language and everything else you can think of. Even ones like car repair manuals that are copyrighted but you can find it if you look. Lots of code samples. I’ve been known to use a few.

    Yesterday I noted a lack of direct knowledge of women who I thought could program. It’s just my experience, I’m sure there are some out there. The few I’ve met weren’t really any good but neither were a lot of men. I’m sure there are some that could find my methods that they would criticize. Of course I’ve managed to write many applications that required thousands and thousands of lines of code and bring them into production. I’ve also long worked towards clarity and efficiency, not needed so much with many things now due to Moore’s Law but I still strive. I’ve often gone back and cleaned up my own work even when not needed.

    My complaints of many falls in their inability to grasp the problem and lay it out before they start slinging lines of spaghetti at it. One woman I worked with that came up here out of LA wrote unreadable crap. What good is that to others working with her. So anyone can type code but many fewer create solutions. I’ll retire soon and the young ones (of any gender – there are so many now) can take over.

    one to try…
    https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/java/

  40. Greg Norton says:

    So if Robert Francis loses by 2 points, the powers that be will run him again. If he loses by 10+ points, he will be forgotten.

    I am assuming that he will lose. And there is a Beto sign in my middle brothers front yard according to my father. My SIL.

    I don’t see Abbott winning by 15 points (minimum, easy) and Cruz failing to retain his seat — a double digit swing across the aisle on the same ballot. Last night, the San Antonio ClearChannel station had Robert Francis down by 10.

    I am concerned about our stiff Congresscritter, John Carter, getting turned out by MJ Hegar (call sign: “Ambien Eyes”). Go watch their respective ads on YouTube.

    Gillum may indeed win FL, but the Legislature already spent eight years hating on Rick Scott, a member of their own party. A radical Democrat isn’t going to get much done, and Gillum will receive “Come to Jesus” phone calls from Publix and Disney on day one, chilling all the talk of a corporate tax hike.

  41. paul says:

    However you call it Greg, I’m good.

    I’m not a Republican fan. I’ve tended to vote Dem. I also don’t vote for whoever is running unopposed. Heck, almost all politicians are slime.

    Tho when I was a kid I thought Nixon was the bee’s knees and oh, hell, I would have voted for George Wallace is I had been old enough and if he had shown up for his speech in Tillman’s Corner as scheduled. LBJ? White trash. Heh, I was 12 or 13, ok?

    But…. with all the crap since GEPOTUS won and, I doubt I’ll vote Dem ever again.

    Yep. I’m happily one of the deplorable dregs.

  42. lynn says:

    Yep. I’m happily one of the deplorable dregs.

    Me Too.

    GEPOTUS = God Emperor POTUS ???
    https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rkx30/what_does_gepotus_mean_srs/

  43. Nick Flandrey says:

    @harold,

    that’s what happens when you outsource national defense. “oh we don’t need all those manufacturers here, that’s outdated, we’ll simply buy our chips on the open market….”

    Yeah, except for counterfeits, grey market chips, and now actively subversive designs……

    Maybe we should buy all our armor plate from Russia too…

    n

  44. Greg Norton says:

    Yeah, except for counterfeits, grey market chips, and now actively subversive designs……

    My real first job out of college was at Jabil. The novelty of working contract manufacturing wore off after about a week.

    I wasn’t surprised that most of those jobs left the US since actually doing the gig is awful for a EE career, but I figured that something like the Supermicro scandal would happen sooner or later.

    Even in the early 90s, we bought the boards from China and populated them with components at our final assembly floor in FL. “Supermicro” has been coming for a long time.

  45. lynn says:

    that’s what happens when you outsource national defense. “oh we don’t need all those manufacturers here, that’s outdated, we’ll simply buy our chips on the open market….”

    Yeah, except for counterfeits, grey market chips, and now actively subversive designs……

    One of the funniest moments in the Armageddon movie is when the Russian cosmonaut “fixes” the space shuttle taking off from the asteroid:

    “Lev Andropov: It’s stuck, yes?

    Watts: Back off! You don’t know the components!

    Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEkOT3IngMQ

  46. lynn says:

    My real first job out of college was at Jabil. The novelty of working contract manufacturing wore off after about a week.

    Dude, how many companies have you worked at ?

    I am rocking five.

  47. jim~ says:

    After Lynn’s comment the other day about his temp folder, I looked at my windows/temp folder. Gee. 59 Gb of “something”.

    I don’t know if you can do it in Windows past version 7, but the first thing I do is set the admin environment variables such that: %TEMP% = c:temp_all, and subsequently, user JohnDoe = c:temp_johndoe, and so forth. Makes housekeeping a snap.

  48. Nick Flandrey says:

    today I feel like I fell down a flight of stairs. My neck is stiff and sore as is my back, hips, shoulders, and even my hands. Having a dishwasher fall on me as I fell on the stairs might have something to do with it.

    WRT employers, I’ve had dozens but then almost my entire span of careers has been in project work.

    n

  49. Nick Flandrey says:

    This should send a chill down your spine…

    “Linda Dwire, 64, (left) was booked into Garfield County Jail in Colorado on Monday night and charged with two counts of bias-motivated harassment”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6241279/Linda-Dwire-arrested-harassing-women-speaking-Spanish-Colorado-grocery-store.html

  50. Nick Flandrey says:

    And gee, no one could possibly have predicted this…

    “School district’s toilet policy under investigation after ‘girl, five, was molested in the bathroom by a gender fluid student’

    A mother says her daughter was sexually assaulted by a gender fluid student
    She claims the student attacked her daughter in the bathroom, but was only allowed in there because of school policy
    When she complained, she alleges the school called child services on her
    Pascha Thomas has filed a complaint with the Department of Education”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6241723/School-toilet-policy-investigation-girl-five-molested-gender-fluid-student.html

    n

  51. mediumwave says:

    Happy Broderick Crawford Day!

    (Some of you are old enough to get the reference. 🙂 )

  52. Greg Norton says:

    Dude, how many companies have you worked at ?

    I am rocking five.

    Seven professional jobs. After the last month at the current gig, it wont be long before I’m at number eight.

    Lest anyone judge, I stayed at the two telecoms long enough to vest in the pensions and 401(k) plans, and I left both jobs with three weeks notice.

    To answer the question from yesterday, “locums” are medical temp jobs. Even if a skilled surgeon has an interest in living in East BFE, W. VA, chances are that the spouse isn’t interested, and East BFE Memorial Hospital often uses locums in the ER and operating rooms, especially on weekends.

    Rural locums generally pay more out of desperation, and the hospitals usually get grants from the Federal Government to defray the expense.

    Even relatively well off places like Fredericksburg have to use financial incentives to get physicians. My wife’s Prog associate in Vantucky burned the hospital out there for a bunch of money before heading to the West Coast.

    Boys and girls, always get it in writing, especially with Progs.

  53. MrAtoz says:

    10/4 … 10/4!

  54. lynn says:

    BTW, junior programmer reports that the programmer environment at G is one of the worst that he has ever seen. 30 programmers in a room with no walls, no cubicles, just long tables with computers thrown on them. Sheer pandemonium and an incredible amount of noise. There were closed meeting rooms but no camping out in them.

    That’s for the provenance of the synergy of the creative paradigm.

    Okay, they’re being cheap. The expectations of Millennials have been dialed way down since industry flushed most of the X-ers with layoffs or age discrimination.

    BTW, junior programmer says that the minimum salary in that 30 programmer room is $120K. That is a lot of horsepower in that noisy environment.

  55. lynn says:

    I forgot to mention that I got the septic tank cleaned out yesterday at the office. 1,500 gallons of … nasty. The vacuum truck drier mentioned and showed me that the lines were not flushing properly so he threw his water hose in them. Turns out that we are flushing too many … solids. So, he advised me to run more water down the lines, just turn on a faucet for an hour occasionally. Just one of the old engineering maxims, “when in doubt, dilute”.

    The charge was $480. Not bad for five years of poo.

  56. Nick Flandrey says:

    A consequence of mandates in the face of physics. Low flow fixtures don’t have enough flow with code required slopes.

    IIRC several cities in EU pump water into the sewers to make up for the water that no longer flushes…

    n

  57. Greg Norton says:

    BTW, junior programmer says that the minimum salary in that 30 programmer room is $120K. That is a lot of horsepower in that noisy environment.

    That’s pretty standard for The Valley. I made $96k in Seattle five years ago, and I imagine they’re up above the $100k line too right now. Housing costs are the killer.

    Even Austin is getting pricey. Management wants to put together a group of people who do nothing but our installs, but they are living in Fantasyland in thinking that someone qualified willing to do 50%+ travel will take the gig for anything less than six figures.

  58. Nick Flandrey says:

    I was getting $1200/ day plus expenses and per diem food to do traveling technical work 8 years ago. I don’t think there has been much wage growth in my former industry though.

    n

    and now to bed, perchance to sleep for a few hours before bumping my elbow…

  59. mediumwave says:

    Who supplies your servers? Supermicro?
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

    There have been rumors of this for years in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan books.

    Also in Gerrold’s The War Against the Chtorr.

  60. ech says:

    Also in Gerrold’s The War Against the Chtorr.

    Will he ever finish it? Maybe he’s the inspiration for George RR Martin.

  61. Nick Flandrey says:

    I’ve seen various places where he’s claimed to be close to done…. Several years ago.

    N

  62. lynn says:

    I’ve seen various places where he’s claimed to be close to done…. Several years ago.

    Me too. The last time, I realized that he has written books 6 and 7 but cannot get book 5 finished. Probably his son will publish them when he passes on.

  63. lynn says:

    Who supplies your servers? Supermicro?
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

    There have been rumors of this for years in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan books.

    Also in Gerrold’s The War Against the Chtorr.

    Huh, I do not remember that. I need to read the Chtorr series again.

  64. BillF says:

    Lynn, I also had my tank pumped recently. Up here we have to have our septic tank inspected and pumped if needed every 3 years. I don’t know the size but suspect it is 1000 to 1250 gallons. It was $210.00. When we first moved here 20 years ago it was under $100. But after hearing what you had to pay for 1500 gallons, I guess I don’t feel too bad.

    One of the other engineers at work and I like to talk about getting our own pumping business going. There is money in $hit! The guy that pumps ours pulls up in a chromed out Pete with all the bells and whistles. Usually has a Daisy Duke type along for the ride! Good money for 10 minutes of actual work!

  65. lynn says:

    The guy that pumps ours pulls up in a chromed out Pete with all the bells and whistles. Usually has a Daisy Duke type along for the ride! Good money for 10 minutes of actual work!

    Yup, my guy drives a chromed out Peterbuilt also. No Daisy Duker though. But he worked for a solid hour as my system has three 750 gallon tanks: initial, separation, and chlorination. There was some poo in the chlorination tank so he had to clean that out too. Then he checked out the pipes going into the septic tank and washed the office pipe clean to make sure that it was not plugged. He said he is required to do that now.

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