mid 70s and damp…
Got hot yesterday. And super sweaty. No sir, I don’t like it.
Dropped the dog off with friends, cleaned up around the yard, emptied the back of the pickup… maybe I’ll cut the grass.
That’s right, another trip. Just a party on Saturday, the back home Sunday. Lots of the wife’s family, most of them in fact, will be there. It will be strange to see both sides in the same visit. Flying to BOS this afternoon, home late Sunday.
So I’ll be getting groped, unless the power of the small child protects me, and putting my family and myself at the mercy of strangers. Nope, don’t like it.
It looks like it will be a taste of fall, as it’s MUCH cooler than Houston.
The worst thing for me is losing 3 days of getting stuff done.
Oh well, can’t be helped, as I wasn’t going to let them go without me.
I’m taking my tablet and phone, so there might be typos and poor spelling (more than normal) and terse commenting, but I’ll be back home late Sunday.
If I don’t get a post up by 9am Central time, perhaps Rick will open the door and start the day.
n
I’m taking my tablet and phone, so there might be typos and poor spelling (more than normal) and terse commenting, but I’ll be back home late Sunday.
We learned the hard way that my daughter’s Dell caps out at 4GB so it had to be replaced recently when she got into art and drawing in Photoshop.
The upside is that I have another laptop which isn’t something I would worry about losing on a trip so I’m going to install Linux and see how usable that is. My current Linux-only laptop for travel is getting too dated, and it is a load to carry.
I could carry the little dell I set up for my daughter, it’s about the same size and weight as the keyboard/galaxytab combo. The psu is bigger though, and it will want to update at the worst time…
n
I could carry the little dell I set up for my daughter, it’s about the same size and weight as the keyboard/galaxytab combo. The psu is bigger though, and it will want to update at the worst time…
I don’t travel with Windows on personal trips so that avoids the update hassle.
The work laptop wants to update all the time with Microsoft *and* corporate junk, but the company locks those down so we can’t boot anything else except Windows 10.
Their property (or lease IIRC), their decision. If I can’t work because an update bricks the laptop, it is the IT department’s problem. If I’m on the road, I’ll be down at the pool waiting for Fedex to arrive.
(Not actually the pool, but you get what I mean)
We had a couple of geniuses working for us who were sent to Columbia to do an install. They were sharing pix of themselves kicking back by the hotel pool, with drinks and girls, during daylight hours.
Mr. Dumass, we’re looking at you….
n
There is a frost advisory for tonight where I am. The forecast low is 35F but it will drop a bit lower in few places. I definitely prefer the colder weather to the heat. I can always add an extra layer and as a bonus I get more pockets for EDC.
In other news: This week marks 2 months at my new job. I had my 60 day meeting with my boss the other day and all is well. They plan to keep me around. This job is much faster paced than my last one and that has been an adjustment. Now that I’m in my upper lower 50s (or lower mid 50s) (53) I don’t do fast paced as easily I used to but I am keeping up.
@JLP , that’s great news! Doesn’t seem like it could be that long already.
n
We had a couple of geniuses working for us who were sent to Columbia to do an install. They were sharing pix of themselves kicking back by the hotel pool, with drinks and girls, during daylight hours.
We’re trialing a group of install-only engineers right now. The bosses got obsessed with hiring a particular personality type — ex-military, Signal Corps preferred — believing that it would shortcut the process of winnowing out the slackers, but people are still people. Slack dies hard.
Columbia or Colombia? If you’re not paying the risk premium (at least six figure income), in my experience, you’re rolling the dice as far as work ethic with someone stupid/crazy enough to go to Bogata to do an install on the cheap. Kidnapping Americans was the growth industry there for a while.
I had systems in Bogata and Caracas at GTE. Management never got me on an airplane to South America making $40k/year, even in 1999. The only person they hired with that travel on the table in the job interview burned them after the first trip and filed an EEOC complaint with HR when she realized that she couldn’t day trade stocks (it was the 90s, after all) from Caracas.
Yeah, she got away with it. Big but obscure name engineering school diploma — RPI, Leghigh, or Rose Hulman. I forget which. The company liked those, but I never saw them as different than the local state university grads.
Good luck with that. 9am Central is 7am Pacific, and I’m retired. I like to stay up late. Don’t have a reason to get up that early.
I usually get up at the crack of 8:30am (PST).
Cocaine Columbia. These guys blended in better than I would. Same for Nigeria and Tobago. Not the hardest workers. The pay was good, but not good enough to get me to those places.
N
We had kidnap insurance, but I wanted hazard pay too. I didn’t want to go anywhere the host provided transportation and bodyguards. Or the word compound was used.
N
Happy Broderick Crawford Day to all! 😉
We had kidnap insurance, but I wanted hazard pay too. I didn’t want to go anywhere the host provided transportation and bodyguards. Or the word compound was used.
Based on observations I’ve made over 30 years of working, Americans are the only nationality who do as much overseas travel as the multinationals demand without a *lot* of compensation involved, enough to enable what would be a mid-six figure lifestyle at a minimum in this country.
I usually get up at the crack of 8:30am (PST).
I got up at the crack of 11 am this morning due to an urgent bladder alarm. After reading until 330am. I always get a little depressed after a software release.
10-4! 10-4!
“US to Demand Facebook Halt Encryption on Messaging”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/371144/us-to-demand-facebook-halt-encryption-on-messaging
“The letter represents the Justice Department’s latest push to reignite the encryption debate and compel Silicon Valley to create a ‘government backdoor’ into their technology products.”
What part of NO do you not understand ?
nope Greg, they do, maybe you not, but they do
and give me a break, Detroit is worst than Bogota (disclaimer) or Medellin
I was at various sites
Freefall:
“Every now and then I run into something that everyone is supposed to know so there’s no explanation of what it is or how it works.”
I definitely know that feeling! 😀
You know, I was really hoping to get rid of DirecTV at the new used house. The wife is hinting that she would like to keep it for now. DirectTV is still the Cadillac of tv services. Except for rain fade.
Freefall:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm
“Every now and then I run into something that everyone is supposed to know so there’s no explanation of what it is or how it works.”
I definitely know that feeling!
Monday, that URL might be:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3400/fc03340.htm
And that is the story of my life.
“Romney: Trump requesting Biden investigation from China, Ukraine ‘wrong and appalling'”
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/464396-romney-trump-requesting-biden-investigation-from-china-ukraine-wrong-and
Romney, just keep your pie hole shut. You are losing more and more fans with every word you speak against Trump.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
“New video shows severe damage to Interstate 10 bridge at San Jacinto River”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/New-video-shows-damage-to-Interstate-10-bridge-at-14492315.php?cmpid=hpctp#photo-18377664
The Houston metropolitan area is really taking a beating from all of the floods over the last five years. Five 1,000 (or almost 1,000) year floods in five years is really not good. Tax day flood, Memorial Day flood, Hurricane Harvey, May 7, 2019 flood (17 rain inches in 3 hours), and Tropical Storm Imelda. The only good thing is that no one flood covered the entire region except for Harvey.
Wow, I had 8 GB of downloads from my web server yesterday with the new software release. I am getting old, I can remember when that would bring a server to its knees and saturate all internet connections. Now it is just a blip in the load chart.
Now I realize why you never post a link to the current Freefall page.
Good catch, Lynn!
“Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20896908/microsoft-windows-satya-nadella-importance-apps-services-android
“It’s all about apps and services”
Sad, very sad. Especially when I have a business that is mostly built around the Windows desktop.
Monday, that URL might be:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3400/fc03340.htm
Now I realize why you never post a link to the current Freefall page.
Good catch, Lynn!
Yup, I always wait for a permanent* URL.
* There is no such thing as a permanent URL on the intertubes. Here today, gone tomorrow applies very much to any internet content. The only prayer that one might have if a website disappears is that the website might be archived on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:
https://archive.org/web/
I looked at my own website, https://www.winsim.com/ , and it has been archived 341 times on the Wayback Machine, all the way back to 1996.
@Jenny, this corgi video is for you, “Adorable puppy attempts to climb steps for the first time”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt94EYrXuhs
The quadriplegic man and the exoskeleton operated by his brain waves.
Do I need to make the obvious reference to the powered armor in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers?
What part of NO do you not understand ?
Facecrack will comply. Zuckerberg is just putting on a show.
“What If We Stopped Pretending?” By Jonathan Franzen
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
“The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.”
“I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.”
We are all going to die.
Seriously, the human race is incredibly adaptable. We were designed for extreme conditions. If global warming does happen, which I seriously doubt, we will adapt to it. We have adapted before and we will do it again.
Bishop Mittens is all about “God is on my side”.
The more goobermint backdoors into software, the more hacks and leaks there will be.
And, stop with the “we can save Mankind from Climate Ejaculation” by giving millions to the Goracle.
Sad, very sad. Especially when I have a business that is mostly built around the Windows desktop.
I don’t think you have to worry in the short run beyond making sure that your products run under Wine on RHEL (or CentOS) 7/8, but the interns need to get cracking on the Linux ports.
@ayj, yes, Detroit is scary. We were told not to work past 4 so we could be safe at the hotel before dark. There are lots of places I wouldn’t like to be after dark, and some I don’t want to be during the day, but by and large, they are isolated and small.
In the last decade, all the social policies and poor spending choices have come together to destroy many of our cities, and allow a minor part of our population to literally run riot. Nothing like Brazil or Colombia though. Yet.
N
Added, of course having money insulates you from most of the problems, and for the wealthy, there are always nice places.
“Food Crisis 2019: It’s Looking Bad, Bad, Bad at a Global Level”
https://strangesounds.org/2019/10/food-crisis-food-shortage-world-bad-farming-weather-business.html
“The global food system is collapsing.”
“Be ready for food and water shortages. Be prepared for food price dramatic increase. Here some recent shocks on the global food system.”
Fake news ???