Should be a nice day. [65F and sunny]
Yesterday was cool, bordering on chilly in the morning, rising to very nice in the afternoon and evening. Sunny, a bit gusty, but very nice day.
So I worked outside. Re-potted two trees. Re-potted the last of the new pepper plants. Added soil to both of the big trash bag potato towers. They seem to be growing well. Watered the gardens and potted plants. Moved some grass from the kids’ sandbox to bare spots in the front yard. Don’t know if that will ‘take’ but willing to try for the little effort it took. Cleaned the pond filter box and changed the media. Pond looks nice with a bunch of lily pads and one (remaining) goldfish. The goldfish that went walkabout got his final resting place today too. He’d been in the fridge while I waited to see if the kids were going to need a full funeral for this one. Nope. So under the other fish’s marker he went. Moved a bunch of saplings in pots out of the raised bed to get ready for whatever I can still plant. I’m thinking root veg. Carrots did well, so did turnips, and they store well, and freaking squashes and beans do not.
The cabbages are doing well. The broccoli is spindly and weak. The collards are still alive but not really growing. On the other hand, I’ve got budding fruit on the orange and grapefruit trees. That’s a first for the grapefruit since the year I planted it. The lemon and limes look ok too. The peach is finally almost leafed out, and the pecan tree is too. The blueberries continue to ripen, what few there are. Still, they are fun for the kids.
Nothing in the window boxes from the radishes, turnips, and beets yet. Planted the onion starts and they look good, and planted some lettuce. Never had any luck with lettuce, so we’ll see how it does. Ate one golf ball sized tomato with dinner, one left in the fridge. That would be typically all I get before the heat stops tomato production. Harvested a couple more sweet peppers off the old plants.
I’ve got material to build another 12 ft of window box for the fence, and some still needs new dirt and seeds. We’re supposed to have some clear days so I’ll be in the driveway working on that.
Meanwhile, the fridge in the garage is emptying out. It has more empty shelves right now than in the last 10 years. I guess I should clean it… Freezer is still full, and the chest freezer too. Kitchen fridge is starting to empty, freezer is still full. Weird seeing the stocks dwindle way past the point I usually fill things back up. I haven’t had this few eggs on hand in years. I may move some other stuff to the fridge to extend shelf life. Or depending on conditions, I might make a store run. Sure don’t want to.
Dinner was frozen fish fillets, buttered, seasoned and baked, with asparagus chopped and saute’d in butter with onions and a splash of soy sauce, canned corn, and warmed up hawaiian rolls. Yum. I had my leftover personal pie under ice cream, and the kids ate Easter candy.
I slept late and woke more rested than I have in many days. I hope that continues.
Stay in, stay safe.
nick
(oh, I noticed that my keyboard is both filthy, and I’ve worn the satin finish off the keys to the underlying shiny plastic. They’ll be even shinier when I clean the freaking thing.)
Sara Hoyt’s article, Modeling COVID 19 and the Lies of Multiculturalism, was quoted and discussed at length on the Rush Limbaugh Show in his third hour yesterday. It is behind a pay wall, but the article is worth the price of admission.
I was just reading a couple of posts on reddit. People who lost their jobs to COVID, and were stating their intent to stretch out any benefits as long as absolutely possible, because they don’t want to actually have to work.
I heard the same thing almost 10 years ago sitting at the pool at this resort in FL, from a couple of guys at the next table over, discussing how they were at the end of their extended Great Recession unemployment benefits and facing having to go back to work. These were *guests* who had maxed out their unemployment — 18 months (?).
https://tween-waters.com/beach-cam/
Not extremely expensive, but not where you’d expect to find two guys collecting unemployment benefits, even in FL in 2010.
I don’t think the benefits will be as generous this time around. And the a**hat factor is higher, especially in tech-heavy areas — read between the lines of this story.
https://www.fox7austin.com/video/673592
SXSW cancelled. Company holds bacchanalia anyway. Everyone in company gets sick.
I’ll bet they have “unlimited” vacation and daily catered lunches. VC-funded accelerator according to the website — nothing actually useful.
The other “Austin” news fun yesterday.
https://www.fox7austin.com/video/673586
12 at the Salvation Army. I’m shocked. Shocked!
Pay attention to the images of the temporary housing for the homeless while the Salvation Army is closed for cleaning.
Well, I don’t get my unemployment this, or actually any week. Making what I do at the church over qualifies me for benefits. I sort of knew that going into the process but I had to try.
The site that TN uses is incredibly poorly organized and confusing. When I first applied I did list all my income as requested. I was informed I was eligible for $32.00 a week even with the income I reported. But when filing weekly and inputting that same information I am disqualified for that week as I made too much money that week. Why the disparity I do not know. The income that was input for the weekly was exactly what I input when I applied. This is a function of a poorly designed web application.
The site is so bad it will not work with the Chrome browser. I try to sign in on Chrome and get a page that the session has timed out and I must log in again. I log in again, same message. I have cleared all the cookies for the website so I don’t know what the site is using to determine the session has expired.
These sites are built, or approved, by state government employees. It is obvious these people are not up to the task as they have failed to test properly. Or just don’t care.
Does not really matter to me anymore. I will never qualify for weekly benefits even though my subbing job has been shut down. I will not be using TN’s unemployment site again.
And in other news my stimulus money is in my account. Arrived yesterday evening via ACH, posted late last night. Effective date is supposed to be tomorrow but my credit union posts ACH items a day early.
When I worked at the bank in San Antonio the bank received massive ACH transactions twice a month due to the military. Back then (1980’s) the data arrived by magnetic tape from some other facility. Regulation E stipulated the money had to be available by in the account by bank opening on the effective date. This caused the bank problems as the software they used (purchased) for the demand deposit accounts would only post transactions on the effective date. These batch posting runs were only done at night thus causing ACH transactions to not be available on the effective date.
I was tasked with finding a solution. One option was to take the information from the tapes and redo the tapes moving the effective date back one day (or more if a weekend). That was problematic as the bank generally received four or five data tapes for military payroll. That limit had to do with total counters (I seem to remember they maxed out at $9,999,999.99) in the batch headers for the batch on the tape not being large enough to handle amounts. It was also determined by the legal team that changing effective dates changed the transaction and that would be illegal.
My solution was to create a negative HOLD on the account that expired the same day it was posted. I had to write a program to scan the ACH tapes to get the accounts and amounts. Then create and post a negative hold to the account. Management thought it was brilliant and it did indeed work. Fortunately the banking software would allow negative holds on accounts as that is how it handled cash deposits until the deposit ticket batch processed at night.
My solution did require a minor modification to the ATM software, which was written in-house, to account for the negative hold amount and actually show the correct balance.
The site is so bad it will not work with the Chrome browser. I try to sign in on Chrome and get a page that the session has timed out and I must log in again. I log in again, same message. I have cleared all the cookies for the website so I don’t know what the site is using to determine the session has expired.
Try IE if you still have a machine around running a copy.
When I left CGI two years ago, that was still the preferred browser for testing our web apps. CGI did a lot of state government work, mostly managing the outsourcing overseas.
I used EDGE without any issues. It is just unfathomable to me that a website would not check it’s operation on different browsers.
+1
We’ve used a local management company for 30 years on our property in Leavenworth, KS.
King tRump the First 2020! “I have absolute authority to open the States”
It’s there even in Win10. You just have to hunt it down on your disk.
The directory is there.
I’ve had to do this more than once for websites using old MS backends that refuse to die.
I used EDGE without any issues. It is just unfathomable to me that a website would not check it’s operation on different browsers.
Sounds about right for a CGI project.
I worked on a system for private customers which still used Java applets in 32 bit IE for the front end. 2018.
My project management, legacy AMS going way back to their days in that HQ on the hill above the Potomac, uncorked a bunch of bitterness about CGI when I phoned him to give notice. Those guys got hosed worse in that buyout than my division did at GTE in the Verizon “merger”.
The MSM needs to make up its mind. Just last week they were railing against the few states that still hadn’t issued stay at home orders. Now, this week, they’re all about how each state is different and should have different timelines for opening things up. They wanted Trump to shut the country down a couple of weeks ago and now they’re arguing he doesn’t have authority to open the country up.
They have. Trump is wrong no matter what.
Komrad Bernie: “I’m asking all Dumbocrats, Independents and some Redumblicans to vote for Plugs Biden.”
Does he really think Indys will vote Plugs? I’m sure Indys hate tRump, but at least they know who they are getting. And he’s gone forever in four years. Even Shot Girl is not on board. Yet. Plugs will slide even further Left to get her. More lame promises and then, if elected, drop them all and try to become Obola 2.0.
The MSM is always foolish, with no memory for what they said only yesterday, much less last week. OTOH, Trump is busy destroying his own credibility, even for people like me who are more-or-less on his side.
“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”
Um…guess again, big boy. Executive/Legislative/Judicial? States rights? Constitution?
“This is a very brilliant enemy, you know. It’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics, you see? Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is… the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it!”
That’s almost Biden-level incomprehensibility. Plus, in the current situation, he absolutely ought to know the difference between a virus and a bacterium.
Seriously, I think he’s losing it. Whatever “it” is…
Oof, I think my thesis of ‘herd immunity’ is screwed:
https://komonews.com/amp/news/coronavirus/seattle-researcher-debunks-theory-covid-19-spread-in-calif-in-november
To be clear, I still believe in ‘herd immunity’ but if the virus has only been hanging around for a few months the population is unlikely to have achieved the critical mass needed to provide broad protection.
Or indeed, whether an asymptomatic case even provides protection!
I’m a little behind reading this site, and am catching up over morning coffee. Good thing I didn’t have a sip before reading this. Just a random comment?
Still snickering, and surprised no one else commented. Post diurnal award!
Day 25: How Bad is It? 🙂
Mister Rogers put a sign on his lawn that said, “Stay out of my neighborhood”.
There was a meme…
n
Austin went off the deep end this morning, mandating the mask kabuki.
https://www.chron.com/news/local/article/Austin-Travis-County-extends-stay-at-order-to-15199290.php
Am I understanding the unemployment benefit…
Entry-level unskilled warehouse workers at my employer make, on average, $13/hour. That comes out to $520/week. Our state max on unemployment is half your weekly income or $440 (whichever is less). So, standard unemployment for one of our warehouse workers would come out to $260/week. However, add in the $600/week in federal stimulus unemployment and they’ll get a weekly check for $860. So, employed they’re making $27K/year. Furloughed they’re making $45K/year?
Uncle Sam is incentivizing everyone who makes less than about $55K/year to just not work.
I get that all the time. As I should, because I’m an engineer and that’s kind of in the career description.
It becomes problematic when all of the proposed solutions are shot down for one reason after another, usually reasons which either boil down to feewings or which reflect constraints which were not conveyed to me. “I don’t want to use either of those tools because they both run on Java and I don’t want that on the server.” (Not because of security concerns, just because he doesn’t like the Java programming language, which doesn’t even have much to do with the Java Runtime Environment.) Or “I don’t want people to have to learn another programming language to use that continuous deployment tool,” which would be fine except that they’d already rejected every other tool which would suit the needs. “I don’t want to have to pay the $200/year license fee for that. Why don’t you just write something?” (When I point out that my time during the day is limited and consumed by other things and then the boss says “You’re salaried so I expect you to put in whatever time is needed”, that’s the cue for me to start looking for a new job.)
Impossible constraints are also fun, and it’s very fun to explain to the manager or customer or sales guy (who just made a big promise to land a big deal) why they can’t have both X and Y. Even if it’s not technically impossible, what they want won’t fit with the current system or it needs big bucks to upgrade the hardware or it needs three people for a year to update the code base to use a newer version of a programming language which has the new feature the boss heard about from a colleague. Fun.
Since the Governor promised that sweet sweet gov money to “gig economy” and self employed, I figured I’d try to sign up. After all, my sales are 0 and I’m not going to anyone’s house to put in cameras any time soon….
Lots of data entry before you even get to the disaster question, which obviates some of the data entry. (and yesterday the site was so slammed I kept getting logged off on timeouts.)
Finally get to the end, after finding no provision for self employment as a job, I discover that they will require, within the next three days, my 2019 complete 1040 along with schedules C, F or SE. None of which are done, because IRS extended filing deadlines. I can FAX it to them if that’s more convenient.
And, I can’t complete the verification process for receiving electronic notifications, because the link they sent FAILS on their end.
“Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to apps.twc.state.tx.us:80. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG”
–the token is 30 characters.
Submitting the link with IE gets different errors, telling me to enable TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, and TLS 1.2 (which are already on)
I think, no sweet gov money for me.
n
Getting new carpet installed throughout the house. We are moving the furniture and removing the old carpet ourselves. Saves some money but most importantly allows us time to fix some floor squeaks. The entire process is turning out to be a lot of work. Disposing of the old carpet and pad requires loading into the truck and a trip to the landfill. Carpet is heavy. Stuff has been in the house 25 years so time to replace.
SSL on port 80? Someone made a mistake.
“someone made a mistake. ”
Low bidder. Clueless oversight.
n
From the very beginning I’ve been cautioning that there was evidence that you don’t get lasting immunity from wuflu…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8217529/Doctors-say-COVID-19-antibodies-not-guarantee-immunity.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8215339/Growing-fear-catch-Covid-19-once.html
–and also that you don’t want to get it because we don’t know what any long term effects might be.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8215567/How-virus-like-one-harm-health-long-youve-recovered.html
–remember the videos I linked for what I’ve been calling sudden drop dead syndrome? there are very similar vids coming out of south korea now too.
This is super double plus ungood.
n
I was unemployed last year and had no issues with the TX web site. I’m sure they are big trouble with the recent rule changes and trying to get the contractors to make rapid changes.
Funny what a near death experience will do to your outlook on life….
“Professional liar” doesn’t feed the soul after all….
n
WRT immunity:
The “common flu” changes itself all the time, that is why last year’s flu vaccine does not work this year. The vaccine is also only a best guess and at best 75%-80% effective. It took “scientists” many years before they figure out the algorithm for the virus change. The trouble is that they are now discovering that the algorithm is changing.
It should be obvious to the most casual observer that the WuHu Flu is a creation of man designed to be constantly mutating, essentially every time it moves to a new host. There is no way to develop any sort of vaccine that will have an effective value, the virus is changing too fast.
This is one cat that cannot be put back in the bag.
During my Master’s program in OR/SA, we all had to take a class called “Industrial Psychology.” In it, we studied various OR solutions presented to company problems (for $$). The number one tenet developed from studying these cases:
“A company wants a solution it can understand, not necessarily the best solution.”
And there were a lot of superior solutions that would have helped the company greatly in the long run. Nope.
Another tenet for companies wanting to maximize profits:
“Go out of business. Pay me.”
Funny what a near death experience will do to your outlook on life….
He’s been there for a while. The “Fredo” nickname gnaws at Cuomo because he knows it is dead-on accurate and has zero to do with racism.
The younger brother imagines himself as Bobby Kennedy at a Camelot 2.0, but Cuomo the Elder might need Robert Francis to win Texas, whether he makes a run this year or in 2024.
The MSM is always foolish, with no memory for what they said only yesterday, much less last week. OTOH, Trump is busy destroying his own credibility, even for people like me who are more-or-less on his side.
“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”
Um…guess again, big boy. Executive/Legislative/Judicial? States rights? Constitution?
“This is a very brilliant enemy, you know. It’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics, you see? Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is… the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it!”
That’s almost Biden-level incomprehensibility. Plus, in the current situation, he absolutely ought to know the difference between a virus and a bacterium.
Seriously, I think he’s losing it. Whatever “it” is…
You know how you tell who is leading the charge ? It is the guy with all of the arrows in his back.
You gotta give Trump a lot of slack. He is leading the charge against the SARS-2, COVID-19. He may not get everything correct but, he is leading. Shoot, I am surprised when he gets half of things correct.
Trump is the most active President that we have had since Teddy Roosevelt. I believe that he is a gift from God to the USA. God uses imperfect people to achieve his means. Just look at the loser that preceded Trump, Obama. That guy was busy giving away the USA to China and NAFTA, just like his predecessors.
I finally finished our federal income taxes last night and efiled them at 3 am. This morning I had an email that the IRS accepted them and that my REFUND is in processing. Sweet, sweet refund. I was really sweating that we were going to have to pay money this year and cash is tight right now.
We made a 40% profit on the commercial property in 2019. My realtor at the time (he passed away three weeks after we closed with a known heart problem at age 71) and my son looked over the numbers with me extensively. We all thought it was a win, win, win when we bought the commercial property back in 2011 and it has been.
I almost had my home at the time paid off and I refinanced it to get enough cash to walk to closing with 46% cash. It was difficult to get a commercial mortgage even with that much cash since I split the property into two parcels.
Now the wife has to do her father’s tax return with his three income streams (social security, army disability, civil service pension) and three rent houses. Two of his rent houses (a duplex) hit one hundred years old last year and the maintenance has really been high for the last couple of years. Plumbing and electrical are tough on older properties.
We got our Paycheck Protection Program loan funded today for the software business. Awesome ! Now I will not have to lay anyone off in May or June. I have had to lay off or fire many people over my 25 years in running a small business. It is always a heartbreak when I have to affect people’s lives. It was especially trying since one of my partners passed away in March. Luckily I have the Power Of Attorney for the business. I’ll bet that I had to submit 300 pages of documentation for the loan.
We still have to be careful and make the payroll, IRS payments, Fidelity IRA, and health insurance payments from the loan account for the next two months. We need this forgiven otherwise we have to start making $8,000/month payments in November.
Day 25: How Bad is It?
Mister Rogers put a sign on his lawn that said, “Stay out of my neighborhood”.
Heh. One of my neighbors put his snow man family up in his front yard. Lights and all. The wife and I applauded him Sunday evening as we were walking in front of his house.
Got the septic tank sprinklers fixed this morning at the new used house. One of the four sprinklers was broken in the ground and created a pond of former poo water in the back yard. The dog kept on running through it and the lawn mower guy sank his mower in it. All fixed until the next time.
I supervised the work as usual. When he opened the lid on the first tank, the sludge tank, a flock ? herd ? swarm ! of mosquitoes came flying out. They had hatched in the two inch thick layer of sludge (poo, toilet paper, etc). Nasty !
I think he’s doing as well or better than anyone else could under the circumstances. I’m surprised he hasn’t made more mistakes. Can you imagine Biden or Hillary handling that press conference every day for 2 hours?
I briefly saw Kimmel laying into him last night based on Fauci’s stupid answer that he since walked back. Fauci is a mess anyway, there’s video of him in Feb saying the China flights shutdown won’t help, then video in March of him saying the shutdown was “absolutely” the right thing to do. And he’s in Hillary’s emails (on wikileaks) saying “we all love her” in reference to Hillary.
Carpet is heavy. Stuff has been in the house 25 years so time to replace.
50% dead dust mites and sloughed off skin.
Nasty !
Dammit, Lynn! You unleashed a swarm of Progressive politicians, didn’t you?
Now I will not have to lay anyone off in May or June.
If you think you will have to furlough anyone with good C++ skills, preferably with a background in Unix shell and/or Python, we have multiple openings and a lot of work. No guarantees, but I get a referral bonus incentive for the resume.
Don’t worry — they won’t want to stay with us when business improves. The first trip out to Taylor will scare ’em sufficiently.
“OPEC, Russia approve biggest-ever oil cut to support prices amid coronavirus pandemic”
https://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/news/2020/04/opec-russia-approve-biggest-ever-oil-cut-to-support-prices-amid-coronavirus-pandemic
Yup, gotta cut supply, demand is down by 40%. And the Texas Railroad commission is meeting today to possibly order the first cut in oil production in Texas in 50 years. The Texas Railroad commission has the power to regulate the percentage of oil that a well can produce in Texas for over a hundred years. It has been set at 100% since 1970 or so.
Dammit, Lynn! You unleashed a swarm of Progressive politicians, didn’t you?
Heh. If only their lives were the same length as a mosquito. Isn’t Pelosi about a 120 years old ?
You gotta give Trump a lot of slack.
I think he’s doing as well or better than anyone else could under the circumstances. I’m surprised he hasn’t made more mistakes. Can you imagine Biden or Hillary handling that press conference every day for 2 hours?
I briefly saw Kimmel laying into him last night based on Fauci’s stupid answer that he since walked back. Fauci is a mess anyway, there’s video of him in Feb saying the China flights shutdown won’t help, then video in March of him saying the shutdown was “absolutely” the right thing to do. And he’s in Hillary’s emails (on wikileaks) saying “we all love her” in reference to Hillary.
I figure that Biden would fall asleep after the first ten minutes at the podium. Hillary would be screaming at everyone after five minutes.
Fauci is a total mess without his ten XXX fifty postDocs standing in front of him. He is just another DC swamper. There are many.
Sara Hoyt’s article, Modeling COVID 19 and the Lies of Multiculturalism, was quoted and discussed at length on the Rush Limbaugh Show in his third hour yesterday. It is behind a pay wall, but the article is worth the price of admission.
“On Losing Respectability” by Sarah Hoyt
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/04/14/on-losing-respectability/
WARNING: she has a NSFW picture at the top of the article
“Meanwhile, while my close friends told me that because I was read by Rush on air, I was no longer respectable, and were joking — particularly as they said I’d no longer be bought by traditional publishing. Which is a forgone conclusion, and also, seriously? I’m not sure there will be a traditional publishing after this house arrest stunt. Their one advantage was placing paper bricks in bookstores. That might be gone now — there were comments elsewhere on social media that said that and were serious.”
“By having one of my pieces read on air by an icon of right of center media, I was beyond the pale.”
“My answer to that is what Portuguese fisherwomen did — and I never figured out what it meant, and mom still won’t tell me, so I suspect it’s obscene — which is holding one hand palm up and hitting it with the BACK of the other hand. That for your respectability!”
“If respectability consists of endorsing the Marxist thinking that has killed a hundred million (and probably more) across the world over the last hundred years, I want no part of it. You go on and be “respectable” all you want.”
Nice !
I briefly saw Kimmel laying into him last night based on Fauci’s stupid answer that he since walked back.
None of the three late night hosts will ever back down on Trump bashing ever since Jimmy Fallon touched Trump’s hair during the 2016 campaign and, in the minds of the suits, destroyed the reputation of the “Tonight Show”.
Fallon was on the edge of losing his job after this season but has become a hit on YouTube as of late, posting clips of the show he does from his house on Long Island.
Racist!
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/paul-mccartney-targets-chinese-wet-markets-eating-bats-coronavirus-1290173
FEMA daily update
Was out in the yard.
Added dirt to the potato towers. Those spud plants are growers! Bundled up more of the tree waste from the crepe murder. Pulled a couple of weeds. Sold some masks.
Beautiful day.
n
Starting next week my son’s employer is starting a rolling furlough regime for everyone. 50% of the company will be furloughed each week, the next week they will return and the other 50% will be furloughed. This will continue until the first week of July.
They fired a person yesterday who had administrative access to the servers. So you can guess what happened. Yup, she set a “digital-time-bomb” that brought their servers to a halt, Internationally. They managed to recover overnight. I wonder if they a smart enough to prevent this from happening in the future?
The gooberments; Federal, State, and Local have no comprehension of the problems they have created with this “lock-down.” It is not something that can be “unlocked” as fast as it was “locked”. No matter what, however, they decide to do it it will create cries of “unfair” and “favoritism”.
And what is going to happen when (notice I do not say “if”) a new version of the WuHuFlu emerges?
Nope. It isn’t mutating to any significant degree. Coronaviruses are single strand viruses that are not built like flu virus. Flu virus has 8 sections and if a cell is infected by two flu viruses, they can swap segments. Trying to predict which segments get swapped is hard and that is why sometimes the flu vaccine is not very effective.
SARS-CoV-2 is not manmade or edited. It has too much in common with other bat coronaviruses that have been sequenced. It probably escaped from the research lab in Wuhan, which was known to be analyzing bat coronaviruses. The wet market was not to blame other than a superspreader may have visited.
Not sure why anyone gives a rat’s ass what some so-called late night TV show host has to say.
Same for Rachel. First time I saw her I thought it was a comedy skit. Yeah, I’ve never watched much CNN.
Carson was funny. Don Rickles smashing the cigarette box was insane. Leno wasn’t as funny but Jay’s cool. The rest, when I’ve stayed up that late, are just not funny. Oh hey, like SNL isn’t funny anymore.
Or it’s definitively established that you don’t get lasting immunity, and worse, the second time you get it it kills you with heart failure. Remember when that speculation was coming out of reports from China?
n
@DadCooks – re the fired server admin…. Ya gotta be careful when you are going to fire a server admin. Precautions must be done before the actual firing event – as you (and others here) probably know.
Full backups off-line, permissions changes, credentials changed, etc., done before (or during) the actual firing event. And confidentiality throughout to prevent prior knowledge of the firing before it happens. Along with a document from legal about penalties if there is any current or future damage done by the admin because of the firing.
And those precautions might be important before any firing event, even if not a server admin.
I suspect there could be some legal action against the admin possible for the ‘time-bomb’.
@ech – I appreciate your words that appear to be based on actual science.
The South Korea “reinfection” cases may be due to testing problems. (They had some problems with their test, also.)
Even if immunity fades, vaccines are the long term solution.
And we are going to have to close most loopholes for refusing vaccination. Don’t get vaccinated? Can’t attend public school. Or licensed daycare. Or work in food prep/service or cutting hair or medical facilities.
ech, I don’t care what the science says. I’m going to continue calling it the Chinese bioweapon because it annoys right-thinking people (in which both “right” and “thinking” should be in sneer quotes) and you can’t stop me!
(But other than that I agree with you. But shhhh!)
Starting next week my son’s employer is starting a rolling furlough regime for everyone. 50% of the company will be furloughed each week, the next week they will return and the other 50% will be furloughed. This will continue until the first week of July.
Our upper management has been working on something in the office for the last couple of weeks while the rest of us “sheltered in place”, working from home.
We have an “all hands” web meeting tomorrow. My guess is something like the plan at your son’s employer might be coming our way. The HR schemes are never original.
OTOH, Austria lifted certain restrictions so we could hear some kind of plan to return to business as usual … or as usual as Austin/Travis County will allow.
I doubt Williamson (Round Rock) County, where we live, will extend the shelter-in-place since the Judge himself got caught violating it in a huge way.
If anybody is interested, the reason my son’s employer has to furlough people is two things that are gotchas.
First, they rely on “just-in-time” supply for everything.
Second, the metals they use are 100% from China.
So they can, at best, build a small percentage of the product they usually produce, IF they can get some critical Titanium tube (not easy to get domestically without a contract), as well as other parts.
Just another case of senior management in their Ivory Tower, who have never really done of a lick of real work, have to follow all the Business Lemmings of the cliff at the expense of the worker-bees. Sure the spreadsheet looks good for “just-time” and “cheap” Titanium (also of inferior quality), but the realities and past failures of business need to be heeded.
Ok, last Monday at about this time Missy gave me a funny look, sat down and had a fit of some kind. Foaming at the mouth and thrashing. Then she woke up, sort of, and we slowly went to the house.
More spells. White gums….
She was mostly gone mentally around 9PM. Sort of still responded to petting and feet tickles until about 2AM. Stopped breathing the next night around 11PM.
Asthma? Allergies? Heart attack? I don’t know.
It’s been a looooong week.
But enough about me.
Penny is “not right” as expected. Missy was born in January and Penny in October. Penny-poo is missing Missy.
Oh, how? P-p hasn’t been in the rocker recliner since. Or on Missy’s bed. Zero interest. She’s actually going to bed on her bed. Getting on Missy’s bed and on the chair was a thing to try to bother Missy… Penny HAD to be first out the door, too. Missy didn’t care. Missy let Penny be “big dog” and “queen of the pack”. It was interesting to watch.
I’m missing watching the interactions. Oh, but in a few or several months, there will be a puppy. Which will be fun.
I’ve always said every dog is different. I seem to be correct.
Actually quite clean underneath. I was surprised. When my son had carpet replaced in his house there was a pile of dust and crap that the carpet installers swept up, said it was normal. We did not experience any of those issues.
I think a lot of that cleanliness was due to the Roomba vacuum that runs every day. I have always vacuumed a couple of times a week with a big vacuum. Wife has the carpet cleaned at least once a year by professional cleaners. The Roomba filled up every day when we first started for about a month. Now it fills up every couple of days, mostly dog hair.
Indeed. When I was working for the credit union I had developed an ACH warehouse program as the current vendor did not warehouse transactions, something I railed against on many occasions. About six months after I left the program failed and allowed no ACH transactions to process. CU discovered the failure after almost a week of no ACH processing (yeh, another issue).
One of my former staff called me and asked how to fix the issue. I basically said “not my problem”. A few days later I get a letter from a lawyer accusing me of sabotaging the system and that I owed the credit union thousands of dollars in damage. The letter demanded I pay immediately or face legal action. I wrote back telling the lawyers to prove it. Show in the code where there was a “time-bomb”. I also said I had my copy of the code as it was when I left and any changes would be readily apparent. Never heard back. I think the CU just quit using the program as I heard a few months later they got in trouble with NACUA for posting transactions too early, sometimes several days before the effective date.
Trump stops funding WHO. Excellent. Without U.S. support the organization will probably fold. Next the U.S. should stop funding The United Nations and kick them out of the country or charge reasonable rent for the building, make them provide their own security.
I finally have the truck running. Still messing with enabling auto door locks. It’s nice to have silly things like turn signals and brake lights and dome lights working. WTF, all this fuss to save at most twenty pounds of wire?
It seems there would be a reset to factory option but I haven’t found it. Like, for the next owner….
The license plates expired the end of January. So I have to do the BS of getting it inspected. Er, I have to go to town to see if the inspecting place is even open. But, yeah, all of 40 miles maximum so far this year.
The weather forecast looks to be decent on Thursday. I need to get feed for the lone emu. A trip to Tractor Supply is due, also, for cat food. All ok for dog food… for some reason.
Reminds me of an incident that happened early in my career, back in the mainframe days. I was working as a jr. Programer for a regional bank, when one Monday morning the DL2 accounts db was gone, deleted! It took two days to recover and do forensics. Turned out that a couple of years before, a senior db admin had put a check in the weekly payroll run. If his name didn’t appear in the hourly pay list, then the routine would delete the accounts db. This was his revenge if he ever got fired. But he got promoted instead, moved from hourly to salary, so his name didn’t appear in the hourly payroll and the revenge routine triggered. Needless to say he didn’t enjoy his new position long.
Fascinating!
Agree – a family member was watching it. I sometimes try to point out the factual errors but they don’t believe me and never do the research to find out.
Amazes me how the left *completely* trusts the TV & celebrities.
I also note that youtube has stopped recommending #walkaway videos.
@Nick, here is a web comic you might like !
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2020/04/11
They fired a person yesterday who had administrative access to the servers. So you can guess what happened. Yup, she set a “digital-time-bomb” that brought their servers to a halt, Internationally. They managed to recover overnight. I wonder if they a smart enough to prevent this from happening in the future?
Oh, some people in law enforcement might call that a terrorism felony.
In all my years of working for companies and doing coding I would never consider doing such. It is foolish, illegal, childish and will affect any further career opportunities.
When I worked at the bank in San Antonio I had added some code to the operating system. The code had to do with printer backup files and the numbering. I was the only one that understood the code as I was the only one that understood the assembly language used to create the module. I was also the only one that understood how to integrate the module into the operating system.
I was also responsible for the online teller system, the online account system, and the ATM system. I maintained the software for the online system. I wrote and maintained the ATM and PULSE interface software. I had the ability and the resources to do a lot of damage.
Because of this I was always extensively audited twice a year. Once by the bank auditors which included having to provide full financial disclosures. I also got audited by the external examiners in significant detail.
I would always tell the auditors that I was not going to risk my job over a few dollars. The real concern would be the bank opening Monday and being shy $50 million dollars and my last purchase on the bank credit card was an airline ticket to a county with no extradition treaties with the U.S. Auditors never saw the logic of that scenario and would continue to scan for penny discrepancies that I could have caused.
When a new online system was purchased and installed there was better security. Levels assigned to people. Some modules I could not access but the security manager could access. That annoyed me so I would patch the program while it was running to give me access to everything. Then I would get on a terminal, sign on, and change my authorization to everything so it would stay past the next restart. I did modify the reporting program to indicate the permissions I was allowed rather than what I actually had.
This was not done for nefarious reasons but to make my support of the system much easier. When problems arose I had to have access to the entire system. The restrictions made that impossible and sometimes problem resolution was delayed significantly. Especially if the problem happened on a Friday evening and the security person was out of town for the weekend. Thus unable to temporarily change my authorizations.
Probably not a wise thing to do in retrospect. But it made my job easier, solved problems quicker, and was beneficial to the bank. If I was discovered I might have been terminated, a thought that did not cross my mind when I enabled the options. But I thought I was more important than I really was, an ego fault.
In all my years of working for companies and doing coding I would never consider doing such. It is foolish, illegal, childish and will affect any further career opportunities.
I’ve wreaked more havoc by departing in a completely professional manner than I ever would have doing something stupid. Kharma catches up with the incompetent management in my experience. I think the Death Star lost the source code for the Linux version of the IBM NetClient among other brain farts.
The last time I saw my CGI member manager was at his new job stocking shelves at Buc-ee’s in Temple last year. Granted, I aspire to clean the mens room at Buc-ee’s, but I don’t think that working there was part of my manager’s life plan.
(Member managers are different than project managers at CGI. Sometimes that’s good, but I considered it to be a negative in my particular situation.)
The only company I quit without notice got bought out by Nokia in 2018 … five years after I left. I doubt I would have made five years with that management to cash out my options, however.
I walked off a job in the middle of the night ( a movie of the week with a really abusive work environment). I had to almost physically restrain myself to keep from formatting the hard drives on the two macs in the production office. I still have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of doing so. If it had impacted the construction coordinator negatively that would have been good for the rest of the crew, and anything that went wrong was going to be blamed on me anyway.
They were very lucky that none of the accidents that resulted from that particular cc’s attitude were fatal. One guy was badly concussed, including loss of consciousness, and one guy was electrocuted and had to be hospitalized for the organ damage. I got the hell out while I still had my wits and my fingers.
n
added- checked the imdb page, and I didn’t get a credit. Funny that I don’t recognize the other crew in the department either. I wonder if the union thugs they brought in eventually got credited while my guys just got hospitalized. The Art Director (cc on this job too) got his daughter a nice credit as Scenic Artist.
I walked off a job in the middle of the night ( a movie of the week with a really abusive work environment).
Movie of the week. My age group was the last to enter high school without cable so I actually remember those.
I just found my other tv special on line and watched a bit of it. Looks pretty good for what it was. I checked the imdb and there isn’t even a cast and crew list, although I know I was credited in the original air on Fox…
Pretty sure none of the MTV stuff I did was ever credited.
I wonder if any of the commercials are out there?
n
ha, here’s one, shot on location in LA, I built props and scenic elements, was onsite for install.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOT24fOKKig
And at 0:38 for a few seconds in this one, you can see some full sized blimp doors I worked on..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFcY2UzE-8o
I worked on a lot of the elements in this Oakley commercial-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWifSqFPvTg
Windows, walls, elevator doors…
n
This commercial was where I learned that plexiglas will burn. We had an 8K watt xenon spotlight shining thru one of the windows for a bit too long. It caught on fire and the fire started going up the window. One of our guys broke the plex with a fire extinguisher then squirted the pieces. Fun times.