Cold. Temps were dropping when I took the garbage out last night, and I expect the cold came back. We’ll see, but I’m thinking “cold”. It was hot and wet, although not actually raining yesterday. Grey most of the day. Might be the same today, except cold…
Did some stuff. Mainly replaced and reconfigured some gear at my client’s house. It should have been quick and easy. It wasn’t. The control system moved from a traditional IDE that any programmer might be familiar with, to a sort of drag and drop web based automagic atrocity. It’s very object oriented. It builds the connections in real time on the fly, based on what you tell it about each of the objects. But you must do it in the correct order, no skipping steps, no editing to make a simple change, deleting the old before it will let you populate the new. And it’s completely opaque and backwards.
Swapping one piece of gear, with only 5 attributes, maybe 6 if you count where it “virtually” lives, with another almost identical piece, with the same attributes should take minutes but it took hours. Edit which IP addy the controller talks too, add the addresses of the connected gear. That’s the OLD way. The new hotness is much more tedious.
The software doesn’t recognize that the hard wired PoE version of the hardware is essentially identical to the WiFi version, just a different IP addy. Had to delete the old, add the new, then re-connect all the virtual patching between the controller, the new expansion box, and the TVs connected to it. Straightforward if annoying. BUT I had to also delete the objects representing the TVs before I could re-add them, so I lost what THEY were connected to. Had I known, I’d have looked and noted the connections before deleting. As it was, my partner had to connect remotely and re-do that part of the setup, and I confirmed that it was talking to the hardware and actually doing the things, there in the rooms. One hour job turned into 4 hours and I needed remote help.
The new hotness is like a straightjacket.
And the gui to do all the attribute setting was designed by mac fanbois, so no scroll wheel, no right click context menus or drop downs. Instead of window sliders, you have to click and flick to move the lists and they move OPPOSITE the way you’d expect. To add injury to insult, all the icons are unique to the app and don’t have tool tips, it’s all done in shades of grey, and the visual clues like highlighting, “busy” indicators, etc are either very subtle, or positioned in dumb places.
I’ve used other software to configure and “build” virtual control systems using drag and drop, graphical tools. Drop your component on the drawing, edit its attributes, draw lines to connect it with other “blocks” or components to describe interconnections and signal flow. Very discoverable. Very intuitive. Like using Visio, but the blocks all are hardware or hardware modules and they all actually do something when the drawing is ‘compiled.’ This POS has none of that. Reinvent the wheel. But this time, it’s square, and only rolls when the surface it contacts has the right shape.
Bah. I’m not a programmer for reasons that should be obvious. We got it done, and my client is back up and running again. Fighting the tools is teh sux tho.
————-
Today I’ve got some pickups to do. There is lots of stacked up domestic bliss waiting too. Should be a full day. Longer and fuller if it’s raining.
But I’ll have some more stuff for the stacks, some more hobby stuff, and some more radio stuff both to use and to sell. Those are good things.
Kinda like stacks. Good to have. Useful.
nick
Today
Yep, don’t we all 🙂
– – – – –
In other news, emergency root canal this morning. What fun. At least the tooth hurts less now. Shouldn’t hurt at all, given that the nerves are literally gone, but what can you do?
Can I go back and kick my teenage self for screwing up my teeth? He probably wouldn’t have listened, though, he was kind of an idiot.
Reminds me of a sci-fi story I once read: Some magical treatment took an old geezer and made him into a teenager again. Turned out that, being teens again, people were just as stupid the second time around.
Hormones don’t listen or learn.
I was right. 45F again this morning.
Bean broth is brewing, lunch is made, females need some more waking…
Other than cold, looks like a good start to the day.
n
The best programmers are ones that go to a client and sit and watch them actually use the code, see how the user interacts. It is too easy when doing coding to lose site of the objective as one can no longer see the forest because of the trees in the way.
When I was at the bank I was in charge of the teller software written by a third party. My job was mostly maintenance and problem solving. One day I sat on the teller line for the entire day. I saw a teller entering a $20 withdrawal as 2000, two extra keystrokes and certainly looked like more than $20. I then watched a teller enter “35.00” and the system rejected the entry because of the decimal. Another screen with eight input spaces required “00002000” to properly register $20.
Over the next week I wrote a routine to front all input boxes. Numbers could be entered in almost any fashion and the code would figure out what it should be. $20 could be entered “$20.00”, “20”, “00000020”. Two thousand dollars could be entered as “2,000”, “2,000.00” or “2000”. There was a short learning curve to get the tellers to not enter “2000” for $20. Most figured it out in less than a day.
Teller line productivity went up 15%, errors dropped to a fraction of a percent. Everyone was elated. Except the software vendor. I, or rather the bank, sold the code to several other banks using the same software. They all really liked the addition to the teller software. The vendor got wind of the software.
The software vendor contacted the bank and asked for the software. The bank said no, but would sell the vendor the software. The bank named a price of which I was not told, and the vendor told the bank to pound sand.
On the next major release of the software there was somewhat functional code to do what I had done, but not as well, nor as thorough. My code performed much better, and faster than the vendor’s code. We ripped out their code and put my code in instead. The other banks did the same. The software vendor considered me not a friend.
Coders forget they work for the user, not the other way around. The user is the ultimate recipient and the code should work for the user, not the other way around. Getting the user’s input, suggestions, ideas is always a good thing. It makes the user feel involved and that someone is actually listening. A valuable lesson I learned at the bank that served me well on other projects.
Over the next week I wrote a routine to front all input boxes. Numbers could be entered in almost any fashion and the code would figure out what it should be. $20 could be entered “$20.00”, “20”, “00000020”. Two thousand dollars could be entered as “2,000”, “2,000.00” or “2000”.
One of my first assignments when I was learning to code (in the late 60s, in FORTRAN II on an IBM 1620, no less!) was to parse numeric input strings. Alas for my lost youth! 😉
@lynn, just looked in my kindle library, and you are responsible for me buying about 66 books this year.
Dang.
Expensive habit.
Better than drinking though.
n
The banking system code was originally written for IBM systems and ported to Burroughs systems. The entire package was written in COBOL. Apparently IBM systems did not have string manipulation instructions and parsing a string required much looping code.
Burroughs systems had instructions specifically for parsing strings, Scan Delimiter Equal (SDE), Scan Delimiter Unequal (SDU) where the delimiter could be several characters or just one character. Scanning to the end of a number was easily done with one instruction. Not so with IBM which required a loop consisting of comparing (maybe multiples), incrementing, checking for bounds, then comparing again. Scanning a string of 10 character would require 30-500 instruction executions rather 1 instruction execution for Burroughs.
Of course, since the system was written in COBOL, the language constructions were the same. The generated code to accomplish the task was the difference.
I know a lot of strings in C are delimited by the NULL character. Back in 1972 we had the Gumball (NULL), giant Gumball NULLNULL, and the Giant Giant Gumball (NULLNULLNULL) to delimited records on the personal system. The records were variable length and the Gumballs were used to delimit the end of records, files, or entire folder.
We also implement dates as numbers representing the number of days since January 1, 1900 with the decimal part being the time in seconds. We mostly used dates so most fields were just integer fields.
What I don’t know is if these techniques were spawned by other software and hardware vendors or if 1972 was before their time. Honeywell and IBM existed as I used those systems. Did DEC with their VAX system precede that? Did Unix exist before then in a usable form.
Who came first, the chicken or the egg? Or who came first, Bill or Monica?
@Ray Thompson
“The software vendor considered me not a friend.”
Better than most medals
“Coders forget they work for the user, not the other way around. The user is the ultimate recipient and the code should work for the user, not the other way around. Getting the user’s input, suggestions, ideas is always a good thing. It makes the user feel involved and that someone is actually listening. A valuable lesson I learned at the bank that served me well on other projects.”
Omit the last sentence, and engrave it on a plaque for every coderspace.
First program I remember, other than a parser for a text adventure game on my trash 80, which was just if then statements.. was a bubble sort. When I got it to work, I went back, cleaned it up, and made it recursive- that’s called ‘refactoring’ now, right? That was on apple II in high school, or maybe jr high.
Then I spent a week at summer camp fighting compiler errors, extra spaces, missing commas, etc. for pascal on a mainframe at Bradley university. After that, I didn’t do much programming.
Poked at the DG in my college engineering program, while messing with my TRS-80 model 100- the worlds first notebook computer…
Tried to learn some python 20 years ago.
Until the compiler can take natural language, and ignore minor syntax errors, I’m outie…
n
Numeric input strings can be parsed using a finite state machine–not that I knew what an FSM was back then, of course. Nowadays I suspect the young’uns would just fire up a regular expression.
I had salespeople from both Cisco and RSA (as in the RSA encryption algorithm) try to convince Death Star management to fire me after I caught them on something bad.
The attempt by RSA almost worked with my last manager. Think Fat Bastard’s less personable cousin and you get the idea of what I was dealing with leading to my exit from the Death Star.
I never directly witnessed my manager try to eat Verne Troyer, but I wasn’t around him 24/7 so it may have happened.
A regular expression is still a finite state machine. Addition of a stack takes the machine outside the DFM/NFM circle in the classic “Barber of Seville” diagram.
I lived three semesters of that material, one undergrad class and two grad.
I was almost mulcted by the CS department in WA State to pay half of the professor’s salaray for a fourth class out of Sipser’s text, but I declined that “opportunity” for self improvement.
A regular expression is still a finite state machine.
I’ve since learned that, but back then I had to craft my own FSM without realizing that that was what I was doing. Fun times!
Pushdown autonoma is the next circle out in the diagram, which adds a stack to the FSM.
You cannot use a finite state machine to decide that a string has a number of ‘a’s, followed by the same number of ‘b’s.
ab, aabb, aaabbb, aaaabbbb, aaaaabbbbb, …
However, accumulate the ‘a’s on a stack and pull an ‘a’ off the stack for every ‘b’, and you can make the decision if the string is “legal”.
My fight is I realize I work for the user, but the sales weenies want kewl and flashy and don’t care about useful and practical. I fight frequently with the sales type.
Anyone wanting to learn the gory details of finite state machines can go here:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-404j-theory-of-computation-fall-2020/
I’ve had three classes covering the class material up through Lecture 16. I saw Lecture 19 in person three weeks ago.
MIT works their students hard. ACM used to require at least some exposure to the material in the class for CS program accreditation.
Digging further, I’ve not seen Lecture 10 and 11 material first hand.
I was fiddling around with a LeetCode problem that required parsing regular expressions. Not the whole range, but definitely some difficult bits. For example: “a*b*c*a” should match with “aaa”. I got stuck, but maybe going back and treating it as an FSA would do the trick. Dunno. I’m getting my programming jollies with AdventOfCode for the moment.
For those who know it, I taught SpringBoot today. Gawd, do I despise frameworks like that. When I put the lecture together, an update came out that broke a couple of my examples. I fixed that. Since then, another update has come out, breaking the core code students are supposed to use for a project. For this semester, I’ll just suggest they not use the latest version, but: haven’t those idiots every heard of “backwards compatibility”? Geez…
My fight is I realize I work for the user, but the sales weenies want kewl and flashy and don’t care about useful and practical.
– back when I was still working for Canadian bigcorp, they didn’t understand that the customers were MINE, not theirs. Yeah, I’m the field service and install guy not sales or engineering, but I’M the guy sitting with the customer for a month of 12 hour days. I’m the guy he calls when his room is down. I’m the guy he trusts because he can see me and eats lunch with me, and knows I won’t lie to him because of years of relationship…
I always thought of myself as working for the customer to give him a tool to further his business goals.
When I left, the customers left too. Within six months the Canadian group exited my market. To be fair, the company was a manufacturer, and didn’t really understand Design Build.
n
I started serious work with IBM 1401 assembler, dabbled in FORTRAN, moved into COBOL, then ALGOL, Burroughs Assembler, Burroughs BPL, wrote a couple of compilers along the way, dabbled in MSBasic building a program that built a MSBasic program, then DELPHI a Pascal type language, moved in to ASP, with the last major languages being ColdFusion and SQL.
I played around C and C++ and decided that those were write-only languages after having to modify someone else’s code. My results were not much better, even with comments.
At the bank for a few months I dabbled in CICS, VTAM, RCAF, and some other acronyms I don’t remember. What I found surprising was the VTAM was nothing but a bunch of macros that generated huge IBM assembler programs. For a large network it was a couple hundred thousand lines of code. CICS was not much better and the integration with COBOL seemed clunky.
The most enjoyable was ALGOL on the Burroughs B-6*00 series of machines. Created a compiler on that machine to build B-3*00 code. A large compiler consisting of about 32K lines of code that would compile in about 3 minutes as ALGOL was a single pass compiler.
Input is still an issue.
My microwave (Hamilton Beach, i.e. China) has a timer for the power, and also a kitchen timer.
The power on timer works right to left: “3” is 3 seconds, “33″is 33 seconds, “330″ is 3 minutes & 30 seconds.
The kitchen timer works exactly the opposite, left to right: “3” is 30 minutes, “33” is 33 minutes, “330” is still 33 minutes. You have to enter “033” to get 3m & 30 seconds.
Way overcooked some tortellenis before I realized.
Construct the NFA and then convert that to the DFA. I count 11 states possible in the DFA, but it should simplify to something smaller.
I’m sure there is a trick. If not, that would be a 30 point problem on a test with a lot of partial credit if I ran the class.
The most enjoyable was ALGOL on the Burroughs B-6*00 series of machines.
Definitely the high point of my “career” also!
My bank likes to mess with the UI, maybe striving for that “new workspace effect”.
Once they changed the bill pay, from left-right, to right-left with no implied decimal.
My DSL bill went in as something like $1258.00 instead of $125.80. Frontier reluctantly returned the overpay … three weeks later. I am lucky it wasn’t $12,580.00 I suppose.
They changed it back, very quickly, I suspect I was not the only one to get burned.
I am a lot more careful now.
“FEMA response to NC hurricane victims weathering snow and freezing temps is worse than you can imagine”
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/12/05/fema-response-to-nc-hurricane-victims-weathering-snow-and-freezing-temps-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-1507624/
If you are depending on FEMA for anything then chances are that you will be screwed. They are not competent nor do they seem to care.
“Last Biden pardon of student loans could cost $600,000,000,000”
https://www.thecollegefix.com/last-biden-pardon-of-student-loans-could-cost-600000000000/
Will Biden pardon me from my future IRS payments ?
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
It feels good to get this site back to computing and techie stuff, and away from politics.
I am a little surprised that nobody has mentioned analog computing. I’m not the most senior one on this site. I graduated from an EE program in 1968. That’s Electrical Engineering, with a major in electronics. Yup, that’s when we still had light bulbs with thermionic emission. Lee de Forest ruled!
My only computer course was divided between analog and digital computing. As a sparky, analog felt more familiar than punched cards and FORTRAN.
In 1972, I settled here in the desert, and one of my assignments involved an analog computer simulation of an air-to-air missile, which was also analog. This sim incorporated a real guidance section, affectionately called a “hardware in the loop” simulation. The analog computer controlled everything, and substituted for the rest of the missile and its aerodynamics.
There was also a digital computer simulation, but it was limited by the speed of the computer, and had to be run at a fraction of real time speed. This made the use of real hardware impossible. Back then, especially, sims were just that; the gold standard was to actually fly the missile against a target, but that was expensive and fraught with side effects. Hence the hardware in the loop sim.
Eventually, digital computers became fast enough, and replaced analog computers for real time applications.
@lynn, just looked in my kindle library, and you are responsible for me buying about 66 books this year.
Dang.
Expensive habit.
Better than drinking though.
n
Wait, wait, wait, I did not get a single penny from these sales. I must rectify this. Aren’t influencers suppose to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from their followers ?
Heh.
I hit the very end of the Analog era ca. 1979:
I took the last course requiring a sliderule at my JC, and the last course requiring an analog computer at Cal Poly: a tall cabinet with plugs & dials (rheostats?).
Touching the student loan paper which funds Obamacare would be problematic and require a very complex piece of legislation to get around the inevitable court challenges.
We had to pass the bill to find out what was in it. We still don’t know everything.
I was impressed with the targeting computers in the big battle ships in WWII. To take in all that information and produce gun aiming parameters was a true feat of mechanical computing. Wind, ship speed, distance, ship rolls, direction, and several other factors computed the gun angle and direction using nothing but gears, rods, chains and some grease. Amazing mechanical engineering to build an analog computer.
The bomb sites used in the planes were of the same caliber and complexity.
All very hush-hush highly secret stuff. Some of the technology is probably still is classified.
“Take Two Puberty Blockers & Call Me In The Morning? Justice Sotomayor Under Fire For Aspirin Analogy In Oral Argument”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/take-two-puberty-blockers-call-me-morning-justice-sotomayor-under-fire-aspirin-analogy
Sotomayor is a disgrace to SCOTUS.
These kids will call themselves “The Mutilated” in the not so far future.
“US judge says Southwest must face bias claims over free flights for Hispanic students”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-judge-says-southwest-must-202336897.html
“(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Friday said Southwest Airlines must face a lawsuit by a prominent affirmative action opponent claiming a now-defunct program that awarded free flights to Hispanic college students was racially discriminatory.”
I am slowly losing my respect for Southwest Airlines.
Even the Dems are over The Wise Latina and want her to step down before January.
Jackson, occupant of the “Roe” seat, invoked an even dumber analogy, however.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-loving-virginia-transgender-care/index.html
Amazing. She’s playing on the fact that she’s married to a guy so white that the family tree includes a signatory on the Declaration of Independence.
The Marshalls must be taking Kagan out for smoke breaks every half hour since the new term started.
Even with a pediatric ER, you can almost hear crickets chirping around the new Texas Childrens Hospital complex near my house. I know what crazy that building was built to serve.
Biden is going to have to include a lot of hospital group C-suites if he’s going to start issuing proactive pardons to protect Dem interests from Trump and Pam Bondi.
“UPDATE: Manslaughter charge against Daniel Penny dropped”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/daniel-penny-trial-deadlock-jury
The guy is a hero. Instead, NYC is treating him as a predator.
Hint: predators go after the women and the weak. Heros protect the women and the weak.
“‘GOLD BARS’: EPA Advisor Admits ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Funnels Billions to Climate Groups”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/12/06/gold-bars-epa-advisor-admits-insurance-policy-against-trump-funnels-billions-to-climate-groups/
“In a shocking video released by Project Veritas, an EPA official appears to confirm what many have long suspected: taxpayer money is being shoveled out the door with reckless abandon, all in the name of climate policy. The official’s words paint a damning picture of an agency prioritizing speed over prudence, all to sidestep political obstacles. His cavalier attitude suggests that the real motive is not saving the planet, but safeguarding their funding from potential Republican oversight.”
Can a future EPA call these fake awards all back ? Or a DOJ ?
“US judge says Southwest must face bias claims over free flights for Hispanic students”
There must be more to this, a private company can, like individuals, discriminate with their own money if they want to, barring it being a government subsidized activity.
There are all sorts of private student grants & tuition assists for various nationalities and creeds, for example.
Naval Gazing has some neat background on the rise of analog fire control systems in navies:
https://www.navalgazing.net/Fire-Control-Part-1
Note: about the slowest loading website you will run across, don’t despair, it is worth it.
“Will Houston see a serious freeze this winter? Answering that and timing out a wet weekend”
https://spacecityweather.com/will-houston-see-a-serious-freeze-this-winter-answering-that-and-timing-out-a-wet-weekend/
I remember that 7 F record on Dec 23, 1989 very well. It was 6 F in Sugar Land and 8 F in Port Lavaca. I had just left TXU and called my boss back in Dallas with a record -4 F. He replied that they were burning 330,000 barrels (14 million gallons) of fuel oil (diesel and fuel oil #6) a day to make electricity and barely hanging in there. He asked me once again to come back but I said no once again.
My middle brother and I walked out on the sea ice in Lavaca Bay over a quarter mile and suddenly realized that we were standing on ice over ten feet of very cold water. We hurriedly made our way back to dry land.
For my 7th grade science fair project I built an analog computer that multiplied. Two potentiometers to set the two numbers, read the result on a meter. Dad got all the project info and built a neat wooden box for it. We did several of the kind of “boys life” or Popular Electronics projects from the 50s… The hot dog cooker that used 120v ac was scary.
Met one of my long term friends at that fair, he was wearing a blue star trek shirt and had soldered up a digital clock kit.
He went to Rose Hullman and became an engineer, I got weeded out of engineering and ended up in theater. More parties and girls in theater…
n
I worked for the Egghead Discount Ponzi that holiday season. The constant rolling blackouts in Central Florida meant that we had to break out the manual credit card imprinter and bad card list to get the last sales on Christmas Eve.
It is the God-given right of every Floridian to wear shorts at Christmas, even if the temperature outside never got above 40 degrees that day at Tampa Airport, just across the Causeway from the store.
Florida is the future in that most of the homes have electric heat. And that was when Tampa Electric still rocked coal fired generators.
Florida is the future in that most of the homes have electric heat. And that was when Tampa Electric still rocked coal fired generators.
Almost all of the apartment complexes in Texas used electric strip heat back then. We used to have to back our coal units down to ½ power at 4 am when the one million apartments in Dallas – Fort Worth woke up at 6 am and turned on their electric heat, the dispatchers would yell at all 125 power generators, get it ! get it ! get it !. Only about 20 of our 125 generators worked on automatic dispatch, the rest required an operator to get a phone call from dispatch, walk over to the board, and hit that steam valve throttle.
The fun would come when there was a fuel problem and one of our large units would trip offline on the way up. Then 2 to 4 other generators would trip in sympathy as their steam valves opened wide and the boiler could not keep up, trip. Then the rest of Texas would have a few trips also and we would all be sucking wind.
As I posted previously, I bought a set of AirPods (and an iPhone as I was an Android user) hoping to get a hearing aid. Unfortunately, I have had little success. This post is just to provide an update on how it is going.
First, the instructions that came with the AirPods were completely useless – a comic strip in appearance with not a word anywhere. Using a search engine, I got them charged overnight.
Second, they have a Fit Test that you must complete successfully. I failed, repeatedly. I called Apple for support and their Chatbot finally arranged for a visit to my nearest store, a 130 mile round trip. The woman at the Apple store could not get the Fit test to run in her store; the background noise was too high. Her last comment was to return them for a refund.
I got home and cheated the Fit Test. I did the test while wearing my ear muffs that I wear at the shooting range.
Third, the hearing test was quick, too quick, I think. More on this in a line or two. I then had to go on-line in order to figure how to activate the hearing aid feature (app). Success of a sort! I can hear sounds I hadn’t heard in years.
Fourth, this app chirps in the background all of the time. It is a warning the something is wrong according to the search engines but nothing I have done stops the chirps. If I can’t resolve this chirping issue, I’ll return them.
Fifth, the hearing aid app or the hearing test increases the high frequency sound a lot. Way too much; I’m going to take the test again and hope to get a improved hearing aid.
Sixth, the batteries in the AirPods are good for about 5 or six hours. If I am going to use them for hearing aids I’ll have to buy a second set.
Seventh, today and yesterday the hearing aid feature is not working; there is no amplification. The good news is that the chirping is gone. I checked all of the settings, reviewed them several times and can see nothing wrong. Bluetooth sees the AirPods and they are connected. The batteries are charged. I’m completely out of ideas to try next. I’ll keep looking for solutions as when they did work I could hear.
I haven’t retaken the Hear Aid Test as there is no point in doing so if the hearing aid app is not working.
I was an Android user. I have had several Samsung models but most recently I’ve been using Motorolas. I like my new to me iPhone 14. I got the smaller one that fits better, as I hoped it would, in my pocket.
“More parties and girls in theater…”
A pair of green eyes almost got me into geology…
My office Starlink is back up and running. Starlink sent me a complete antenna kit and I replaced the inside router and the outside antenna. It was wonderful seeing the antenna unfold itself and point at the sky. I suspect that the outside antenna was dead since it had ants in it. I now have it mounted on the office north wall fascia board. The mount was $60 or something like that, came with lag bolts and everything I need except a drill and lag bolt driver which I had.
“Biden will leave office as the ‘worst president’ in modern history, according to voters in devastating poll”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14162187/joe-biden-nixon-trump-rating-president.html
Closely followed by Jimmy Carter.
Hat tip to:
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/12/06/daily-mails-headline-and-pic-sums-up-the-biden-years-perfectly-n2404759
Wow, that is a great Doc Brown photo of Biden.
“Cory Doctorow’s story from Radicalized has come true”
https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1h78b6z/cory_doctorows_story_from_radicalized_has_come/
“Yesterday the CEO of an insurance company was killed and I’m wondering if anyone else has read Doctorow’s 4 story collection called Radicalized? One of the stories is about an online rage/support group for people whose loved ones have died after being denied coverage by insurance companies and then someone starts attacking insurance company CEOs….”
And there is “The Rainmaker” by John Grisham (book and movie)
Possibilities for the UHC assassin’s gun (as reported by the DM)
>> Second, they have a Fit Test that you must complete successfully. I failed, repeatedly. I called Apple for support and their Chatbot finally arranged for a visit to my nearest store, a 130 mile round trip. The woman at the Apple store could not get the Fit test to run in her store; the background noise was too high. Her last comment was to return them for a refund.
@Bob, Android fanboy that I am, I very rarely recommend Apple products to friends. And if I do, it’s with the caveat that they are local to an Apple store for access to a Genius Bar. In any case, hope you get your issues resolved.
AirPod update. Lates last night I changed a setting for Noise control from “Adaptive” to “Transparency”. That seems to have been the problem as they started working again.
This morning they are working like they should. I really don’t understand the otpions listed for Noise control; other two prtions are “Off” and “Noise Cancellation”. I report on those after I try them. I first want to research this Setting group.
I’ll repeat this post on today’s thread.