09:49 – Barbara just left for the hospital. They’re discharging her dad this morning and transporting him to the Brian Center nursing/rehab facility. It’s one of the best ones available, and it’s where my mom lived for a year before her final illness. It’s also only about a mile from our house, which’ll make it a lot easier for Barbara to visit. Barbara’s sister works not far from it, so it’ll be easy for her to visit as well. No word yet on when Sankie will be released, but it may be this weekend. She’s recovering well, emotionally as well as physically, and told Barbara she wants to go back to their apartment at Creekside Retirement Village. Once she’s off the IV antibiotics, I’m sure they’ll be taking her home.
I was getting low on pipe tobacco, so I ordered five pounds (2.3 kilos) yesterday. It’s a Dunhill My Mixture 965 clone, and it cost me about $27/pound, with free shipping. Years ago, I used to smoke the real Dunhill 965, but Dunhill hasn’t actually produced it for many years. Instead, they license out the name. They’ve done that serially with two or three different manufacturers over the years, and it’s never been the same as the original stuff. The clone I ordered is actually better than the branded stuff from the current manufacturer, which costs about twice as much as the clone. The vendor was backordered for a couple weeks on the clone 965 product, which is fine. I always reorder when I get down to my last pound, and five pounds lasts me about seven months.
While I was on the phone with the vendor, I asked the guy about the possible new taxes on pipe tobacco. He said they were following the matter, but had no real idea if or when these new taxes would come into play. I’ve heard numbers as high as $100/pound in new taxes, and told the guy they needed to keep their mailing list updated on when these new taxes would come into effect so that we could stock up before the price skyrocketed. I also told him that I was in North Carolina and if it really came to that I’d just start growing my own.
Since I was making phone calls anyway, I decided to call DMV to make an appointment to renew my driver’s license, which expires next month. After getting busy signals several times, I finally got through and told the guy that answered that I wanted to make an appointment. He said “just a moment” and put me on hold. Eighteen minutes later, the call disconnected. So I called back, getting busy signals several times, and finally got a person on the line. I told him I’d been dropped after 18 minutes on hold. He apologized and … put me on hold. Fortunately, this time someone picked up after about 15 seconds and made the appointment for me.
I was on a roll, so I decided to call Time-Warner Cable tech support and see if they could do something about the Internet problems we’d been having for several days. They’d gotten much worse by yesterday, and I ended up connected to a nice young woman, who said that my modem had been up for six months and needed to be reset. She verified that we had Internet service and basic cable TV. She said the modem was a TWC Internet + VoIP modem. I explained that we formerly had VoIP but no longer had it. She said, “So you’re talking to me on a phone?” I said, “Yes, but …” She said “I’ll reset your modem now.” I continued “we’re on a third-party VoIP service so if you reset the modem you’ll kill our call”, but I was talking to dead air. I looked down to see the modem lights resetting. Oh, well. The reset worked, and our Internet is now running normally.
I managed to get 30 sets of the LK01 Life Science chemical bags made up yesterday, and 30 sets of the small parts bags. Today I’ll assemble shipping boxes for them and get some finished kits built. Then I’d better start on a new batch of biology kits, because we’re down to 20 or so of those in stock.
Bob, you double posted your paragraph on the TWC modem.
“I always reorder when I get down to my last pound, and five pounds lasts me about seven months.”
How long does it last before it “goes off”?
I bet he keeps his in the freezer, and only has 1 or 2 days worth as “fresh”. Tobacco dries out very quickly unless in a good humidor, and becomes very harsh when it does.
Thanks. I fixed the double paragraph.
As far as tobacco, I used to get five pounds at a time in one-pound bags. I’d stick those in the freezer and take one out when I ran low. That’d last me six weeks or so. Then back last October, I ordered the first five pounds of the 965 clone, which arrived in one large bag. I’d intended to break it down into gallon ziplocks, but I never got around to it, and it’s as good now as it was when it arrived. Tobacco doesn’t really degrade in any reasonable amount of time. As Bill said, the major problem is it drying out, which makes it burn fast and too hot. A sealed plastic bag stops that from happening.
A lot of people age their tobacco (pipe tobacco and cigars) purposely to enjoy the way it changes as the different tobaccos in the blend mingle over time (premium cigars are sometimes aged 12+ years). Stored frozen and tobacco doesn’t really age, but that’s not a bad thing as not everyone chooses to age tobacco. Pipe tobacco, unlike cigars, should never be kept in a humidor. Cigars are ideally stored at 70 degrees (+/- 2 degrees) in a 70% humidity (+/- 2 percent) humidor made from spanish cedar. Pipe tobacoo should just be store in an airtight container at room temperature (though, vacuum sealing and freezing are popular too).
Bob, where do you buy your pipe tobacco these days? Still from Cornell & Diehl?
Sorta related; saw a piece online recently on the new pot that’s out there; man, I’d grow my own before I used any of this stuff:
http://takimag.com/article/has_pot_become_a_hard_drug_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz2SoH9CX7C
No, I gave up on C&D after Craig Tarler died.
http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2012/09/06/thursday-6-september-2012/
I never did hear from them, and they never did ship me any tobacco to make up for the light bags they’d sent. So I decided to buy elsewhere.
Yikes, I was away so long that I missed OFD’s RIF announcement. I have never been RIF’d, but was fired once. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but the biggest one was not seeing the light when I was flown in for an interview during Xmas vacation where all the staff were on holiday and I saw only the impressive brand-new equipment that had just been installed. Why that did not click as beyond odd, is one of the worst perception failings of my career. That job turned into the worst nightmare of my life, but it was bizarrely the best job I ever had. The politics there were, well, downright evil on several levels. After 8 months, I got the same treatment as the guy I replaced. I was told at the strange nobody-around interview, that he was leaving voluntarily—but nothing could have been further from the truth, as we were both fired with no advance warning whatever, and no reason given (he confirmed that to me when I contacted him after getting fired myself). My projects were all advancing with great success, and my main show was very handily beating out CBS on Sunday mornings, everywhere we were opposite them—about 15 of our 40 markets. Meanwhile, I had moved a wife and 2 young kids half-way across the country and had bought a new house that had to be sold after occupying it for only a little more than a year. Oldest kid had to change grade schools for the second time in 2 years. The workplace went totally bankrupt and closed about a year after I got the boot.
Nor did I intend to leave Germany, but Jeri’s illness struck at just the wrong time. We were planning to move back into the city to reduce the 90 minute each way commute, but at the time she passed, my teaching gigs had fallen off to only 2 classes a week, whereas I had been hauling down an average German income just 6 months earlier. This was 2009 when Germany finally got hit by the US financial fiascos and everything there began slowing considerably. Stepson needed the income we were paying in rent for our apartment to make his mortgage payments, and Jeri’s situation had exhausted our euro reserves. We could make it together, but without Jeri, I had no choice but to vacate the space to him and take up residence in Tiny House, which I already owned. A few instances of good fortune after returning to the US brought me enough income to survive, and things have been getting progressively better ever since–although I am still not making as much money as a citizen in the US, as I was as an immigrant in Germany.
So, best of fortune in finding something new, Dave—and perhaps closer to your current digs. I understand your desire to stick with *nix, as my brother was a Unix programmer, first for AT&T, then for a string of companies and eventually the government before Windows hit the desktops. Daughter in-law, on the other hand, is a Ruby on Rails programmer for Windows—using a Mac for programming (is that odd or what?). She loves the work and has no objection to Windows. I have come to terms with the fact that I will never get Windows completely out of my existence, as some elements of my work these days, require supporting others who use Windows and helping maintain their machines. I’m reconciled to using both Windows and Ubuntu, and probably adding CentOS for the radio automation by the summer. Most radio operations are mixed shops, with Windows handling orders, billing, and program log traffic, Macs for audio production, and some form of *nix for automation and transmitter control. Takes a lot of knowledge to keep all that and the network feeding it going. In fact, radio chief engineers are no longer electronics guys, but IT folks instead. Quite a few stations now have no wiring but Cat5 everywhere, as digital takes over the entire operation, connecting all the equipment, and routing all the audio. The transmitter is now the only element that is still analog.
Barbara just left for the hospital. They’re discharging her dad this morning and transporting him to the Brian Center nursing/rehab facility. It’s one of the best ones available, and it’s where my mom lived for a year before her final illness. It’s also only about a mile from our house, which’ll make it a lot easier for Barbara to visit. Barbara’s sister works not far from it, so it’ll be easy for her to visit as well.
Excellent news. Hopefully he will agree to stay there as he gets better.
I asked the guy about the possible new taxes on pipe tobacco. … I’ve heard numbers as high as $100/pound in new taxes
But we were born free!
Thanks, Chuck; it does seem to be quite a mix out there. I see where Fred Reed is dumping PCs for a Mac, and for him and his needs that would be the ticket, I guess; I wouldn’t wanna pay the extra dough for not much. For example, the stuff on this HP Pavilion Windows 8 desktop would cost three times as much on a Mac. (at least I have Fedora 18 as a vm on it and an RHEL desktop next to it!).
I’ve reached a stage like many of us here in that I figure I can work with whatever IT technology and infrastructure I have to. Whatever puts bread on the table at this point.
74 and climbing here; very windy last couple of days; we have possible rain showers in the forecast coming up after about ten days without any.
Don’t forget, kidz: The Most Holy Hallmark Holiday of All Time is coming up Sunday.
Hey Bob, here you go, “Big Bullets make Big Holes”:
http://frontsight.com/newsletter/html/18-big-bullets.html
“OK, I know you still want recommendations. Here they are. Don’t get too hung up on them. A gun in any caliber is better than no gun at all.”
“.45 ACP. Our grandfathers knew it in World War II and our grandfathers’ grandsons are figuring it out again in Iraq. A .45 stops ‘em best.”
“.40 S&W is the next best choice and in most handguns allows more magazine capacity compared to the .45ACP.”
“.44 Special, .357 Magnum, .357 Sig, and 9mm Plus P all run near third place.”
“.38 Special and 9mm are in distant fourth place. You can plan on delivering a cranio-ocular shot after two to the chest to end the fight with these calibers.”
“.380, .32, .25, and .22 — Don’t even bother shooting your opponent in the chest with these. Your standard response with these pocket pistol rounds is two to three rounds to between the mustache and eyebrows (cranio-ocular cavity).”
Understood. Also to be understood is that semi-auto handguns need daily babying, period. Most people aren’t up to that. I am, but don’t feel like it, and am happy with my “third-place” .357 4″ and 2″ snubby that can also fire tons of different .357 and .38 ammo in either. Furthermore, the handguns are only for very close-range encounters and really what you’re using until you can get to a shotgun, rifle, machine-gun or howitzer.
I see where Fred Reed is dumping PCs for a Mac, and for him and his needs that would be the ticket, I guess; I wouldn’t wanna pay the extra dough for not much.
There are great gobs of people out there who do nothing on a computer but email, a little web browsing, and Facebook. Apple makes sure that works flawlessly on the Mac, and my own experience has been that if those people have a need to make more demands on their Macs, they end up stymied and stumped and have to call on people like you and me. If they use computers at work, somebody else maintains them and shows them how to do their chores. Their problem with Windows is a complete lack of knowledge about what to do under the hood. Apple hides all that until you want to do more than email and Facebook.
I had high hopes for Linux, but my assessment is that many of the people who were involved in an open-source way, have abandoned Linux and gone back to Windows. There are just way too many completely deserted projects out there for that not to be true. The only development happening now comes from Red Hat and Shuttleworth; if it weren’t for them, Linux would be dead. Even Open Office/Libre Office is nothing more than a Word clone, and Word is 10 times faster than those, and frankly, is more configurable.
A friend who uses both PC’s and Macs in his home office, recently complained to me that every time he had to do something on a PC the folders were littered with “db” files in practically every folder. I informed him that that came from his accessing those folders from the Mac—the MAc was the one that dropped those files there, not the PC. He was incredulous, as Apple hides those files when you view a PC’s folders with it.
I’d go for the .44 Special over the .40. Oh, wait. I did. I don’t trust small, light bullets, no matter how fast they’re moving. I think it was originally John Barclay Armstrong who, when asked why he carried a Colt .45, replied “Because they don’t make a Colt .46.”
The .44 Special, particularly hand-loaded but even in factory loads, is essentially a rimmed .45 ACP. I load my .44 Special revolver with rounds that put a .429, 240-grain bullet out the muzzle at about 850 fps. That’s pretty convincing.
Agreed on the .44 Special; it can be handloaded very nicely to a man-stopper round. Many years ago I had a Charter Arms Bulldog and a local old-school gun shop guy disparaged it as a “dirtpile.” I wish I had it back; I like the .45 LC rounds for the same reasons and both work nicely in larger revolvers.
I also have a thirty-five-year-old S&W .41 Magnum that I just reblued and put new grips on to give back to my brother, the unemployed UNIX engineer in MA; he’d given it to me back then in lieu of paying back a $400 loan. I may pick up either a larger Taurus DA revolver in that caliber or a Ruger SA. It was developed by the late, great Elmer Keith back in the Iron Age for law enforcement but never caught on. Very flat-shooting, accurate and powerful round, meant to work between the .357 and .44.
“The only development happening now comes from Red Hat and Shuttleworth; if it weren’t for them, Linux would be dead.”
That’s a bit of an exaggeration but I see your point; RH is huge now but it’s for enterprise-level operations and clusters and server farms. The average consumer can’t do a whole with it beyond also using it for the basic email and web stuff. Their clones CentOS and Scientific Linux seem to be holding steady but that’s about it. I’ve been disappointed by Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu for a while now; stuff wasn’t working anymore here at home that I needed to work. Updates became a problem.
As for the Linux market in general, go to distrowatch.com and check out the multitudes of them out there; most are niche markets with small user communities. But as far as competing against the Apple closed garden or M$, it ain’t happening. As Chuck says, a lotta projects have fallen through the cracks and a bunch of developers have gone to, or back to, the Dark Side, because for some odd reason they need to make money.
I’ll keep Fedora as a vm here and CrunchBang on old laptops to use as possible firewall projects or whatever and if I end up with a M$ gig locally here, I may just as well repurpose the RH machine to a Windows 2012 server or Hypervisor server. We also need money here. While I continue to investigate the viability of striking out on my own somehow.
I do disagree with the claim that 10mm are impossible to handle. I thoroughly enjoy the caliber and it would be my #1 choice if it weren’t for the cost of ammo (.22, 9mm and .45ACP are probably the cheapest to shoot). I’ve never had a problem shooting a 10mm and handling the recoil, nor do I detest larger frame pistols.. Then again, I am a big guy (6’4″ 300lb) so perhaps that’s some of it.
I have thought about that off and on. I’d suggest reading Alan R. Simon’s How To Be A Successful Computer Consultant but it is out of print. The key thing to remember is that if you strike out on your own, you are going to have expenses that worker drones don’t have and spend time on things you can’t bill for. So to set a billable rate you have to take your hourly rate that you would want an employer to pay you and multiply by at least two to come up with a billable hourly rate.
I’ve never struck out on my own. The first reason being that there are a whole lot of people who charge X/2 per hour when I would charge X per hour. The second is sales and marketing is not my strong suit.
“and my own experience has been that if those people have a need to make more demands on their Macs, they end up stymied and stumped and have to call on people like you and me.”
I’ve used Macs since the original. My own experience is Windows users are just as stymied when they “make more demands”. Simply because they are the same ones who have everything maintained for them at work. They just use Windows at home and are just as ignorant. I’ve used Macs exclusively for 6 years (except for a VM of W7) and still get calls from friends because their Outlook is bunged. I ask them “Ever heard of scanpst?” Huh! is the usual answer. My daughter is a web designer and graphics artist and non techie. She uses all the Adobe crap on her Mac without problem. You don’t get more heavy than that. I use Final Cut for video editing without problems.
As for “under the hood”, Apple’s “system preferences” is very similar to Windows “control panel”. True, there is a lot you can do with the terminal that is hidden. But that’s something you can’t do on Windows since OSX is *nix based. There are Mac programs that allow noobs to access them graphically.
Throw a network into the mix, and the problems start with Macs. Throw a network into the mix with exclusively Windows, and it is seamless. I do agree that programs made for Mac work well—like Final Cut for video and Pro Tools for audio. But again, try and move elements those programs need around a network, and the troubles begin in spades. Fewer of those problems with Linux.
On the Linux front, Ardour for audio and Cinelerra for video are superb. I once thought their interface was made by monkeys not familiar with editing, but if you read how and why the developers use it, you can see it is no mistake. Operating conventions are changing, so I try not to be a fuddy-duddy and get with it, instead. That’s not easy at times.
Being on one’s own—which I have been for about 20 years now—requires being ruthless. Whereas with fulltime work, I previously thought about how to solve problems in off-hours and at home, these days I cannot afford to lift a finger if I am not on the clock. I found that out early on, when somebody hired me to solve a problem. I could not do it in the one day allocated to it, but I continued to mull it over and work on it for a few weeks, then when I got the solution, they did not want it and were actually pissed that I did not come up with it during the one allocated day. So from then on, it was all or nothing. I am theirs 100% when getting paid, but they get 0% from me otherwise.
I don’t answer RFP’s, either. Been there, done that. Hours and hours of work, and then I get told, “We went with so-and-so, because they did a good job for us on the last project.” Answering RFP’s is for some organization that can afford to pay a staff person to answer them. It is mostly for government work, anyhow—which ain’t bad, if you can get it.
I definitely agree about Cinelerra for video. Back when I was thinking about trying video editing for the first time, my editor sent me his Mac Mini to play with. I found the Mac app (iMovie?) so simplistic it was unusable. It was also awkward. Cinelerra has, as you say, a UI that’s different from anything I’d ever seen, but it works superbly. I found it much more intuitive to use than the Mac app, although I typically understood only maybe 1% to 5% of the options available.
I remember talking to someone who scoffed that a FOSS video editing app could be any good, but I shut down that discussion decisively by asking him, “Why do Hollywood production and animation companies use it to make big-budget movies, then?”
I remember when you first posted about the Mac mini. Back then it was so under powered I’m not sure why they sent it. iMovie back then was also crappy. Final Cut Pro X looks very similar to Cinelerra. Maybe Apple stole the interface. Not much difference at all.
As for seamless networks, use all macs under an OSX server and it is just as seamless as windows. I run OSX server at home on a mini that backs up all our macs, shares files, runs iTunes for the AppleTV, etc. Windows and Linux are king and queen in networks, though.
We are going to freeze to death (heard Rush mention this today):
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/us-temperatures-have-dropped-almost-3c-over-the-past-year/
“If the current trend continues, the US will approach absolute zero by the end of the century. This is appropriate, because we have a bunch of zeroes running the country.”
OK, that is funny. However, most people do not realize that warm temperatures are a good thing. Cold temperatures require heating. Lots and lots of heating. Lay in your coal piles now!
BTW, Sugar Land has only only seen 90 F once so far this year. We are usually bouncing off 95 F most days by now and today’s average historical high temp is 89 F. And the long range forecast for May and June is cool.
I do not know what to make of this either:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/coldest-spring-on-record-so-far-in-the-us/
Has anyone reported glaciers in North Dakota yet?
I am all over this! Bring the glaciers! The colder the bettuh! Less undesirable riff-raff around here in Retroville and flatlanders will move out and head south! Au revoir, mes amis!
Not. Actually we would be bettuh off with the scary and terrifying globalclimatewarmingchange thang, as anyone with a brain in their head would know. Longer growing seasons and lower fuel costs. We are for that here. I wanna grow bananas and coconuts in the back yahd and ogle nekked nubile young women on the Bay shore!
Here here! I can get behind naked young women. Er, get behind anything that leads to more naked young women.
Hey, Lynn, I just got email from a headhunter. Is this for your company?
Just joking, of course. Even though C and C++ are no longer as popular as Java or Ruby, there’s probably more than one company in the Houston area which uses them.
Hey, Lynn, I just got email from a headhunter. Is this for your company?
Nope, here is the only job opening that I have right now (and they will have to walk on water):
http://www.winsim.com/jobs.html
Even though C and C++ are no longer as popular as Java or Ruby
Um, are you sure about that? Ruby “shudder” “shudder” “shudder”. I use to write user interface code in Smalltalk. It was cool until things got complicated and then all the lookup tables ate you alive even when they used hash indexes. When we converted to C++, we got a 100X speedup. The average user did not see it but anyone doing complicated stuff sure did.
http://www.langpop.com/ and
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
generally consider C to be the most popular language followed by Java. People are scared of Java at the moment because Oracle Sun is asserting some weird trademark rights on the language. However, there is boatload of client side programming going on in Javascript.
Even though C and C++ are no longer as popular as Java or Ruby, there’s probably more than one company in the Houston area which uses them.
Probably only 500 or 600 engineering software companies or divisions in the Houston area that use C/C++ in the need for speed. All the CFD reservoir and process modeling programs use millions of points, if not billions of points, in their grids. The need for speed is great and quite a few of them are using private clouds and CUDA / OPENCL boxen. You would be surprised to find out how much software development that Exxon and its competitors do.
I have also been really pressed by a couple of our customers to make our software run way faster. We implemented a 3X speedup a couple of years ago and temporarily made them happier so that their CFD runs only take a few hours now. They were running 24 hour turnarounds on jobs before that.
I went to a conference last year where Chevron (now Phillips 66) gave a paper on using automation software and a lot of glue code (python if I remember correctly) to optimize mixing gasoline in their product delivery farm with forty tanks. It was quite complicated and impressive.
“Duration: 6+ months”
Yeah. That’s the key phrase right there. Pretty much 90% of the email I get from headhunters, recruiters, HR drones and the like, are for short-term temp contracts now in the IT field. All over the country. Travel out for the interview/s at your own expense. Find a temp place to live at your own expense.
We’re also told that we should be overjoyed at the prospect that companies no longer pay for or even bother to show any interest in, sending us to training to do our jobs better. We should be ecstatic, in fact, to do that on our own time and our own dime and it would BEHOOVE us to do so.
My distinct impression is that the rulers devoutly wish the other side had won the War of Northern Aggression and that slavery still existed, and not just for African-Americans anymore, either.
Getting listings for short-term contracts wouldn’t bother me if they were limited to where I live or had otherwise expressed an interest in. But no, I get email and telephone calls for contracts all over the country even though I clearly indicated that I’m not interested in moving. I talked it over with one experienced, professional recruiter (from IBM, as it happens) who was disgusted with the “spammers”, as he refers to the headhunters and body shops who don’t pay any attention to the prospect’s location, desired position, or anything except keyword matches.
Lesson learned, and passed along to anyone it might help: When putting your profile into Dice and Monster and such, use a new gmail account and don’t include your telephone number.
As for being responsible for your own training, that doesn’t bother me. Probably that’s because I’ve been a consultant for most of my career — “consultant” either as subject matter expert brought in for a tricky problem or as butt-in-seat staff augmentation. I’ve gotten almost no employer/customer-provided training, and I think none that was worth a damn. For 25 years I’ve been on my own as regards skill set, so anything else would seem strange.
Good points, and good tip on the job profile info; hadn’t thought of that. I would only add to any Linked-In users here: do not accept connection requests from any recruiters or headhunters; their crap will drown out everybody else you’ve got on there in no time.
I’ve also noticed that roughly 90% of the emails and phone calls I’ve been getting for the past six months are from people whose origins are in south Asia, and who almost always have a challenged English-language ability. I note also that some of their brethren are here with doctorates or the equivalent in the IT and engineering fields, with younger guys just nailing the whole series of RHEL cert exams regularly. By comparison my intellect in these things is roughly that of a cabbage.
I don’t do LinkedIn so I can’t comment on that.
Yes, about 90% of headhunters or consulting company recruiters lately are Indian. The accent doesn’t bother me at all, but the lack of competence does. Some of that might be attributable to foreign origin — eg, not knowing that Albany is not part of NYC — but most of the incompetence is probably unrelated to nation of origin. Also, it might not be personal incompetence but corporate incompetence: they’re just drones following the script for getting a list of prospects from a jobs database and the script doesn’t call for checking location.
Yoiks, Lynn, good luck with that. ChemEng PhD who’s a top-notch programmer? I’m guessing there are a bunch in the US but I’m also guessing they’re all employed because they’re probably in high demand.
I wrote sloppily about popularity of programming languages, above. I should have specified that I meant what was appearing in Help Wanted listings and general industry buzz. (I’m discounting the email I get from headhunters because Java/JEE work features prominently in my experience so that would bias the results.)
Oracle’s been messing around with both MySQL and Java for a couple years now. Even though the terms of purchasing Sun explicitly stated that Oracle was not to be a bunch of dicks about those two community products and the trademarks and such, I suspect no one is surprised by the dickitude on display. MySQL creator Michael Widenius says that everyone should ditch MySQL and go to MariaDB. The Java community has its own issues with Oracle. In both cases there’s a lot of inertia so it’ll take a while, but I’m pretty sure that Oracle’s managed to kill them both. Which was probably the intent.
I’ve read that bit elsewhere about dumping MySQL for MariaDB. I used to be a DBA for the state here but it was boring to the point of tears and making my eyes cross and hair fall out. Never again. IT security has turned out the same way for me. Thought my law enforcement and security background combined with IT would be slick but jeezum, it’s all paperwork and meetings and phone yak stuff.
Gimme a mix every day of hands-and-feet hardware and sitting on my can working scripts, installs, troubleshooting, etc. as a sys/net admin, whether Linux or Windows, I don’t much care so long as it pays the bills. And until I can find my bliss, as the buffoons Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell used to blather about.
I don’t follow the nooz much nor do I watch tee-vee, per se, but I see from other boards that the Benghazi hearings were going on and it looks like the move is afoot to oust HILLARY! from the permanent seat of power and gradually slide the Mooch in there; talk is that it will be her that takes over when Barry leaves to run the family money machine. And there was clearly never any intent whatsoever to rescue those people in Benghazi; if anything it worked out great that they got killed. The Larry Klinton administration was damn near satanic but this one….there’s no ‘damn near’ about it, as the novelist Martin McPhillips attests.
I have RSS news feeds from the TV station I used to work for in Indy, the Indy newspaper, BBC, BBC Biz, NYT, and a couple Berlin newspapers. A quick glance at them keeps me informed enough, and usually, just reading the headlines in the feed is enough. In Berlin, I had a radio in the bathroom and always listened to the World Service news while showering and shaving. That way I did not miss anything really, really big and important, like the MJ OD. (Just kidding.) That is a little harder now because I don’t have a radio source for World Service in the bathroom these days. Probably need to get one of these, and broadcast their stream to the house in the morning.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB2-0-FM-Audio-transmitter-Wireless-adapter-/230669438036?pt=Other_MP3_Player_Accessories&hash=item35b4f84c54
Heavy lightning and thunder right now as we get soaked for the next couple days.
I wouldn’t trust the Beeb or the NYT for telling me where the sun rises and sets each day, let alone anything else.
We listen to shortwave broadcasts from all over; the nooz media here is virtually worthless.
the MAc was the one that dropped those files there, not the PC
Macs will also happily write to USB drives. This caused major problems with a CF card with pictures. The card was full and the Mac wrote the files anyway destroying the several image files. Apple’s response was there were no reports of that as a problem so it was an isolated incident and would not be reported. Clever huh?
Still in Germany. Good trip.
People in Germany that I have talked with say the Euro will survive and there is no way Germany will ever leave the Euro.
1300 pictures and 10 days to go. May be buying a couple more memory cards to supplement the 12 gig I have with me.
Posted from my iPad.
OFD wrote:
“We’re also told that we should be overjoyed at the prospect that companies no longer pay for or even bother to show any interest in, sending us to training to do our jobs better. ”
In 1990 my employer had just installed Amdahl (IBM compatible) mainframes and I was sent on about 55 days training that year, most of it in Sydney or Melbourne. Basically a PITA as on Monday morning I had to get up at 430 to get to the airport, made for a long day and the travel time was my own. My (former) employer hasn’t sent me on a course for about 15 years. (shrug)
don’t pay any attention to the prospect’s location, desired position, or anything except keyword matches
I figure it’s idiots who hope to make a buck without actually doing any work. I had this recently on one of my little consulting contracts: A company wanted a new piece of software. Not your average stuff, but still off the shelf. I put together a requirements catalog, estimated the price they’d have to pay (six digits, not cheap stuff), and started contacting companies with offerings in the market.
For a lark, I also sent an inquiry to Capterra, which claims to be in the business of matchings customers to software. What a mistake! I got an absolutely clueless email from one of their employees, showing that she hadn’t even bothered to read my inquiry. Replied, got another email where she still didn’t understand what I had written. She had a pretty unique name, so I googled her: zero technical education and this is her first job. Not her fault, but just how she is supposed to help customers with complex software requirements is a bit of a mystery. Anyway, the clueless emails continued, and continued – long after the contract had been awarded. I finally added the whole company to my spam filter.
@SteveF: I don’t get the uproar about MySQL. Seems to me that Oracle hasn’t done anything horrible, indeed, support may be better than under Sun. The cry to move to MariaDB looks to me more like sour grapes and political infighting by some people who have personal axes to grind. Is there something I’m missing?
Re Global warming: I finally re-found a paper I had run across some time ago. The auther analyzes the climate cycles to make a firm prediction – and compares his prediction to the IPCC. Skip way down the paper to Figure 5, and look at the inset graph: The green region is the range of IPCC projections, the light blue the range of his predictions.
We’ll see what the future brings…
ChemEng PhD who’s a top-notch programmer? I’m guessing there are a bunch in the US but I’m also guessing they’re all employed because they’re probably in high demand.
There are about 200 in the world. They are all employed. They are … different. This is not a bad thing.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and take a wild guess that most of those ChemEng PhDs who are also top-shelf programmers can also read and write English as well as any English PhD.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and take a wild guess that most of those ChemEng PhDs who are also top-shelf programmers can also read and write English as well as any English PhD.
Written, yes. Certainly much better than me. Spoken, not necessarily. Half of them are USA born. The other half are mostly from Europe (both sides), India, Russia and China. They think in their native language and translate on the fly. I make all my technical staff work technical support for a while to give them customer perspective so spoken English is important.
We’ll see what the future brings…
I have a serious issue with people wanting to make severe societal changes based on suppositions and “consensus”. That said, I do not have a problem with a small carbon tax, say up to $1.00 per million btus. But I think that all of our taxes should be consumption taxes.
“I make all my technical staff work technical support for a while to give them customer perspective so spoken English is important.”
Excellent; would that all organizations did so.
“…I think that all of our taxes should be consumption taxes.”
I’d need to see the parameters on that but am not opposed; and taxes, no matter how arrived at, should only go to support their own collection and used to provide for a common defense and a basic safety net for those most vulnerable and defenseless among us.
Re Global warming: I finally re-found a paper I had run across some time ago. The auther analyzes the climate cycles to make a firm prediction – and compares his prediction to the IPCC. Skip way down the paper to Figure 5, and look at the inset graph: The green region is the range of IPCC projections, the light blue the range of his predictions.
BTW, that graph is going negative in a hurry right now.
I always thought that Pournelle’s _Fallen Angels_ book
http://www.amazon.com/Fallen-Angels-Larry-Niven/dp/0743471814 /
was a joke with the savages chasing the astronauts with spears in the deep snow because they were supposedly causing global warming. Now I am concerned that may be a possible future outcome in the USA. Both global cooling and savages!
Global cooling: The plural of anecdote is not data, but we’ve had a gawd awful long winter here, piles of snow, and Spring is still too cold. Possible frost this weekend above 1000m; shouldn’t get below 5C here (I hope, else our cucumbers will be dead).
Can you cover them with a tarp or something? Cover them up before the sun goes down, before the ground starts to cool. It doesn’t work for a large area but should be doable for a hobby garden.
There’s also the trick of spraying with water when it goes below freezing. The water lets out a bit of heat when it freezes and that protects the delicate plant. Doesn’t always work and it’s a lot of before-dawn effort, but it’s better than losing the crop.
I’m old enough to remember when climate scientists were raising frantic alarms about global cooling and imminent glaciation. There were proposals actually under consideration for doing things like scattering lampblack across millions of square miles of arctic territory to decrease the planet’s albedo.
Which may actually be a good idea, given that we’re hugely overdue for another ice age. Maybe they were right all along. I remember some of them saying that the onset would be incredibly sudden, as in (literally) it being 80F in Miami one day and snowing the next.
In my haht I want the snow and ice and fog and wind; keeps the riff-raff away. But in my head I know we should have bananas and coconuts in the back yahd. I can manage the resulting hordes of riff-raff if need be; we’ll just form up some militia and run the buggers off!
I would just like to see blizzards in Mordor, Miami, Los Angeles, SF, etc.
As far as news goes, when we were traveling in Europe last summer, we found excellent news coverage on RT (Russia Today). RT and ironically, Al Jezeera seem to be the best for impartial and thorough news these days.
.mg
I found exactly what Mike G. found about the RT and AJ nooz outlets as being better than the shit we have here, but made the mistake of mentioning it on another board and was roundly castigated as a perfidious and treasonous bastard probably in the pay of Vladimir Putin and Al Quaeda. God forbid one should ever question CNN, MSNBC or Fox. They also have fah bettuh pics online, too.
Biases of the news feeds doesn’t bother me. I worked in journalism for over 30 years, so I know when something is an editorial and when it is reporting. But I use those news feeds only to find out about events. Seldom do I read the articles, and if I do, it is only to find out more about the events. If I abstained from all those sources on my list because I did not like their politics, I would not know anything.
Al Jazeera is certainly the best there is out there at present. Their coverage of the Boston bomber capture was strikingly good work—well above anything else I tracked. They hire smart people, too—which CNN did once upon a time. Of course, my die-hard Republican friends really lay into me for watching Al Jazeera,—but they really are losing complete touch with reality. BBC is reliable information, and has been losing their left slant, due to the significant scandals that have surfaced there recently. They have definitely given up the global warming crusade, except for an occasional every-other-month comment that it is “accepted science”. Nothing like 6 to 10 years ago, when they had significant-length stories on global warming every other day.