Cool and clear here in Santa Fe. Yesterday it got warm enough to take off the jacket…
Plan for the day is sightseeing, food, drive, fly, and home.
Tomorrow get back in the swing at home and pack for the Hamfest. I need good weather to sell off all the cr@p I’ve been accumulating for the fest. I hope I can find it all and fit it in the truck.
Food here has been great. Super savory, spicy, and delicious. I’m not a big fan of green chilies but ‘when in rome’ … And they’re famouse for it.
Better get packing…
N
I love Thursdays. Two trucks show up with guys on them and grab the stuff at the curb at the house. The first truck is just plain old trash and runs on Mondays also. The second truck is recyclables (supposed). All for $18/month. A bargain ! I would pay twice that ! Four times that !
I am becoming amazed by the amount of memory in usage on my Windows 7 x64 office pc. I have a Intel i7-2600K with four cores and eight threads that runs at 3.7 Ghz on a Gigabyte motherboard. My immediate drive is a Intel 480 GB SSD that runs like the wind. My LAN internal backup drive is a WD 4 TB green hard drive. I have 16 GB of ram. I have Samsung 27 inch and a Samsung 19 inch monitors. I also have a AMD HD 6800 video display board.
Anyway, I rebooted yesterday and noted that my ram usage upon reboot was 3.1 GB. That was with no desktop apps running. I do have several items such as Office 2003, Office 2016, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2015, and Act! 2012 for Workgroups installed which automatically start things such as Microsoft SQL Server Win64 in the background. Plus I have Microsoft Security Essentials automatically running.
This morning I note that with seven command prompt windows, Thunderbird Win32 52.0.6, FireFox x64 59.0, Adobe Acrobat 10.1, and Act! 2012 for Workgroups running, I am using 5.1 GB.
Wow ! Where will the memory usage stop growing each year ? I am thinking about upgrading to 32 GB of ram as the 16 GB occasionally runs out and it starts paging. I am upgrading my apps to x64 (Win64) so they have more threads and memory. I am starting to think about upgrading our desktop software that we sell to Win64.
“iHeartMedia files for bankruptcy: What does this mean for Houston radio fans?”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/iHeartMedia-files-for-bankruptcy-What-does-this-12755672.php
“In Houston the brand oversees Sunny 99.1, 94.5 The Buzz, 93.7 The Beat, the newly-minted 104.5 KISS FM, AM talk radio powerhouses 740 KTRH and KPRC 950, and SportsTalk 790 which is the radio home of the Houston Astros and Houston Rockets.”
“Across the country iHeart employs nearly 19,500 workers and runs 858 radio stations in 150 U.S. markets.”
Chuck W. ??? should be happy, he predicted this years ago.
Speaking of LAN backups, our office LAN backup is at 4 TB and growing at 100 GB a month. I still use three internal backup drives, two are WD 4 TB green drives and one is a WD 8 TB white drive ripped out of an external drive. The 4 TB drives only have 200 GB of free space and have been reformatted several times. They will be upgraded to 8 TB internal drives soon. The 8 TB external drives are now $170, amazing !
I also write an external USB drive each week on Friday. It takes 12 to 18 hours to do an incremental backup and 3 to 5 days to write a full backup to a clean drive. No compression. There are seven drives and they are stored offsite. Three are WD 6 TB and four are WD 8 TB.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN/dp/B01LQQHLGC/
I still do not understand why WD does not sell an 8 TB green drive though. I just buy a WD USB external drive and strip the drive out.
_The 5th Wave: The First Book of the 5th Wave Series_ by Rick Yancey
https://www.amazon.com/5th-Wave-First-Book/dp/0142425834/
Book number one of a three book young adult alien invasion series. I read the well formatted and bound trade paperback. The book has been made into a ok movie that I watched last weekend. I will buy and read the two following books.
https://www.amazon.com/5th-Wave-Blu-ray-Zackary-Arthur/dp/B01AYDOH9M/
We spotted the Alien spaceship when it starting braking at Mars orbit. Ten days later, it went into orbit around the Earth. It was the size of Manhattan and circled at 250 miles up. All attempts at communication failed. Then the waves started.
The first wave: an EMP blast worldwide destroyed all electronics and electrical system. A million people were killed in planes and such.
The second wave: the others dropped a rock a mile wide into the ocean. The resulting tsunamis killed half of the world’s population who lived within 60 miles of a coastline.
The third wave: the others infected birds with a highly contagious disease with a 97% fatality rate for humans.
The fourth wave: the others implanted many of their kind into humans who started killing unimplanted humans. Trust no one !
The fifth wave: …
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (2,926 reviews)
Glad you’re enjoying Santa Fe! It’s a nice town, with some really good food. I wouldn’t want to live there – it’s at least as leftist as California, with Native American politics tossed in for good measure. But it’s definitely a great place to visit.
@Lynn: You’ve written about your backups before. I’m pretty paranoid – I have backups of my backups – but I just don’t get the sheer quantities of data you have. As far as I know, you do software development with insignificant multimedia content. There’s just no reason for your total backups to be more than 1TB, and even that seems excessive. Certainly, your data shouldn’t be growing by 100GB per month! It really might be worth a couple hours of your time to optimize this – it would save you time in the end.
Just for comparison: our total backups, which includes my wifes small business (including annual archives for the past 15-20 years), plus all the software we’ve ever written (nothing as big as your system, but still substantial), plus all my teaching material for every course I’ve ever taught, plus our private data (including hundreds of ripped music CDs) – this all comes in around 300GB total.
Part of it may be this: data that’s not on the NAS doesn’t exist. Individual PCs are not backed up, and everyone knows this. If a PC goes belly up (which does happen, although rarely), I have a list of all the software it needs, and it gets a fresh install. That doesn’t really take a lot more time than restoring from backup, and I didn’t lose time managing backups for individual PCs.
Lynn “The 8 TB external drives are now $170, amazing ! ” Yes indeed, amazing. I remember when the folks I was working for upgraded their Radio Shack TRS-80 from cassette drive to two single sided 180 kb 5 1/4″ floppy drives, for $400 each.
Not just backups of backups but historical. I have ‘snapshots’ that go back years. I’ve used them at times too.
Wow ! Where will the memory usage stop growing each year ? I am thinking about upgrading to 32 GB of ram as the 16 GB occasionally runs out and it starts paging. I am upgrading my apps to x64 (Win64) so they have more threads and memory. I am starting to think about upgrading our desktop software that we sell to Win64.
The new AMD AM4 motherboard in my home server currently has 4 GB installed, but I made a point of buying a board that could support 64 GB down the road.
I run Linux on that machine so 4 GB is plenty for the server chores, but who knows what will happen in the future.
Unfortunately, Microsoft will not officially support Windows 7 running on the new AMD (AM4) or Intel (Kaby Lake and beyond) CPUs and chipsets.
@Lynn: You’ve written about your backups before. I’m pretty paranoid – I have backups of my backups – but I just don’t get the sheer quantities of data you have. As far as I know, you do software development with insignificant multimedia content. There’s just no reason for your total backups to be more than 1TB, and even that seems excessive. Certainly, your data shouldn’t be growing by 100GB per month! It really might be worth a couple hours of your time to optimize this – it would save you time in the end.
@Brad, we have nine people at WinSim. It was ten but one of my programmers quit last month for an absurd raise from another company. All nine are generating incredible amounts of new stuff continuously.
Our software development sandbox is 20 GB. Actually, the most amount of space is used by customer flowsheets that we have collected over the decades. I like to take these flowsheets and run them through our software to see what crashes. I see amazing bugs that way. Every time we have a point release, such as 15.11 to 15.12, I archive my entire production sandbox on the source code file server. As often as monthly. Yes, I am paranoid, I’ve been in too many fires.
Our CRM, Act! 2012 for Workgroups, generates a 1 GB backup file each day at 4 pm. I clean these out occasionally (did so yesterday back to Oct 2017). I do permanently keep the backup file on the first day of each month. And yes, those backups go all over the backup drives as I NEVER delete any files from a backup device until it is full. That is why my CRM file server is using 5.0 GB of it’s backup device now.
Plus, I permanently archive a USB external backup drive every six months. Yes, paranoid. Plus, it lets me replace all of the external backup drives every 3.5 years.
@Brad, we have nine people at WinSim. It was ten but one of my programmers quit last month for an absurd raise from another company.
He’s not back yet?
An “absurd” raise usually means they’re hiding something.
I didn’t see an absurd raise, but I don’t see myself ever going back to CGI unless I had a unique opportunity which didn’t involve the ex-cop/ex-Army third career manager I worked for over the last nine months.
All suspects -er- employees are *guilty*. Period. Ten-hut!
And, yeah, that CGI. As in Doh-bamacare.
If the last sentence doesn’t get OFD typing, he’s still not well enough.
Oops. The “before” pictures of that pedestrian bridge make me nervous, and I’m not a MechE or Civil Engineer. Maybe the school should have talked to Disney — the Mouse has a few bridges like that in Orlando, and, IIRC, engineered the museum spanning the freeway in Nebraska.
http://amp.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article205324154.html
Disney takes a lot of heat in FL, but they build things to last.
“Every. Damned. Day I have this same routine with my computer. The same annoying sequence of events that always ends the same way, and takes up time, and reminds us how the smallest irritations can compound until they’re enormous.
“When I found myself shouting at the screen in a particular cadence I decided to transcribe the dialogue in my head.
“It helps if this is read aloud, and read aloud loudly.”
Read the rest …
On board.
Visited 3 churches today. Made 3 offerings and lit 3 candles for OFD.
I may not be a believer but he is …..
N
Earlier this afternoon there was some time lapse of the bridge construction before it was moved in place. Now all those time lapses seem to be gone and only the movement of the bridge.
I had looked at the construction time lapses many times and noted that the pre-stressing was not done correctly and definitely not enough cure time or stress relief after. Yes I have been involved with pre-stressed concrete construction while I was out at Hanford.
There will be a lot of finger pointing, but the contractor is definitely at fault and the gooberment officials involved are complicit.
@medium wave
Oh _that_ was fun! Shared with my husband…
The intertoobs of things. Didn’t realize lileks was your work. Spent many happy evenings reading about your Jasper dog; and the librarians I supported threw a Regrettable Foods potluck one year.
Small world.
He’s not back yet?
An “absurd” raise usually means they’re hiding something.
He jumped to a C# shop. C# programmers are in high demand around Houston at the moment. And they sell pipeline automation software so he has some experience in that.
“Cryptocurrencies fall as Google announces ad ban”
” At least until the new GoogleCoin is ready for sale”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/google-announces-ban-on-cryptocurrency-ads/
I have actually heard a rumor that Google is working on their own micro-currency.
Hat tip to:
https://www.codeproject.com/script/Mailouts/View.aspx?mlid=13494&_z=1988477
There will be a lot of finger pointing, but the contractor is definitely at fault and the gooberment officials involved are complicit.
Miami.
Home safe, and everything here seems fine too. No dog yet (too late to pick him up) but the fish survived.
Several soiled rat glue pads and disturbed traps but no rats. Clear evidence that I haven’t got them all despite the decrease in noise in the night.
Now I need to head to bed…
n
Lynn, having stripped the functional drive from an external carrier, what do you do with the left over pieces? And might you be willing to sell a couple of them?
Nick, I detest cats but have you considered getting one?
My house in Canberra had mice on and off the whole time 1985-2014. Saw one in 1985 munching on a bar of soap. Yes, they learn to avoid penut butter. Caught one by its front leg once. Dropped it into an empty jar and put the lid on.
At my current place in Adelaide I’ve twice seen dead rats in the driveway but never rats or mice inside. Not even scats.
Lynn, having stripped the functional drive from an external carrier, what do you do with the left over pieces? And might you be willing to sell a couple of them?
Uh, do you want the pieces ? I’m afraid that stripping the bare drive from the external case is a destructive process for me. I’ve only stripped one so far. I got another one on my desk to be stripped any month now.
Oh man, we have a totally new user interface for our DirecTV Genie today. It is crap. And slow. And the fonts are so small that I cannot read them from over ten ft away. AT&T, the problem is not the user interface. The problem is the prices rising one to two percent each month.
https://hdguru.com/att-gives-directv-an-interface-lift-looks-to-mend-subscriber-losses/
Oh man, we have a totally new user interface for our DirecTV Genie today. It is crap. And slow. And the fonts are so small that I cannot read them from over ten ft away. AT&T, the problem is not the user interface. The problem is the prices rising one to two percent each month.
Smells like politics. Back when I worked for Death Star Telephone, about 10 years ago, the company paid Frog Design $1 million to design an ergonomic UI for the first Uverse iPhone app. Thanks to a greybeard with two patents, that never saw the light of day.
Plus, this is a strike year. I’m guessing the DirecTV guys in El Segundo got their first pole climbing assignments in August or September, and more than a few decided to move on. Legacy PacBell staged a strike within recent memory, and CA has some nutty rules that make life harder for scabs.
Lynn, if the cases are in pieces I’ll pass. I was going to recycle some old, lowe(er) capacity drives to be used as externals for a couple of charitable organizations around here. But honestly, the prices for externals are so cheap that it’s probably frivolous to do.
Lynn, if the cases are in pieces I’ll pass. I was going to recycle some old, lowe(er) capacity drives to be used as externals for a couple of charitable organizations around here. But honestly, the prices for externals are so cheap that it’s probably frivolous to do.
The new WD external case is skintight to the hard drive. It has clip points that we could not get to unclip without cutting them. I will try more on the next one when I get around to it.