14:37 – I’ve spent most of the morning on the phone, on-hold, being transferred among, and talking with representatives from various US government organizations, ranging from the US Postal Service to the Department of Commerce to the Department of Defense to (I am not making this up) the Census Bureau.
I was trying to find out how to fill out a form properly, more particularly PS Form 2976-A Customs Declaration and Dispatch Note. The Census Bureau was actually the starting point, where the instructions on the form directed me for information about filling out Box 11, which is descriptively named “EEL/PFC”. I might have figured it out myself if they’d used the expanded form: “Exemption or Exclusion Legend/Proof of Filing Citation”.
I learned that I really, really wanted an EEL rather than a PFC, because the latter is a lot more work. The EEL is basically the quick-and-dirty no-paperwork option. To use it, you must meet two requirements. The first was easy enough. The value of the individual shipment has to be $2,500 or less. Our kits sell for about a tenth that or less, so that wasn’t a problem. But (there’s always a “but” with government crap) the second requirement was that the shipment contain nothing restricted. Restricted in the sense of having potential military or terrorist uses. Stuff like ultra-centrifuges for separating fissionable isotopes. After spending three hours on the phone, with everyone saying “I don’t think high school science kits will be a problem, but you need to make sure…” I finally got to someone who knew how to resolve the issue. I visited a web page where I could “self-qualify” as exempt. So now all I need to do is write “30.37a” on line 11 (and possibly “EAR99” although I couldn’t get a definitive answer for that) and on line 17 “NLR” or “No License Required”. I think.
So then I called USPS support to verify that I knew exactly how to fill out the form. The woman I spoke with said everything sounded fine. In fact, she thought I could just leave lines 11 and 17 blank, but said it wouldn’t hurt to write what I’d been told to write in them. She also suggested that for the first shipment I should visit the local post office just to verify that everything was correct. So, Thursday (Wednesday is a USPS holiday and I didn’t want to ship the day before a holiday) I’m going to drive to post office and ship my first kit to Canada. We’ll see what happens.
We got four chemistry kit orders yesterday, which took us down to only three remaining in stock. I’m not too concerned, because we have everything necessary to assemble another dozen quickly, followed by 18 more once the shipment of beakers arrives. But we did decide to boost the size of the next batch of chemistry kits from 30 to 60, because these things are starting to sell pretty quickly.
I also posted a forensics landing page and forensics kit page. As of now, we’re accepting pre-orders for the forensics kits, although we won’t be shipping them until next month.
Bleh. That’s why I keep my wife around. I’m irritable and impatient
under the best of circumstances and do not suffer fools gladly. Dealing
with government paper pushers and obstructionists brings out the worst
in me very quickly. My wife, by contrast, is more patient and polite
with fools, yet relentless when it comes to getting what she wants.
FYI, RBT, IMO TTG BPS VB.
That is, the site’s speed has been very low for me today. Slow loading
the pages and very slow posting my previous comment. I’m pretty sure
it’s your site (or your host or the intartubesnetweb in between us)
because I haven’t noticed slowness on other sites.
I wonder if TTG’s server is still dealing with the leap second. My guess is that all the Windows systems never even noticed the leap second.
Actually, all of the government employees I spoke to today were polite and tried hard to be helpful. The fundamental problem is that no one actually understands all this stuff. I mentioned it to Barbara a while ago, and she said just to ship the kits to Canada and not worry about it. She’s right. These are highschool science kits, for heaven’s sake; not pathogenic microorganisms or ultra-centrifuges or jet engine parts.
Yes, I’ve been having problems today with slow response as well. What’s very odd is that it’s been limited to the ttgnet.com domain. The other main domain, thehomescientist.com appears to be running normally. They’re both on the same physical host.
Yeah, this whole legacy date/timekeeping thing is fundamentally incompatible with computers. Years ago, I proposed a cunning plan to at least get started on dealing with it.
http://www.ttgnet.com/daynotes/2000/20001225.html#Saturday
Cringely says the PC will be dead in 5 years:
http://www.cringely.com/2012/06/30/life-personal-computer/
I guess that I had better get working on our cloud solution. If no desktops then we are dead. But running our diagrammatic user interface with 300 dialogs in a browser will be tricky, at best.
Cringely is an idiot.
I agree that Cringely has it wrong. What is happening around me, is that people are going for smaller formats of computing when available, and trying to abandon the desktop. When I go to a job these days, the lawyers all have iPads or a small Netbook. A few of them plug into a large monitor, keyboard, and mouse back at the office, and avoid their desktops as much as possible.
These are people for whom IT budgets are no problem and expensive Blackberrys are the norm, thus I am not sure all businesses are going to be abandoning the desktop anytime soon. After all, how many people actually have to take a computer with them to a meeting outside their workplace? Overall, I am betting that number is tiny—people like OFD being one of the small number of exceptions in his overall organization. Paralegals and secretaries I come into contact with, do not have iPads or Blackberrys, and those folks way outnumber lawyers in all the offices I visit.
With legal requirements like HIPAA—patient privacy for medical records—and a similar thing for legal, it is going to be a cold day in hell before record storage or computing is done on the cloud for most firms. Heck, my insurance agent cannot use my house Wi-Fi to connect to her office; she must use a device that accesses her office via the cell phone network and thus does it securely. I do not see how cloud computing is going to be the wave of the future for any but the smallest of companies who have no privacy issues to deal with. I wrote a description for Pournelle of IT security at The Chemical Company where I taught, which he used in his column a few years ago: just to get into the server and equipment area (where I often taught their classes) required my being accompanied by 2 employees, and recognized by somebody inside 2 locked doors, the second of which had to be manually unlocked by the person who visually identified me. There is not a snowball’s chance that company would ever put their records or computing out on the cloud.
Is “Cringely” an idiot? Isn’t “Cringely” a stable of, ah, less than entirely perspicacious pundits and prognosticators? Or am I mixing this pseudonym up with another?
Forget HIPAA and trade secrets and all the rest of that picayune nonsense. The real reason that cloud storage will not take over the world is kiddy porn. So long as kiddy porn is illegal, its possessors will insist on local storage. And, from what I gather from what little MSM news catches my ear, huge numbers of people have kiddy porn — 3/4 of male computer users, or 3/4 of all human beings, or something.
(I admit that I’m one of them, at least according to the alarmists’ definition. But I’m not giving up the baby-in-a-bathtub pictures. If nothing else, I want to be able to blackmail my daughter when she becomes a mouthy teenager with an attitude.*)
* “Mouthy teenager with an attitude”: Some redundancy may be noted.
It is my understanding that Obamacare requires that all healthcare info be available on the net by 2014. My wife is a 7 year cancer survivor now. She has ALL of her info available for her look-up at https://my.mdanderson.org/ . She can see bone scans, xrays, doctor transcriptions, everything that the doctors can see. She just cannot modify anything, her portal is read only.
Blatant redundancy so noted, sir.
Also FYI: Reaching age 20 and thus technically out of the said teenage years is still no guarantee of an end to mouthiness or ‘tude. You heard it here first.
“After all, how many people actually have to take a computer with them to a meeting outside their workplace? Overall, I am betting that number is tiny—people like OFD being one of the small number of exceptions in his overall organization.”
Our issue laptops are encrypted six ways from Sunday and have corporate proprietary data on them in spades, plus access via the net to said data. We’re just a teeny little step away from having them handcuffed to us when we leave our offices, let alone the buildings and grounds. We sys/net/security admin types also haul them in and out of highly restricted data centers and connect them to the server racks to do stuff via CLI, natch.
I also have a Lenovo IdeaPad gizmo loaded with Deft based on Lubuntu that I use for security-related stuff.
At home I still sit here like a schmuck and bash away at a Microsoft Natural ergonomic keyboard, my big screen, two 1-TB drives, and a kicking sound system, with 8GB RAM and Win7 Ultimate. Behind me I sit like a prehistoric golem at the RH 6.2 box, big screen, 8GB RAM, 1-TB drive and nothing else on it besides the standard keyboard and mouse.
My cell phone I use for calls and as a wrist watch, period.
Robert, you might want to watch some old episodes of MASH and get a refresher in government acronyms and paperwork from Radar 😉
Ah, RH 6.2, with rcp enabled by default … The past is a different country.
SteveF wrote:
“I admit that I’m one of them, at least according to the alarmists’ definition. But I’m not giving up the baby-in-a-bathtub pictures.”
When my elder niece turned 21 in 2000 she sent out 21st invitations with a picture of herself as a toddler, stark naked, sitting on the potty. I’d seen that photo in the family photo albums but was pretty surprised to see the way she was using it. But I wasn’t worried. Her then boyfriend, now husband was a cop, her mother a primary school teacher and sister in law a lawyer, so I knew it was probably safe to keep rather than burn it. But I’m glad I wasn’t in the US when I got it, I might have got 500 years in some hell hole for that.
“If nothing else, I want to be able to blackmail my daughter when she becomes a mouthy teenager with an attitude.”
Forget it. Teenagers are completely shameless.
OFD wrote:
“Also FYI: Reaching age 20 and thus technically out of the said teenage years is still no guarantee of an end to mouthiness or ‘tude. You heard it here first.”
Send her over here, I’ll teach her some manners… 🙂
HIPAA certainly affects me. I cannot reuse audio or videotapes that are given to other people. For instance, we make an audio cassette of all of our recording sessions, and it goes to the court reporter who transcribes all proceedings onto printed pages (she uses it to check the accuracy of her work). I cannot take a used tape from one of them and reuse it on a different day, giving it to another reporter, because something from the first case might not be erased or recorded over, and thus might be passed on to someone without the right to private medical information contained in the first recording.
Tapes that remain solely in our possession only can be reused if no parts of different days/sessions are mixed together on the final DVD.
My understanding is that your wife has the right to privacy of her own medical information, and can have the stuff online removed. Around here (in Indiana) that HIPAA stuff is taken very seriously.
In Germany, nudity—even in some public places—is completely acceptable. After all, it is the place where the nudist movement—FKK, Frei Korper Kultur—began. Kids commonly run around the yard (garden) naked until they are about 10 or so. Even then, they might continue doing that if they are not overly self-conscious and cannot be seen from the street.
Although the family took lots of pictures of the kids in this naked state, I had to make sure we had none on any of our SD cards or in the computer, when going to the US. Nobody would bat an eye at such pictures in Europe, but if they were ever found while we were in the US, it would definitely be a trip to jail. Americans are so prudish and uptight—mostly based on religion, when if you believe in religion, why should one be disturbed over what God gave in the first place?
Well, Mr. Oz, she has manners aplenty, with everyone but us! Comes across as Miss Sweetness and Light with any other members of the human species but with us it is like unto the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, perhaps you’ve heard of it?
Wife off to northern Nouveau Brunswick in the morning, driving her mom up twelve hours northeast of here. Then flying back to Montreal next week and taking a bus from there to here. A day at home, and then off to Portland, Oregon for a week. OFD will just plod along, with doubled workload, trying to buy a house, doing all the paperwork, trying to keep the male cat from killing any more birds and the female cat from dragging in half carcasses of rodents. At least we got the Saab wagon back today, with only two-hundred bucks shelled out for a busted power steering belt. And Mrs. OFD’s paychecks to the tune of 25% of my own annual pay are now three weeks overdue.
But it is 67 here right now and we are not sweltering out on the Great Plains or southwestern desert or pretty much anywhere else other than Seattle. I see where Mordor and environs got hammered by storms and three million people with power out and thirteen dead, etc., etc. In a few more years we will probably have regular scenarios of ten times that number without power, and not just for a couple of nights. And many, many more dead. Large cities are not a place to be.
I noticed today that it is so dry there are no bugs, anywhere around. No ants running busily, no bees anyplace, no yellow jackets surveying the siding of the house for holes to nest in, no flies around the trash, no lightning bugs or mosquitoes at night, no moths or millers, no flying bugs of any kind congregating around lights at night, dead spiders hanging with corpses drying in their webs, and my pet earwig has been gone for over a week with no sign of him—no bugs anywhere.
Presumably, they have all died from lack of water. Although a couple violent storms have passed through, the rain that followed them lasted only for 20 to 30 minutes. That has not been enough to change the parched, dry, hard ground at all, nor did it bring any green to my brown grass. Second drought summer in a row—and worse than last year, because last year we still had bugs.
Chuck, I agree with you on the nudity and religious whack-jobbery in the US and such. I believe I have previously expounded upon my thoughts about Puritans and European gratitude.
We should be lucky the modern nudism movement started in Germany. If it had started here it would be the Frei Korpulent Kultur and it would be less a movement than a jigglement.
I’m not sure your assertion, that the dryness is worse this year on the basis of bugs, is correct. Possibly the bugs weren’t able to lay as many fertile eggs last year. I’d be glad to study it, but I don’t see any large government grants coming my way so I can’t do any science. I’ll have to fall back on a religious explanation. Umm… Chicago is about to be smited, but not with any of those old-fashioned plagues of locusts. No, the insects are being cleared away to make room for, ah, a plague of man-eating zombie rats!
Finally, condolences on sharing a name with the horse-faced horse’s ass in England. I’d never made the connection before, probably because I never think of him except when I need to point out the failings of the royal delusion.
I’m a devout constitutional monarchist but I’m hoping Prince Chuck pre-deceases Her Majesty. Here in Australia we have enough trouble as it is fighting off the republicans without having King Chuck as our head of state.
Chuck, please stop blaming religion for everything. Americans aren’t religious nor is religion to blame for the crazy state of affairs between the ears of 300+ million people between Mexico and Canukistan. American are simply crazy. And the would be even if they were all atheists.
Deleting those files was aq good idea, I hope the American disease never catches on here or my sister will have to shred hundreds of pictures in her photo albums.
As to nudity in public places, I’ve told the story before (sorry folks) of the tour gide on our coach tour of Germany in 2003. Some members of a previous tour of Germany sprung him swimming nude in the English Garden in Munich. He also told the story of how one day there was a strong current in the river that flows through t, and a number of people were swept out into the city proper. They just caught the tram back to the Garden, stark naked. There were a few smirks but nothing else.
Back in the Eighties women here were often quite relaxed about what they wore in public. Not any more, and we’ve become less religious in the last 30 years. A decade or so back I noticed the little girl (3-4 years old) of one of my neighbors trotting down the street wearing just knickers. I was more concerned about her being on the road and alone than her state of dress. But that’s the exception nowadays.
Religion is not the reason most Americans are so crazy. It’s because they are Americans. There are many admirable things about your country and people, but 99% of your people (present company excepted, of course) are simply nuts.
I noticed that you don’t have a Canadian version of the Biology kit available for order.
As for the security of cloud computing, my employer has a cloud system we sell that has been certified to keep classified data on, and can have several flavors of such data on it simultaneously and keep the data from being interchanged. It’s not cheap, but it is in use by the US government. (The staff running it might need to have clearances for all the data stored on them, however.)
Our corporate laptops are encrypted and all our data files are “on the cloud”. If I am telecommuting, I use a smartcard to set up a secure VPN connection and then it looks as if I am using it at my docking station. I have full access to my files on the server, and can connect to other corporate assets from it. We are forbidden from using USB sticks unless they are the secure ones that are supplied from corporate IT.
Every time I go to Walmart, I thank God all the people there are wearing clothes. My wife has an aunt who was online friends with a guy who lives in a nudist colony. I don’t have a problem with that, and I’m a Methodist. I just would never go there. I have seen their web site, and I don’t want to see any more thank you. I don’t want to see overweight old people naked.
Panorama image of the University of Tennessee campus. Composed of 30 images. Six HDR images that themselves were created from five images each. Taken early in the morning on July 2. An experiment in stitching HDR images.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/UT.jpg
I don’t want to see overweight old people naked.
Neither does my wife so she put me on a diet. Down 47 pounds.
Good on ya, Ray. Except it’s actually good off ya, but that sounds like
“get off, yah?”, which is getting dangerously close to TMI territory.
Let’s just say “Congrats” and back away slowly without making eye
contact.
“all of the government employees I spoke to today were polite and tried hard to be helpful”
Yes. Being in the midst of a go-around with the government myself, I will attest to this. Every single individual is very nice, and yet…somehow…completely unhelpful.
In my particular case: I left the USAF 20 years ago, and was told at the time that I had an obligation to remain in the Ready Reserve for 20 years. As near as I can figure, that ought to be sometime this month, but I would like to know for certain. Sometime in the last 20 years I have misplaced my copy of the form that documents my transition from active duty to the reserves.
This is kind of an important date: separation from active duty. However, the very polite, friendly folks in the personnel center were unable to locate this date. I frankly wonder what they are looking at; I overheard one long monologue where I am pretty sure the guy was trying (unsuccessfully) to log into the personnel system. Given he was working in a call-center, answering personnel questions, one might supposed he would start out logged into the system, no?
Dave B wrote:
“I don’t want to see overweight old people naked.”
Well, a lot of old people are overweight, including my mum – but she’s lost a fair bit in the last few years. I think old age and overweight usually go together.
Excellent news. I put myself on a diet, and I’m now down 30 pounds. I’m going to try to lose another 20 pounds. Now I need to start exercising. Pretty soon my daughter will realize that she can walk without holding on to things, and I’ll have to be able to move to keep up with her…
Religion IS the basic and prime cause of most lost of liberty and self-determination in the US. Seeing as how religion is complete and total fiction created by a bunch of scribes and priests making up wild stories to swell their ranks, and the Jesus one became the most popular and drowned out the competitors in Western civilization (Eastern religion—where most of the Jesus fiction was set,—never embraced those obvious lies, but came up with a different set of their own that is even more obnoxious than the Jesus one),—it is pretty strange that people don’t cogitate more on its complete and utter absurdity.
As I often say to people around me when we get into religious arguments (quite common in the Bible Belt—even when you want no part of such discussion), if there is a god influencing this existence, then that masochistic bastard is the one who should be roasting in a hell. I want nothing to do with him. Heaven and hell being imaginary constructs of men, I will never be going to either.
(There. Does that sound enough like Christopher Hitchens?)
Christopher Hitchens was a good writer who became a sad and bitter old man. I have a bit more hope for you.
Nice photos, Ray. And terrific job knitting them together. You have some of those trees with all brown leaves, which the old-timers here tell me is indication of an impending early and hard winter. Looks like UT is a woodland campus, like my alma mater, Indiana University. Although we just pretend to be athletically inclined here, we aren’t really serious about it, like Kentucky and Tennessee.
I found out last Friday night that I’ve got a roof rat living in the basement of my nine month old refrigerator. He chewed up all the wiring which has been condemned by the repair dude and survived a close encounter with the condenser fan. The fan did not survive and the bearings have gone out.
Did you know that refrigerator warranty does not cover rat damage? He even ate the wiring on the compressor. According to the exterminator dude, the insulation tastes like peanut butter to them.
we aren’t really serious about it, like Kentucky and Tennessee.
We know. UT is a sports program with a university attached.
Parts of UT are wooded. The big building on the far left is recent and used to be a small hillside populated with huge trees that were dozens of years old. But UT being a green university found someone with enough green (money) to tear down the trees and put in a building. The chap that founded Garmin gave a lot of money and UT bent over backwards to accommodate even though I, along with others, felt there were better locations.
As I have stated before, universities are not about education, but making money and paying people with worthless degrees so the school can hand out more worthless degrees. UT is a leader in that role.
Nice picture, Ray; the architecture on the left sucks, and I thought that before I saw your description of what happened there. I like the church steeple (more terribly evil and false American religion, no doubt) and the buildings on the right.
As I’ve harped on here a few times; I’d close 90% of the colleges and universities and ALL of the publik skool systems.
I am not on a diet at present and have no intention of beginning one. I am aiming for 305 pounds and the ability to punch holes in brick walls and kick over bulldozers and backhoes. In case the shotgun ammo is defective or something…
77 here today and Mrs. OFD and MIL right now about to cross the O Kanada border in Maine, heading into Nouveau Brunswick and a nice long haul across the interior to the neat little fishing village of Pigeon Hill, on a point between the Atlantic Ocean and the Baie de Chaleur. And now for a week of violent crime and war movies again…
Actually I am wondering if Cringely is partially correct. What is the ratio between the consumer to business usage of PCs? If all of the consumers move to smart phones and tablets, where does that leave the business users ? Do the business users even care if 90% ??? of the PC users walk away ?
For instance, I have noted that I rarely see a dedicated cash register anymore. Most cash registers are now a PC with a UPC scanner and a cash box.
And any engineer nowadays in a office has a PC with 2 to 4 screens and 2 or 3 varieties of mice. Working with AutoCAD or Revit almost demands several large screens. My software requires serious cpu power if you are designing anything with a couple of feedback loops. I would hate to have to use a tablet for any of these applications.
I’ve been here before when we thought that the mainframe business users were going to jump to unix workstations back in the 1980s. Instead, they jumped to cheap PCs that they could get easily approved by their bosses instead of the $75K workstations. I would not be surprised to see this happen again and the business users jump to cheap tablets running apps in the cloud.
BTW, I bought a new fridge at Lowes last night. The appliance guy was looking for our choice in their multiple store inventory app. The inventory app was running on a freaking mainframe that he brought up on his sales pc through their internal network! If Lowes still has mainframe apps then will businesses ever make the jump to the cloud ?
A whole lot of corporations still have pretty old legacy systems and iron running and no intention anytime soon of moving to anything more recent for their main IT work. And they leave the rank-and-file office drones on WinXP, which will stop being supported next year, not that that means much now.
I almost fell off my chair this AM when I saw a job posting for a sys admin gig at a place about twenty miles from here; they wanted the UNIX and Linux but also mentioned they had DEC’s VMS. I’d scoot over there just for laffs to take a look but I’m good where I am right now, despite the bulk of my IT background being with VMS. A bunch of the old DEC guys went first to WinNT and then to Linux, like me, with VMS itself being supported from India and now owned, sold and maintained by HP.
I’m also studying up on Hadoop and the cloud thing on top of RH virtualization stuff right now.
FD wrote:
“…they wanted the UNIX and Linux but also mentioned they had DEC’s VMS.
Years ago I was thinking aloud about a job I might apply for, and my mum was there. I concluded “I can’t work for them, they use UNIX”. From the horrified expression on my mum’s face I saw I had to explain what UNIX was… 🙂
And one of my favourite sayings back then was:
“UNIX, the operating system with no balls.”
I’ve worked with DEC’s old Ultrix, now long-gone, I think, and HP-UX, and currently helping to support AIX as it gets shifted out the door in favor of RH. My next-younger brother did thirty years of work with HP-UX and is now gonna be doing Linux.
I was never a big fan of HP-UX. Seems like they never enlarged the internal buffers from the old BSD Unix ??? and I always got the dreaded overflow command when I was grepping code, etc.