Cool, then warm, then hot. And even into the night, still pretty warm. It was in the 80sF at 11pm yesterday. I didn’t even want to sit out with a tiny little fire and a book.
I did spend Saturday doing the stuff my wife wanted me to do. I made two trips to the shop to move stuff out of the house. It was pretty hot in the shop, and I didn’t have the time or motivation to move much around there. The A/C did start up, and all the ice was melted off of it, but something isn’t right with it.
The compressor runs, even if the control panel is set to ‘off’, and none of the controls actually work, except on/off/and temperature. Good thing I have A/C units to spare. And good thing it’s getting cooler.
I did make a nice dinner for W1 and the kids. It wasn’t cheap, but it was cheaper than going out.
Today she’ll be working D2, and I’ll just continue on the stuff I have on the list. With additions, because OF COURSE stuff got added. D1 has some plastic hanging off the bottom of the car that needs to be zip tied up or removed so it doesn’t drag and catch. And I’m sure there will be some other new thing that needs urgent attention…
But that’s all just normal. Do what you can with what you have, and the time you’ve got. And stack.
nick
About 10% of any given population has the cognitive capacity to produce world-class software. The rest pretend, even if they “learn to code”.
I borrowed that number from Mark Stevens’ “Accidental Empires” written under the pseudonym Bob Cringely. Stevens in turn got the number into Bell Labs research into creation of the seven digit telephone number in the US.
Strictly annecdotal, but, after 32 years of doing this professionally, I don’t believe the number is far off from reality.
Michael Caine, Steve Martin, and, believe it or not, Glenne Headly are awesome in that flick.
Don’t watch YouTube clips. See it cold. Martin’s best scene – you will know it when it happens — and the twist at the end are best enjoyed without any advance knowledge.
Headly died way too young at 62.
“Uncle Buck” came up in my media backlog this weekend. I’m unusual among X-ers in that I don’t like much of John Hughes’ output, but that script and the cast make that flick work, much like “Mr. Mom”.
I put the film in the backlog because I wanted a refresher on the genius of the casting of Mrs. Iceman in “Top Gun: Maverick”.
Joseph Kosinski and Tom Cruise nailed that decision.
About 10% of any given population has the cognitive capacity to produce world-class software. The rest pretend, even if they “learn to code”.
After 40 years working, first in comms only, later on IT since nineties, some things maybe are true, IT is a mature industry, anything as next big thing or hot skillz is meh since KyR (IBM maybe made it on SAGE before). For the record I managed into prod lot of things, never learnt to code.
10% maybe, but, more is needed?
So, and surely I am wrong, H1B move more to overseas from US market, and defense related to some selected countries, if any. But development is way to off to allow inshoring. And the sons of H1B are near or in junior age
time will test this
Nonsense. Perhaps 10% have the capacity to create basically-functional software, though I suspect that the number is considerably lower.
I haven’t read Accidental Empires in ages but from what I recall, the populations that “Bob Cringely” was talking about were probably the populations of Microsoft programmers or some such. I could believe that 10% of them can make world-class software. That population is already highly selected and not at all representative of the general population.
74 F and a million percent humidity here at Casa Lynn.
Baby brother is headed down to Moms house for a week. His wife is dropping him off in their one working car, a 2002 honda civic with over 200k miles on it. What could go wrong? That car can do 250 mile round trips, right ?
I told him to stop at heb and buy some bread and meat. Mom does not cook, she lives out of cans and food her friends bring.
If mom would move into her assisted living that she is paying for, she would have three hot meals a day. Sigh.
People are crazy.
Actual capability to sit down and write the code is much lower.
10% is the percentage with the cognitive capacity.
Yes and no. The studios are paying a heavy price for editing 90s TV programs in NTSC using Video Toaster and equivalent tools from the mainstream vendors. The end result looks like cr*p on modern TVs.
Up early, for me on a Sunday with nothing scheduled anyway…
79F. Sunny.
Coffee is almost ready.
Had a weird dream I was visiting campus after 35 years. Since we were talking about swamp coolers, that made me think about the trailer home I lived in, which made me check google streetview to see if anything was still there. As a parcel of land 1 block from the university, no, nothing remains. That led to poking around on the campus map and using streetview within the university grounds. I’m surprised that one of the buildings I worked in is still there, still in use. It was old and run down back then!
Lots of change and development in 35 years.
Now to decide if my back hurts enough to lay back down, or if I should start my day.
n
Based on my personal experience, I don’t believe that most of the H1B labor from India working at tech companies in the US falls into that 10% category.
Granted annectdotal, but my current employer is my third or, depending how you count, fourth Fortune 500 corporation employer in 32 years, including both halves of the CoDominium running telecom in the US.
My experience through teaching is that 10% of the people who study programming can be top-tier developers. That’s 10% of an already self-selected group. Maybe 40% have the ability to be decent programmers, under the wing of one of the 10%. The other 50% will never be useful developers – they can hack together websites, but that’s about it.
The problem with places like India is that many, many people see IT as a way out of poverty. They are not self-selecting for ability or even interest. So the 10%/40% numbers are much, much lower. On top of that, there is a widespread mentality of extreme micromanagement: do exactly what your boss asks, whether or not it makes sense. Individual initiative not desired.
I may have mentioned the one time I was in such a shop: the boss was walking around behind the developers, peeking over each shoulder and giving instructions. The developers were little more than typists. Of course, the boss could not possibly know what all of the people were actually doing, or what problems they had – it was just 5 seconds here, 10 seconds there. Instructions down to the level of “put that CD back in the case”. I don’t remember exactly what they were supposedly working on, but the result cannot have been good.
@Nick: I find the combination of a good whole house swamp cooler and a couple
smalllarge window units (great room and master bedroom) for our few weeks of monsoon weather per year to be almost ideal.It’s dry enough around here that I get nosebleeds if I try to use central air.
But the continual maintenance of swamp coolers is a pain, pads and pump every year, motor every two or three.
It is continuous duty, which is hard on motors, but the original motor was built somewhere in the midwest in 1998 and lasted until ca. 2020, so it is doable.
I always keep a spare new mainland motor handy.
if I knew how bad the modern motors were going to be I would’ve saved the old one and had it rebuilt by Elvis, the local electric motor rebuild guy. Kind of Aspy, floats around the backrooms of a few local shops, but people say that paying the business owner and a box of donuts for Elvis will get you good-as-new.
The problem with the 10% rule for programmers is that that you are fishing from the same pool of IQ for all the other technical portions of a business. Design, manufacture, operations…
The studios are paying a heavy price for editing 90s TV programs in NTSC
– the stuff no one cared about becomes collectible because most of it got lost. The stuff everyone thought would be worth something is worthless because everyone kept it.
Shows shot on video were throwaways. Shows shot on film (after video became widely available) were kept. And part of it is that you couldn’t wipe and reuse the film.
Television was a disposable medium for the most part.
n
*other than titling for low budget, I think most of the non-linear video editing happened on one particular platform that I can ‘t remember the name.
Reminds me of an old (late ’50s?) quote by Ernie Kovacs: “Television is often called a medium because it’s neither rare, nor well done”.
I have heard that several early seasons of Doctor Who were thought lost because the studio reused the video tape, then recovered decades later because a sheik somewhere had physical copies of the lost episodes (since the BBC wasn’t broadcasting in his country).
John Hughes–Saturday Evening Movie Thread – 9/20/2025
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=416508
John Hughes passed at 59, and his legacy includes:
National Lampoon’s Vacation (writer)
Mr. Mom (writer)
Sixteen Candles (writer and director)
The Breakfast Club (writer and director)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (writer and director)
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (writer and co-producer)
Uncle Buck (writer and director)
Home Alone (writer and producer)
That is one heck of a list for less than a decade, yet he doesn’t seem to be getting much respect at present.
I pulled up the IMDb “100 Greatest Movies of the 1980s” (ca 2011) and scrolled through, which left me mystified as to what “metascore” might be and how it was weighted to change the ratings based on the IMDb score. Note that “metascore” is not on the individual pages.
There is always the question of timing in such lists. The same list compiled in 1990 would be different from twenty years on (about 2011, as this list) and forty years on (we aren’t there yet). And the ranking criteria can be box office, rentals, viewer ranking, critics, etc., with changes over time. There are a lot of 2011 list placements driven by critics and post-1980’s evaluations (e.g. Brazil*)
Movies, of course, can be divided by genre. Comedies seldom get the gravitas accorded “films”–I for one would stick needles in my eyes before trying again to watch E.M Forstner on film, and would take any of the above list in a heartbeat to that or a number of others on the IMDb list.
Final observation: The 1980’s saw the resurgence of science fiction driven first by the success of Star Wars and the brilliant use of miniatures and special cameras, followed by the post-Tron (1982) emergence of CGI. The techniques that wowed captured imaginations are blasé now, and I suspect that the forty year list will see a more balanced evaluation and lower ratings for some films.
*I confess that I have a difficult time evaluating any project where a principle was responsible for blatant theft of intellectual property. The long-delayed emergence of such in “Brazil” and Eric Clapton’s “Layla” has forever soured my regard of both.
You have to wonder what’s sitting out there on reel to real, or old computer tapes, or even old vhs that is waiting to be discovered.
n
I wasn’t a fan of Second City, and not much of a fan of John Candy. My sibling loves him and his films. We’re only a year apart, had a common childhood, so it must come down to something innate.
——-
John Hughes was in the right place at the right time, and was VERY perceptive. He had true talent for capturing the slightly glossy, slightly off kilter time. So much was changing and things were looking up but the horrible 70s were still everywhere and there was a nostalgia for earlier times. Preppy was big, as were glasses and hair! It wasn’t bouffants but it was the 80s version of hair excess.
n
I’ve heard that some people can sit down to do paying work with the expectation of being able to work uninterrupted for an hour or more. I wonder what that’s like.
“Do we have any eggs?” – Here’s an idea: Why don’t you look?
(A minute later) “I’m bringing the eggs upstairs.” – When I bring in eggs, I put them in a carton in the basement fridge, as it’s on the way from my desk to the basement door and thus the chickens.
(Two minutes later) “The upstairs fridge has no room so I’m bringing them back downstairs.”
To quote Chris Rock, “Now, I’m not sayin’ he shoulda killed her … But I understand.”
“I have heard that several early seasons of Doctor Who were thought lost because the studio reused the video tape, then recovered decades later because a sheik somewhere had physical copies of the lost episodes (since the BBC wasn’t broadcasting in his country).”
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Lots of twists and turns in the efforts of dedicated fans to track down and restore missing episodes. Note that several people admit to knowledge of holdings by private collectors who are hesitant to come forth due to legal concerns.
Also, not exactly missing is “Shada”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)
Intended as the Season 17 (1979-80) ending, the episode was not finished due to labor actions and for years the only glimpse was in a snippet of footage used in the 1983 20th anniversary special “The Five Doctors”. The episode had keen fan interest due to the writing of Douglas Adams, and eventually, in 2017, a completed version was released. Note that Adams original vision of this story was quite different, and unfortunately his passing has removed his perspective from the historical narrative.
The scene from Pritzi’s Honor where the old guy is reading every word he sees…
it’s starting
n
Early reports are often wrong.
n
Screenwriter’s work is probably the most malleable of any written artistic form.
n
@Nick Flandrey
“You have to wonder what’s sitting out there on reel to real, or old computer tapes, or even old vhs that is waiting to be discovered.”
The link above to the missing Doctor Who episodes gives a taste of the historical treasure hunt. With wide distribution of relatively stable media there is always hope.
Unfortunately, many early films are forever lost. Nitrate film stock was combustible and subject to deterioration if not closely temperature controlled. Many stories have been told of archived copies being opened and discovered to be largely dust, with cases of only a few frames recovered as stills. It’s been years since I’ve heard of any significant new discoveries.
@nick:
It was my understanding, during my days at the BBC, that America tended, in the latter days of Standard definition NTSC, to shoot on film, print to video, and edit in that form, because electonic post was quicker and cheaper.
The degradation in quality was blatantly obvious, especially when you consider that we got sight of completed shows after standards conversion, which made things worse. I’m thinking of “Dallas” and “TNG” in particular, but it’s true of nearly everything produced in America during that era.
Early Dallas, in particular, came to Auntie on 35mm film, and we telecine operators used to joke that the pictures were “sharp enough to cut you”, especially when you consider that every telecine had a device called a Vertical Aperture Corrector, which was used to artificially replace the sharpness loss due to the “aperture effect”. This device was adjusted by eye, to just under the threshold at which objectionable artefacts were generated, typically to about 7 or 8 on the knob, which was scaled 0 -10. “Dallas” frequently required no more than “VAK 5”. (Don’t ask me why the setting as given as VAK, it’s a BBCism from long before I worked in telecine.
Add to that the systematically higher gamma in American TV, which results in lower (sometimes much lower) key images, and conversion artifacts, and American material would often get 1 to 2 grades lower on the CCITT 5-point scale. Film Dallas was often 4 or higher, I would grade video Dallas at 3 or even 2-and-a-half, which is borderline unacceptable.
TNG showed similar effects, with visible video noise into the bargain.
G.
Megan Kelly inciinerates:
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/09/21/megyn-kelly-tim-miller-n2419279
Yeah, we’ll turn the temperature down after the left is burned to cinders.
– angry little girl is angry. And if anyone needed more reasons to ignore current ‘musicians’ and ‘personalities’, well, there you go.
She had NO problem with .gov censorship of conservatives or alt voices on FB or twitter.
And she fundamentally misunderstands the nature of businesses and who they exist to benefit.
I weep for the youth of America.
n
I noticed the other day when I was retail shopping for something else (SD cards) that the resin Adirondack chairs were on closeout sale for $15 at Walmart.
I didn’t buy them then but I noticed while cleaning up the yard this week that my current ones are falling apart, and it occurred to me that I could just order and do a pick up locally, but according to the WM webpage everything is still full price…
it’s not a big deal, but $15 instead of $60 is actual money, particularly if buying two or more.
@edh:
I’ve heard the same. There are reports of combining 16mm film recordings in monochrome with colour information from a fan VHS, to recreate episodes that were lost due to Auntie’s 1970s habit of wiping and reusing 2 inch quadruplex videotapes. I’ve even heard of a few cases where they’ve managed to recover colour pictures from a monochrome FR. This is only possible because the colour information is actually recorded on the film, although the colour reference signal (the colour burst) is absent. This may only be possible with PAL video, I don’t know.
G.
And yes, I did actually spend a few months running the Beeb’s monochrome film recorder. There was only the one, in my day.
G.
@ Geoff – that is some cool technical history. Thanks.
The technical differences between shooting on film and shooting on video made for completely different “looks” that people learned to recognize and associate with good vs cheap.
The transfer process from film to video could be done well, or poorly, but some filmed content just couldn’t be transferred well due to the gamma issues. I used to run into this doing projection work. If you brought the blacks up to the point you could see stuff in the dark, you washed it all out. Contrast ratio sucked, and black levels were horrible.
One of the great things about recent tvs is how black they are, and the depth of color. I worked on a display system that wasn’t very bright on paper, but because of how black black was, and how much color depth there was, everyone perceived it as a very vibrant and bright display. It was difficult selling it without a demo because projectors sell on “brightness”. And historically, like 70s and 80s stereo gear specs, projector “brightness” was often a flat out lie.
Film brightness was and is VERY low. SMPTE standard for projection screen brightness is 14 foot-lamberts. If you didn’t traverse the dark lobby, and sit in the dark theater before the film, you’d be squinting …
n
(for boardroom screens I’d often get 30 or more foot-lamberts…)
n
Yes. I had a work from home business partner and the average elapsed time between interruptions on phone calls was seven minutes (I measured it). Even her husband – who should have known better – would get in on the act. Questions much like yours: “Are my socks dry?”, “The dogs need feeding.”, etc.
After the third or fourth interruption she would politely ask if she could call me back. I would say yes.
There would be several minutes before she would call back, but there were no interruptions whatsoever after that.
TBH it was kind of funny.
I always kind of wanted to be a fly on the wall for whatever was said, and kind of relieved I wasn’t.
Olivia has been an establishment shill for a long time.
– And I’d like to point out that Kimmel wasn’t censored, he made the statement, it was broadcast, it was widely repeated. He was censured because of the lie.
SAG/AFTRA (the “talent’s” union) is even dumber with their post on X “[we] stand with all media artists and defend their right to express their diverse points of view, and everyone’s right to hear them.”
Everyone doesn’t have a “right” to talk on TV, and no one has a “right” to hear them.
Besides, where was SAG/AFTRA when Gina Carano got fired? F them.
n
@nick:
That’s probably a gamma issue. And it’s why we also called out a gamma adjustment, if needed, when we rehearsed a film (read: viewed closed-circuit to establish optimal settings) before tranmission.
G.
We recently watched the unreleased Roger Corman spectacle “Fantastic Four”. Quite the stinkeroo. So bad it was funny. Obviously made for TV and looks like they ran out of money to finish the special effects. Still better than the execrable remake of the remake with Amish Johnny Storm. Available on the high seas.
I should maybe mention here that UK telecines had separate adjustments for gain, lift (pedestal) and gamma for each colour, and there would be someone watching and adjusting everything, by eye, as the film ran. Anyone who did this was expected to have passed an Ishihara test, to establish normal colour vision.
In BBC practice, the adjustments were made with two 3-axis joysticks – master gain and differential gain under your right hand, and master lift and differential gamma under your left hand. I think – it’s been probably 35 years since I did any stick-stirring (as we called it)
There was a master gamma, which was either a switch (0.4/0.3, nominal 0.4) or a knob, depending on the age of the machine – earlier ones had the switch. Differential lift was available via a switch/knob combo, but was rarely needed. Calling gamma 0.3 was an indication that the film had dense blacks, with significant loss of detail resulting therefrom, possibly as a result of underexposure.
And since the eye acclimates to the colours it sees, nulling out errors, we always had a greyscale reference near the monitor, to ensure consistency, and worked under subdued light.
G
They and their children are doubtless in the forefront of the shutdown of conservative speakers on campus.
F them.
Authorities: There are videos of incident at Delta State
https://www.wlbt.com/2025/09/17/authorities-there-are-videos-incident-delta-state/
My heart grieves for a young man who could not find help when he needed it, and for his family and friends who are left to mourn.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/09/21/freedom-isnt-free-the-most-profound-response-to-jimmy-kimmel-yet-comes-from-91-year-old-pat-boone-n2194171
“anywhere you choose” has some limitations, but yeah.
I don’t remember what controls my TV has other than Backlight. Too lazy to go look. I cranked the backlight way down to 15 or 20% from 100%. I’ll go outside to get tanned, thank you very much.
It’s just a really big flat screen computer monitor anyway.
Before digital I found how to set the Tint. People said I was weird then they tried it and sure enough….
Black and white Perry Mason shows are very good for brightness and contrast. Movies from the ‘40 are good, too. Set this in the evening when you watch a lot of TV. Sure, it will look dark on Saturday afternoon, that’s normal.
Then go find something on PBS, some nature show, like tigers hunting emu on the sun-drenched plains of Oklahoma. Marlin Perkins narrating would be a bonus. That will get your color levels about right.
Next, go watch The Cosby Show. No! Not being racist. Set the Tint control so everyone looked real. No one is super-fly black or green like a My Favorite Martian meets meets Creature from the Black Lagoon character. You might want to bump the color level up a tiny bit…. about, if you can feel the rheostat wires, about two wires more.
Then everything looks good no matter what channel you are watching.
He may be mentally ill.
But the writer doesn’t know that.
He may be wicked or evil, old fashioned as the concepts may be.
People are accustomed to using “crazy” to describe all sorts of behavior, but it isn’t necessarily so.
Talking about old TV and such, I’ll recommend again putting Tubi and Pluto on your streaming devices. Free with adds unless it is something special. Charlie Kirk’s funeral is streaming live on Tubi (probably YT+, too). I like Tubi just to throw up some old B/W comedies while I read. Watching the funeral on my iPad.
I wonder how long until the Dumbo’s, PLTs, troons, etc., claim nobody attended or watched Charlie Kirk’s celebration.
I know “The Squad” (ugh) are on TV right now disparaging Kirk as a WHITEY! Christian Nationalist raycis misogynistic xenophobic POS. They can’t even give it a rest on a day of remembrance. How “The Squad” remains in office is beyond me. Shot Girltm made her big “I hate Charlie Kirk” speech on the floor so nobody could sue her for defamation. I’ll never forget Chuckie Schemer and “Dirty” Harry Reid laughing to the LSM cameras how they lied to Redumblicans on the floor to get whatever they wanted. It is time the spineless Redumblicans grew one.
Modern digital tvs have several settings to affect picture.
Many have “sports-games-movie or cinema-bright” choices which load a bunch of different settings from brightness/contrast to gamma correction to frame rate adjustments.
The default color gamut is way to saturated for movies made before 2010, and “smoothing” or high frame rates make movies shot on film look weird. We’ve learned what movies should look like, some flicker from the low frame rate, lens flare, grain, etc. Monsters Inc, a completely animated movie, has a lens flare effect in the opening sequence because that’s what we expect to see.
Then there are the brain and eye factors– perception being different from vision being different from seeing… and some of it is trained. I see certain things because I’ve been trained to look for them, when other people would not even realize they were there.
n
Since it was 96F and sunny I went out and pressure washed the front of the house and the front walk. I also used it to drill a hole in the dirt to put up my new flagpole. Who needs concrete when the sleeve drills it’s own close fit hole into the clay dirt? We’ll see if the wind buffeting the flag works the hole bigger, and I’ll put in concrete if I have to. For now, I’ll just wait for it to dry before putting the flag on it.
Then I had to wrap up because it started raining pretty hard. It seems to have stopped or slowed to a drizzle at the moment.
n
“Doctor Shortage”
https://areaocho.com/doctor-shortage/
“The largest complaint about the US healthcare system is that costs are too high. Did you know that Congress has a cap on how many doctors can be created each year? Yep. Again, here is another problem made worse by government meddling.”
“Even worse, 3500 of those spots each year are taken by foreign doctors on H1B visas. That’s 3500 Americans each year who have graduated med school, but will never become doctors.”
Well, isn’t that special.
My experience through teaching is that 10% of the people who study programming can be top-tier developers. That’s 10% of an already self-selected group. Maybe 40% have the ability to be decent programmers, under the wing of one of the 10%. The other 50% will never be useful developers – they can hack together websites, but that’s about it.
My experience is if the programmer did not start reading about software development and writing software by age 15, their chance of being a top tier programmer is not good. They gotta want it real bad, bad enough to teach themselves to write software.
“SpaceX Eyes 15,000 More Satellites for Cellular Starlink, Hints at Carrier Plans”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-eyes-15000-more-satellites-for-cellular-starlink-hints-at-carrier
“After the $17 billion EchoStar deal, SpaceX requests to build a constellation of ‘up to 15,000’ satellites to bolster its cellular Starlink system.”
“On Friday, the company filed a request with the FCC for the additional satellites, which will harness the radio spectrum SpaceX is acquiring from Boost Mobile’s parent, EchoStar, in a $17 billion deal. “This new system of up to 15,000 satellites will provide ubiquitous connectivity to ordinary mobile handsets and a range of other devices and user terminals,” the company wrote.”
So Starlink is going to become a satellite phone network too. Musk does not miss a trick.
Huh, one of my auctions extended their finish time by 3 hours, “so that you can watch the Charlie Kirk memorial, if you want” and not miss the auction close.
n
I’d bet money that “a range of other devices and user terminals,” includes military handhelds.
n
In all my years of owning a cell phone, I have yet to take a “selfie”. I fail to understand the need to self-gratify, especially the “selfies” in bathrooms.
I’d bet money that “a range of other devices and user terminals,” includes military handhelds.
That is a separate network, Starshield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
re: selfies
When I divorced, I took my first selfie in my office at work, for putting on a dating site.
I’ve taken maybe 2 more since then, but they were selfies of me with other people like my granddaughter, for the memories.
Other than the dating site, none are on the internet.
FWIW, internet dating sites are worthless for chubby men over 50 who aren’t rich.
I can’t pay my electric bill because I don’t know how much I owe, and I don’t know because SCE stopped sending paper bills and the SCE website has been down for days.
Strange world.
Phone? – Far as I know most utilities have an automated phone system. Easy to get info and make payments. You might even be able to talk to a real live person. (well I’m on PG&E but I’d think it’s about the same)
I think I could write a program. I seem to be at least fair with story telling. I’m not totally dumb. Thing is though, write a program to do what? That’s the “spark” I’m missing.
I can do a web page with notepad. Ditto for the css stuff. But that’s all simple, to me, Yeah, I gotta use my cheat notes for the fine details. You can look at my site for proof.
I can mess around with xcopy and batch files and the like. But beyond that, I kinda hit a wall.
It’s annoying to admit to being dumb.
Basic web pages are easy. A bit of HTML and CSS. And with that, you get a web page that looks like a twenty year old design.
But effective web pages, with SEO and targeting and visually appealing, and that work equally well on all types of devices and screen resolutions and screen sizes is much harder. As is testing all of that to make sure that the page works. And then to duplicate that design and functionality across the entire site is another factor that increases the complexity and difficulty.
There are IDE (Integrated Development Environments) that will make building those kind of pages easier. But it is still a lot of work.
Every week or so, I take another stab at understanding programming macros in LibreOffice, because it SEEMS like it should be possible to do what I want in a macro.
Back in the first decade of this century, I had the same issue with browsers and javascript that I am now facing with LibreOffice and their BASIC macro language. It’s all about the “object oriented” Document Object Model, or DOM.
A web page or an ODT document exists, from the language’s POV, as a hierarchical collection of objects or groups of objects. Each object has properties and methods (for LO, also services and interfaces).
The problem 20 years ago was dealing with the fact that Firefox and IE of the time presented different views of the DOM; in effect, different DOMs. We had to implement different javascript to deal with that. But as I recall, we didn’t have trouble finding out what the objects themselves were, nor what their properties were, what their methods were.
I wish I could say the same about LibreOffice objects inside a text document.
The documentation is wretched. The best advice on reddit seems to be “side load this debugger and watch an object. You’ll see all the properties and methods in a side panel.”
There’s no “hello, world” sample script for walking and dumping the hierarchy of objects. The samples I’ve found are all niche and use searches for object names or contents which mask the structure.
I’ll eventually get there, I just wanted to whine a little.
I will also note, this is part of what I refer to as the difference between programming and software. Software has formal requirements and documentation and formal testing.
Once upon a time, I was a G*d with DOS. My 1st PC, an almost cutting edge 386-25mhz with 80 megabyte HDD from Gateway 2000 that I took out a student loan for and took near a decade to pay down and I built into a 486 and Desqview box over years.
I used 4DOS.COM as a replacement for COMMAND.COM, became expert with QEMM fine points and pillaged local BBSs with the dedicated 2nd phone line. My AUTOEXEC.BAT ran to hundreds of lines and called various other batches as needed. There was an X-10 box you could program with a pseudo BASIC language that had my 1917 built apartment running better than George Jetson’s cartoon joint. Alarm, lighting control via motion sensors, coffee on a timer and an IR remote contol for TV and stereo.
Then came Windows 95, the ‘Web and moving. Various Pentiums and bigger HDDs but it was never the same.
Fun stuff.
So I’m messing with the kindle Fire. I connected it to my PC and opened ADBAppControl. Uh. I it works, android is android after all.
So stuff like Alexa and the amazon browser for kids and a few other things need to go away. Clicking uninstall does not work. Clicking disable does work.
Ain’t skeered of bricking it.
Oh. Another factoid. I added my GMail account to e-mail. Pretty cool, my calendar and contacts from my phone all appeared. I liked that. Never mind the contacts are useless because the Fire is not a phone. But I can update the contacts on my phone, to add e-mail addreses, right?
I deleted the GMail account. I never use it and can do that on my phone. The calendar and contacts vanished. Well, ok. Whatever ya dick heads.
Anyway. Black holing 8.8.8.8 in the router has made the kindle faster. And it seems browsing on my PC is faster….. think about that. A java script doesn’t have to go to http://www.random domain, it can go to 8888.
Just saying.
Try asking around whether the documentation is bad because the stuff being documented is changing so quickly or because no one’s gotten around to working on the docn. If the latter, perhaps you’ve found something to keep you busy for a while.
Yeah. I understand what you are saying. But my site, https://remsset.com seems to work fine for me on my PC or my phone or the Fire. It seems to be valid “HTML 4.0 Transitional”. https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=remsset.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 for whatever that is all worth.
Yeah, I have a bug there. I’ll go look to fix it. Some day. With Notepad. I need to tweak the CSS for font sizes too.
The SEO stuff is all garbage now. The AI crap is oh, jeeze, two screens of crap before I find anything near useful.
After Video Toaster, lot of 90s TV programs shot on film were edited in NTSC to save money, including Stage 8/9 era “Star Trek” and “Babylon 5”.
That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Like the Cylons, the AMA has a plan.
Your MBBS will see you now.
Even movies were transferred to video, edited with a computerized NLE system, then when the final cut was done, they’d cut the actual movie. LOTS faster.
AVID media composer, then Final Cut Pro and Premiere. AVID was the pro one everyone used.
n
Try browsing using Fennec from FDroid instead of Amazon’s browser.
I squirrel-brained reading this; Would being good at writing poetry, with it’s arbitrary rules depending on the genre/type, be a good proxy for being good at writing code?
I think you are exactly right.
Sorry. I get twisted when writing a post.
I had a boss once, in a small company, who studied English in college. Nonetheless, he was almost as good a programmer as me.
He made a joke one week that we should submit our weekly status report in the form of a sonnet.
So I did. Not saying it was a GREAT sonnet, but it had the form.
Also, if you need to waste time, look up the poetical form called double dactyl.
When a different English major BA and MA challenged me to write one, I reset the “There was a young lady named Bright” limerick into that form. I did it in one night, and I think it made him angry because he expected me to fail in my attempt.
There was a notice today that Xcode 26 is out.
Man, seems like it was Xcode 16 just last year.
Wait a minute…
…..
Lots and lots of AI
crapintegration.@EdH
“I can’t pay my electric bill because I don’t know how much I owe, and I don’t know because SCE stopped sending paper bills and the SCE website has been down for days.”
Heh.
Can you look at last month’s bill and read your meter?
Send them a paper check with:
Estimated Sept 2025: $x
Estimation fee: $5.00
Website off-line fee: $y @$2.00 per failed access attempt
Enclosed: $(x-5-y)
cc: state utilities board, state governor’s office, your state representative.
…which will cause next month’s bill to include a late charge because the unpaid balance, plus some other additional fees associated with partial payment….
@paul
“I think I could write a program.”
There is a new genre on YouTube that is in it’s infancy. Revenge “videos”, but really just synthetic voice audio, as the video is typically stock footage from an auto rolling down a lightly traveled road in Europe or tooling around an oceanside town, or similarly nondescript.
The story is typically: Hardworking unappreciated brilliant programmer who had been unappreciated for years has IP stolen by evil boss and is suddenly terminated. Unbeknownst to boss, he/she is either the key named compliance person, secretly holds key patents in his/her name, or is otherwise in a keystone position to bork the company.
Typical exit includes being walked out by security with backup hard drive containing keys to the kingdom, chipped coffee mug, and abused desktop plant.
AI fingerprints are all over the story, including obvious computer buzz words/phases from a list but the most hilarious being continuity like a bad haircut executed by a 3 year-old with rounded scissors and rescued with duct tape–most stories have a loop or three where a scene is repeated with different details (e.g. leaves building by front door and walks down sidewalk, then magically is exiting through the parking garage)
HR, the CEO, and “the board” are always featured.
There is always an appeal a couple minutes in to subscribe because 93% people do not, and the team needs to be motivated to bring these fine stories to you.
About 1 in 5 have a supporting character named “Priya”
I don’t play with the monkey trick, but I’m curious as to how long the file is that produces these things.
ref: see Revenge with Karen
@OldGuy
x is an estimate because there is no bill, the unpaid balance is unknown, and no late charge can be charged.
Late charges / etc. will be on the following month’s bill. Go ahead and try it. Prove me wrong.
There is a term that would attach to failure to send a monthly bill followed by levying a late fee for the next month: fraud.
State utility boards oversee utility practices, including billing. Every state is different, but I’m will to go out on a limb and suggest that it’s very likely that customers must receive a bill, rather than determine what they owe though magic or some other extraordinary means.
Tell you what: Let me know what state you live in, and I’d be happy to give your state utility board a call and find out if telepathy or some other arcane means is required when no physical or electronic bill is presented.
Well, this is a result of my research:
Ai much?
None of the above addresses how you are required to pay a bill when you cannot determine the amount.
When they tell you who they are, believe them:
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/09/21/ohio-dems-booted-from-family-friendly-county-fair-for-shilling-86-47-buttons-other-hateful-merch-n2194194
rare honesty from Politico:
The Bougie Fallout of ICE’s Crackdown in DC
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/20/ice-crackdown-dc-elite-00573586
but not complete honesty by everyone:
Why am I certain that the primary reason these restaurants are having problems with labor is that they have not been too concerned with checking immigration status of their non-citizen employees in the past?
The world would look different, if you were a young, female cutie…
if you were a young, female cutie…
– D1 uses hers like a mirror to check her makeup. It’s like the old movies where the femme pulls out a compact to powder her nose.
————
Had a nice tiny little fire and read for a couple hours. Only saw one critter, a black cat. Even the frogs were quiet tonight.
Time to hit the hay though, tomorrow is a school day.
n
Youtube announced that they were banning several types of AI generated content, and I’m seeing less of it in my shorts but it’s still there. Most of it is an AI voice reading reddit threads over unrelated video stolen from elsewhere.
n
>>Plus the guberment will be going door to door and seizing your gold. I am not sure about silver, that may be stage 2 when they get really desperate.
Come on, ante up the silver when they come for the gold…why have them make two trips?