Warm and wet again. 60s and 70sF with really high humidity. Yuck. Blue sky helps, but it’s still unpleasantly damp. And it will continue for a few days yet. Probably.
I spent the day on my computer and phone. Turns out I hit my deductible and so all medical expenses until the end of the year are paid for (subject to copays and other limits.) This is the opposite of what I thought happened, ie, I wouldn’t make it so save discretionary treatment until next year. It would have been nice to know last month. I was able to schedule one office visit this year. I haz a sad because I have a half dozen to schedule. Still checking things out, no bad thing lurking.
I’m also poking at my auto insurance both for an old claim, and for the possible new one. Fortunately Ranger parts are pretty cheap, and widely available. If I decide to fix my trucks axle, no matter who funds it, it should be doable and in the ‘reasonable to do’ range for me.
This means I didn’t get anything else done. Other than laundry. So I’ve got all that still to do.
It’s always something, and there’s always more.
Stack. Because the alternative is actually working on stuff…
nick
Amen to that. It’s a great life if we don’t falter.
Friday. Good morning. A week of my holidays passed already! Where did it go?
I think my sinuses are punishing me for something. I am going to apply some steroids and go back to bed for a couple of hours. That might help…
Disagreed that the language wasn’t a factor. Rust’s features, and I use that noun with reservations, make many ordinary tasks a challenge. If Rust stays around, most likely techniques will be developed to implement these tasks in idiomatic Rust without having to bypass Rust’s features. We (they) aren’t at that point yet. Trying to get things done in Rust is more fraught than doing them in other languages.
Agreed that the developer screwed up and that a seasoned developer shouldn’t have.
Who exactly is a “seasoned” Rust developer outside of the language architects at Mozilla?
Anyone with real work to get done is not going to have the time to hassle with a whole new language just to make a propellerhead manager happy that he can notch a resume entry.
“Managed Rust developers.”
Corporate America has a new age discrimination tool.
Seasoned in general, with knowledge of many languages and frameworks and things that can go wrong.
@Denis
Up early to make civet de marcassin (Wild Boar stew
May I bring wine?
Like I said, it’s a bit involved…
– um, yeah. But sounds mouthwateringly tasty. Sometimes a scent unit would be a nice accessory to the pc.
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40F this morning. Not warm. At least not yet. Looks clear though.
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The IR emitter that I replaced the power supply on the other day is flashing like a chinese LED streetlight. I’ll try replacing the slightly underpowered wart first. IAS – it’s always something.
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Kinder are moving. Coffee smells good. Elf on the shelf can go F itself…
n
Corporate America doesn’t want to pay for that.
Management grudgingly altered my compensation in the last couple of weeks, and that was only due to a change in direct leadership of my group, where stability is required for the next few months to land some big sales while the Monkey Trick plates are still spinning.
The new manager for my group tried the Jedi mind trick on me in a meeting on Wednesday regarding the age issue in the room for most of the last year due to the Go push. “You don’t want to say that to HR.”
This is my last tech job.
Last ever 2nd semester programming lecture – done. Whew. Still have grading to do, but the end is in sight. I have taught that course for way too long, and the student motivation has dropped steadily over the years. During the same time, the number of non-Swiss names has increased. I expect there is a relationship.
Of course, I am teaching programming at the trade school, but that is very different. Also still mostly Swiss, because we are far away from the big cities.
I’m finding that I would like to increase my teaching time. I quit work before I could pass on my hard earned knowledge. Now I would like to.
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Not the iranians. Probably. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/12/brown-university-shooter-claudio-neves-valente-also-responsible/
Thirty year old grudge seems a bit hard to believe.
n
The new auction seller that has the mysteriously disappearing auction when the bids are too low did it again.
I won 3 items last night, but this morning, no record of the auction happening, and he has the same items listed again. This time, with high starting bids.
So the auction ended, my bids were high, the system marked them “won” by me, and he threw all that out because the bids weren’t high enough.
I reported his shenanigans to the platform support people. If, as we are told whenever bidding, “a bid placed is a contract to buy” then surely an item listed for bidding is a contract to sell. One that this guy has violated several times now.
Everyone thinks the reselling game is easy money. It’s not. This guy bought a couple of pallets of cop dash cams and saw the list price from the manufacturer and thought he’d bought a pot of gold. I used to buy similar stuff for $20 per pallet. It’s clear that he didn’t even look at ebay ‘sold’ prices for the bits that do infrequently sell, nor did he figure out that most of them never sell.
The networking gear I wanted sells on ebay used for about $20 net to seller, maybe less after shipping. I won with $5 bid, which is about right vs ebay. Today he has it starting at $20, with additional 10% buyers fee. A quick check of some of the other starting prices and it’s similar. He is starting above or around the ebay net to seller– with none of the buyer protections from ebay. Given the fees from the auction platform, even selling at his open will probably net him less than ebay. And no one will be buying from him at that price anyway.
He hasn’t done his research. Doesn’t understand auctions. Spent WAY too much time and energy listing. Will blame everyone but himself when he goes broke and quits.
n
Yes, people doing metal casting use dry stone and gravel so as not to create an all-natural hand grenade if they spill the molten metal.
My neighbor made one of those double barrel contraptions, and it worked very well for him because he was helping a retired lawyer friend destroy hundreds of boxes of documents. He needed an nice clean burn because there was so much of it and because the county would probably get excited about open flame disposal of same and he wanted a smokeless fire.
Out of curiosity, after a full career in tech, where do you go?
My migration was stepwise down. From team lead of highly technical product development to OS customization (VMS) to product maintenance to healthcare DBA (Intersystems Cache and SQL Server) to SME in Medical Records and Hospital Billing. Then kicked to the curb for not taking he clot shot.
Sometimes I regret my active dodging of management positions. Although that wouldn’t have saved me from termination.
re: Rust
Don’t know beans about Rust, but the discussion about multithreading and coordination of updates to shared data structures reminded me of my training in VMS internals, taught by Digital Equipment Corporation when I was a customer, before I became an employee.
When DEC introduced multiprocessing to their VAX computing line, they had to modify the kernel to support it. They introduced interprocessor synchronization tools called spinlocks to handle shared resources. It was an extension of the concept of mutexes.
We were trained in how to use spinlocks and how to queue requests for shared resources and how to avoid deadlocks.
In VAX assembler language.
In retrospect, most of my OS training was about memory allocation, tracking data structures and sharing, and making sure you handled all the deallocation appropriately.
God, that was all so long ago. The last customization I made was in the early 90’s.
Please do! I would recommend a full-bodied dry red; Bordeaux, or maybe a Cahors.
I had the stew last night with a Christmas beer: Bush de Noël. W1 had a Christmas Val Dieu. Those went rather well. I might have a glass of wine with the leftovers this evening, for scientific purposes, you understand…
It indeed was not awful. I think it will be even better today.
My sinuses are definitely acting up. Too much culinary-olfactory stimulation yesterday, perhaps?
I have hit them with everything in the house pharmacy; steroids, Vitamin C, Xylometazoline, Acetylcysteine and some Sage extract (Salvia officinalis). Next, I will inhale the steam from a bowl of boiling water with a few drops of this stuff in it:
Tincture of benzoin, 30 grams
Eucalyptus tincture, 30 grams
Balsam of Peru 0.5 gram
Gomenol (Niaouli oil), 1 gram.
Fingers crossed. I don’t want to be dragging sinusitis and myself around for Christmas.