Another cool but sunny day I hope. Yesterday was nice, with some clouds but really a nice day.
I did my pickup, and drop off in the afternoon, so I did get out of the house. It was my wife’s first day back in the office “for real” so I was mostly home with the kids. I spent the morning fighting with USB sticks and microSD cards, with the goal of installing linux and the linux version of my security cam NVR software. I’m done with windows updating and taking down my cameras. Some of that tale of woe is in yesterday’s comments. Late last night I got the image onto a USB drive but didn’t have time to install or test. I won’t today either.
I’ve got to do a site visit and install some stuff for my client out in the country. That will take whatever of the day remains when I head out there. Before that, I’ve got some access points to configure.
And we’re meeting with the roofer this morning to sign the contract for our hail damage replacement roof. Once that work is done, getting the HVAC replaced is next on the list. We’ve made it through summer one last time (touch wood) but neither I nor my wife want to roll the dice for next year. And we don’t want to have to do the work in the hot months, or under the gun. Comments about HVAC manufacturers welcome.
Trump is home at the White House and people are acting like he’s going to Outer Mongolia. He’s still going to get the best care available and Walter Reed is still just a short helo ride away. Given the back stabbing doctors, he may not have felt safe there anyway, and there were far too many leaks and comments from people who should have known better.
And to all the people acting like he’s going to infect people on purpose because he’s evil, HE got the wuflu from someone else. All those other people could also have gotten it from the same source or each other. I haven’t seen anything convincing that Trump is personally spreading covid. And if he is? If freaking grocery store workers are ‘essential’ and MUST work with strangers and coworkers all day long, what is the President and the halls of government? I guess no one cares if the deli clerk gets it from a customer, but if a White House aide gets it at work it’s a national event? Gimme a break.
Anyway, stuff to do. Better get to it. I need more room for preps and less room for things that aren’t selling. So I can keep stacking the good stuff.
nick
Trump is home at the White House and people are acting like he’s going to Outer Mongolia. He’s still going to get the best care available and Walter Reed is still just a short helo ride away. Given the back stabbing doctors, he may not have felt safe there anyway, and there were far too many leaks and comments from people who should have known better.
Nurses and other support staff. If Maryland state law is as lax as Texas’ is (was?) regarding non-physician providers having sex with patients, a flexible morality tends to set in and racketeers get busy building networks targeting patient life insurance policies, especially at a high end or prestigious institution caring for a patient base with a high mortality rate.
We experienced that kind of situation first hand with my father-in-law in the transplant program at UT Southwestern. Even the nuns running the guest house have a racket of their own in that place, and the doctors know to keep their mouths shut.
On a side note, someone asked here about DO qualifications a while back. Have you seen the initials after the name on Trump’s personal physician’s jacket? Keep in mind that the President could have anyone he chooses standing there.
Despite being one of the most active hurricane seasons in decades New England has only had 2 moderately windy events neither with much rain.
I would like to sincerely thank all you folks on the Gulf Coast for graciously taking the storms this year. Job well done. Keep up the good work.
Definitely Louisiana’s turn in the barrel….
n
And we’re meeting with the roofer this morning to sign the contract for our hail damage replacement roof. Once that work is done, getting the HVAC replaced is next on the list. We’ve made it through summer one last time (touch wood) but neither I nor my wife want to roll the dice for next year. And we don’t want to have to do the work in the hot months, or under the gun. Comments about HVAC manufacturers welcome.
Just be aware that proprietary”smart” thermostats are increasingly locking you into that vendor for the entire time you own the system, especially variable speed systems.
When I replace our upstairs unit, I’m going single stage heating and cooling, something I can control with a “dumb” $20 four-wire thermostat from Home Depot if necessary.
Our “new” home will need a new roof in about 5 years regular wear and tear. Wife demands a metal roof and I like them too. At our age absolutely the last roof we’re going to need. Having lived in th UK, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, we didn’t see a single asphalt shingle roof the whole time. Roofing was mostly ceramic tile or concrete shingles and metal. In the older, I mean REALLY older, buildings we saw slate “tiles” held in place by two wooden pegs driven through holes drilled in the slate and hung on a wooden frame. Amazingly effective but freakishly heavy. The older cathedrals, like Notre Dame Paris, had sheet lead roofing. Imagine the stress that put on a laid-stone structure. They sure knew how to build back then.
As the owner of a house with two above-ground floors, if I were building a house tomorrow I’d have two central A/C units with two separate thermostats put in. One for the main floor and basement and one for the upper floor.
Asphalt shingles seem to be a mostly North American phenomenon. Hardly anyone else in the world uses them. It’s basically disposable roofing.
Most Houston homes have zones, one for main floor, one for upper floor.
n
“It’s basically disposable roofing.”
–yep, but cheap, and lightweight which saves material in the structure. They are also very fast to install. MOST of the residential construction techniques in modern US homes came out of the post WWII construction boom and were heavily influenced by California ‘production’ builders. They got paid by the unit, so they got to be very fast and efficient.
n
So true. Four homes in our neighborhood had new roofs put on last month. The average time was 3 days start to finish. Two full days of Bang, Bang, Bang all day long. Sounded like a rifle range had moved in down the street. The use of powered nail-guns has made an incredible difference in construction and roofing.
I will have to think about my asphalt shingle roof in the next year or two. When I bought the house 9 years ago the owner provided the paperwork to my insurance that it was a “30-year guarantee” roof and was installed 20 years prior. So next year it turns 30. It is showing it’s age. No leaks but many of the shingle corners have chipped and a few spots seem to be lifting. It’s not a complicated roof but there is a valley that could use some new flashing. And the chimney needs to be repointed. And the gutters are looking decidedly dowdy. And the some of the soffits are not in great shape. And…… Oh crap, why did I buy a house?
Excel is evil.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/10/covid-19-bureaucrats-and-old-technology.html
Actually the real problem is, ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’.
Far too many users only know excel and word and not very well at that. It’s the only way they know to present data. /rant
I came to IT security from a coding background and used Perl scripts and GREP to scan and enumerate huge dynamic log files looking for the unusual. My younger colleagues without coding background, used Excel, and constantly complained about its speed and size limitations.
Well, while waiting for the roofer I got the thumbdrive to boot Mint on one of the garbage picked laptops. So the stick works. Later I’ll put it on the NVR machine.
Nothing interesting on the laptop harddrive, and it was vista not win7 which is not as good. I might throw an SSD in it and install mint for real, and then list it.
n
Excel is a great example of I TOLD YOU SO, NOW LIVE WITH IT
I do not understand american Mc Mansions, really, a ceramic roof is installed in 3 days too, but, maybe I am getting too old (yes I know about cheapness, but)
“If the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’.”
I came to IT security from a coding background and used Perl scripts and GREP to scan and enumerate huge dynamic log files looking for the unusual. My younger colleagues without coding background, used Excel, and constantly complained about its speed and size limitations.
We have 20-year experienced Seniors who won’t grep log files and will look at my like I’m from another planet when I suggest it. I think it has more to do with a Windows background vs. Unix, where the philosophies are much different.
I’ve seen any number of programmers and data scientists write programs in Java, Python, or even R to get, for instance, a count of lines containing some word. Mac users had no excuse because their computers had grep an similar tools. Windows users might have had an excuse because their computers didn’t have command line or GUI tool to do text searches and their computers might have been locked down to the extent that they couldn’t install one, except that I was sitting near them with an identical computer and I had been able to install Cygwin and a bunch of other tools.
As a bonus, most of the programs written to do a one-off of a standard text utility were written wrong. News flash for programmers with decades of professional experience: searching for the string “press” (counting the number of press releases, IIRC) will also pick up “pressure” (as in, pressure exerted by overloaded trucks on highways).
The next week may well decide the election. Unless Trump gets a boost from his trip to the hospital, he’s toast. And he will take the Senate with him. If the GOP was smart, they would dump huge media buys and GOV efforts into the Senate races and abandon Trump. That’s the only possible check on President Harris in a year or two.
It is possible that there will be a bunch of “shy voters” turn out for Trump, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Bah. Barring unprecedented levels of vote fraud, Trump will win in a landslide.
And it doesn’t matter. One side or the other will refuse to accept the (s)election results. Exciting times are in our near future no matter what.
“‘Ive never been busier’: COVID proves an economic boon for Lake Conroe”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/COVID-19-proves-an-economic-boon-for-Lake-Conroe-15623219.php
“For Fourth of July, Bruns Powers, her husband, Steve, and their four sons were to reunite with her mom in Daytona Beach, Fla. Concerns over COVID-19 transmission, however, grounded the family at home in Spring.”
“They instead took in a professional fireworks show from the waterfront house on Lake Conroe they purchased during the pandemic.”
@Nick, people are buying property north of Houston like crazy.
I’m sure a lot of Trump voters refuse to answer the pollsters, or say Biden to throw off the number.
My parents’ house in the UK had a steep slate roof and underneath a 12×6 (actual size) solid wood beam running horizontally to support the weight.
”
Bah. Barring unprecedented levels of vote fraud, Trump will win in a landslide.”
–from your lips to Dog’s ear…
@ech, we all move in different circles, with different inputs, so I’m a bit concerned by your prediction. What are you seeing that makes you think that?
n
(and I’m off to work in the attic, at least it’s only 90 in the sun today, and cool with a breeze in the shade.)
Trump is hard to measure via polling as he has a lot of silent supporters. People who will say “Undecided” or “Biden” when asked (whether in person or over the phone) but alone in a voting booth with the curtain pulled behind them they’ll vote Trump. Just ask Hillary.
Honestly, I have no idea which way things will go. Usually I have a pretty good feel of how I think it will play out (even if I’m dead wrong). This time I got nothing. I’m probably a little less confident in Trump being reelected than I was a year ago, but that doesn’t mean I think Biden is going to win either.
Winner ! Winner ! Winner !
I got 14 down votes yesterday !
Since all our desktops had MS Office on them, I had to learn MS Visual Basic for Applications to provide others with programs built using Word, Excel and Access. If the GPS in the cars works OK, then my products used for rocket launches must have been OK.
You need to do something now. Buy a bigger house on a bigger lot in Katy. How about this one ? Has 4,483 ft2 two story, two barns and a two story garage on 1.5 acres for $685K. No HOA, no MUD. Tons of storage space. Your girls can have horses. Built in 1994. Did it flood ?
https://www.har.com/homedetail/29020-dove-ln-katy-tx-77493/11043047
Oh yes, if we are moving I want outbuildings, not a lot so small I can’t get a shed on it.
That is a nice looking property.
n
Yes, it is. That was a 20 minute search using the “For Sale / Search by Map” option in http://www.har.com . I can spend hours there dreaming, wishing, and wanting. Maybe even some envy in there.
I will have to think about my asphalt shingle roof in the next year or two. When I bought the house 9 years ago the owner provided the paperwork to my insurance that it was a “30-year guarantee” roof and was installed 20 years prior. So next year it turns 30. It is showing it’s age. No leaks but many of the shingle corners have chipped and a few spots seem to be lifting. It’s not a complicated roof but there is a valley that could use some new flashing. And the chimney needs to be repointed. And the gutters are looking decidedly dowdy. And the some of the soffits are not in great shape. And…… Oh crap, why did I buy a house?
You gotta live somewhere man.
Excel is evil.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/10/covid-19-bureaucrats-and-old-technology.html
Actually the real problem is, ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’.
Far too many users only know excel and word and not very well at that. It’s the only way they know to present data. /rant
Our chief software competitor is Excel. My software is built to handle discontinuities. We do it all day long. Macros in Excel generally discount the effects of discontinuities as a minor phenomenon. Uh oh.
I’ve seen any number of programmers and data scientists write programs in Java, Python, or even R to get, for instance, a count of lines containing some word. Mac users had no excuse because their computers had grep an similar tools. Windows users might have had an excuse because their computers didn’t have command line or GUI tool to do text searches and their computers might have been locked down to the extent that they couldn’t install one, except that I was sitting near them with an identical computer and I had been able to install Cygwin and a bunch of other tools.
As a bonus, most of the programs written to do a one-off of a standard text utility were written wrong. News flash for programmers with decades of professional experience: searching for the string “press” (counting the number of press releases, IIRC) will also pick up “pressure” (as in, pressure exerted by overloaded trucks on highways).
I use the unix utility wc, word count, from a cat pipe. I want credit for all lines written in the code including comments. “cat *\*\*.f | wc” gives me this on our software:
C:\dii>cat *\*\*.f | wc
Lines Words Chars
722190 2979660 24355874
C:\dii>cat *\*\*.c | wc
Lines Words Chars
42270 118699 1179460
C:\dii>cat *\*\*.cpp | wc
Lines Words Chars
429995 1485274 12851568
All source code lines matter !
I’m sure a lot of Trump voters refuse to answer the pollsters, or say Biden to throw off the number.
It is actually much more insidious than that. “Insider: Pollsters Are Oversampling Anti-Trump Republicans”
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/09/28/insider-pollsters-are-oversampling-anti-trump-republicans/
“WATCH NY Nazi Governor Cuomo: “I’m going to close the synagogues.””
https://gellerreport.com/2020/10/watch-ny-nazi-governor-cuomo-im-going-to-close-the-synagogues.html/
Isn’t there a 1937 ??? video of Herr Hitler stating this exact same sentence ?
Hat tip to Mark Steyn on the Rush Limbaugh radio show today.
https://www.steynonline.com/
“For Fourth of July, Bruns Powers, her husband, Steve, and their four sons were to reunite with her mom in Daytona Beach, Fla. Concerns over COVID-19 transmission, however, grounded the family at home in Spring.”
We went to Fort Walton Beach/Destin for the 4th without contracting the virus.
Our chief software competitor is Excel. My software is built to handle discontinuities. We do it all day long. Macros in Excel generally discount the effects of discontinuities as a minor phenomenon. Uh oh.
Excel has to remain compatible with Lotus to accommodate macros from mostly business users going back to the 80s.
The last Sears store hasn’t closed … yet. When it does, the cleanout crews will pull at least one WfW 3.11 machine out of the back rooms. I don’t recall exactly what the machines did, but they were part of the stores’ network infrastructure and deemed critical.
Your chief competitor is engineers who think they can whip up something just as good in Excel.
“Tal Bachman: Forty Years Later, A Musical Memoriam”
https://www.steynonline.com/10667/tal-bachman-forty-years-later-a-musical-memoriam
“The song is “Good Times, Bad Times”. The album is Led Zeppelin I, released in early 1969. And the drummer was a scrawny, twenty year old Brummie who’d never taken a drum lesson in his life. For the next twelve years, John Bonham would power the biggest, most influential, most iconic rock band in history, until his premature death forty years ago this past week. Even now, all these years later, ask any rock musician who the greatest rock drummer in history is, and almost all will name Bonham. Here’s why.”
I remember going to see “The Song Remains the Same” in 1976 at the Houston Galleria movie theater on a Saturday afternoon. It was a sellout for about a thousand seats of a very raucous crowd. Then we watched a two hour movie about Led Zeppelin getting ready for a concert tour and performing the concert. Right in the middle of the movie, all of the band members walked off the stage except the drummer. And we watched this crazy drummer go nuts for at least ten minutes. It was awesome and the entire movie theater was watching the movie in awe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_Remains_the_Same_(film)
I’ve seen any number of programmers and data scientists write programs in Java, Python, or even R to get, for instance, a count of lines containing some word. Mac users had no excuse because their computers had grep an similar tools. Windows users might have had an excuse because their computers didn’t have command line or GUI tool to do text searches and their computers might have been locked down to the extent that they couldn’t install one, except that I was sitting near them with an identical computer and I had been able to install Cygwin and a bunch of other tools.
I have worked in really restricted environments and always managed to install Cygwin’s file hierarchy in a directory in my Windows desktop under my personal account.
Cygwin used in commercial environments is relatively new, only within in the last 20 years, since Red Hat bought out the project and changed the license. Prior to that, however, plenty of Windows and DOS toolkits existed to give the command prompt a Unix-ish flavor. Even when I worked in Windows-only development at the Death Star, we still had a site license for MKS. There is no real excuse for anyone experienced in software development on any platform to not be familiar with grep-ing large text files from the command line.
Where I work, not being able to search and track track transactions across hundreds of log files has turned into an excuse for the poor performers in the group, and, for whatever reason, management is covering for them. This is why I’m sitting on the edge of being fired this afternoon or eating a sh*t sandwich in a figurative sense to keep my job long enough to find something else — I pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
Our chief software competitor is Excel.
Your chief competitor is engineers who think they can whip up something just as good in Excel.
Yup. They rarely succeed but they fool themselves into thinking that their spreadsheet is awesome. The actually call us (mostly email) and demand that their spreadsheet has correct numbers and that we need to fix our software. My PhD Chemical Engineer manning the technical support seat usually has to talk them off the ledge.
Cygwin used in commercial environments is relatively new, only within in the last 20 years, since Red Hat bought out the project and changed the license. Prior to that, plenty of Windows and DOS toolkits existed to give the command prompt a Unix-ish flavor. Even when I worked in Windows-only development at the Death Star, we still had a site license for MKS. There is no real excuse for anyone experienced in software development on any platform to not be familiar with grep-ing large text files from the command line.
The problem with Cygwin is that it is slow and has recursion problems. At least it did ten years ago. I have no idea about the current version.
I have been using The Thompson Toolkit on DOS and Windows since 1991. It just works. And it is incredibly fast. Those cats and wc that I showed earlier run in about three seconds on my Windows 7 Pro x64 PC. 2,581 fortran files, 92 C files, and 785 C++ files. Unfortunately, The Thompson Toolkit could not compete with free and left the marketplace.
http://www.tasoft.com/
Come to find out, people at my employer have lost data to exactly the same issue. They brought in data from whatever sources and saved as .xls. And didn’t notice they’d lost data and presented their findings to the clients and then had to tap-dance when called on their bogus results.
And now at least one of the non-technical staff is learning R in order to be able to do analyses and not suffer from Excel’s limitations. I see no way for any problems to arise from someone with a degree in public health generating analyses and reports in R. (Specifically, Rmarkdown, which lets you interleave narrative with the code.) Well, at least the databases are mostly read-only.
The problem with Cygwin is that it is slow and has recursion problems. At least it did ten years ago. I have no idea about the current version.
Cygwin is better under Red Hat and, now, IBM ownership, but if what you have works, stick with it. When I left the Death Star in 2010, my partner was still using a late MKS release.
I have a full time Linux box at home which I can reach from any SSH terminal on my network and be just as productive as sitting in front of the screen. If something is to big for Cygwin, I’ll drag and drop the files across via Samba and run the process there.
I have been using The Thompson Toolkit on DOS and Windows since 1991. It just works. And it is incredibly fast. Those cats and wc that I showed earlier run in about three seconds on my Windows 7 Pro x64 PC. 2,581 fortran files, 92 C files, and 785 C++ files. Unfortunately, The Thompson Toolkit could not compete with free and left the marketplace.
Free, and Cygwin has 64 bit versions along with recent GCC compilers for x86_64, which, if nothing else, takes advantage of the additional registers in the architecture for speed at the expense of using more memory for the programs.
I don’t completely trust the 64 bit versions so they aren’t on my work PC, but I switched my personal ThinkPad’s Cygwin to the 64 bit directory full time.
I find MS Access is a much greater evil than Excel. With it’s Forms and Reports people have turned their .mdb and .accdb files into “applications”, share them with others, then over time they become business critical. Then something breaks or something needs changed and the “I know just enough to be dangerous” guy who made it is long gone and so they go running to IT with this horrid mess of forms, queries, reports, and VBA macros . Of course, everyone in IT wants to stab them in the face.
My previous employer refused to install Access on anybody’s workstation because of that crap. You had to get like VP-level approval and explain why you NEEDED to have Access.
I’ve seen some finance guys do some pretty amazing things in Excel and in a hurry. It certainly has its place.
At church we use PowerPoint slides to display pre-service announcements on a continuous roll. The church enlisted the efforts of a high school student whom she claimed was an expert in PowerPoint. Having used it in school for many projects for which she received awards for her expertise.
Not even close. She had no idea how to create a 16×9 slide. She had no idea how to create animations within PowerPoint. She had no idea how to time slides and make the slides auto advance. She was basically clueless on PowerPoint.
What she had done in school was create a couple of slides, advanced them on a mouse click (the default) and used a fancy font (which displayed badly). Apparently in the eyes of the teacher this makes her an expert and fully qualified.
What is even more alarming her experience in school probably puts her above 99.9999999% of the population in using PowerPoint. These same people that have little clue how to effectively use MSWord or Excel. Returns at the end of each line, double return at the end of a paragraph, spaces at the end of a paragraph, using spaced to align text, etc. Really bad stuff.
Central Air: I bought Goodwin. Made in Houston, I think. Goodwin also makes Amana branded systems. Maybe a few more, it’s been a few years since I installed the system.
Two stage compressor, variable blower. 16 SEER. Oh, it’s a heatpump. There was a three stage compressor available but, yeah, an extra grand to get 18 SEER didn’t work as a money saving effort in my head for an expected 20 year life of system.
I’m not sure about the expected life of the system. The warranty says the compressor is covered for as long as the original buyer owns the house. I’ll worry about that when something happens.
I think the largest electric bill this Summer was $120 including the $21 charge just to have a meter.
Roofs: I have metal. “Stone”, an off white/beige/light tan. It’s installed over the original asphalt shingle roof. 1×4 were nailed and screwed to the old roof, 3/4 inch foil covered foam board fitted between the 1x4s. I think the foam board is R6 but I’m too lazy to look at the scraps in the pump house.
The electric bill dropped $100 a month during A/C season, easy.
Then replaced the cheap windows with low-e double pane double hung. Yes, “experts say” I wasted money. Perhaps, if I move. My math in head skills figured 8 years to break even vs cost of windows and savings on the electric bill. Well, call it $40 a month. Just two more years to start making money. Meanwhile, no drafts and that’s worth something.
“It looks like George Floyd was not “murdered” after all”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/10/it-looks-like-george-floyd-was-not.html
“A former federal and state prosecutor dissects the evidence against the police officers charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, and concludes that there’s substantial evidence that in fact, he died of a drug overdose. He also asks troubling questions about why the release of that evidence was delayed, and asks why the charges have not been dropped in the light of it. Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.”
I can just see the riots across the country when the District Attorney drops the charges from the cops falsely accused of murdering George Floyd. I am thinking that it will happen on Monday, Nov 2, 2020.
“Eddie Van Halen Dead at 65”
https://www.tmz.com/2020/10/06/eddie-van-halen-dead-dies-cancer-65/
and
https://nypost.com/2020/10/06/eddie-van-halen-dead-at-65/
“Eddie Van Halen — the legendary guitarist and co-founder of Van Halen — has died after a long battle with throat cancer … TMZ has learned.”
Wow.
@SteveF
For your coworkers learning R (good for them!), you might point them to EdX. I took a couple R classes free on EdX to augment my University of the People R classes. Really helpful.
EdX offers several, here is a link to one of them:
https://www.edx.org/course/data-science-r-basics
“Delta rapidly intensifying as it nears Cancun, Gulf of Mexico”
https://spacecityweather.com/delta-rapidly-intensifying-as-it-nears-cancun-gulf-of-mexico/
“2:10pm CT Tuesday: We’re talking about Hurricane Delta this afternoon, which has undergone rapid intensification and is now a powerful Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph winds. (It was only named Delta 30 hours ago.) The storm will approach the Yucatan Peninsula tonight, and likely make landfall somewhere near Cancún early on Wednesday. This will be a dangerous hurricane for that area. By Wednesday evening the storm will be back out over the Gulf of Mexico, moving to the northwest.”
Cat 4 hurricane, are you kidding me ? It was a tropical storm yesterday.
Global warming, Lynn.
I find MS Access is a much greater evil than Excel. With it’s Forms and Reports people have turned their .mdb and .accdb files into “applications”, share them with others, then over time they become business critical. Then something breaks or something needs changed and the “I know just enough to be dangerous” guy who made it is long gone and so they go running to IT with this horrid mess of forms, queries, reports, and VBA macros . Of course, everyone in IT wants to stab them in the face.
The point of Access was to put the Clipper cottage industry out of business. Clipper couldn’t make the leap to Windows and died 25 years ago, but we still have Access, probably because of the type of scenario you described.
I have a program called “BirdTrak”. Yeah, you have to put clipper=15 in autoexec.bat. Maybe sys.ini or win.ini.
I forget. I have one bird left and she sure as heck isn’t going to let me scan her for a microchip.
Why yes, I do have a 486/66 running Wfw3.11. I haven’t booted it in 4 or 5 years, so who knows.
His approval rating is below where it needs to be to have downticket positive effect.
The betting markets are now showing a strong tilt to Biden.
I heard an interview with a Republican “insider” that has access to the Republican polling at the state level in the battleground states. He’s convinced Trump will lose and that the Senate might be salvagable.
The current spate of Republicans that have COVID, having all showed up for the Barrett nomination dog and pony show without masks, shows that the administration can’t be trusted to manage the pandemic.
The riots have given him a slight uptick, but not enough to close the gap. He needs to pick up a few points between now and the election – but even that may not be enough because of all the early voting going on.
There is no sign that Trump has mended fences with the one group that he needs to win – suburban female voters. They have traditionally gone (R), but defected in the last two elections, causing the loss of several formerly safe (R) districts, including my old district in (7th) Houston which had been a Republican seat since 1966. The district went for Clinton in 2016 and went for Beto in 2018 over Cruz, even though it went (R) on statewide races. This was repeated in a number of districts around the US. Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) has been running ads during football games that emphasize his role in promoting women’s issues – getting funding to eliminate the backlog of rape kits, etc. I don’t see Trump doing this. He does have one ad in which a Black, former NFL player who supported Obama touts Trump’s record on criminal justice and jobs for the Black community. Good idea, but may be too little, too late. I hope he’s doing similar ads on Spanish language radio and TV.
In short, he’s booted the ball on the pandemic (or at least it seems that way to people). He hasn’t wooed back the suburban women. He trails in internal polls. He’s going to lose and may take the Senate with him. And there will be extreme pressure on Biden to:
– have the Senate nuke the filibuster
– pack the Supreme Court
– make Guam, DC, and Puerto Rico states
– and more.
Cat 4 hurricane, are you kidding me ? It was a tropical storm yesterday.
Really warm water. Upper 80s. Bathwater.
The Yucatan does bad things to storms, however, and the water temps above 25 N aren’t right for a Cat 4 landfall in the US.
Still, the potential is there for something ugly into Coastal LA again. Columbus Day gas shortage!
Columbus Day gas shortage!
That is Indigenous Peoples Day for you my friend !
My current employer (large FI in Canada) allows business staff to use Access but IT staff are not allowed to provide support. As pointed out, the business builds “applications”. Oh boy. The state of processing of many claims are tracked within an Access d/b. Original author is of course gone. Access is of course single-user but this is used by many users simultaneously. Lots of data loss. It’s frightening. While this d/b is crucial to much of the claims processing the business has yet to come to IT and say: “build or find something stable that can do this”. Last I checked, they hired a college grad to maintain it for them. What they will do when “the grad” moves on… (which is why IT departments were invented).
Columbus Day gas shortage!
That is Indigenous Peoples Day for you my friend !
I’m from Florida. All things Burt Reynolds are sacred. That’s the “Cannonball Run” weekend.
More correctly, the annual The Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.
Fortunately, the traditional route is through areas not traditionally prone to gas shortages.
The record has been smashed six (maybe more?) since quarantine started, however, so maybe it is played out for now.
My current employer (large FI in Canada) allows business staff to use Access but IT staff are not allowed to provide support.
Sorry, what is FI ?
Same here. Unfortunately, if it’s business critical enough there’s always someone in upper management that can force IT to break its “We don’t maintain or support Access databases or Excel workbooks that weren’t built but IT” policy.
This is where “shadow IT” starts creeping up and next thing you know the various business lines are hiring their own programmers to maintain the stuff. I remember when I worked for a bank one of their “tech savvy” sales managers actually had a server rack in his office.
“Eddie Van Halen Dead at 65”
https://www.tmz.com/2020/10/06/eddie-van-halen-dead-dies-cancer-65/
and
https://nypost.com/2020/10/06/eddie-van-halen-dead-at-65/
“Eddie Van Halen — the legendary guitarist and co-founder of Van Halen — has died after a long battle with throat cancer … TMZ has learned.”
Wow.
I listen to FM 107.5 on the radio all day in my office using my 33 year old AM/FM radio that I bought a few jobs ago. It is great background noise to cancel the office noise. Anyway, they have been playing all Van Halen since 2pm.
https://www.houstonseagle.com/entertainment/remembering-eddie-van-halen-playlist-van-halens-biggest-hits/GR43EICOOBAPDKWMUV5AVWSHH4/
we all move in different circles, with different inputs, so I’m a bit concerned by your prediction. What are you seeing that makes you think that?
His approval rating is below where it needs to be to have downticket positive effect.
The betting markets are now showing a strong tilt to Biden.
I heard an interview with a Republican “insider” that has access to the Republican polling at the state level in the battleground states. He’s convinced Trump will lose and that the Senate might be salvagable.
I guess that we will just have to wait another 28 days to find out who will be our next president of the USA. I am convinced that the Trumper will win. I plan to early vote next Tuesday, Oct 13.
(snark) Please vote often, too!
Financial Institution?
“Sorry, what is FI ?”
Financial Institution?
Finance/Insurance.
That’s what I saw the acronym used for at CGI. Canadian company.
“Asking The Question That Nobody Dares To Ask Publicly”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/asking-question-nobody-dares-ask-publicly
“…who targeted the president?”
“”I always trust my gut,” begins AmericanThinker.com’s Sally Zelikovsky, “litigators and trial attorneys tend to do that.””
“When things don’t make sense or add up but you don’t have a smoking gun, you start nosing around with questioning and investigating to see if your hunch pans out.”
“Zelikovsky notes that, obviously, she doesn’t have any proof that the recent COVID-19 infections of POTUS and FLOTUS, several Republican senators, and people working on his campaign and in his administration, are truly random events or something planned, but it doesn’t pass the “random cluster of infections” smell test. Come on, admit it. You are all thinking it, too. I’m sure like me, you spent the weekend texting friends about your suspicions.”
“The virus appears to have targeted Republicans only and left Democrats unscathed.”
Yup.
And “32 Sickened In White House COVID-19 Outbreak As 4th Press Shop Aide Tests Positive”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-mulls-nationwide-address-insists-americans-must-learn-live-covid
If one knows engineering, math (algebra, geometry, statistics, calculas, etc.), VBA, creating analytical solutions, Excel can be used for anything. I used it to create rocket launch analytical predictions of trajectories.
As Confucious says: “what go up must come down”. Well, I did not adhere to that.
MS Access has file locking And record locking since 2007…
I do not like it but it has its place and if well used it is fast to implement things that were normally done with Excel…
Joe Biden is stating there should not be a second debate if Trump has Covid-19. Which tends to add to my theory that somehow the democrats orchestrated the White House infection. I find it odd that only republicans have been affected by the White House affliction. Or perhaps those are the only ones the media is reporting.
No second debate as Biden would get crushed. Covid-19 is an excuse, nothing more. He is taking the coward’s way out. If Biden fears Covid-19, then why not have Biden in one studio, Trump in another studio? Everything else has gone virtual, surely the debate could also go virtual.
As Confucious says: “what go up must come down”. Well, I did not adhere to that.
Cue Tom Lehrer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
Joe Biden is demonstrably a bully. It’s close to a universal truth that bullies are cowards.
I suspect there are ‘bullies’ on both sides. IMHO.
Ah, the “moral purity” argument. One is not allowed to cast aspersions, lay blame, or identify faults unless he himself is wholly virtuous and without any hint of fault, real or imagined.
I hope you’ll understand if I do not sign on to that line of reasoning.
The issue at hand was Joe Biden, or more accurately his handlers, using any excuse to avoid public appearances, confrontations, or debates. I don’t care if everyone opposed to Biden is a puppy-kicking, mother-raping cannibal. It’s irrelevant to Biden’s shortcomings.
Well, got about 95% of what I needed to do at my client’s house done. Only spent a short while in the attic.
Came home with my mouth watering for crockpot stew, but the heater in the pot died some time this afternoon. Wife rescued the meal by putting it in the instapot for 20 minutes at high pressure. Yummy stew. It needed a beet or two though. They make a huge difference.
I’m hoping to get to bed early tonight. I’m beat.
n
In 2001 we identified several mission critical systems using Access over the WAN. Access over a WAN with multiple simultaneous users making inputs is both a bandwidth hog and a constant source of errors. I convinced management (MCI Europe) to ban Access from our systems and we put together a project to rewrite all network Access apps in a REAL multiuser network capable DB. It was costly but in my estimate less costly than the continuous errors and data corruption from legacy Access. I wasn’t popular with a number of departments who liked to own their own data when we gave it to the database team.
Clever you are young Jedi.
I came to IT security from a coding background and used Perl scripts and GREP to scan and enumerate huge dynamic log files looking for the unusual. My younger colleagues without coding background, used Excel, and constantly complained about its speed and size limitations.
– – – – –
We have 20-year experienced Seniors who won’t grep log files and will look at my like I’m from another planet when I suggest it. I think it has more to do with a Windows background vs. Unix, where the philosophies are much different.
Why in the world would anyone want to share their command-line and programming super-powers with those who are not only unable to comprehend them but also sneer at the mere suggestion? If you have an advantage over your fellow cubicles dwellers, why give it up?
Asking as someone who has in the past been taken advantage of by his less-skilled and less-knowledgeable cow-orkers.
““Tenet” killed the movies”
https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2020/10/tenet-killed-movies/
“Billed as the movie that would save theaters, Christopher Nolan’s end-of-summer puzzle box was supposed to bring American audiences flocking back to multiplexes. While about 70 percent of theaters were open in the U.S. in early September, the money-making markets of New York and Los Angeles remained closed, and Tenet made just $9.4 million in the U.S. over Labor Day weekend — a drop in the bucket of the $400-million-plus it needs to break even.”
“Worse still, Tenet’s poor domestic opening gave other studios the jitters. Warner Bros.’s Wonder Woman 1984 subsequently got bumped to Christmas; Universal delayed its highly-anticipated Candyman to 2021; Marvel’s Black Widow likewise fled for the greener pastures of next year. Plink, plink, plink go the rivets, with MGM’s No Time to Die, rescheduled from Nov. 20 to April 2021 on Friday, being the latest to plummet earthward.”
From:
https://theweek.com/speedreads/941773/tenet-killed-movies
Oh man, there may not be movie theater left in the USA in a month or two.
I buy most of my movies, wait until they are $4.99 on iTunes, $6.99 if I really like the movie. If the movie is a block buster, I go to a theatre as I like the big screen experience. Theatres also offer some stuff I am unable to get at home such as 3D and much better sound. Seeing Avatar in 3D was an awesome experience as was Lord of the Rings series and the newer Star Wars.
It would be a shame for theatres to disappear. The venues have tried options. Reclining and heated seats was a great upgrade. Another theatre you order food and drinks (expensive though) from your seat and the stuff is delivered, but only available before the movie starts.
I also liked drive-in movies. Back the pickup in facing the screen, a couple of reclining camping chairs, a blanket or two, snacks and drinks in an ice chest, audio through the vehicle radio, sit back and watch. Ignore the vehicles that spends half the time rocking with strange noises. There is one about 30 miles from where I live and that is the only one that I know exists in the area.
I posted days back that Plugs is a bully. His brain is also Swiss cheese. He recently blathered what Black Women are good for. But he’s not a raycisss, tRump is. Confirmed by Moochele Obola. She’s a POC so it must be true. Plugs also blathered again about little girls and how he can’t wait to see them dancing in four years. The man is a fruit loop.
HARRIS/biden 2020
RE Central Air:
My experience with Goodwin was horrible. The new compressor in our heat pump failed three times in the first 120 days. Goodwin would not repair replace it the third time. I installed a Crane because they could do it that day I called. It was trouble free for 6 years when I sold the house.
RE Central Air:
I own six central air units at the moment. Was eight until we sold the old house in July.
2 Carrier at the new used house (a 4 ton and a 3 ton). 3 years old.
3 Trane at the office building and warehouse (two 3.5 tons and a 3 ton). 16 years old.
I forget what the unit brand is for the little office. I have not run it in nine years.
The old house had a Ruud (3 ton – 5 years) and a Trane (5 ton – 10 years).
Good experiences with all of the units.
No heat pumps.
“Being A Robber In 2020 Is Complicated”: by Ryan George
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKJds7N1Co
Yup, breaking and entering specialists need to find a new line of work in 2020 since everyone is home all the time. Mugging does not seem a big reach though.
Thanks forthe feedback on A/C units. That is a powerful feature of the braintrust.
I’m headed for bed. Tired. Sleepy.
n
RE: Central Air
Our first house had a Lennox heat pump. Owned that house for 9 years, only issue is something broke (I’ve slept since then, so i can’t remember what it was) and it took 2 days for the dealer to get a part in. This was, of course, during a streak of high 90’s. I don’t know if it’s stil true, but the dealer said its almost impossible to get Lennox parts anywhere that official channels, which can cause delays.
Our current house (10 years) has two 13 SEER Trane heat pumps. A 3 ton for the first floor and a 1 ton for the bonus room above the garage. The only issue I’ve had is the blower motor went out in the 1 ton unit a couple years ago. I replaced it myself. I’m sure one will go out soon, since I’ve talked nicely about them…
It does if there was a superspreader at the ACB announcement. Research is showing that superspreaders are the most common vector in COVID cases. The R0 in COVID cases seems to be mostly driven by them. The R0 (how many people a person infects before they get ill) is an average. What is important in COVID is “k”, the dispersion in R0. It is a measure of how wide the distribution is. It’s very high in COVID cases.
From the article linked below:
So, if there was a superspreader at the event, where many of the current Republicans who have tested positive were, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/