Re: Check you can complete before you start
Saw that in sixth grade. I'd love to say it reformed me.
1876 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
There was a brief period a few years ago when I saw a number of stories that were essentially Somerset Maugham's short story "The Verger", but with details changed and presented as fact. There may only have been three such that I saw, but it did surprise me.
Given that Horatio Alger and Samuel Smiles are long since in the public domain, I don't see what's stopping anyone from posting lots of inspiring borrowed stuff. For every grouch who recognizes the source, twenty or fifty will give a thumbs-up.
Perhaps fifteen years ago, I got a call from a co-worker:
Co-worker: I tried to query IMPORTANT_TABLE and the system says it doesn't exist.
Me: [After a quick check] It doesn't.
Co-worker: ???
Me: [After another quick check] As a matter of fact, you have about three tables left in your schema.
This was Oracle 8 or 9, though, and it was quick to get them back from the recycle bin.
Well before that, some co-workers found that ANOTHER_IMPORTANT_TABLE in a different database kept disappearing. I don't know how that happened, but I wrote them a DDL trigger that would raise an error if one tried to drop certain tables.
I gather that somebody has published emails between persons known to have advocated Brexit, in which they discuss ways of advocating Brexit. That in itself hardly strikes me as a big story. Did the emails advocate misleading the public? Bad if so, but isn't that sort of thing--within limits--taken for granted and discounted in political discourse?
(Yes, I could RTFEmails, but I am an American citizen and so this does not seem to form part of my civic duty.)
"Perhaps more curious given Ukraine's been in the news again, not just for hacking, but potentially what influence they may hold over the Bidens."
I wondered what all those headlines referencing Ukraine were about.
"Or just the politics behind using Ukraine as a puppet to attack Russia, and weaken the EU."
Yes, the fighting around Smolensk says it all, doesn't it?
The visa requirements were odd, perhaps burdensome. (Last three employers, when one had folded and another had been merged out of existence into Yoyodyne General United Federal Business Systems.) It was not horrendous as in requiring blood samples or blood oaths.
But I did greatly enjoy seeing the Hermitage, even if the management of light and air seemed to be awfully casual.
Many years ago, my boss and a co-worker returned from a site visit saying "You'll love Robert Smith". When I got to the site, I learned what they meant. Robert Smith sat behind a desk and smiled. The smile did not vary with what one told him, that I could see, good news, bad news, or mere indifferent information. As far as I could tell he did nothing but smile. However, the powers that were had given Robert an assistant, Roberta, who did not smile, and who did respond to the environment, and who did accomplish things.
For certain work, they needed hard-sectored 8.5" floppies, and had come up with floppies of the correct size, but soft-sectored. I explained that these would not work. Roberta tested every floppy in the box to be sure that I wasn't bluffing them.
(Names regomized, but they were of that pattern.)
In the US: yes and no. Generally, an appliance will be marked as "Does not convey" if the owners are planning to take it along.
But I do recall a case where the wife, then about six months pregnant, went ahead to the new house to get some cleaning done while the husband and his friends loaded the moving truck. She called the husband to ask that toilet paper be included in the first load of goods, for the prior owners had taken it all.
An acquaintance of my wife's once had an interview with a small publisher. The interviewer asked about standardized test scores, though I no longer recall whether they were from the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) or SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test). Americans commonly take the GREs in late college, aged about 21, and the SATs in late high school, aged 16 to 18. The woman was in her early 50s, I believe, and couldn't see the relevance. My guess is that one of the owners had scored very well on one of the tests, and so thought it an excellent measure of everything.
Back at the beginning of the teens, I went off to a meeting as the token IT manager. ("Token" as in, the other IT staff were perfectly competent to manage everything without supervision.) I did a little troubleshooting, and was astonished when a legal secretary complained that a printer did not properly enclose a table from her WordPerfect document. I gently suggested that Microsoft Word might be the better option, but she wasn't having it.
Long ago, I worked with Data General minis running AOS/VS. This had a rich list of file types, and a convention for extensions: OL for for overlay, .EXE for executables, etc. However, it was quite possible for file type and extension not to match. I went spent sometime frustrated at the the cryptic error message I received trying to compile (or was it assemble?) some source. Eventually I discovered that the extension was correct, but the file type was the AOS/VS default, which I think was UDF (user data file). In a case like that, one ran
create/type=aok newfile.aok
copy/append newfile.aok oldfile.aok
and proceeded. I was not the only person to be caught by this--somebody I emailed some C files got bit by it, too.
"despite the fact that pedestrianism is the natural state for most of us"
You're not from Los Angeles, then, are you? I have fond memories of a young woman from Los Angeles I worked with, who would drive fifty yards to a convenience store rather than walk. Even in a very car-happy county this stood out as unusual.
@Brad18600
The last grown man I've known of roughly those proportions had an out-of-control thyroid. I don't think it would be a bad idea to check in with the physicians.
(In my 20s, I ran a lot of marathons, in decent time for a recreational runner, but I don't think I ever dropped below 19.7 BMI.)
@themeerkat
The old big 3 of *x scripting languages were Perl, Python, and Tcl, no? There was not at time of creation anyone in particular that they were undercutting, that I can think of. Perl allowed one to do things that were inconvenient or difficult in an awk | set pipeline, Python in its early days might have been considered to undercut Perl, and I can't think of what in the "glue" space Tcl would have competed with.
So it seems to me that there are fair-sized areas of open source where the intent is to supply a perceived need, not to write a better X, or a worse but free and still usable X.
Of course, you could point to Postgres as competing with and undercutting Oracle and SQL Server. But if sympathy were electricity, I don't think I could power an LED Christmas-tree light with the Commentariat's sympathy for Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.
According to this morning's Washington Post, the Kronos attack has affected Prince Georges County, Maryland (the county bordering the District of Columbia on the east). The Post says that this affects timekeeping but not payroll, and that timekeeping for now is "manual", which is suppose could mean paper-and-pen or Excel.
B.B. King said that early in his career, a fight started in a bar where he was playing, two men fighting over a woman named Lucille. In the course of the fight a fire started. King left, but when back in to rescue his guitar. He said that he named his guitar Lucille to remind himself never to do something that stupid again.
Among American Boomers, it was mostly women who named their cars, and I can remember only two who did. An acquaintance in college called her Fiat "Tazio" after the driver Tazio Nuvolari. A friend of about 25 years ago named a VW of some sort, but I can't remember the name--a woman's name, not a man's.
Once, working on a government contract, I had to help retrieve a document from backup. For reasons I no longer recall, it was necessary to take a look at the file, which I found to be part of a novel: the beginning of a chapter, set as I recall on a sailboat in some Californian harbor. We did support an office specializing in admiralty and aviation torts, known locally as Splash and Crash, but even there I don't think it could have counted as work product.
A co-worker of mine once told me that however sure I might be that a gentle tap with a hammer was just what was needed to align a toilet properly, don't use that hammer. Porcelain does not handle hammers well. (His family seems to have been hard on toilets: a brother-in-law had accidentally shot a toilet in his parents' house--toilets tolerate bullets even less that hammer taps, I gather.)
My brother, in town for a visit, told me that the downstairs toilet was running. I ended up taking off the tank, replacing the flapper, and putting the tank back on again. How the damn thing ever worked in the first place, I can't guess, for the valve couldn't be made to close--arms too short.
I should probably replace a couple more valves, but those toilets are wedged into spaces where it's hard to work.
I'm not sure what transgender-rights rows have to do with IT projects, at least not since the days the prudent tech kept a gender-bender in the traveling kit.
And actually a bit of cancel culture might not hurt the IT world, provided it was losing projects that were canceled, and canceled early enough.
First, all praise to the author for speaking of the parties to mentorship as trainer and trainee. The term "mentee" makes me grind my teeth.
Second, yes, faxes were a pain. I remember reading years ago that the legislature of one of the US states was considering a law to ban junk faxes. The legislatures fax machines were then swamped with faxes from companies in the junk fax business, to the extent that faxes necessary to its work could not be received. It was a distributed denial of service many years before I ever heard the expression.
I know of a case where a fellow tried this out on a non-profit that got enough government money to be subject to the oversight of Defense Contract Audit Agency, once describe to a government employee I knew as "those unsmiling guys down the hall who are out to send you to jail." He actually ran his scam--services, not equipment--for several years before being caught.
A co-worker of my father's was holding a tube containing picric acid when it exploded. The man and another chemist in front of him suffered a lot of cuts. Their eyes were fine, for the steel company they worked for was strict about matters such as safety glasses. The fellow who was holding the tube did not lose any fingers, but bits of glass kept working their way out for quite some time.
Why was a chemist at a steel company working with picric acid? I don't think I ever heard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022