Certainly a job I'd happily do. one Two week mission, followed by three years paid vacation!
Posts by elawyn
44 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2010
Study recommends mandatory 3-year vacation so astronauts' brains can recover
Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers
It's sometimes all that 'other' knowledge that makes tha different too
As an 'oldie' myself ( 67 years young), I know things that would take young-uns a decade to learn fully.
Like the mandated regulations under HIPAA ( not just privacy, but also the other three parts. I know Medicare rules for managing part D benefits (which change every 6 months or so, and also Medicaid ( all 50 of them!). I know which states have restrictions on opioid prescriptions and what those restrictions are.
I know the ANSI X.12 standards too, and how they differ from NCPDP standards.
I know which two states charge flat sales tax on prescriptions.
I know what 8521760 means in a numeric field that was badly mapped from a 4 byte EBCDIC alpha field.
I'm a database designer, and if I get a requirement to add tables or columns that imply breaking 42 USC § 1320d-2 I can stop it before it happens.
I also know COBOL, which is still heavily used in mainframes.
I can usually answer client questions about any obscure bit of data on their billing files without needing to refer to ANY documentation. Others have to try to find the documentation and pass it to someone else to interpret what the client *Actually* said.
It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system
Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers
Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT
Back-to-office mandates won't work, says Salesforce's Benioff
I've worked quite happily from home for the last ten years, only gone in a handful of times to get a new laptop and once for a meeting. The difference is that I am getting towards the end of my working career as a database designer and have many decades of experience behind me. If manglement told me I had to come back to office working I'd simply quit and file for retirement.
Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

We happy few?
For those of us who can successfully WFH there would have to be some severe incentives to go back to office work. I've been WFH for over a decade ( as a database designer and guru on several subject areas with 20 years of experience in my field and a further 20+ in IT). No more having to fight traffic, no more having to arrive early to park within a reasonable distance (the office was on a corporate campus with a dozen parking lots up to a half mile away, no fun in the winters to trudge half a mile in a blizzard to try to get the snow off the car when I'm already frozen from the walk!).
No more having to rush from one meeting to another at the opposite end of the campus and back again afterwards for the next one. No more going down 3 floors and across the courtyard and up 3 more only to find a note on the door to say 'Meeting moved' or 'Meeting cancelled'.
Manglement is almost figuring out that meetings shouldn't start and finish at the top of the hour either instead they're warming to the idea of starting 5 or 10 after the hour and finishing 5 before. I just wish many of the would make that inviolate.
I am one of the lucky ones, I am within shouting distance of retiring ( which I'm delaying because Covid stopped me from traveling to find a place to retire to with the amenities I want nearby).
Not everyone has all the same luxuries of choice tho, which is a shame , especially if their management *insists* of going back to a Victorian indentured labor style.
What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday
I have an older alarm clock, bought before the U.S. shifted the time changes by a week at either end, so I have to manually change it FOUR times each year!
And don't tell me to go buy a new one, it works fine apart from that.
At least I don't have to go move all those big stones on the Salisbury plains twice a year!
Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie
Fun for days!
Way back in the early days, I was a shift leader in the computer room ( ICL 2904), I'd called in the engineers to fix the card reader and while they were in the other room finagling something they'd removed from the staking tray, I wrote " DO NOT USE CARD READER" in 6 inch high red letters on the whiteboard. Or ops manager( Hiya Barry!) Came walking in with a full tray of cards, I was across the room putting a new ribbon on a line printer and watched as Barry loaded a full stack of batched cards ( 10 cards followed by a checksum card, hundreds of them!) into the card reader and kicked the job off. Keep in mind that Barry was insistent we all check the whiteboard before running anything!
I watched in horror ( well, amusement actually!) as the card reader started reading at it's fll speed of about 300 cards per minute, the stacker not stacking but instead flinging the cards into the air.
Barry killed the job, spent a while picking up the scattered cards and just putting them back in the reader ( they didn't bother with sequence numbers at that place) and restarting the job. Every group was rejected for invalid checksums and Barry had had to go grovelling to the punch girls to have everything re-keyed. I was kind enough to point the big message on the whiteboard as he was picking up all those cards from the floor. I think he invented a couple of new swearwords that day!
Angry birds ground some Google Wing drones in Australia
Why waste away in a cubicle when you could be a goddamn infosec neuromancer on £50k*?
IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Fun for days
I used to work for an information services division of General Electric in the UK (the US GE tho) at a field office. I was always the first to arrive. I'd just got a pot of coffee going when the doorbell rang. It was the new Managing Director there fore a meeting with the senior sales staff (None of whom would arrive for at least another hour).I sat him in the reception area, poured him a coffee and told him I could not let him into the main office since he did not have an ID badge (apparently it was his first week). Ran into him at head office a month later at some 'all hands' meeting and ended up being invited to come have a few lunchtime pints with him across the street. He was VERY appreciative of hearing the truth from the folks that actually did the work.
In defence of online ads: The 'net ain't free and you ain't paying

Targetting the ignorant?
They aren't targeting you, or almost all readers here. They are targeting those too stupid or uneducated to figure out how to block unwanted stuff. The kind that believe the BS thrown at them (LIke 'Oxyclean', which is really just a few generic ingredients, fancy packaging and advertising at ridicukously loud volume) to convince them that <insert brand name here> is so much better than a generic (or even home-made) alternative. and those too uneducated enough to do a little research and prefer to be 'spoonfed' heaping helpings of BS.
* OxiClean is sodium percarbonate (Na2CO3•H2O2), an adduct of sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2).[3] This breaks down into hydrogen peroxide when dissolved in water. TAED is often used as activator
NSA sought data on 534 MILLION phone calls in 2017
I've got way too much cash, thinks Jeff Bezos. Hmmm, pay more tax? Pay staff more? Nah, let's just go into space
Guntree v Gumtree: Nominet orders gun ads site must lose domain
Finally, a use for your mobile phone: Snapping ALIEN signal blurts
Flying drug mule crashes in Manchester prison
Britain beats back Argies over Falklands online land grab
US Air Force reveals what's inside its top-secret space plane, this time
NASA robot plans mid-2020s trip: Europa. Wet, radioactive life forms (hopefully). Bliss
Dr Hurricane unleashes FUSION POWER at Livermore nuke lab
Short-staffed website swaps DOGS for DEVELOPERS
Colombian boffins reconstruct flight path of Russian meteor
Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox
Brit boffins' bendy bamboo bike breakthrough
Facebook 'personal' news feed gets algorithm rejig
It could be worse. They could be posting just the first few words of all your friends updates, then when you click on 'more', you get "And first, a word from our sponsor with an exciting new offer!" and you have to sit through some marketing droids feeble attempt at a flash animation for a product you'd never buy.
LOHAN: She's low orbit and helium assisted

orbit
Strictly speaking, anything that goes 'ballistic' *is* in orbit, just not a complete orbit. If you stand in your garden and throw a rock, it goes 'ballistic' and starts to fall under gravity. The faster you throw it, the further it goes. Throw it at 7 miles per second and it's in an 'escape' orbit. Any slower and it's in a 'decay' orbit.
Semantics, gotta love them!
'3-2-1 ... Good Morning Atlantis!'
HP's Hurd quits quickly on sexual harassment probe
Miracle-tech that could fix almost everything: Major advance
London hospital hosted grumble flick shoot
PARIS in hot glue gun action
Medical diagnoses for 130,000 people vanish into thin air

unencrpyted?
wtf?????
Straight violation of Hipaa Privacy and the little known Hipaa security regs. If I remember correctly, that's a $50k fine PER, plus up to ten years in 'club fed' *just*on the privacy part.
On the security part::-
1.2 Penalties
CEs that do not comply with the Security Rule requirements are subject to a number of penalties. Civil penalties are $100 per violation, up to $25,000 per year for each requirement violated. Criminal penalties range from $50,000 in fines and one year in prison up to $250,000 in fines and 10 years in jail.
Good grief, that's a 1996 regulation!