Posts by C-L 15 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2013
Commentary on my title ("Principal Consultant") ran from "your title is misspelled" and downhill. I thanked them all and signed using the same title spelling.
In one patient case, 3 exchanges took place before a phone call came (obsessive compulsive?) I had no choice then but make the referral to the dictionary.
Opted out of crap TV about 18 years ago, it's been blissful!
Many times people ask with astonished tones "how do you keep up with news?" They admit, though, that I am no less up-to-date on news than they are, then scratch their heads when *they* are stumped about items I ask them about.
The amount of junk and crap I avoid inserting into my mind seems staggering.
A side benefit is restricting the fight with Ads to just computers and smartphones, one less front in the war on crapola!
I understand well wanting the convenience of data available even from remote locations. Clearly the data is important to have and to access.
What I fail to understand is the utter neglect exercised by people just dumping their life work somewhere WITHOUT backup.
Cardinal rule NUMBER ONE of *ALL* data storage: BACK THE STUFF UP, MAYBE EVEN MAKE SEVERAL COPIES!
I am sorry for your loss but it also feels you had a hand in the loss, contributing to your own misery.
Ouch!
and yet, over 70 MILLION people in the US of A think otherwise :(
No accounting for the murkiness of minds, even 70 mil of them. They say that mass hysteria and mass behavior is also indicative of wisdom or lack of.
My vote goes to the cats of the other posyer here. I could not vote for either top choices on thenprwsidential ticket made me gag vehemently...
Think of the slimes such as US AttyGen Barr, or WH Operatives such as Steve Miller, and in the past Bannon, and of course the stable genius Orange Monkey currently known as "US President"... Would you trust them or their delegates and appointees? I'd rather perform a self-root-canal...
This is an idea that deserves to be ground to dust, then sent on a rocket to a sun in another galaxy. Yikes!
> ...but over the past few (two?) years it's just
> become a hellhole, the laughing stock of the
> civilised world of which it's no longer a part.
I wonder how that happened! [Plants tongue firmly in cheek!]
BTW, the correct term to describe the place is no longer "hellhole" but instead "s**thole" ☺️
Decades ago, on an IBM 360 Model 20 (or something like that), I wrote assembly code to figure out all the valid combinations of some industrial contraption being machined. Their original "system" broke down (bad code, dumb logic) and the original programmer gave up, could not figure out his own bad code.
I was approached to "fix it". It took me all of an hour to get the assembly code just right, and it was so small I could multipunch it on 3 punch cards (remember those 80 column babies??)
When I asked the manufacturer what if it cannot be fixed, he said he'd shut down. And if it can be fixed? He said he'd make a mint, he had a rich, juicy contract for the product. I asked for 3% of the mint. He thought he'd arrived in heaven!
In this case my hourly rate was huge, many-many times what the most expensive lawyer I heard of, really! But a business saved, 3 salepersons had jobs, 18 manufacturing and other workers in the business had a job, owner had a business that continued thriving and growing for at least a decade that I am aware of. Yeah, they got into many other things after they came back from the dead, well, the had money to do it...
1973 or 1974. 3am call. Bla bla bla is nor working. I am diagnosing problem. Some database indexes went left when the rest of the database went right. Names, account numbers, addresses - none have any relationship to each other.
On the phone is one of the brighter operators and so I dictate an assembler program(!) along with all the JCL (IBM mainframe-land!) to create a program that will recreate the index in-situ and then re-run the job. All is well.
Morning the next day. I walk into my office and there are several big THANK YOU NOTE on my desk. Huh? Operators and their supervisor all signed.
WTF??? I go to the computer room and eveyone is smiles and thankyous fly for saving the production run (also month end and quarter end!)
I have no idea what is going on, but they tell me the night's events as I wrote above: diagnosing, dictating, recreating the indexes, but TILL TODAY I have zero memory of the event of my own - only the stories of the operators. Needless to say I panicked and immediately checked the program "I wrote". It was pristine, it was brilliant, it was impeccable! I called my wife, she confirmed I was on the phone for over an hour and seemed to dictate something technical.
I decided to tske credit on condition that I can apply the overtime pay to several rounds at the local bar to all operators, supsn and 2 managers. I really deserved none of that - someone did, but no one knows who exactly.
The usual claptrap idiotic blathering from populist politicians pandering to the lowest layer of the scum voter, hoovering the most fetid of crap. Sure, the populist gets you votes. But this vote is volatile, it will turn on you and dump you when the next scum-sucking politician makes another, more moron-cativating statement.
Why is it that YOU get to say what is extreme and what is not? Did the Queen die and left you the title Emperor in her will? Yeech!
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