Posts by disgruntled yank 2035 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
@KittenHuffer
Much greater duration? That depends on a) how far you are flying, and b) how far you are from the airport. We traveled from Washington, DC, to western Michigan last weekend, and the flight time was 90 minutes, the driving home from the airport nearly an hour.
Long ago, I worked for a company that made systems on DG minis. Some of the customers had a low-end storage unit with a 25 MB drive and an 8" floppy for installation, backup etc. For reasons probably including the rubber-belt drive of the main disk, disk corruption occurred now and then. For reasons certainly involving the nuisance of backing up 25 MB of storage on floppies holding 1.1 MB, the backups weren't always what they might have been. I was sent to customer sites on short notice at least twice to help them recover ther systems. I regret to say that the sites were not in European capitals, but to places on Long Island and in northern Alabama.
I did get an upgrade to first class on the Alabama trip, after Delta got me into Atlanta too late for the initially scheduled flight. But that particular customer was a Baptist publishing operation, and I thought it unwise to sample the free alcohol within two hours of showing up.
@missing semicolon:
>> She's been knocking around California representing various districts (how does that work?) since 1993.
She will have served in districts drawn after the censuses of 1990, 2000, and 2010, and I suppose will run this fall in one drawn after the 2020 census. Since the 1960s, state legislatures have had to draw districts that are roughly equal in population, and every census brings an adjustment.
This is not to say that one can't gerrymander to some degree--there was a North Carolina congressman who said he could drive down the interstate with both doors open and hit every one of his constituents.
As for service since 1993, that's a short-timer by the current standards. Senator Grassley (R-IA) was first elected in 1981.
In about 1980, I remember seeing a help-wanted ad in the newspaper. The job seemed to be require that one be the very model of a modern major general, and also be fluent in Chinese. The salary advertised was about what a secretary might earn. I found this bizarre. Years later I learned that work visas went to those who had skills that no American citizen could offer at a comparable rate.
With the introduction of Real ID, it must be a lot harder to proffer forged licenses. But in the 1980s and before, county clerks were a lot more casual about providing copies of birth certificates, and he who has a legally valid birth certificate has a jump on getting everything else: driver's license, passport, social security card. There are probably a few thousand persons living quietly under false identification in the US. Those who took what I believe the professionals say is the best route, of assuming the identity of a child who died very young, will not need to fear the impersonated turning up at the bank or Social Security Administration office.
I can see the attraction of taking the name William Donald Woods: Woods is a common name in the US, and the combination William Donald is not unusual: William Donald Schaeffer rose to be mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. I can see the attraction of taking a hot dog vendor's name: the chances of the victim remaining unknown are better than if you assumed a physician's or engineer's name. But why assume a name? I suppose that Keirans had some police department looking for him when he started thisl
First, did the patient not take her husband's surname when they married? Or does the English press consider that William should have followed old precedent and married a Battenberg or Hohenzollern, that KM's status is morganatic, and that one must constantly keep that in view?
Second, the newspapers I read did mention this matter in passing. The amount of space allocated has been much less than they give to the NCAA basketball tournament or MLB spring training.
Prior art: a version of the joke shows up in Bill Mauldin's Up Front, from the campaign of North Africa.
I did once live about five miles from the Coors brewery, and get a whiff of the malt from time to time. Coors (and I am not talking about Coors Light) was not bad when the air temperature was over 90 F and the Coors was chilled until ice crystals just started to form.
"circa 50 percent of IBM’s reduction goal will impact staffing levels across the European continent" looks like corporate PR's way of saying "about half the layoffs will occur in Europe."
And when IBM says "corporate rebalancing", I imagine employees walking blanks to port and starboard both.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked on a US government contract. The server room access log was ring binder with forms in which you might write your time of arrival, your task, and your time of exit--office buildings commonly have such at the front desk. The boss contractor mentioned as an additional reason for their use that they could get one out of trouble: somebody accused of smoking pot in a stairwell was shown as have been in a server room at the time of the alleged offense. I don't think that I was particularly conscientious about filling them out.
@Someone else
< "believe that anything created before they were born is of no importance."
Boomer here, but it sure sounds as if you're talkin' 'bout my generation.
Well, actually, we probably pushed "before they were born" up to "before we hit puberty."
Many years ago, I worked for a contractor at a US civil agency, supporting mostly WordPerfect Office. The email did not have auto-forward, so our programmer wrote one. He wrote it in COBOL, since that's what he knew best, and I don't recall how he kicked it off--a batch job, probably.
it had no loop detection. We fielded many calls from users upset to find that their in-boxes had thousands of repeated messages. It seems to me that I tried to introduce loop detection, though given that I knew, and know, essentially no COBOL, I can't think how.
Marketing: Shortly after my employer signed up with KnowBe4, a building-wide email went out for an umbrella organization for charitable giving. The domain name did not match the organization name (not well, anyway), and WhoIs was not forthcoming with domain ownership. I thought it was real phishing, not KnowBe4, because the quality of the clickable link was a step up. It was later in the day that I managed to find out that this email was legitimate. But it certainly looked like phishing.
I suspect that the backgrounds you name are supportive of getting well-paying employment. I'm not sure, though, how far that culture can hold out before being absorbed into the broader stream. Apart from anything else, smart kids will figure out where to power lies in the corporate world, and who gets to declare whom redundant. A co-worker, born in Asia, reported that a lot of her friends' kids were off getting law degrees and MBAs.
In the US vocational-technical high school is a step down from a university. In fact, in the old days most of the students at such a school would not have been expected to attend a university--the instruction focused on trades, not on college preparation.
Having said that, US school districts often have IT departments that manage the systems of several or many schools. Whether that is the arrangement in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I don't know
I can see the contracting officers' world looking favorably on these, which would lead to government contractors urging their employees to go get one.
Years ago, I had the impression that the Cisco certifications really meant something. (I know very little about networking, though, so it could have been the leather jackets.) I did have an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) card back in the Oracle 7 or 8 days; after I went to Open World and found what esteem grizzled DBAs found the OCP credential, I lost interest in keeping it current. (I lost even more interest when, Oracle being Oracle, it revised the requirements so that one had to keep taking classes in order to take the exams.)
About 40 years ago, a techie friend had arranged to do some contract work for a big government contractor. All was going well until somebody within the organization called him to arrange for a drug test. He certainly had nothing to fear from such a test, but thought it very bad sign that the company should mention it only so late in the process. He told them so, and broke off communications.
On the other hand, I am no teetotaler, but would just as soon that those who have been drinking go home and sleep it off before they work on computers. I remember (also from about 40 years ago), and operator with a blood-alcohol level approaching "embalmed" who left a customer's mini unusable for a couple of days.
@TimMaher
That sounds like the unit Data General used to sell--a 25 MB hard drive with an 8" floppy one could use to back it up. I remember being at a customer's site and hearing a "spang", which was followed immediately by a system panic. The sound was that of the belt drive falling off. We left replacement to the FE.
@Glenp
Many, many years ago, while taking a break from school, I worked as a driver. The printing company had what appeared to be a moderately sized truck, but was van with a truck box fitted on. Normally this wasn't something one noticed, but then one day it was necessary to load it with considerably more than the usual two or three pallets. The front rose up in a manner that reminded me of pictures of 1940s aircraft with the little wheel at the tail. The tilt was not so bad as to dangerously obstruct the view forward, but the ride was squishier than usual, and I drove very carefully across town.
"In any case, if we were all paywalled out of using Twitter, hopefully the world's discourse would become somewhat saner."
We are hopeful because
We don't remember Usenet and its odder corners.
Before Usenet existed, we never listed to late-night talk radio. (OK, maybe only an American thing.)
We have no knowledge of the practices of newspaper empires before that--Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Northcliffe.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
