Yep. First thing that I did when I started that job was disable all the backup agents, and things improved tremendously, not to mention saving a lot of dollars from the annual licensing. I would probably trust Redgate's backup solution, but in no job have I ever had the budget for third-party tools of any sort. I wrote tons of code for monitoring and managing my servers in Perl and T-SQL, one of these days I'll start seeing about doing them in Powershell, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
Oh, I certainly know what happened next! Spanning was never a good idea, but sometimes it was the only tool that we had.
The funny thing was that when I was at #1, they had two Wang mini-computers. And no power protection. We'd get summer monsoon rains, and there was invariably power interruptions, and invariably some board or another in the Wangs had blown up. I had mega-UPS backup on my 3Com LAN long before the Wangs had protection. One day I was walking in to the building and the Finance manager jumped me: "The LAN is down!" The 3Com servers were on the first floor, the actual computer room was on the 4th, which was where my office was. I walk in and look at the servers, and they appear happy. I connect through a console computer next to the servers, and everything seems fine, but no one is signed on. I go up to my office, and I can't connect. I go in to the computer room. My hub (didn't have switches, those were too expensive!) was located on top of its UPS underneath a modem rack for the Wangs. A storm had hit the previous night, and the operators had started switching off the modems. And continued down and powered off my hub for the 3Com network. Powered it back on, and all was well.
I remember once, over a holiday weekend, they shut down the power to the building for maintenance. They didn't tell me, so I didn't power down the LAN. Finance manager arrives early Monday: power is still out. But the UPS system for the 3Com servers are beeping away 'Excuse me, but you're on battery power!' and the servers were happily ticking away, though no one else had power to their computers in order to connect. All weekend long they'd kept the servers up. As I recall, it was a pair of 1500 or 3000 watt systems. Gorgeous, and weighed a tonne.
I had a guy 'who knew databases' change a primary key field from character to numeric, because all the data in it was numbers. The data also had leading zeroes. And it broke the relationship to all the child tables, which he hadn't changed, which had leading zeroes. All of a sudden 'lots of records are missing!'
It was easy enough to fix, but it took some time to figure out what he did. Naturally he didn't mention the change that he'd done.
Exact same thing happened to me! Hired by A, and his last day at that org was my last day at my previous employer. Now managed by B, whom I'd never met. And B turned out to be grossly incompetent. Fortunately long ago and the nightmares have mostly stopped.;-)
For one of them I got a t-shirt from Shark Tank! But I'm not going to write about that one, it'd take too long.
Boss 1 (very early '90s): we're holding a rare all-hands meeting on a Thursday or Friday (small dept, 8 people or so, tops), and I'm starting a two week vacation that weekend. Whole purpose of the meeting was for Boss to say that when I get back from vacation, I'll no longer be the LAN admin, I'm going to work with Bob doing COBOL programming, and Dave is going to take over as LAN admin for Finance. I came within an inch of saying 'Fuck you, Larry, I quit. I'll be in tomorrow to clean out my desk.' Larry hadn't said a word to me in advance about this change, never a whisper of it. While I could do COBOL, I much preferred doing FoxPro and managing the LAN. And I knew Dave couldn't handle doing everything for Finance. Over my vacation I thought about it and I decided to wait it out. I started showing Dave everything that I did for Finance, and he was quickly lost. Nothing further was discussed, nothing changed, and I never wrote a line of code with Bob. And people in Finance wept when I left because they knew they were now at the tender mercies of Larry.
Boss 2, which predated Larry. I had been hired (mid '80s) to create a merge document in a word processing package for creating retirement plan contracts. Awesome job, got me out of a lousy job. Eventually that job transitioned to running the billing system, maintaining the PCs, etc. It then evolved to create a reporting system in dBase III for the canned accounting package to produce better and prettier reports. My boss, the office manager, hired her husband to come in as Senior IT, and he clearly had little knowledge of micros. Eventually my boss told me that I was being put back in to doing word processing, which led me to find another job. One of the programs that I'd written was for producing 1099 forms as they were required whenever a pension plan did a distribution. Okidata Microline 93 printer, continuous form feed of multi-part pre-printed forms, dBase III (boss's hubby wouldn't let me use FoxPro because 'I might get hit by a bus'), and some very specific formatting code like microline advance to make the database info line up with the pre-printed form. In the code were comments that said "DO NOT ADJUST THE CODE IN THIS BLOCK OR YOU'LL BREAK THE FORMATTING!" You couldn't miss it. He touched the code, apparently didn't have a backup, broke the code, and they were never able to print the forms again.
Boss 3 (actually management above my boss was the problem): Working at a school, appeared to be a good job, I'd spent over two years developing a very nice database system for them. It was complete, worked great, just needed final deployment. Costs for software and hardware had already been paid. Everyone there is on an annual contract: all teachers, all staff. Then the administration decided not to renew my contract. Zero complaints about my work, excellent reviews, never called in to an office to discuss something bad that I'd done, and the project was complete. The project was never deployed: complete waste of time and money. At least I got to mothball it so that it could be brought back with a few weeks work if a more intelligent type of administrator is found (highly unlikely). They later told my boss that I had been hired on a temporary basis for the project. Funny how the fact that it was a temporary role was never mentioned in my interview. Or on-boarding process. Or annual review. Or contract renewal. Or to either of my bosses (the one who hired me retired a year later).
Boss 4. Working for a moderately-sized city. The storage admin, who 'knew all', didn't want me backing up the ERP system (180 gig or so a that time, growing at about 5% per month) using SQL Server's transaction log and database backups. He said the SAN backups would capture it all. Finally a meeting was called with Boss, SAN admin, and me. I lost, and I turned off SQL Server backups on that instance as inst
American politics are so horribly distorted and exclusionary, look at the inability for the majority party in Congress to try to work with the minority party (over the last 20 years, not just right now). I haven't come up with what I think is a good unofficial motto for the Dems, maybe they're too internally divided for one. As a gross oversimplification, I think the Repubs ignore the social cost of a lot of the things they do, the Dems ignore the fiscal costs. What I find interesting is that the Republicans always claim to be the fiscally conservative party, yet since Reagan the deficit and debt has always ballooned during their reigns. Yes it grew under Obama, but it was slowing and he had two unpaid for wars to manage plus a recession to fight. He was far from perfect, but at least he tried to pay for the things he did. And now under the current regime's proclaimed plans we don't know what's going to happen: either the deficit and debt will explode again, or the federal government will be gutted and thousands of people will become unemployed, there's not much in the way of alternatives.
My wife and I constantly discuss/argue about the two-party system, I think it's impossible for two parties to adequately represent a nation's interest, my wife thinks that more parties would just add more chaos to the system. I keep thinking about the saying that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Maybe we need a new form of government, and we just don't know what it should look like yet. Maybe part of the problem is too many gross oversimplifications, like my unofficial motto of the RNC. I think the only certainty is that we all operate, form opinions, and make decisions from imperfect information.
I really need to get breakfast made and get away from the news and read my morning comics.
I agree and disagree with you whether money is an infinite resource. While money is just bits in a computer, it still requires some resource to back it up. That used to be gold, and I cannot imagine the disruption that would happen if we actually tried to go back to the gold standard! There comes a point when money is like thermodynamics. For example, the housing bubble could not grow infinitely and had to burst, or go through an adjustment. In that case, it was a massive collapse because of systemic fraud that was largely ignored. Neither can the stock market grow infinitely. Money becomes a zero-sum game: as the ultra-rich hoard more and more, there's less and less for the middle and lower class, which I think will ultimately result in a collapse of services for the ultra-rich. The funny thing is that most of the ultra-rich inherited their money and didn't do much to expand it, they're living off interest and earnings.
Consider it another way: manufacturing costs. Many countries outsourced manufacturing and other jobs to China. Their economies started rising, and now those jobs are getting more expensive, so manufacturers are looking for other inexpensive places to manufacture. When manufacturing leaves those countries that have gotten more expensive, the jobs went away and the economy probably found itself on a bit of a see-saw. China retained the tech capability and is using it to improve its own economy and become self-boosting. Other countries may not be able to maintain an industrial base like China did when western industry pulls out for cheaper pools. Eventually every country will have raised wages for their poorest, but this paradigm is also becoming distorted by the increased adoption of robotics. There's still cheap manufacturing for some jobs, like textiles and clothing assembly that are best done by hand, and robots still need supervision and maintenance.
I'm not expressing this as well as I should, my brain hasn't fully spun up this morning and I haven't taken any courses in macro- or micro-economics. Money is a mutually agreed upon fiction, but there has to be some reality behind it. Artificially adding more to the supply just punts the ball down the road and makes the inevitable readjustment all the worse. I've heard, but don't know the numbers behind it, that right now wealth inequity is greater than it was during the French Revolution, I'm curious how it compares to the Great Depression of the early 20th century.
Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
Then don't bitch about the costs of health care when you go out of your way to buy more expensive medicines.
This is the reason so many insurance companies are switching away from copays and straight to deductibles.
Excuse me, but at what point did I "bitch about the costs of health care"? I made a comment that I willingly pay more for meds locally than buying them through the mail, I don't see a complaint in what I said. Having said that, I do spend a lot on health care and pharmacy as I have an immune disorder that is very expensive to treat and keep me alive. I don't like the fact that it seems like my monthly OTC meds get more expensive every time that I pick them up, but I didn't bitch about it. I recognize that my meds will get more expensive over time and that those costs support jobs for the pharmacy insurance company that gives me theoretical price breaks. I'm OK with companies making profit, but not when it's mainly to go for an executive to get a new boat. I don't have to increase their profits by getting my meds mail order at the cost of jobs that are local to my economy.
I hadn't heard about a switch from copays to straight deductibles, thank you for that information. That could be pretty painful for my wife and I until my annual is met, which, depending on how much the annual cap is, could be 4-5 months. We'd probably have to front-load a slush fund to have a pre-allocated cash surplus for the start of a new plan year.
I've been saying for a few years that the unofficial motto of the Republican Party is "I've got mine, screw you" and this just perpetuates that even though this is driven more by the on-going reality series, Wall Street and the Quest for Quarterly Profits. Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
I don't understand how people can think that money is an infinite resource. It has to be backed by something tangible, and when you remove wages from the local economy like this then you weaken the local economy. The middle class is on life support, and that seems to be what the RNC and Wall Street want. There's a story of Henry Ford showing a UAW president a robotic assembly line, bragging about the robots never strike, never ask for a raise, don't take time off sick, can work 24 hours a day. The UAW president replied "But how many cars do these robots buy?"
Personally I think morality left business when the personnel office became 'Human Resources'. When you devalue a person to a slot that can be filled by any number of interchangeable people, then morality and ethics are out the window.
The thing that I particularly love about this is the irony that it's Disney, the company being sued by workers for outsourcing its IT department to India and sacking all of its local IT workforce. So go right ahead and learn to code under the Disney IT directive, kids -- you're never going to code for them! You might stand and let people on to rides for $10 an hour, but you're not going to code for them.
No, not everyone should be programmers. I have no problem with exposing everyone to code, you never know when someone might be incredibly gifted and they just needed that exposure. All I needed was to be shown that KSR-33 teletype with the dial-up acoustic coupler modem back in '74 and I was hooked. I didn't know a thing about code at that time, but I learned pretty quick. Give kids a class every other year that also helps them with critical thinking, and maybe there's a chance we can improve the state of computer security and reduce the amount of Nigerian Prince fraud that goes on over time. It requires curiosity, drive, and a certain mind set to be a coder, and not everyone is cut out for it. I've seen amazing coders, I've seen horrible coders, and personally I think I'd rather see fewer of the latter than more of the former.
I'm in a similar boat. I have a 2011 MBP with 16 gig of memory, I'm planning on putting in a 1 TB SSD when I get another job. What I would like to do is get the last model before everything got soldered/glued in (2013? 2014?) and hope that I can keep that ticking. Possibly buy two of them and maybe alternate using them a year at a time, pulling the battery from the one that's in temporary retirement.
I went Mac about a decade ago, I'm typing this on a brand-new 27" iMac (insurance replacement for my 2011 27" iMac that was stolen over Thanksgiving - long story). And I am an Adobe user, but not a CC user. I'm also a Microsoft user via Parallels as my former occupation was as a SQL Server developer/admin.
My main reason for switching was reliability and updates. I was sick and tired of OS crashes and reloads and having to reboot my computer seemingly every other day. Frequently the crashes took care of the need to reboot. One day I was sitting at work, again, about a decade ago, when the IT director came by my desk and started giving me a ration of shit about owning a Mac. Finally I turned to my Mac, ran uptime, then said "Yeah, Don, it's junk. It's only been up 46 days without a reboot." He turned on his heels and left.
Macs aren't perfect, and Windows has gotten much better, but man -- their UI just makes me want to claw my eyes out! I have a Windows 10 x64 box with a nice 28" Viewsonic connected to a nice Radeon card, and typing in a browser doesn't look much better than it did 15 years ago! I've never understood why in all the years of good video cards and GUI development that Microsoft couldn't get font rendering looking good. And you'll never get me off Time Machine backups! It made deploying this new iMac or my wife's new MacBook Pro that her boss bought her last Fall so easy. My wife is an astronomer and all of their data center is Linux, so Macs are a very smooth fit for the staff.
Maybe Microsoft is eating in to Apple market share. No doubt Apple has had some missteps. I don't care. As long as they're around or as long as I can keep their kit working, I'll stick with my Macs. I started with the original four-screw IBM PC and Dos 1.0 and worked on pretty much everything since then, and I've had more than enough. I just want my computer to work reliably. And that is what my Mac does.
I interviewed last week for a Library Aid position at a local K-5 school, functionally I would be the one and only school librarian. It pays $9 an hour and I'd be happy to take it because it helps the local community, money isn't the objective here. I was informed that I would have the kids for 30 minutes per week per class to help them find books and material for their homework assignments. THIRTY MINUTES PER WEEK PER CLASS. Now, I've been doing programming and relational database since the mid 1980s. I've worked with every edition of SQL Server from the OS/2 version up through Azure cloud-based. I've taught classes before, including absolute computer novice adults, though I've never taught programming to kids. I used to be able to program in a dozen different languages, I admit some of those skills are kinda rusty. And Google thinks that in this age of high-stakes testing that there's enough time in a school day that kids can be taught programming when they have THIRTY MINUTES PER WEEK in the library?
Somebody's fooling themselves. Or I need what they're having. I'm more and more becoming a fan of the phrase "It will be a glorious day when our education system has the money it needs and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." Of course, if DeVos gets approved to be the new SecEd, it will only get worse.
My wife is an astronomer, operates a 3.5 meter telescope. Last year she wanted to hire a guy from Chile but visa issues made that difficult and it didn't happen. She lost the American lady that she wanted when her boss got wind of the job offer and upped her wage, ended up with an American working in Canada (he might be wishing he'd stayed there in a few months). So this definitely could be an issue, no doubt. LOTS of foreigners at the observatory on the other telescope: three Russians, a Chinese, a French guy. I have no idea what their work visa status was, may or may not have been H1B. One Japanese woman at the observatory, born in the USA, might be moving to Japan depending on what our new POTUS does.
In May, my boss came in to my office and said my contract wasn't being renewed. I said that was OK, I hadn't been terribly happy there for a while and I was almost done with the project. I thought I was there for the long haul, apparently not. It was a school, and all employees are on annual contracts, so your job may be terminated any year.
What I hated was the duplicity. They later told my boss that I was a temporary hire. Funny, they didn't tell me that in my interview. And they didn't tell him when he took over the unit. Or the guy who hired me. Or me when I was hired. Or signed all of my paperwork. Or when my contract was renewed. Or in my termination paperwork. Had I known it was a temporary role, I wouldn't have bought a new car last year. They told the state unemployment office that "they had no more work for me." I have since learned that this is not unusual behavior for them, sort of like what our next Commander In Chief's reputation is like with contractors. I had two more projects lined up, one that could be done in about a month, one that was a major rewrite and would take about six months. Plus a total system replacement that, when done, would save the school about $3,000 a year in licensing alone, plus expanded and improved asset tracking throughout the school that would reduce a major amount of paperwork and footwork. AND they scrapped the database that I'd been developing for two years -- it never saw the lite of day. I wasted two years of my life in a job that produced absolutely nothing.
But what do I know, I've only been working with databases for 25 years.
I absolutely love my Time Steel, I just hope I get my Time Steel 2 at some point! I was concerned with the Kickstarter when I learned that the 2 wasn't fully developed yet, now I'm VERY concerned.
I bought the Time Steel via the Kickstarter after I had cataract surgery and was sick and tired of pulling my iPhone out to see what time it was. My Steel is awesome: alarm clock with vibrating alarm, count-down timer, AND I CAN READ IT WITHOUT MY GLASSES. The Time 2 series: my interest was the larger display, the heart rate monitor is of minor interest. And the stainless steel casing is fantastic!
Well, off to Kickstarter to see if I can find out if my 2 will be completed or not.
Seconded for mSecure. I've been using it since I switched from a Palm Pilot to an iPod Touch back around '08 or so. Palm had a very nice third party encrypted note pad program, but Palm self-destructed and that's all to be said about that. While I consider the interface for mSecure just a tiny bit clunky, I am quite fond of the program and I recommend it to anyone who uses the iOS infrastructure. It's not free, but it was well worth the money.
I'm ticked not only about the lack of USB-A ports, but that they're moving away from MagSafe power supplies. I LOVE that feature, and it has saved many a laptop of ours from damage as we have a rampaging standard poodle who does not respect power cords when we're sitting on the couch. My current laptop is a MBP 2011, I can't see me moving past the '14, which I think is the last year for MagSafe and SD card reader. Maybe I'll just keep my '11 and we'll see how long an SSD will keep it alive, then we'll see if Apple comes back to their senses or the ghost of Jobs returns to take over the company.
I'm surprised that Belkin or someone else hasn't made a C-to-MagSafe adapter for MacBook owners.
I need to replace my wife's iPhone 4S, but it won't be with a 7. That loss of a headphone jack makes it unusable for use in a car that doesn't have BT.
is that some vendors charged two upgrade prices: one for the new chip-ready terminal, a SECOND to upgrade the software to a set that is chip-ready! So many businesses ended up with new terminals with deactivated chip readers.
Another issue that I've seen is speed. It seems like some chip-ready installs are using dial-up to transmit info, which is really odd. We spent a few weeks in Germany last summer, and all of the terminals that we used were quite brisk.
Texas keeps threatening to leave, personally I'd tell them yes. Then watch as they try to pay for all of the military bases and hardware that would be removed.
In Arizona, Pima County/Tucson would like to secede as the Arizona Legislature has gone absolutely bat-shit crazy. One of the more interesting recent bits of ritual idiocy is the governator signed a bill adding two seats to the Supreme Court to stuff it with conservatives. The twit who proposed the bill said "We wouldn't have put it forth if the governor was a Democrat."
I have in front of me of my recently arrived DVD complete Yes Minister, and I am reminded of an exchange between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker. To paraphrase:
Sir Humphrey: There are two responses. "It is under consideration", which means we've lost it.
Hacker: And the other?
Humphrey: "It is under active consideration", which means we're looking for it.
And I freely admit that I don't track things like CPU specs any more, is why Windows is still 32 bit? Are modern CPUs still coming in 32 bit? I have no problem slapping 16 gig or more of RAM in any of my Macs and they just say Cool! Why do we have to buy a 64 bit version of Windows to get more than 4 gig of RAM in a box?
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Yep. First thing that I did when I started that job was disable all the backup agents, and things improved tremendously, not to mention saving a lot of dollars from the annual licensing. I would probably trust Redgate's backup solution, but in no job have I ever had the budget for third-party tools of any sort. I wrote tons of code for monitoring and managing my servers in Perl and T-SQL, one of these days I'll start seeing about doing them in Powershell, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
Oh, I certainly know what happened next! Spanning was never a good idea, but sometimes it was the only tool that we had.
The funny thing was that when I was at #1, they had two Wang mini-computers. And no power protection. We'd get summer monsoon rains, and there was invariably power interruptions, and invariably some board or another in the Wangs had blown up. I had mega-UPS backup on my 3Com LAN long before the Wangs had protection. One day I was walking in to the building and the Finance manager jumped me: "The LAN is down!" The 3Com servers were on the first floor, the actual computer room was on the 4th, which was where my office was. I walk in and look at the servers, and they appear happy. I connect through a console computer next to the servers, and everything seems fine, but no one is signed on. I go up to my office, and I can't connect. I go in to the computer room. My hub (didn't have switches, those were too expensive!) was located on top of its UPS underneath a modem rack for the Wangs. A storm had hit the previous night, and the operators had started switching off the modems. And continued down and powered off my hub for the 3Com network. Powered it back on, and all was well.
I remember once, over a holiday weekend, they shut down the power to the building for maintenance. They didn't tell me, so I didn't power down the LAN. Finance manager arrives early Monday: power is still out. But the UPS system for the 3Com servers are beeping away 'Excuse me, but you're on battery power!' and the servers were happily ticking away, though no one else had power to their computers in order to connect. All weekend long they'd kept the servers up. As I recall, it was a pair of 1500 or 3000 watt systems. Gorgeous, and weighed a tonne.
I had a guy 'who knew databases' change a primary key field from character to numeric, because all the data in it was numbers. The data also had leading zeroes. And it broke the relationship to all the child tables, which he hadn't changed, which had leading zeroes. All of a sudden 'lots of records are missing!'
It was easy enough to fix, but it took some time to figure out what he did. Naturally he didn't mention the change that he'd done.
Exact same thing happened to me! Hired by A, and his last day at that org was my last day at my previous employer. Now managed by B, whom I'd never met. And B turned out to be grossly incompetent. Fortunately long ago and the nightmares have mostly stopped. ;-)
For one of them I got a t-shirt from Shark Tank! But I'm not going to write about that one, it'd take too long.
Boss 1 (very early '90s): we're holding a rare all-hands meeting on a Thursday or Friday (small dept, 8 people or so, tops), and I'm starting a two week vacation that weekend. Whole purpose of the meeting was for Boss to say that when I get back from vacation, I'll no longer be the LAN admin, I'm going to work with Bob doing COBOL programming, and Dave is going to take over as LAN admin for Finance. I came within an inch of saying 'Fuck you, Larry, I quit. I'll be in tomorrow to clean out my desk.' Larry hadn't said a word to me in advance about this change, never a whisper of it. While I could do COBOL, I much preferred doing FoxPro and managing the LAN. And I knew Dave couldn't handle doing everything for Finance. Over my vacation I thought about it and I decided to wait it out. I started showing Dave everything that I did for Finance, and he was quickly lost. Nothing further was discussed, nothing changed, and I never wrote a line of code with Bob. And people in Finance wept when I left because they knew they were now at the tender mercies of Larry.
Boss 2, which predated Larry. I had been hired (mid '80s) to create a merge document in a word processing package for creating retirement plan contracts. Awesome job, got me out of a lousy job. Eventually that job transitioned to running the billing system, maintaining the PCs, etc. It then evolved to create a reporting system in dBase III for the canned accounting package to produce better and prettier reports. My boss, the office manager, hired her husband to come in as Senior IT, and he clearly had little knowledge of micros. Eventually my boss told me that I was being put back in to doing word processing, which led me to find another job. One of the programs that I'd written was for producing 1099 forms as they were required whenever a pension plan did a distribution. Okidata Microline 93 printer, continuous form feed of multi-part pre-printed forms, dBase III (boss's hubby wouldn't let me use FoxPro because 'I might get hit by a bus'), and some very specific formatting code like microline advance to make the database info line up with the pre-printed form. In the code were comments that said "DO NOT ADJUST THE CODE IN THIS BLOCK OR YOU'LL BREAK THE FORMATTING!" You couldn't miss it. He touched the code, apparently didn't have a backup, broke the code, and they were never able to print the forms again.
Boss 3 (actually management above my boss was the problem): Working at a school, appeared to be a good job, I'd spent over two years developing a very nice database system for them. It was complete, worked great, just needed final deployment. Costs for software and hardware had already been paid. Everyone there is on an annual contract: all teachers, all staff. Then the administration decided not to renew my contract. Zero complaints about my work, excellent reviews, never called in to an office to discuss something bad that I'd done, and the project was complete. The project was never deployed: complete waste of time and money. At least I got to mothball it so that it could be brought back with a few weeks work if a more intelligent type of administrator is found (highly unlikely). They later told my boss that I had been hired on a temporary basis for the project. Funny how the fact that it was a temporary role was never mentioned in my interview. Or on-boarding process. Or annual review. Or contract renewal. Or to either of my bosses (the one who hired me retired a year later).
Boss 4. Working for a moderately-sized city. The storage admin, who 'knew all', didn't want me backing up the ERP system (180 gig or so a that time, growing at about 5% per month) using SQL Server's transaction log and database backups. He said the SAN backups would capture it all. Finally a meeting was called with Boss, SAN admin, and me. I lost, and I turned off SQL Server backups on that instance as inst
American politics are so horribly distorted and exclusionary, look at the inability for the majority party in Congress to try to work with the minority party (over the last 20 years, not just right now). I haven't come up with what I think is a good unofficial motto for the Dems, maybe they're too internally divided for one. As a gross oversimplification, I think the Repubs ignore the social cost of a lot of the things they do, the Dems ignore the fiscal costs. What I find interesting is that the Republicans always claim to be the fiscally conservative party, yet since Reagan the deficit and debt has always ballooned during their reigns. Yes it grew under Obama, but it was slowing and he had two unpaid for wars to manage plus a recession to fight. He was far from perfect, but at least he tried to pay for the things he did. And now under the current regime's proclaimed plans we don't know what's going to happen: either the deficit and debt will explode again, or the federal government will be gutted and thousands of people will become unemployed, there's not much in the way of alternatives.
My wife and I constantly discuss/argue about the two-party system, I think it's impossible for two parties to adequately represent a nation's interest, my wife thinks that more parties would just add more chaos to the system. I keep thinking about the saying that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Maybe we need a new form of government, and we just don't know what it should look like yet. Maybe part of the problem is too many gross oversimplifications, like my unofficial motto of the RNC. I think the only certainty is that we all operate, form opinions, and make decisions from imperfect information.
I really need to get breakfast made and get away from the news and read my morning comics.
I agree and disagree with you whether money is an infinite resource. While money is just bits in a computer, it still requires some resource to back it up. That used to be gold, and I cannot imagine the disruption that would happen if we actually tried to go back to the gold standard! There comes a point when money is like thermodynamics. For example, the housing bubble could not grow infinitely and had to burst, or go through an adjustment. In that case, it was a massive collapse because of systemic fraud that was largely ignored. Neither can the stock market grow infinitely. Money becomes a zero-sum game: as the ultra-rich hoard more and more, there's less and less for the middle and lower class, which I think will ultimately result in a collapse of services for the ultra-rich. The funny thing is that most of the ultra-rich inherited their money and didn't do much to expand it, they're living off interest and earnings.
Consider it another way: manufacturing costs. Many countries outsourced manufacturing and other jobs to China. Their economies started rising, and now those jobs are getting more expensive, so manufacturers are looking for other inexpensive places to manufacture. When manufacturing leaves those countries that have gotten more expensive, the jobs went away and the economy probably found itself on a bit of a see-saw. China retained the tech capability and is using it to improve its own economy and become self-boosting. Other countries may not be able to maintain an industrial base like China did when western industry pulls out for cheaper pools. Eventually every country will have raised wages for their poorest, but this paradigm is also becoming distorted by the increased adoption of robotics. There's still cheap manufacturing for some jobs, like textiles and clothing assembly that are best done by hand, and robots still need supervision and maintenance.
I'm not expressing this as well as I should, my brain hasn't fully spun up this morning and I haven't taken any courses in macro- or micro-economics. Money is a mutually agreed upon fiction, but there has to be some reality behind it. Artificially adding more to the supply just punts the ball down the road and makes the inevitable readjustment all the worse. I've heard, but don't know the numbers behind it, that right now wealth inequity is greater than it was during the French Revolution, I'm curious how it compares to the Great Depression of the early 20th century.
Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
Then don't bitch about the costs of health care when you go out of your way to buy more expensive medicines. This is the reason so many insurance companies are switching away from copays and straight to deductibles.
Excuse me, but at what point did I "bitch about the costs of health care"? I made a comment that I willingly pay more for meds locally than buying them through the mail, I don't see a complaint in what I said. Having said that, I do spend a lot on health care and pharmacy as I have an immune disorder that is very expensive to treat and keep me alive. I don't like the fact that it seems like my monthly OTC meds get more expensive every time that I pick them up, but I didn't bitch about it. I recognize that my meds will get more expensive over time and that those costs support jobs for the pharmacy insurance company that gives me theoretical price breaks. I'm OK with companies making profit, but not when it's mainly to go for an executive to get a new boat. I don't have to increase their profits by getting my meds mail order at the cost of jobs that are local to my economy.
I hadn't heard about a switch from copays to straight deductibles, thank you for that information. That could be pretty painful for my wife and I until my annual is met, which, depending on how much the annual cap is, could be 4-5 months. We'd probably have to front-load a slush fund to have a pre-allocated cash surplus for the start of a new plan year.
I've been saying for a few years that the unofficial motto of the Republican Party is "I've got mine, screw you" and this just perpetuates that even though this is driven more by the on-going reality series, Wall Street and the Quest for Quarterly Profits. Though I could save money by getting my prescription meds via mail, I buy them locally because that's local taxes and supporting local jobs. And when our pharmacy plan calls to tell me how much I could save, I tell them that and it usually leaves the person on the other end of the line silent.
I don't understand how people can think that money is an infinite resource. It has to be backed by something tangible, and when you remove wages from the local economy like this then you weaken the local economy. The middle class is on life support, and that seems to be what the RNC and Wall Street want. There's a story of Henry Ford showing a UAW president a robotic assembly line, bragging about the robots never strike, never ask for a raise, don't take time off sick, can work 24 hours a day. The UAW president replied "But how many cars do these robots buy?"
Personally I think morality left business when the personnel office became 'Human Resources'. When you devalue a person to a slot that can be filled by any number of interchangeable people, then morality and ethics are out the window.
The thing that I particularly love about this is the irony that it's Disney, the company being sued by workers for outsourcing its IT department to India and sacking all of its local IT workforce. So go right ahead and learn to code under the Disney IT directive, kids -- you're never going to code for them! You might stand and let people on to rides for $10 an hour, but you're not going to code for them.
No, not everyone should be programmers. I have no problem with exposing everyone to code, you never know when someone might be incredibly gifted and they just needed that exposure. All I needed was to be shown that KSR-33 teletype with the dial-up acoustic coupler modem back in '74 and I was hooked. I didn't know a thing about code at that time, but I learned pretty quick. Give kids a class every other year that also helps them with critical thinking, and maybe there's a chance we can improve the state of computer security and reduce the amount of Nigerian Prince fraud that goes on over time. It requires curiosity, drive, and a certain mind set to be a coder, and not everyone is cut out for it. I've seen amazing coders, I've seen horrible coders, and personally I think I'd rather see fewer of the latter than more of the former.
I'm in a similar boat. I have a 2011 MBP with 16 gig of memory, I'm planning on putting in a 1 TB SSD when I get another job. What I would like to do is get the last model before everything got soldered/glued in (2013? 2014?) and hope that I can keep that ticking. Possibly buy two of them and maybe alternate using them a year at a time, pulling the battery from the one that's in temporary retirement.
I went Mac about a decade ago, I'm typing this on a brand-new 27" iMac (insurance replacement for my 2011 27" iMac that was stolen over Thanksgiving - long story). And I am an Adobe user, but not a CC user. I'm also a Microsoft user via Parallels as my former occupation was as a SQL Server developer/admin.
My main reason for switching was reliability and updates. I was sick and tired of OS crashes and reloads and having to reboot my computer seemingly every other day. Frequently the crashes took care of the need to reboot. One day I was sitting at work, again, about a decade ago, when the IT director came by my desk and started giving me a ration of shit about owning a Mac. Finally I turned to my Mac, ran uptime, then said "Yeah, Don, it's junk. It's only been up 46 days without a reboot." He turned on his heels and left.
Macs aren't perfect, and Windows has gotten much better, but man -- their UI just makes me want to claw my eyes out! I have a Windows 10 x64 box with a nice 28" Viewsonic connected to a nice Radeon card, and typing in a browser doesn't look much better than it did 15 years ago! I've never understood why in all the years of good video cards and GUI development that Microsoft couldn't get font rendering looking good. And you'll never get me off Time Machine backups! It made deploying this new iMac or my wife's new MacBook Pro that her boss bought her last Fall so easy. My wife is an astronomer and all of their data center is Linux, so Macs are a very smooth fit for the staff.
Maybe Microsoft is eating in to Apple market share. No doubt Apple has had some missteps. I don't care. As long as they're around or as long as I can keep their kit working, I'll stick with my Macs. I started with the original four-screw IBM PC and Dos 1.0 and worked on pretty much everything since then, and I've had more than enough. I just want my computer to work reliably. And that is what my Mac does.
I interviewed last week for a Library Aid position at a local K-5 school, functionally I would be the one and only school librarian. It pays $9 an hour and I'd be happy to take it because it helps the local community, money isn't the objective here. I was informed that I would have the kids for 30 minutes per week per class to help them find books and material for their homework assignments. THIRTY MINUTES PER WEEK PER CLASS. Now, I've been doing programming and relational database since the mid 1980s. I've worked with every edition of SQL Server from the OS/2 version up through Azure cloud-based. I've taught classes before, including absolute computer novice adults, though I've never taught programming to kids. I used to be able to program in a dozen different languages, I admit some of those skills are kinda rusty. And Google thinks that in this age of high-stakes testing that there's enough time in a school day that kids can be taught programming when they have THIRTY MINUTES PER WEEK in the library?
Somebody's fooling themselves. Or I need what they're having. I'm more and more becoming a fan of the phrase "It will be a glorious day when our education system has the money it needs and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." Of course, if DeVos gets approved to be the new SecEd, it will only get worse.
My wife is an astronomer, operates a 3.5 meter telescope. Last year she wanted to hire a guy from Chile but visa issues made that difficult and it didn't happen. She lost the American lady that she wanted when her boss got wind of the job offer and upped her wage, ended up with an American working in Canada (he might be wishing he'd stayed there in a few months). So this definitely could be an issue, no doubt. LOTS of foreigners at the observatory on the other telescope: three Russians, a Chinese, a French guy. I have no idea what their work visa status was, may or may not have been H1B. One Japanese woman at the observatory, born in the USA, might be moving to Japan depending on what our new POTUS does.
Do not bet on there being an exit interview. I have NEVER had a formal exit interview.
In May, my boss came in to my office and said my contract wasn't being renewed. I said that was OK, I hadn't been terribly happy there for a while and I was almost done with the project. I thought I was there for the long haul, apparently not. It was a school, and all employees are on annual contracts, so your job may be terminated any year.
What I hated was the duplicity. They later told my boss that I was a temporary hire. Funny, they didn't tell me that in my interview. And they didn't tell him when he took over the unit. Or the guy who hired me. Or me when I was hired. Or signed all of my paperwork. Or when my contract was renewed. Or in my termination paperwork. Had I known it was a temporary role, I wouldn't have bought a new car last year. They told the state unemployment office that "they had no more work for me." I have since learned that this is not unusual behavior for them, sort of like what our next Commander In Chief's reputation is like with contractors. I had two more projects lined up, one that could be done in about a month, one that was a major rewrite and would take about six months. Plus a total system replacement that, when done, would save the school about $3,000 a year in licensing alone, plus expanded and improved asset tracking throughout the school that would reduce a major amount of paperwork and footwork. AND they scrapped the database that I'd been developing for two years -- it never saw the lite of day. I wasted two years of my life in a job that produced absolutely nothing.
But what do I know, I've only been working with databases for 25 years.
I absolutely love my Time Steel, I just hope I get my Time Steel 2 at some point! I was concerned with the Kickstarter when I learned that the 2 wasn't fully developed yet, now I'm VERY concerned.
I bought the Time Steel via the Kickstarter after I had cataract surgery and was sick and tired of pulling my iPhone out to see what time it was. My Steel is awesome: alarm clock with vibrating alarm, count-down timer, AND I CAN READ IT WITHOUT MY GLASSES. The Time 2 series: my interest was the larger display, the heart rate monitor is of minor interest. And the stainless steel casing is fantastic!
Well, off to Kickstarter to see if I can find out if my 2 will be completed or not.
Seconded for mSecure. I've been using it since I switched from a Palm Pilot to an iPod Touch back around '08 or so. Palm had a very nice third party encrypted note pad program, but Palm self-destructed and that's all to be said about that. While I consider the interface for mSecure just a tiny bit clunky, I am quite fond of the program and I recommend it to anyone who uses the iOS infrastructure. It's not free, but it was well worth the money.
I'm ticked not only about the lack of USB-A ports, but that they're moving away from MagSafe power supplies. I LOVE that feature, and it has saved many a laptop of ours from damage as we have a rampaging standard poodle who does not respect power cords when we're sitting on the couch. My current laptop is a MBP 2011, I can't see me moving past the '14, which I think is the last year for MagSafe and SD card reader. Maybe I'll just keep my '11 and we'll see how long an SSD will keep it alive, then we'll see if Apple comes back to their senses or the ghost of Jobs returns to take over the company.
I'm surprised that Belkin or someone else hasn't made a C-to-MagSafe adapter for MacBook owners.
I need to replace my wife's iPhone 4S, but it won't be with a 7. That loss of a headphone jack makes it unusable for use in a car that doesn't have BT.
Thank you. I was a little stunned that there was no info in the TFA to disable it.
is that some vendors charged two upgrade prices: one for the new chip-ready terminal, a SECOND to upgrade the software to a set that is chip-ready! So many businesses ended up with new terminals with deactivated chip readers.
Another issue that I've seen is speed. It seems like some chip-ready installs are using dial-up to transmit info, which is really odd. We spent a few weeks in Germany last summer, and all of the terminals that we used were quite brisk.
Texas keeps threatening to leave, personally I'd tell them yes. Then watch as they try to pay for all of the military bases and hardware that would be removed.
In Arizona, Pima County/Tucson would like to secede as the Arizona Legislature has gone absolutely bat-shit crazy. One of the more interesting recent bits of ritual idiocy is the governator signed a bill adding two seats to the Supreme Court to stuff it with conservatives. The twit who proposed the bill said "We wouldn't have put it forth if the governor was a Democrat."
I have in front of me of my recently arrived DVD complete Yes Minister, and I am reminded of an exchange between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker. To paraphrase:
Sir Humphrey: There are two responses. "It is under consideration", which means we've lost it.
Hacker: And the other?
Humphrey: "It is under active consideration", which means we're looking for it.
And I freely admit that I don't track things like CPU specs any more, is why Windows is still 32 bit? Are modern CPUs still coming in 32 bit? I have no problem slapping 16 gig or more of RAM in any of my Macs and they just say Cool! Why do we have to buy a 64 bit version of Windows to get more than 4 gig of RAM in a box?