The problem is that the tail's wagging the dog. Why on Earth are people using their check register to pay their bills?
I log onto my web site with Firefox and use my bank's online bill pay feature to pay my bills. I can download these transactions into whatever money manager supports their download format. I don't bother, preferring to scrape the screen and put the display into a text editor, as I can then import it into my spreadsheet with a few clicks.
Cost: About $6 a month. Beholden to: Only my bank, and I trust them to be the custodian of my money anyway, so I'd better trust them.
Intuit has been sending me begging and pleading letters to upgrade my Quicken 4.0 for years, and all I do is laugh and throw them in the recycling bin.
Do I want Intuit telling my bank what to do? Hell no! That's why I do this rather than initiate bill pays from the payee's web site; you gotta push, don't pull the transaction.
Hint: If you use the bank's software to communicate with the bank, you'll never have a problem.
Nor exactly one that bn.com has in stock either.
on
The Naked Corporation
·
· Score: 1
They appear to be out of print. They have three or four used copies, from $11 to $33.
Guess I'll go to my local used bookshops and see what I can find.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
...produced by an organization of one -- or very few.
The issue that we face is that organizations themselves are changing. In Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation and on Tom Peters' website (among other places) there's lots of conversation about the change in organizations. They were an aberration. When this country first got founded we had craftspeople producing goods for themselves because there were no other ways to do it. When the tools needed to produce goods got too expensive (steel mills, cars, etc.) Organizations were created to have custody over those tools, and Organization Men came to use them and then they went home again. But for software, a quick trip to Dell and less than a grand will give you PLENTY of horsepower to produce goods and services in this, the knowledge based age, and the pendulum is swinging back to individuals and small groups that hang together.
Bottom line is that Pat V. is an organization. An organization of one. And you'd better get used to that, because that's the way things are going (or returning.)
Perhaps you should RTFA. His illness is in no way over.
From the latest changelog entry, it looks like progress is being made, but he still has a bunch of diagnostics facing him and possible heart surgery. That hardly qualifies as "over."
I think I'll wander over and buy a copy of Slackware now.
Technically, yes. I'm hoping that if LJ decides to implement such a scheme (let's call it "LEPO" for "Leisurely Emergency Power Off") that they run it past the fire marshal or the code inspectors first, who may have another opinion about how smart this idea is.
The only downside is that the hot water ends really abruptly when the hot water tank goes empty.
When I gave the builder the specs for our new house, I made damn sure that wouldn't happen. I'm in a McMansion with a jacuzzi tub in the master bath, and to service this I specified a 50-gallon HW heater for the whole house EXCEPT the master bath suite, and an additional 75 gallon HW heater for the master bath suite (the tub is a 70-gallon capacity tub.) The builder looked at me like I was nuts, but I have the last laugh...
No more running out of hot water if I'm doing laundry and dishes at the same time, and SWMBO wants to take a bubble bath or jump in the shower.
It sounds wasteful, but the incremental cost to keep 75 gallons heated is minimal. These are super-insulated Bradford-White units. They turn on about every 4 hours when idling, and run for about 2 minutes. Dunno how much NG that equates to but it's gotta be trivial.
SWMBO hates running out of hot water. This was a miniscule investment in domestic harmony.
Someone probably hit the big red switch on the wall, the one covered in a plastic case
That does happen. I remember working at Purolator Courier's data center in NJ back in -- oh, geez, mid-80s some time. I was a third shift print operator, helped out with the mag tape library too. One night the trouble alarm went off on the fire suppression panel. We'd been having trouble with it all week, and the alarm guy was due in in the morning. One of the newbie operators -- the only one at the console at the time, the others being on a smoke break or asleep in the tape library -- panicked and went over to the annunciator panel. He opened it as I watched him from the console area. I think he thought the halon was about to dump because he reached around the panel and instead of hitting the halon dump abort, he hit the emergency power cutoff.
BLAM! It was as if a firecracker went off as all the breakers tripped and the fans came to a sighing halt. Both on this floor -- the one with the console and the tape drives -- and the floor above, with the CPU and the disk farms. Dead as a doornail.
Now, this was Purolator COURIER. We had AIRPLANES coming in to land at Indy center and as of this moment, no way to tell the crews which gate to go to, where to unload their stuff, or how to sort it.
Not only that, but this was an IBM mainframe shop -- S/390, the Big Iron, with 3380 disk drives. You don't just flip the power switch back on. An emergency power cutoff blows breakers in the power supplies on those DASD strings. The IBM Field Engineer was duly dispatched and arrived with cases of breakers the next morning. But we were still dark when I got off shift the following morning.
The next night a brand new plexiglass cover was mounted over the Big Red Switch.
Sure it'll produce failures. But the failures will give you learnings and then success will follow after that. You need the Bransons and the Bezos' to do something different, dammit. 20 different attempts all done the same way aren't statistically significant.
My current sig is Anatole France: "I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom."
Reading in the announcement of the first IBM PC here...
The big news might be the software -- there's plenty of it. If you don't like their idea of a diskette OS or Pascal compiler or word processor, you can try USCD Pascal or CPM-86, coming soon from Softech and Digital Research. (Gee, and I was looking forward to JCL).
Re the account, I didn't need to get one, not sure how that worked...
Re the funding, they're floating a loan, NASA's kicking in part of the gate from the Canaveral visitor's center, they're selling vanity license plates and some other stuff.
I'm sure I missed something, but that's the caffeine deprivation talking.
I'm happy that things are working out for you. I'm happy that your employer would give up his paycheck for you. Would that we could be all that altruistic. However, my experience (over 20+ years in the biz) has taught me, if anything, that my loyalty is to me and what I can accomplish. And is that so strange? Seems to me that this is the way things Used To Be, when we had craftsmen and sole proprietors as the prevalent business unit.
I prefer to subscribe to the Theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude through the Assumption of a Negative Result.
The Boy Scouts had another name for it, called "Be Prepared."
Loyalty still means something, but it may not be what you think it means.
Look, these people were dumb, that much can be argued. They were dumb for using a monitored service to do this, and they were dumb for (ostensibly) stealing their company's resources for the purpose of setting up a competitor.
However, you need to decouple this from the loyalty argument. The loyalty you need to have is not to your company any more. Are they loyal to you if business turns sour and they have to start slashing the payroll? Hell no. The corporate sinecure is dead. "Ma" Bell doesn't evince the image of a benevolent mother any more.
The kind of loyalty you should have is to your projects, to your work, to you as an individual and to your Rolodex (or electronic equivalent.)
If you live every day as if you might be laid off, working on projects that will escalate your worth and making sure that lots and lots of people know what kind of value you contribute, then you'll be better off; your customers (those who are the beneficiaries of your projects) will be better off, and your company will be better off.
And if things should turn sour, then you shrug your shoulders, get your Rolodex out and start calling.
So instead of "Logo Loyalty" you should cultivate "Rolodex Loyalty" (thanks, Tom Peters.)
Are you sure you don't think you need to learn C just because you don't know C?
Probably.
Java and I aren't best friends in the world; I did have a lot of fun with C++; my other 'milk languages' are xBase (specifically FoxPro,) COBOL (don't snicker) and a smattering of REXX/awk/shell script stuff. That's me, jack of all trades, master of none.
There's just so damn much I don't know. Of course, I forgot how to play the trumpet too, and I'm re-teaching myself that too. But that becomes off-topic unless I stick in a gratuitous comment about how programmers are really artists, and have latent musical ability. LOL
I find myself a closet programmer. By day I'm what They (tm) call a "Systems Analyst," said with a breathy expulsion like it is some sort of position involving the laying on of hands. My employer makes no bones over the fact that this is the Way of Things, so if I want to continue to get a paycheck, I will learn soft skills and management skills and all that other non-coding stuff.
But what do I do at night? I go home and write code. Why? Because I get a blast out of it.
I think Joel's article is right on; especially the piece about learning C. I was taking an inventory of my skills (mostly with 4GLs and non-bare-metal languages, though I have written smatterings of C++ and S/390 Assembler) - and the one area that I'm really deficient in is C.
Since I'm also in school for an MS in Information Systems, it might take me a little more time than I thought... but It Will Be Done.
As far as my employer goes, they can promote the soft skills and the management skills all they want; I may even find my hair forming into the PHB hair style; but when I go home and close the door, they will take my laptop only if they pry my cold dead fingers from around it.
Luckily, my employer still uses square boxes for the cases (even if the products are irregularly shaped.)
Too, Item Data Sync involves GTINs, which exist at all levels of a consumer product - consumer unit, inner pack, outer pack, pallet. Each has its own GTIN, and each GTIN has its own attributes including cube and weight.
Cube quite handily describes what WE need to fill a trailer.:)
Yeah, "cube" is a logistics term when dealing with "shippable volume in a vessel."
I've seen it used in OTR trucks, cargo ships, rail and intermodal transport.
Even though my main function is EDI, much of my work is with the logistics people; we send out Advance Ship Notices, for example, to the customer to let them know what's going to be on the trailers when they get to the distribution centers.
I just can't see them having the weights of every single purchasable item in the database.
If they're doing Item Data Sync (and I know for a fact Wally World is, along with some other retailers -- since they're doing it with my employer) not only do they know the price, the UPC code, the weight, the color, but they know the inner pack (how many in a "multi-pack" if any,) how many per case, and the cube of the item so that they know how much volume the item will take up in the truck and how much real estate it will consume on the pallet. We have Logistics Strategy Analysts who think it's a Good Day (tm) when they can get a truck that gets closer to the nirvana of 4000 cube (which is the theoretical capacity of a 53' trailer.) The cube data that is provided by Item Data Sync allows them to max out shipments without "weighing out" (being overweight) or "cube out" (being too big to fit on a single trailer.)
It's a trivial matter to send this weight data to a checkout scale.
My ADD son told me this joke...
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 5, Funny
... which was published in the October Readers' Digest.
Q: "How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?"
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the tail's wagging the dog. Why on Earth are people using their check register to pay their bills?
I log onto my web site with Firefox and use my bank's online bill pay feature to pay my bills. I can download these transactions into whatever money manager supports their download format. I don't bother, preferring to scrape the screen and put the display into a text editor, as I can then import it into my spreadsheet with a few clicks.
Cost: About $6 a month. Beholden to: Only my bank, and I trust them to be the custodian of my money anyway, so I'd better trust them.
Intuit has been sending me begging and pleading letters to upgrade my Quicken 4.0 for years, and all I do is laugh and throw them in the recycling bin.
Do I want Intuit telling my bank what to do? Hell no! That's why I do this rather than initiate bill pays from the payee's web site; you gotta push, don't pull the transaction.
Hint: If you use the bank's software to communicate with the bank, you'll never have a problem.
They appear to be out of print. They have three or four used copies, from $11 to $33.
Guess I'll go to my local used bookshops and see what I can find.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
...produced by an organization of one -- or very few.
The issue that we face is that organizations themselves are changing. In Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation and on Tom Peters' website (among other places) there's lots of conversation about the change in organizations. They were an aberration. When this country first got founded we had craftspeople producing goods for themselves because there were no other ways to do it. When the tools needed to produce goods got too expensive (steel mills, cars, etc.) Organizations were created to have custody over those tools, and Organization Men came to use them and then they went home again. But for software, a quick trip to Dell and less than a grand will give you PLENTY of horsepower to produce goods and services in this, the knowledge based age, and the pendulum is swinging back to individuals and small groups that hang together.
If you haven't, read Free Agent Nation. Quite entertaining.
Bottom line is that Pat V. is an organization. An organization of one. And you'd better get used to that, because that's the way things are going (or returning.)
Perhaps you should RTFA. His illness is in no way over.
From the latest changelog entry, it looks like progress is being made, but he still has a bunch of diagnostics facing him and possible heart surgery. That hardly qualifies as "over."
I think I'll wander over and buy a copy of Slackware now.
I told you so.
Looks like my "Newbie Operator" found hisself a new job.
Technically, yes. I'm hoping that if LJ decides to implement such a scheme (let's call it "LEPO" for "Leisurely Emergency Power Off") that they run it past the fire marshal or the code inspectors first, who may have another opinion about how smart this idea is.
"If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid."
Measuring laser 'dot' size is a simple experiment that I urge anyone who thinks lasers don't spread to try.
:)
Just not against aircraft.
I found this website that lets you fling spacecraft around -- it's an orbital mechanics simulator.
If nothing else, it's a graphic demonstration of how damn hard it is to get a spacecraft in orbit.
Just click on the illustration and drag to give your object a vector, then see what happens.
It's quite addictive.
Well, that's what the guys told me. (shrug) Hey, I was a print operator. What do I know?
All I remember was FEs standing around open DASD cabinets playing with power supplies.
The only downside is that the hot water ends really abruptly when the hot water tank goes empty.
When I gave the builder the specs for our new house, I made damn sure that wouldn't happen. I'm in a McMansion with a jacuzzi tub in the master bath, and to service this I specified a 50-gallon HW heater for the whole house EXCEPT the master bath suite, and an additional 75 gallon HW heater for the master bath suite (the tub is a 70-gallon capacity tub.) The builder looked at me like I was nuts, but I have the last laugh...
No more running out of hot water if I'm doing laundry and dishes at the same time, and SWMBO wants to take a bubble bath or jump in the shower.
It sounds wasteful, but the incremental cost to keep 75 gallons heated is minimal. These are super-insulated Bradford-White units. They turn on about every 4 hours when idling, and run for about 2 minutes. Dunno how much NG that equates to but it's gotta be trivial.
SWMBO hates running out of hot water. This was a miniscule investment in domestic harmony.
... I just wanna know how you say "Slashdotted" in Russian.
Someone probably hit the big red switch on the wall, the one covered in a plastic case
That does happen. I remember working at Purolator Courier's data center in NJ back in -- oh, geez, mid-80s some time. I was a third shift print operator, helped out with the mag tape library too. One night the trouble alarm went off on the fire suppression panel. We'd been having trouble with it all week, and the alarm guy was due in in the morning. One of the newbie operators -- the only one at the console at the time, the others being on a smoke break or asleep in the tape library -- panicked and went over to the annunciator panel. He opened it as I watched him from the console area. I think he thought the halon was about to dump because he reached around the panel and instead of hitting the halon dump abort, he hit the emergency power cutoff.
BLAM! It was as if a firecracker went off as all the breakers tripped and the fans came to a sighing halt. Both on this floor -- the one with the console and the tape drives -- and the floor above, with the CPU and the disk farms. Dead as a doornail.
Now, this was Purolator COURIER. We had AIRPLANES coming in to land at Indy center and as of this moment, no way to tell the crews which gate to go to, where to unload their stuff, or how to sort it.
Not only that, but this was an IBM mainframe shop -- S/390, the Big Iron, with 3380 disk drives. You don't just flip the power switch back on. An emergency power cutoff blows breakers in the power supplies on those DASD strings. The IBM Field Engineer was duly dispatched and arrived with cases of breakers the next morning. But we were still dark when I got off shift the following morning.
The next night a brand new plexiglass cover was mounted over the Big Red Switch.
... but valuable.
Sure it'll produce failures. But the failures will give you learnings and then success will follow after that. You need the Bransons and the Bezos' to do something different, dammit. 20 different attempts all done the same way aren't statistically significant.
My current sig is Anatole France: "I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom."
Reading in the announcement of the first IBM PC here...
The big news might be the software -- there's plenty of it. If you don't like their idea of a diskette OS or Pascal compiler or word processor, you can try USCD Pascal or CPM-86, coming soon from Softech and Digital Research. (Gee, and I
was looking forward to JCL).
Re the account, I didn't need to get one, not sure how that worked...
Re the funding, they're floating a loan, NASA's kicking in part of the gate from the Canaveral visitor's center, they're selling vanity license plates and some other stuff.
I'm sure I missed something, but that's the caffeine deprivation talking.
I feel sorry for you.
Don't.
I'm happy that things are working out for you. I'm happy that your employer would give up his paycheck for you. Would that we could be all that altruistic. However, my experience (over 20+ years in the biz) has taught me, if anything, that my loyalty is to me and what I can accomplish. And is that so strange? Seems to me that this is the way things Used To Be, when we had craftsmen and sole proprietors as the prevalent business unit.
I prefer to subscribe to the Theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude through the Assumption of a Negative Result.
The Boy Scouts had another name for it, called "Be Prepared."
Best of luck to YOU.
Loyalty still means something, but it may not be what you think it means.
Look, these people were dumb, that much can be argued. They were dumb for using a monitored service to do this, and they were dumb for (ostensibly) stealing their company's resources for the purpose of setting up a competitor.
However, you need to decouple this from the loyalty argument. The loyalty you need to have is not to your company any more. Are they loyal to you if business turns sour and they have to start slashing the payroll? Hell no. The corporate sinecure is dead. "Ma" Bell doesn't evince the image of a benevolent mother any more.
The kind of loyalty you should have is to your projects, to your work, to you as an individual and to your Rolodex (or electronic equivalent.)
If you live every day as if you might be laid off, working on projects that will escalate your worth and making sure that lots and lots of people know what kind of value you contribute, then you'll be better off; your customers (those who are the beneficiaries of your projects) will be better off, and your company will be better off.
And if things should turn sour, then you shrug your shoulders, get your Rolodex out and start calling.
So instead of "Logo Loyalty" you should cultivate "Rolodex Loyalty" (thanks, Tom Peters.)
Are you sure you don't think you need to learn C just because you don't know C?
Probably.
Java and I aren't best friends in the world; I did have a lot of fun with C++; my other 'milk languages' are xBase (specifically FoxPro,) COBOL (don't snicker) and a smattering of REXX/awk/shell script stuff. That's me, jack of all trades, master of none.
There's just so damn much I don't know. Of course, I forgot how to play the trumpet too, and I'm re-teaching myself that too. But that becomes off-topic unless I stick in a gratuitous comment about how programmers are really artists, and have latent musical ability. LOL
I find myself a closet programmer. By day I'm what They (tm) call a "Systems Analyst," said with a breathy expulsion like it is some sort of position involving the laying on of hands. My employer makes no bones over the fact that this is the Way of Things, so if I want to continue to get a paycheck, I will learn soft skills and management skills and all that other non-coding stuff.
But what do I do at night? I go home and write code. Why? Because I get a blast out of it.
I think Joel's article is right on; especially the piece about learning C. I was taking an inventory of my skills (mostly with 4GLs and non-bare-metal languages, though I have written smatterings of C++ and S/390 Assembler) - and the one area that I'm really deficient in is C.
Since I'm also in school for an MS in Information Systems, it might take me a little more time than I thought... but It Will Be Done.
As far as my employer goes, they can promote the soft skills and the management skills all they want; I may even find my hair forming into the PHB hair style; but when I go home and close the door, they will take my laptop only if they pry my cold dead fingers from around it.
Some items have irregular shape
:)
Luckily, my employer still uses square boxes for the cases (even if the products are irregularly shaped.)
Too, Item Data Sync involves GTINs, which exist at all levels of a consumer product - consumer unit, inner pack, outer pack, pallet. Each has its own GTIN, and each GTIN has its own attributes including cube and weight.
Cube quite handily describes what WE need to fill a trailer.
Yeah, "cube" is a logistics term when dealing with "shippable volume in a vessel."
I've seen it used in OTR trucks, cargo ships, rail and intermodal transport.
Even though my main function is EDI, much of my work is with the logistics people; we send out Advance Ship Notices, for example, to the customer to let them know what's going to be on the trailers when they get to the distribution centers.
The link in your [the OP's] post has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
;)
Sure it does. Note the parent's UID and the home page. It was just a little bit o' Astroturfing, that's all.
Without clicking, however, I'd wager that you were right.
I just can't see them having the weights of every single purchasable item in the database.
If they're doing Item Data Sync (and I know for a fact Wally World is, along with some other retailers -- since they're doing it with my employer) not only do they know the price, the UPC code, the weight, the color, but they know the inner pack (how many in a "multi-pack" if any,) how many per case, and the cube of the item so that they know how much volume the item will take up in the truck and how much real estate it will consume on the pallet. We have Logistics Strategy Analysts who think it's a Good Day (tm) when they can get a truck that gets closer to the nirvana of 4000 cube (which is the theoretical capacity of a 53' trailer.) The cube data that is provided by Item Data Sync allows them to max out shipments without "weighing out" (being overweight) or "cube out" (being too big to fit on a single trailer.)
It's a trivial matter to send this weight data to a checkout scale.
... which was published in the October Readers' Digest.
Q: "How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?"
A: "Let's go ride bikes."