Spreadsheets are one of my favourite tools. To me, no matter whether it was SC, or 1-2-3, or Excel, or LibreCalc, a spreadsheet is a "rubbery grid", which I mostly use for calculating things, but also for formatting things in blocks, and even making things like logos and graphics. My 1st business cards were made in Lotus 1-2-3 with Allways. I recently rebuilt all the logos for my website in LibreCalc.
I've been in meetings where easily 75% of the attendees were there for political reasons, or "just in case." There's the DB guy, the Network guy, the Internet guy the Security guy, a "representative" or two or three from a few tangential business units. I've been one of those people too, in pre-smartphone days. No wonder kids tune out...
KDE has the concept of a "Workspace" which reminded me of the OS/2 idea, and extends it to add Desktop chrome and widgets.
Just like in OS/2, for me the idea was interesting but never made it into my toolkit.
- an ex-CAOS/2 member
I have, perhaps modern enough (the last of them in service in the mid-90s) that there was no "racket", but rather what sounded like leaves rustling as the relays chattered away. There was one lone remaining section of walls of relays installed in racks, and I asked for and got one - it's about the size of a Mars Bar.
Costco is not in the retail business to sell products - Costco's business model uses retail sales to get CASH, which it then invests in arbitrage and currency markets. Before debit cards etc. Costco stores had pneumatic tubes that cashiers used to clear their tills of all but enough cash to make change. That cash was invested on an hourly basis. Thus, Costco was an early pioneer in retail that was essentially a line of cashiers at the exit of a warehouse. The only difference from other retailers is that Costco spends little on marketing or merchandising - prices uber alles and that means cash for the backroom boys to invest.
In high-school chemistry I saw a chart like this, though arranged to accommodate the rare earths as their own separate but related group. It was nerd art for me - each element was assigned a shade of blue or red to indicate pH. I ordered two and they came with additional materials explaining the new chart. The charts are packed away, but I just looked up the hand-outs and tried to Google but found nothing. But, one of the had-outs is a reprint of a write-up in Chemistry magazine of September 1976. It was created by James Franklin Hyde, who is apparently the Father of Silicones acording to Wikipedia.
I am not a pro coder at all, but I have worked with some and have absorbed their best practices to make myself a passable coder generally, and pretty darned good when pressed.
One of the best lessons I learned from the 2 most-influential mentors in my coding life is the power of legibility. Use whitespace, indenting and layout to make things more exposed. Take advantage of the fixed-width nature of a code editor to make nice blocks that attract and keep continuity and pattern-ness.
My greatest peeve is code that is single-spaced with goofy, or no indenting. If I see a mash of text I am already wanting to go elsewhere because it's not even fun/interesting to look at, nevermind figure out.
and... don't forget the influence and interests of the Pharmaceutical industry - everything is getting its own Spectrum Disorder now, so that's GOTTA be good for business!!!
I lived in a house with 3 women and I figured that to be equal to everyone, and generally make things tidier, we only needed 1 rule:
Everyone put Everything down all the time
How hard can that be? But, I was outvoted (practically speaking), so I just went to leaving it however I felt like, and of course that wasn't appreciated either. Can't win with 'em....
Whereas before I liked having LEDs to tell me stuff was happening, now my cablemodem/router combo is tucked away out of sight because the LEDs serve no useful state information except ON. My Motorola cablemodem has 4 green LEDs that are on all the time, and one amber one that flashes constantly. No more Rx/Tx - they're either all on, or a couple of them are off. My DLink router also has a constantly-flashing Status light, and the SMB traffic on my LAN mean that the lights for each port are always winking. So, either they're on, or they're off. I use GKrellM to see a nice view of what's really going on, and put the flashing lights away.
I do, however, keep a red blinking LED out of my field of view - have for years. It came in the box with the early Logitech LED mice, to get people's attention on the shelf. They shipped with batteries in a plastic holder, so I ripped mine out and have used it in various places to look like a security indicator, and it drains all my AA batteries after my wireless mouse is done with them.
I'd want to do restorations, not fix everyday cars, but take older cars with personality and make them new again. Maybe even make a few cars of my own - I have ideas.
I was a janitor for about 17 years with my Dad (grades 3-11 after dinner 5x a week), and then a hospital orderly. Both exposed me, from an early age, to the day-to-day cycle of tidying up. I think that did something to my approach to clutter. Now, having had some kind of office/desk for over 25 years, my approach is to clean up when it bugs me most, and when i can enjoy the new state most. I keep "dirty" at bay, because I'm not _that_ much of a slob, but "tidy" is really not worth micromanaging. Plus, there are better anal-retentive moments of satisfaction at the end of tidying up (or mowing the lawn or shovelling the walks or washing the windows) because I enjoy the _contrast_ between the old messy and the new tidy.... and it's a satisfying way to procrastinate!
I have used the Environment Canada site for my local forecast for years - it's world-class and hey, I pay for it through my taxes. Plus, the weather office is right across town so I know the measurements are locally-accurate. For a time I even screen-scraped the pre-CSS version of the page for my city every 15 minutes to add a META REFRESH tag and a set of the other links I use. I'm a weather nerd, yes. I have a set of pages loaded into tabs in Konqueror and set the ones I can to refresh every half-hour. It occupies a permanent spot on my main virtual desktop and I have a couple old monitors burned with the image of that page from when I had a separate machine for my "weather console".
Funny that this item came along - I was just thinking today of resurrecting a page I used to have for weather links that friends used to use to get their weather. There's a weekend project...
of a technique used by water-testing labs. Trout and Daphnia are used in the lab I consulted to once. For things with a higher ppm range trout were used, and for lower ppm concentrations Daphia (which are barely naked-eye visible) are used. The waterborne equivalent of canaries in coal mines.
Or, put another way... consumers have long been happy consuming like sheep. Fake newspapers? Do the National Enquirer The Globe, Weekly Wold News or The Star count? A slothful overfed society that gobbles up American Idol, Twinkies and conspiracy theories as "reality" is ripe for the shearing by anyone with the right graphics and a coiffed-but-concerned narrator.
I've been on eBay for I think 5 years now (feedback rating of 530+), buying memorabilia for a particular marque of British auto. Like another poster I buy pretty small things and out of nearly 1000 transactions I've had only a couple items in my "Stiffed" file - 1 from a seller who (apparently) died, 3 or 4 lost in the mail, and a 2 from a seller that was woefully disorganized for their volume. I've paid by PayPal, US$ cheque and cash, and only 1 payment went astray and it was a cheque that I cancelled. I have sent money to various spots around the world that would make people a bit leery, but anything like this is a gamble.
I deal in a niche, not in the mainstream consumer products market, so that's probably why my experience is so good. Nobody's wanting to get rich off the stuff I buy. People chasing "deals" on the same stuff everyone else is chasing will always be targets for the unscrupulous.
Slashdot Mirror
Spreadsheets are one of my favourite tools. To me, no matter whether it was SC, or 1-2-3, or Excel, or LibreCalc, a spreadsheet is a "rubbery grid", which I mostly use for calculating things, but also for formatting things in blocks, and even making things like logos and graphics. My 1st business cards were made in Lotus 1-2-3 with Allways. I recently rebuilt all the logos for my website in LibreCalc.
It's not the machine - it's the machinist.
I've been in meetings where easily 75% of the attendees were there for political reasons, or "just in case." There's the DB guy, the Network guy, the Internet guy the Security guy, a "representative" or two or three from a few tangential business units. I've been one of those people too, in pre-smartphone days. No wonder kids tune out...
KDE has the concept of a "Workspace" which reminded me of the OS/2 idea, and extends it to add Desktop chrome and widgets. Just like in OS/2, for me the idea was interesting but never made it into my toolkit. - an ex-CAOS/2 member
I have, perhaps modern enough (the last of them in service in the mid-90s) that there was no "racket", but rather what sounded like leaves rustling as the relays chattered away. There was one lone remaining section of walls of relays installed in racks, and I asked for and got one - it's about the size of a Mars Bar.
Costco is not in the retail business to sell products - Costco's business model uses retail sales to get CASH, which it then invests in arbitrage and currency markets. Before debit cards etc. Costco stores had pneumatic tubes that cashiers used to clear their tills of all but enough cash to make change. That cash was invested on an hourly basis. Thus, Costco was an early pioneer in retail that was essentially a line of cashiers at the exit of a warehouse. The only difference from other retailers is that Costco spends little on marketing or merchandising - prices uber alles and that means cash for the backroom boys to invest.
http://www.inklingmagazine.com/articles/the-calculus-of-saying-i-love-you/
I laughed when I read about this - I thought "Gee, now that slug has to do even LESS to survive - what a slug!"
I have one of those keyboards and I've never figured out how to re-map those keys since they appear to generate 2 keycodes. How do you do it?
Oh, here's a link I just found to the chart http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=164
For the Internet Database of Periodic Tables, see http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?Button=Spiral+Formulations
I am not a pro coder at all, but I have worked with some and have absorbed their best practices to make myself a passable coder generally, and pretty darned good when pressed.
One of the best lessons I learned from the 2 most-influential mentors in my coding life is the power of legibility. Use whitespace, indenting and layout to make things more exposed. Take advantage of the fixed-width nature of a code editor to make nice blocks that attract and keep continuity and pattern-ness.
My greatest peeve is code that is single-spaced with goofy, or no indenting. If I see a mash of text I am already wanting to go elsewhere because it's not even fun/interesting to look at, nevermind figure out.
Yes! "Nerds for Nerds"! This is the best of SlashDot.
and... don't forget the influence and interests of the Pharmaceutical industry - everything is getting its own Spectrum Disorder now, so that's GOTTA be good for business!!!
thatsalottamassive!
I lived in a house with 3 women and I figured that to be equal to everyone, and generally make things tidier, we only needed 1 rule:
Everyone put Everything down all the time
How hard can that be? But, I was outvoted (practically speaking), so I just went to leaving it however I felt like, and of course that wasn't appreciated either. Can't win with 'em....
Whereas before I liked having LEDs to tell me stuff was happening, now my cablemodem/router combo is tucked away out of sight because the LEDs serve no useful state information except ON. My Motorola cablemodem has 4 green LEDs that are on all the time, and one amber one that flashes constantly. No more Rx/Tx - they're either all on, or a couple of them are off. My DLink router also has a constantly-flashing Status light, and the SMB traffic on my LAN mean that the lights for each port are always winking. So, either they're on, or they're off. I use GKrellM to see a nice view of what's really going on, and put the flashing lights away.
I do, however, keep a red blinking LED out of my field of view - have for years. It came in the box with the early Logitech LED mice, to get people's attention on the shelf. They shipped with batteries in a plastic holder, so I ripped mine out and have used it in various places to look like a security indicator, and it drains all my AA batteries after my wireless mouse is done with them.
I'd want to do restorations, not fix everyday cars, but take older cars with personality and make them new again. Maybe even make a few cars of my own - I have ideas.
I was a janitor for about 17 years with my Dad (grades 3-11 after dinner 5x a week), and then a hospital orderly. Both exposed me, from an early age, to the day-to-day cycle of tidying up. I think that did something to my approach to clutter. Now, having had some kind of office/desk for over 25 years, my approach is to clean up when it bugs me most, and when i can enjoy the new state most. I keep "dirty" at bay, because I'm not _that_ much of a slob, but "tidy" is really not worth micromanaging. Plus, there are better anal-retentive moments of satisfaction at the end of tidying up (or mowing the lawn or shovelling the walks or washing the windows) because I enjoy the _contrast_ between the old messy and the new tidy. ... and it's a satisfying way to procrastinate!
The forecast for my city:l ?ab-50&unit=m&b_templatePrint=true
http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.htm
And radar:t ml?id=wrn
http://gfx.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/radar/index_e.h
Then continental satellite imagery in the Infrared band:g oes_nam_1070_100.jpg
http://gfx.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/data/satellite/
And the big (polar) picture, a meteorological map:/ winfos/arcisoTTPPWW.gif
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo
Finally, for the super-big picture (I have this for fun):t ime-update.html
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/real
Funny that this item came along - I was just thinking today of resurrecting a page I used to have for weather links that friends used to use to get their weather. There's a weekend project...
of a technique used by water-testing labs. Trout and Daphnia are used in the lab I consulted to once. For things with a higher ppm range trout were used, and for lower ppm concentrations Daphia (which are barely naked-eye visible) are used. The waterborne equivalent of canaries in coal mines.
Might be easier for King Crimson and Robert Fripp fans I suppose, as Fripp is responsible for "Windows sounds" according to http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1518 53
and
http://www.krimson-news.com/2006/08/25/the-fripp-s ound-in-windows-vista/
Or, put another way... consumers have long been happy consuming like sheep. Fake newspapers? Do the National Enquirer The Globe, Weekly Wold News or The Star count? A slothful overfed society that gobbles up American Idol, Twinkies and conspiracy theories as "reality" is ripe for the shearing by anyone with the right graphics and a coiffed-but-concerned narrator.
I've been on eBay for I think 5 years now (feedback rating of 530+), buying memorabilia for a particular marque of British auto. Like another poster I buy pretty small things and out of nearly 1000 transactions I've had only a couple items in my "Stiffed" file - 1 from a seller who (apparently) died, 3 or 4 lost in the mail, and a 2 from a seller that was woefully disorganized for their volume. I've paid by PayPal, US$ cheque and cash, and only 1 payment went astray and it was a cheque that I cancelled. I have sent money to various spots around the world that would make people a bit leery, but anything like this is a gamble. I deal in a niche, not in the mainstream consumer products market, so that's probably why my experience is so good. Nobody's wanting to get rich off the stuff I buy. People chasing "deals" on the same stuff everyone else is chasing will always be targets for the unscrupulous.