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User: donald325

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  1. For You or For the People You Are Going To Help? on Hurricane Relief - What Would You Bring? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I live near the Katrina zone. I've been hit by Ivan, Dennis, several tropical storms this year, then Katrina and brushed by Rita. I still have a house, a bad back from boarding up my house four times this past year, and anxiety about the last third of this hurricane season.

    For you, high-top leather boots to keep the snakes from getting to you. Don't walk in water unless you have high-top waders. Farmland chemical run-offs will burn your skin, the snakes and alligators will bite. So stay out of the water. Maybe an inflatable raft if you are adventurous. Since you won't be down here long, don't worry about comforts of home, like your MP3 player or hair products. Live a couple of weeks like the locals. Hope you have an epiphany.

    For the people you are coming to help, bring lots of tooth brushes, tooth paste, deodorant and soap. Clean clothes would be nice, or something to wash their current clothes with (Era, Wisk).

    Since you are with a church group, I would guess alcohol would be out of your delivery agenda. If not, a small bit of fine brandy, rum would not go unnoticed.

    Before Katrina, I had large bags of childrens clothes, shoes, adult clothes ready for my local mission to donate. After the storm, I just went through my closet and dumped a lot of my currently wearable clothes into bags to add to that. We donated about $4,000 worth of clothes. That's my donation this year, without the US tax receipt. So the Govt gets the money I would have gotten for the tax deduction and the people still get the clothes. The bags of clothes were donated to my local church who went there right after the storm.

    My recommendation: Bring things you are willing to give away off of your back. This is devastation down here. Don't bring your comforts of home crap, unless you are willing to leave them to someone in need.

  2. Re:Every operating system sucks... on Build Your Own Apollo Guidance Computer · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but I worked with a guy at IBM, while I consulted for them, who helped write the code for Apollo. For you old mainframers out there, the challenge was to never ABEND (abnormal end). All possible contigencies had to be programmed, the software could never stop running (Blue Screen). That knowledge was probably what made me a good programmer/designer today. And yes, I have moved on from mainframe to C, C++, Delphi, SQL Server, .net, etc. The other hard part was that the program on the Apollo had to write it's own code as it moved through the flight, replacing the non-essential past code with what's ahead. And, no, I did not read the Frickin article (completely).