BXLE_1-1-BitIs1

There were times I took a dial up terminal home. Before that in university, we had to punch our own card decks.

I didn't need to be at the office to write programs. All I need is a pad of paper (with maybe a few manuals) and a nice place where I can concentrate without interruptions.

"The people writing COBOL and FORTRAN on mainframes - I got my start writing C and FORTRAN on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes - didn’t speak about the joys of programming. They clocked in, clocked out and went on about their lives."

FORTRAN was my first language in the 60s and I ENJOYED using it until "better" languages came along.

I debugged COBOL and once taught SQL to COBOL programmers while refusing to write anything in it.

I had my best fun with mainframe Assembler and CMS Pipelines.

It's become a lottery similar to pursuing a professional sports career. Similar to professional sports, the career duration is short. There's always kids coming up trained in the technology du jour who will work long hours for peanuts that employers will happily hire while they dump the expensive old guys.

You can do extraordinarily well as a founder if you find an opportunity, get it to market and build a moat that competitors can't surmount.

The Immigration and Nationality Act is a moving target. Periodically it is amended, or the Supreme Court strikes down certain provisions.

Having been born to a Canadian father in the US and moved to Canada when I was nine, my US citizenship lapsed when I turned 25 in Canada (I was quite happy to stay in Canada during the Vietnam war during my twenties). At the time I was unaware of the INA provisions repealed in 1978 that lapsed my US citizenship.

New FATCA and IRS obligations motivated me to research my US citizenship status and I was happy to discover that it had lapsed.

US Customs officers sometimes ask questions when I show up with a Canadian passport with a US birthplace. Now I pull out my copy of State Department FAM 1200 APPENDIX C to explain my status, but the legalese is a challenge for people with just high school. .

Happily Canada has Close in Age exceptions depending on the age of the younger party.

The surgery is not fun. The worst part was the cannula for the subtenon block - not painful, but my anxiety at something being poked into my eye socket went through the roof. My sister opted for sedation after she heard of my experience.

The second operation was easier as I told the surgeon about my reaction to the subtenon block and he put some topical in the right place making it much easier. However the residual anxiety from the first operation remained. All that said, I've had rougher times at the dentist.

I opted for optimal vision at arm's length with a monofocal lens. We spend most of our days around the house. Bifocals with plano below work fine for outdoors, driving and flying (check with your aviation doctor before lens selection as aviation authorities are strict in what lens options are allowed). The depth of field has turned out better than I expected, but I use 1.25 diopter drug store readers when I'm using my tablet at home and put it at arm's length in the coffee shop.

The results are absolutely wonderful and I feel gratitude every time I step outside.

One of my boys was invited out by some classmates, then beaten up in a back alley. I called the police who visited their homes. They got the message that they'd be in court if they did anything like that again.

End of problem.

If your kid is bullied, call the police. Most school authorities are bully enablers.

Netanyahu recently spoke that Israel needs to become a Super Sparta as the world is turning against it.

Sparta periodically declared war against the Helots.

In between those "wars" (it's not really a war when a helpless population is subjected to killings) the Crypteia assassinated Helot leaders.

I agree with Netanyahu in characterizing Israel as a Super Sparta.

My favourite Pixel feature is Screen Call.

My primitive security precautions:

1. DO NOT use your Gmail for recovery. Use another email provider.

2. Use a family member's phone number for recovery.

3. DO NOT install your bank's app. Somehow the Royal Bank of Canada's app was used as an attack vector. If the RBC app can get hacked, smaller banks are even more vulnerable.

4. Use incognito mode on your browser for banking so a thief or hacker can't use your browser history to find out your bank.

Having worked in Toronto and Calgary, I vastly prefer Calgary's +15 system. Daylight in Calgary's +15 second floor retail spaces is the only daylight exposure an office worker gets in the depths of winter.

The Tick Key, www.tickkey.com, does the job quite well. You put it over the tick and slide the narrow slot from behind until the mouthparts are in as far as they can fit.

You may be surprised at how hard the tick holds on, but work slowly until it pops off, preferably into a container that you can put in the freezer.

Etick.ca can be used to identify and report the tick.

My cat has brought in three ticks this spring and summer that I found crawling about while he was on my lap. Cats grooming themselves seem to prevent ticks from embedding.

Doctors can prescribe doxycycline as a precaution.

You don't need explosives to take down a helo,just a good enough length of strong rope with weights to put the rotors out of balance.

20- & 30- somethings in the 80s are now mostly past retirement age. Actuarial attrition is a fact.

Abdul Azziz al Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, received supplicants on a near daily basis as all his subjects believed they had a right to bring their complaints to him.

In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.

I spent several years with DCF, Document Composition Facility, and markup languages - including one of my own. At Xerox I worked on software to enable DCF output on Xerox printers.

Much preferred Optima to the sans serif fonts.

Printer and screen resolution have a large effect on the appearance of fonts. Low resolution favors sans serif, but Garamond was pretty good on earlier IBM laser printers.

Perhaps the question is how much misery are you willing to tolerate to prolong your life for how long?

Certain treatments take weeks to recover from while giving you months, years, even decades of life expectancy with good quality.

Other treatments of late stage terminal cancer only give you a few more weeks in the hospital.

Axial flow made more demands on metallurgy of the time than centrifugal flow. The Viscount was the first turbine powered civil aircraft using RR Darts with two centrifugal compressor stages.

I enjoyed flying on the Viscount. It offered a much nicer passenger experience than the current crop of sardine cans.

Decades later I got in a lot of time flying the simulator that Air Canada donated to a tech school.

http://www.vickersviscount.net/Pages_Technical/Rolls-RoyceDa...

I am reminded of my time at Xerox: Financialisation, making numbers, frequent reorgs, looking down on software...

But the biggest was coming up with nice new technologies, selling to customers; then not that many years later dropping support and leaving customers without a path forward.

Started programming over half a century ago. The insurance company I was working for gave me a joint life actuarial evaluation problem for which I wrote a Fortran program, picked up from a book. My uni student buddy let me use his ID so I could drop decks into their IBSYS. Turnaround was about a day. My career as a professional manual reader began.

Well yes, my high school maths were in the high 90s - more than my language scores in French, German and Latin with some off curricular Russian. I guess being a polymath helps.

Unless you are doing an engineering or mathematical application you don't need much math, especially as you can just call a function in the vast majority of the time.

I did a number of software products and operating system modifications without using any math beyond arithmetic operations.

I was a resource for other programmers including the odd math PhD.

The helo route was likely instituted decades ago when traffic was lower. The NTSB incident database search turned up a close call between rotary and fixed wing just about every month in the last several years. This was a accident waiting to happen.

This is not by any means the only midair collision where a crew was avoiding a different aircraft.

I wonder why Oz Customs didn't simply seize the shipment as it seems it was declared on the invoice or packing list. Given the miniscule amount, the authorities would not have known otherwise.

On a similar note a Canadian prosecutor in Halifax got seriously concerned about the large amount of dihydrogen oxide in a hobbyist's container.

If you can't hack STEM, the legal system is a good career option

Nice puzzle with a twist of Zugzwang. Took me about 8 minutes, but it's been decades since I was doing chess.

Played it on the mainframe in the 70s. It took many plays to make Adventurer Grand Master.

Another game at the time was Lunar Lander. I finally achieved a landing with only three commands: Retrofire, Coast, Final fire.

There was also a Formula 1 race car game and a chess game that I tried out. The chess game was clueless in positions.

2nd Amendment and self defense arguments could be argued if you shoot plainclothes officers in fear of your safety.

z boxes use a flavor of VM to run all the LPARS and allocate memory and devices. z/OS, z/VM and Linux all run as VMs.

Then there's CMS which runs under VM; theoretically it could run as an LPAR, but I've not seen that as running DIAGNOSE (VM system call) to the LPAR hypervisor could be disruptive. It would be interesting to drop DIAGNOSE into a z/OS environment, but I suspect it would be intercepted.

I much prefer z/VM to z/OS as a development environment. At one shop, I developed products under VM for deployment under both VM and MVS.

Many early S/360 installations ran 7070 and, I guess, 1401 emulators.

Eventually with VM, the SIE (Start Interpretive Execution) instruction appeared. A form is running LPARs.

I've done solo trips in a 16' 4" Pinetree Ojibway 32" beam canoe in Lake Superior and a number of river systems. Didn't sleep in the boat and didn't take cans. Pasta, sauce and soup in packets. Didn't have to worry about fresh water supply.

An interesting read which tempts me to put up an essay assignment:

Compare the conduct of Trump and his acolytes to Cortez, the Pizzaros and other conquistadors.

What I don't see in the Guardian articles is any measurement of lead levels in the neighboring air and soil, and the difference between that and neighborhoods away from racetracks and airports.

In Australia, there have been cases where fishermen have disappeared from docks high up from water leaving behind their tackle. Don't dangle your legs over a dock.

It is also unwise to sleep on a lonely beach.

https://www.rarebookcellar.com/pages/books/67453/hugh-edward...

Salties can snatch a bird in flight.

The Reconquista had finally driven out the Moors from Spain in 1492 - 26 years before Cortez entered Tenochtitlan and began the dismantling of indigenous religion. The Spanish Catholics were the Wahhabis of the day.

Thought Experiment: If the Iberian Moors were still in power in 1518,would we today be calling Latin Americans "Arabs"?

Similarly, popular opinion in Israel likes to call Palestinians "Arabs" because they adopted the language of their conquerors.