dpb001

Back in the 90’s Perl was about the only scripting platform that gave you access to host commands and info as well as the ability to connect to databases running on that host. Part of bringing up a Solaris host for Oracle always started with a visit to sunfreeware.com to get a version of Perl compatible with the latest DBI/DBD and enhanced email CPAN modules. I abused the backtick feature heavily.

“Flipping burgers…”. This made me laugh because it is so true. My last involvement in interviewing candidates was for a position for an ETL developer. One of the other team members who was part of the interviewer schedule proudly announced that he had discovered a great source of tricky SQL puzzles that he intended to use. My comments were along the lines of “you do you, but I’m more interested in how someone would generally approach the 3 or 4 categories of tasks they will be routinely doing day-to-day”.

Years ago I decided to take the Lake Shore Limited from Albany to Chicago for a business trip just to have a different experience. Two things I didn’t expect: 1. It was very difficult to get pre-approved for the expense because my employer’s process had to make sure I wasn’t costing them extra money. Somehow this was not an issue with plane tickets. 2. Overnight stops interrupted my sleep (in seat) as boarders banged luggage around and discussed seat selection when groups were involved.

Interesting, but would book a room if traveling this way next time.

This brought back some memories. Back in the day I couldn't afford the Aztec compiler (or it wouldn't fit onto my dual floppy 48K Heathkit H89, can't remember which). I ended up buying Leor Zolman's BDS C compiler. Just looked him up and it looks like he's still around!

https://www.bdsoft.com

I have always asked the first part of your first question, but it never occurred to me to ask the second part as a follow-up. It reveals a lot about a manager - if there isn’t a thoughtful answer that’s a red flag for me.

Years ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.

7-Eleven’s will vary. Some are closer to the Japanese model, but in my experience the ones in the typical PTT/Amazon coffee/KFC clusters are more like their US counterparts than not. Edit: should add except for an absence of overall sketchiness

I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.

Yes, this is still a thing. Last year I installed Linux on an old laptop to use while traveling in SE Asia. Had problems with TD Bank because of this, complicated by my account needing SMS to the US number for the extra verification.

A year ago I had a spring fail in my old/cheap system with tension springs. I was surprised to see the level of scamminess present in this particular area of repair.

After seeing that a set of replacement springs from a big box store was under $100 and wouldn't be that hard to do myself, I figured that it would be reasonable to pay an extra $100-200 just to have it done while I was busy with other things.

One guy over the phone tried to convince me that he would need to replace the entire cable system as well and lost any interest after I told him the cables were fine and the spring had failed from fatigue in the hook section where the cable was attached.

Someone else was "dispatched" from a local-sounding number and showed up with out-of-state license plates on his van. He quoted me $800 for the repair. I tried not to be a jerk and told him thanks, but I'll be looking around some more. He then dropped the price to $400, saying he'd do the job for that if he could replace only one spring. After another thanks, but no thanks he became aggressive and said that was a special one-time price that ended when he left my driveway. He later texted me with a $200 dollar price, but by then I had already arranged for someone to do a full conversion to a torsion system for about $500.

I’m (slowly and painfully) learning to read Thai and find myself wondering how a written language could naturally evolve without spaces between words. It adds a significant overhead since it requires learning the word boundary rules.

I just learned about the film in the recent book “Connecticut in the Movies” by Ileana Douglas. Burt Lancaster referred to The Swimmer as “Death of a Salesman in swim trunks”.

I have had similar thoughts, but I suspect this sort of accidental discovery will be less interesting to future generations because of the competing volume of online content. I remember stumbling across a supply of second hand amateur radio magazines (QST and 73) as an 11 year old in the mid-60’s that started me down the tech path. These days I would probably be in front of some sort of screen instead of poking around in my grandparent’s basement or a used bookstore.

Another vote for freetaxusa.com. The only complexity for my Federal returns is accounting for both refunds and taxes due to filing state returns in two states (as well as some 1099 income), but they handle those exceptions well.

For years I kept a Windows VM around just to run whatever the cheapest tax return software was for that particular year.

In the mid/late 70's I was using LSI-11 systems (PDP-11/03's) in college to collect measurements in labs. I too wanted an H11 when I got out of school and started earning those big engineering bucks, but if I recall a usable system was about one-third of my gross salary at the time.

A couple of years later I put together a CP/M H89 but it never gave me that "real computer" feeling.

+1 for Crutchfield - have had nothing but good experiences with them for instructions and support

If you changed the case of a table name, this means you had to change whatever was generating the SQL since mixed or lower case requires table or column names to be surrounded by double quotes.

So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.

The phrase "tune it via their CBO" doesn't make sense.

Oracle DBA here who hates their licensing, practices, etc. as much as the next guy, but I have to hand it to their query optimization. I've seen their optimizer get better with every major release, and yes, regression testing will always turn up a few problems but Oracle gives you the best tools to analyze and override the decisions that the optimizer is making when necessary (and I'm not just talking about basic hints here)