bandy

Joined 16 years ago

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182

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135

Member since

Jun 8

When people tell me that the computers of today are better than the ones I started on, I remember that APL\SV never crashed, and considering the Personal Computers of the era, I ask them "How often did WordStar crash for you?" And if it did crash, you could fire it right back up by executing your favorite zero-length .COM file and save out a copy of your work for comparison with its autosave file. The computers of today are faster, but the quality of the software has declined considerably as people have concentrated on implementing flashy interfaces over solid functionality.

I have worn many hats during my career, but they all have these things in common: 1. You have to ship/deliver when you say you will. 2. You can't ignore customers' needs, and this includes fixing their problems. 3. If you leave a mess, someone is going to have to clean it up - of course, it's best not to leave a mess in the first place, but do document what you've done so the next guy will have an easier time of it.

I am the sole inventor of a patent in the field of networking.

Hobbies: Amateur ("ham") radio, weather spotting ("is that cloud rotating?" "is the wind above 58MPH?" "are there any hailstones coming down that are 1 inch in diameter or greater?" => call it in!), playing music by ear, woodworking, and photography: chemical, mixed-media, and digital.

I have worked for a wide variety of companies in and out of Silicon Valley, as well as the (US) Federal government and some universities. I currently work for a Fortune 500 firm near the center of the country - please wave as you fly over.

e-mail: [email protected]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago

> Nobody uses anything but meters and seconds with metric in science.

Sure, now. It took the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter to end the Imperial madness at NASA.

Comment · 7 years ago

Comparison shopping is difficult because the stores are allowed to get away with marking interchangeable items with wildly dissimilar units (type and/or magnitude), quoting per item, per ounce, per pound, per gram, per quart, etc., all on items that are sitting next to one another. All of the grocery chains that I've ever shopped at are guilty of this.

People who are serious about cooking know about the volumetric units used in cooking and the relationships between them. (teaspoons/3 = tablespoons)/16 = cups.

But your American friends who don't know how many ounces are in a pound? I hope you're kidding. That's basic stuff, taught in elementary (primary) school.

Comment · 7 years ago

(Hi Chuck!) I find myself to be in the mathematician camp ("A materials scientist, a Physicist, and a Mathematician were sharing a hotel room when a fire broke out, waking the materials scientist...") when it comes to things kinda like this. If it's a solved problem, I'm not interested in going any further - it's a solved problem, and therefore not really interesting.

Given that one wouldn't care about spectrum purity, the required budget becomes minimal, with a trivial hardware component resulting in components easily obtainable with an anonymous visit to a swap meet, if one were to visit the right swap meet. After that, it's a simple matter of programming.

I've found that a lot of people are so defined by their job that they have no idea what happens above or below them. The "I deal with packet filters" person can't explain basic networking, nor do they have any idea what the overall configuration of the (enterprise) network is like, to cite an example.

Comment · 7 years ago

It was their "cheaper than gasoline" milk that got us in there. The overall quality of their offerings kept us going there. There are some specialty items that we have to go to our local grocery for.

From what I remember of my first exposure to Aldi about a decade ago, they were cash-only and had a horrid fruits & vegetables selection. Some of their stores in some parts of the country still have the fresh fruit & veg problem. (They have a distribution center two towns over from where we live.)

You can google up various "best beers at Aldi" list and find differing opinions. It's cheap enough that if you're willing to try something and abandon it at a party if it's not to your taste, you can probably find something that you like. They don't sell a porter or a stout, but their "Holland" is a decent enough summer Bier. (I'm surprised that they don't have a Weissbier, though.)

Comment · 7 years ago

People here in Kansas City will gift their paid-for cart to someone else rather than leaving it in the parking lot.

From what I've seen on YT, cart rental is a Euro in Europe.

Comment · 9 years ago

That takes me back 33 years...

Comment · 13 years ago

If they're actually local and speak English well enough to be understood over a crummy cell phone connection, I'll keep in touch.

If not, I whack the Spam button.

Comment · 13 years ago

Really. Identical error and debugging messages that might as well have all said "Foo!" across a 300,000+ LOC subsystem.

Comment · 13 years ago

Really? I give location and context and the Why of the message. I make sure that every message is unique (unlike the code I changed in a certain once-prominent US firm's three-letter operating system) as well. I clearly know nothing and shouldn't be in the profession.