zafka

I moved here when rocks were young because my (soon to be ex) wife moved here with my son. Since then, I have grown to love being near the ocean - about 5 minutes, and I also love the being able to grow things all year long. Admittedly, part of the reason I stay is inertia, once I have a nice rut, i tend to furnish it.

Ha, I type to slow :)

I borrowed privately in 2006 to pay off the last 20 K of my 50 K mortgage. Then dropped my insurance which was asking 5K a year - previously about 1 K. I am betting most wealthy folks build resilient structures and carry minimal insurance. If you can cover the costs easily, why pay for the administration and profit of the insurance companies. -- South Florida here. Direct hits from Francis and Jeane, Wilma was milder, but a spun off tornado took the roof off my business.

Now I am imagining a 501-C where school children are encouraged to read studies to mice. Children get better at reading technical papers, mice learn more about their options! Win Win!

This interesting! We entered my Mom into this study. Next month she will be 98. I think her habit of exercising contributed a lot, but the good (lucky) genetics are there too. She used to get carded well into her 30s.

It might be childish, but I did laugh at the Ben Carson aside.

I have to say that the reworded title is what made me read the article. It is almost poetic. I could see it being a title of a campy movie.

Hmmm, Now I need to find out where my copy is hiding. I really need to reorganize the books again. I savored this for a while, but have not gone through the entire book yet. Sort of like War & Peace - books that everyone must read before they die, and I am saving them for insurance.

Hi, I sort of wandered into my career. I started in telecom due to a co-op, and then jumped to a cool job making computers for blind people that was both closer to my home, but also offered the opportunity to see many parts of the business. I ended up working on electronics and software in the medical device field. If one has the aptitude for it, I think jobs that are closer to the hardware will have a much longer shelf life. Get a copy of "Horowitz and hill", if you find that book entertaining, you should be fine.

I am curious(because I get stuffed up a lot also) Do you know what is causing your stuffiness?

When I was a kid, I scavenged a hunk of cable "Ma Bell" had left behind. I spliced together a quarter mile pair of wires to connect the neighbors house to mine and hooked up a battery and microphone on one side, and a speaker on the other. No luck. Then we connected the "speaker side" to the input of my friends stereo, and it was possible to be heard. I was about 10 at that time ( ~1970) and was not very aware of voltage drop. The taps and recording system I put in our basement worked much better!

I know I am biased both by my education and my chosen path. My first computer class was pascal based,my second course was intel based assembler. These were both in community college. When I started my degree in Computer Engineering, the microprocessor course was essentially an assembly course using the Motorola 6800 chip. I was lucky that the main CS courses were taught using C, course work was compiled on Vax mainframes running some unix variant. I used Borland C/C++ 3.0 to do my homework, then would have to figure out what changed when I used the Vax compiler to turn in my work. I really think it is worthwhile to get an understanding of the low level workings of computing. Every now and then I see a nice article comparing different access times for disk, ROM, DRAM, cache which is also important to know for critical code. Embedded for Telecom, Medical,etc.