Convenience über alles!...

[Don Y]

On 6/8/2022 9:00 PM, rbowman wrote:

SWMBO has literally hundreds of art books acquired through those sales.
The sorts of titles you\'d expect to find as, say, *references* at a place
like, maybe, a LIBRARY... <frown

My wife was a librarian and started at the Forbes in Northampton MA which is
also the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library. Among the usual stuff they have
his electric horse. She would never let me ride it...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/86888/show-tell-calvin-coolidges-electric-exercise-horse

That would probably be entertaining! Though I would assume not
as intense as the \"bulls\" in cowboy bars (?)

My public education was actually quite good. But, I tended to be assigned
to the better/best teachers, etc. No idea how those in the \"business\" path
fared.

Nor do I. The homeroom included some business or shop people but when the bell
rang we went our separate ways.

\"Homeroom\"... I\'d forgotten that concept!

They took typing and Spanish among other
subjects. The college entrance kids took two years of Latin followed by a
modern language, French for the liberal arts bound, German for the engineers
along with the usual courses.

In JrHigh, we were offered a choice of Latin, Spanish and French. None seemed
particularly useful to me so I opted for two years of French. So, by the time
I\'d made it to High school, there wasn\'t much reason to start with another
language (esp as the curriculum assumed you\'d already had that language
previously)

In later life I realized Spanish and typing would
have been a lot more useful.

No need for Spanish in Lily White suburbia so it wasn\'t even a consideration.
Everyone (?) took a year of typing in JrHigh so no option there.

Now, of course, Spanish would have been a considerably better choice
(living in the southwest). But, I can often get a clue as to what
is being said based on *some* similarities to French.

[And, SWMBO enjoys foreign language films (English subtitled) so is
amused when I can understand the french ones]

\"Field trips\" were pretty common (Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, NYC,
etc.) so we saw a lot of things first hand that others likely just read
about.

We did have a few field trips like to the Stratford CT for Lear at the American
Shakespeare Theater,

I recall seeing _Carmen_, there.

Every 5th grade class produced/acted a Shakespearean play (for my year, it was
_The Merchant of Venice_).

Most trips were tie-ins to things we were learning in classes. E.g.,
Boston/Concord/Lexington/Philadelphia/DC all had \"American History\"
tie ins (two years of Amer History required to graduate along with
two years of Amer Literature). NY we\'d visit the UN, Empire St, etc.
DC was monuments and museums (I still feel sorry for folks who\'ve not
had the opportunity to tour the many museums, there!). As nuclear
power was \"new and exciting\" (?), we toured the Connecticut Yankee
facility. I recall a tour of Pratt & Whitney. Mystic seaport. Local
newspaper. etc.

While we tended to welcome the trips (as it meant we weren\'t *in*
school), they also tended to be really long days -- leaving before dawn
and returning after nightfall. But, you knew there would be no \"pop
quizzes\" on those days nor any *homework* assigned!

and a rather poorly chaperoned (thankfully) trip to NYC
for Spoon River Anthology. A couple of friends and myself went to the World\'s
Fair on GE\'s dime but that wasn\'t a school trip. GE was trying to lure
potential engineers.

They weren\'t much of a trip but RPI had a number of events to pique people\'s
interest.

I did take a summer biology class that was mostly field trips. That was fun.
Well, maybe not the trip to the Albany sewage plant. A worked sidled up and
asked \'You kids get extra credits for coming to this place?\'

One of the most entertaining was a trip to a local bakery. Lots of
\"samples\"!

Was pushed by my guidance counselors to start taking college classes
(nights)
from age 14 (because the school system had nothing comparable to offer).
And, eventually pushed off to college when I ran out of high school
courseware!

Calculus wasn\'t normal high school fare but I took it after normal school
hours. The teacher was from RPI so it was their freshmen calculus course. His
name was Dis Maly and he lived up to it. The previous summer I\'d taken a summer
course in linear equations in preparation that was taught by his wife, a
wonderful teacher.

Calculus was part of the college prep curriculum, senior year. As my
\"schedule\" was accelerated, I took it as a Junior -- after having had
two semesters at college (nights).

So, teacher would let me do my *other* homework during class which
usually meant I could go home without any work to do.

My point being that they didn\'t hesitate to push as much education on kids
that could benefit from it.

Like I said there was a bit of a panic after Sputnik for STEM education so the
schools were on their good behavior. Being in NYS helped too. The Regents exams
were state wide and schools didn\'t want to look incompetent at the end of the
year.

I remember taking lots of \"standardized tests\" but can\'t recall what
they were for (other than SATs). Being a good student meant the tests were
just inconveniences for me.

Ah. My drafting class was in JrHigh -- along with metal and wood \"shops\".
In business, I used a lettering guide to keep my schematics pretty.

We had a shop class. The best thing that could be said was everyone left at the
end of the year with all the body parts they started with.

I liked shop. I think I enjoyed metal more than wood as we also
did castings, turned parts on the lathe, etc. I made a nice little
ball-peen hammer with knurled handle that I still have, somewhere.
And some lamps that were still hanging in my bedroom until that
house was sold.

I would LOVE to have a brake. And, spot-welder. But, prefer having
the space they would otherwise occupy.

[Local maker house doesn\'t have a brake else I would probably join.
Most of the other tools they\'d offer I could work-around, but not
a brake!]

I keep lead holders by each workstation and a lead pointer that always
seems
to be somewhere *else*. But, try to do most of my drawings in electronic
format as it is SO much easier to make changes when the connections \"rubber
band\". The days of D & E size drawings are gladly behind me! (I design to
a D size but render on B paper)

My drawing days were pretty much behind me the CAD started taking over.

I was an early adopter; I started drawing schematics with FutureNET in ~85 (?)
and still find its interface considerably more productive (for drawing) than
anything that\'s come along since. But, it\'s a dead product -- along
with most of the rest of that \"suite\". A shame as it meant all of the
libraries I had created at that time were useless.

I\'ve adapted to whichever toolchain clients have used to make the
incorporation of my documents into their \"process\" easier. There\'s
a lot of variation in terms of quality and ease of use that most folks
never experience (cuz they stick with ONE toolchain)

Strange to say I\'m a CAD programmer -- Computer Aided Dispatch.

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/cad-systems

We\'ve had a couple of very confused people at job interviews that had failed to
do their due diligence.

I\'ve had the same problem with \"gaming\" -- esp as I\'ve worked in both
interpretations of the term (video games and gambling).

Sadly, we are reactive instead of PROactive. Everyone (i.e., the powers
that be) will be \"surprised\" (as in \"not having foreseen that\") when
something
new happens. And, they\'ll rush to put a bandaid on that without further
thought as to OTHER vulnerabilities that should suggest.

frown

Yeah, Yellen\'s \'Who\'d ever thunk it?\' didn\'t impress me. I have no expertise in
economics, foreign affairs, etc. etc. so I wonder why I often can predict the
outcome better than all the king\'s men (and women).

It\'s a question of *thinking* about the situation instead of just observing it.

I\'m *really* (REALLY!) good at finding bugs in people\'s designs because I
can easily think of everything that *could* happen instead of just the
things that SHOULD happen.

At least in the city letting the fruit rot on the tree is frowned on.
There are enough bears wandering around looking for pet food without
attracting them.

Ah, I\'d not considered that! We\'re far enough INTO town that the only real
wildlife are bobcat and javelina. A bear in the neighborhood once but that
was an exception (though the image of him climbing over the wall gave new
meaning to \"hung like a bear\"!)

The city isn\'t that big and the edges are at open spaces.

That\'s similar to here; nothing much beyond the city limits for tens of miles.

The university prides
itself on being the only school in the country with a mountain on campus --

We\'ve got the southernmost ski slope! :>

which also means wildlife on campus. The bears are no big deal but the cats
raise more alarms particularly in the vicinity of school bus stops.

There is a popular \"national park\" in town at which folks regularly hike
recreationally. But, you\'re on THEIR turf while there. People tend to forget.

I am cautious when walking the neighborhood after dark. It\'s not uncommon to
encounter coyote, javelina or bobcat. Alarming to find them in your (walled)
backyard! :<

As far as
deer, there is no need to buy kitschy lawn ornaments. A couple of rivers run
through town and there are a number of islands that aren\'t utilized since they
flood every year. That led to a moose on the loose one year but that was a rarity.

I think most folks just don\'t want to be bothered with the effort to grow
good *tasting* fruit. They have one or more trees and notice that the
fruit
is small, dry, tart, etc. and dismiss it in favor of store bought. Folks
who \"know better\" are equally lazy and more opportunistic

There are some orchards down the Bitterroot but they tend to produce small,
lumpy Macs. There are a couple of (hard) cider operations that absorb a lot of
them. There is even a part of town called Orchard Homes. They were productive
in the early 20th century but blight and drought hit them hard in the \'20s and
they never recovered. There were also problems getting the apples to the
markets. It\'s a minor part of Steinbeck\'s \'East of Eden\' but refrigeration
wasn\'t available.

I grew up essentially surrounded by apple orchards. We would routinely
go pick our own fruit -- fun as a kid where climbing was more recreation
than chore. Now, I think I\'d rather someone else do the picking!

The Macouns are pretty delicate -- look at them funny and they bruise.
While living in Denver (I think... maybe Chicago), my folks shipped me a
bushel of them -- each one individually wrapped to survive the trip. It
was a delightful treat.

Climate change strikes again. The start of the 20th century was abnormally wet
in Montana and many people were sold homesteads in eastern Montana that
promised to be productive farms. Then the climate went back to normal.

[Always amusing when folks find something too costly or difficult for
THEM to do -- but not too costly to expect OTHERS to do FOR them!]

One company I worked for did contract electronic assembly for people like DEC
and GTE and the workforce was mainly women. A delegation approached us and
asked if the company would sponsor a softball team. No problem. we would but
the uniforms, pay any fees for the ball fields, and might even occasionally
pick up the tab for a post game party. So far so good but when we said we were
NOT going to run the team the interest faded away.

It\'s amusing to see how quickly people want *power* -- but how strenuously
they avoid WORK and RESPONSIBILITY.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 03/06/2022 19:12, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jun 2022 10:54:57 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

Par for the course these days. Our bin men don\'t get to my village until
about lunchtime so it isn\'t a problem for me.

Our serious noise source is un-muffled motorcycles. The morons love to
blip! blip! just to wake up more people.

That was an interesting problem at night in Japan too but even more of a
problem was the police chasing them whilst obeying the speed limit and
using a loudhailer to ask them to stop making a noise (I kid you not!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bōsōzoku

Where I lived wasn\'t a big problem but in the expensive foreigner
ghettos they liked to go for a ride and annoy the expats like my boss.

In the UK anything without a silencer would be fairly quickly pulled
over by the police. Is that not the case in the USA too?

Some custom cars here have silencers that deliberately resonate or
backfire under rapid acceleration but are just within the letter of the
law. UK police seem to be getting sloppy about enforcing some laws.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[server]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 12:39:24 +0100, Martin Brown
<\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 03/06/2022 19:12, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 3 Jun 2022 10:54:57 +0100, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

Par for the course these days. Our bin men don\'t get to my village until
about lunchtime so it isn\'t a problem for me.

Our serious noise source is un-muffled motorcycles. The morons love to
blip! blip! just to wake up more people.

That was an interesting problem at night in Japan too but even more of a
problem was the police chasing them whilst obeying the speed limit and
using a loudhailer to ask them to stop making a noise (I kid you not!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B?s?zoku

Where I lived wasn\'t a big problem but in the expensive foreigner
ghettos they liked to go for a ride and annoy the expats like my boss.

In the UK anything without a silencer would be fairly quickly pulled
over by the police. Is that not the case in the USA too?

Here in SF there has lately been no prosecution of \"minor crimes\" like
vehicle violations, car break-ins, drug sales, or shoplifting. Which
is why we just dumped the Soros-funded D.A. in a famous recall.



--

Anybody can count to one.

- Robert Widlar

 

[rbowman]

On 06/09/2022 01:11 AM, Don Y wrote:

Now, of course, Spanish would have been a considerably better choice
(living in the southwest). But, I can often get a clue as to what
is being said based on *some* similarities to French.

Latin theoretically would be helpful. I don\'t know more than a few words
in French which led to some amusing moments while working in Quebec.

facility. I recall a tour of Pratt & Whitney. Mystic seaport. Local
newspaper. etc.

My \'tour\' of P&W lacked a lot. I was given a minder who escorted me the
the machinery I was repair. It was surrounded by welding screens so I
couldn\'t get nosy. At lunch time he gave me two choices. We could go to
the office cafeteria where all the pretty secretaries hung out, or we
could go to the workers cafeteria where we could get two bottles of
beer. He was relieved when I chose the beer. Times have changed and I
doubt that beer is on the menu anymore.

Calculus was part of the college prep curriculum, senior year. As my
\"schedule\" was accelerated, I took it as a Junior -- after having had
two semesters at college (nights).

It seems to have gotten pushed back to high school. The standard fare
for senior year in my high school was spherical trig. I didn\'t take it
because of the calc path. Again in retrospect I can\'t remember the last
time I used calculus but I do a lot of GIS work where spherical trig is
somewhat helpful.

I remember taking lots of \"standardized tests\" but can\'t recall what
they were for (other than SATs). Being a good student meant the tests were
just inconveniences for me.

We had the Regents exams, the SATs, and the National Merit Scholarship
exams. I was a mediocre student, then came the tests. I had the highest
score on the Regents scholarship test in the county. When that was
announced over the PA during homeroom period the general reaction was
\'Who is that?\' I wasn\'t one of the bright academic lights. Not only did
that net me a scholarship but the opportunity to work for the NYS Dept.
of Education summers. The was a runner up for the NMS, but didn\'t get
that and the SAT scores were similar. All of a sudden they were adding
another name to the National Honor Society induction ceremony.

Because of the performance on the Regents test I also got a prize for
excellence in biology. It was all of $50 but it pissed off a girl who
thought she had it in the bag. I\'d been unsuccessfully pursuing her and
that completely put an end to that.

In college I resumed my gentleman\'s C performance for most courses that
didn\'t capture my imagination.

I would LOVE to have a brake. And, spot-welder. But, prefer having
the space they would otherwise occupy.

I\'d like a welder although I\'d probably go with gas as being more
versatile. I was semi-competent with a stick back in the day but it\'s
been decades.

[Local maker house doesn\'t have a brake else I would probably join.
Most of the other tools they\'d offer I could work-around, but not
a brake!]

The new library has a lot of nice toys, scanners, 3D printers, laser
cutters, and so on but I don\'t know if they have a brake. The library
opening was delayed because of the plague and when it finally opened
masks were required so my exploratory tour was brief. At least so far
they\'ve dropped the masks. I just heard on the radio that they\'re now
required for Federal buildings at Glacier NP.

I\'ve adapted to whichever toolchain clients have used to make the
incorporation of my documents into their \"process\" easier. There\'s
a lot of variation in terms of quality and ease of use that most folks
never experience (cuz they stick with ONE toolchain)

I was an early adopter of \'portable\' (a 21 pound Osborne 1) computers. I
could bring my happy little environment into a client\'s plant rather
than using whatever weird lashup they had. Compared to using a cross
compiler on an elderly PDP11 that was hogged by the bean counters it was
heaven.

I\'ve had the same problem with \"gaming\" -- esp as I\'ve worked in both
interpretations of the term (video games and gambling).

I don\'t know if they\'re still in business but there was a video poker
company out in Bozeman that I sniffed at but I couldn\'t work up a lot of
interest.

I\'m *really* (REALLY!) good at finding bugs in people\'s designs because I
can easily think of everything that *could* happen instead of just the
things that SHOULD happen.

My day will probably be looking at some code that was based on optimism.
A crash was reported by one of our ops people training at a new site
about 1700 yesterday. I took a brief look and I think it\'s been a
problem for the last 5 years but nobody ever used the \'feature\' twice.

The university prides itself on being the only school in the country
with a mountain on campus --

We\'ve got the southernmost ski slope! :

Mt. Lemmon doesn\'t count...

I am cautious when walking the neighborhood after dark. It\'s not
uncommon to
encounter coyote, javelina or bobcat. Alarming to find them in your
(walled)
backyard! :

When I wintered at Why AZ, walking in the dark was interesting. My
favorite was the sidewinders that would run out of gas after sundown and
curl up wherever. Even in the day it was hard to figure out exactly
which direction they were headed in.

I\'d left some weevily rice outside that I was going to take to the dump
the next day. While reading I heard noises outside and found a herd of
javelina helping themselves. I treated it as a photo op and they didn\'t
seem to mind. The park is called Coyote Howls and that isn\'t
overselling. At the end of the season when there weren\'t many people
around I\'d be reading and a coyote would casually stroll by like a
domestic dog.

I hear them at night sometimes but they\'re shyer up here. When I hear
the yipping I figure another cat done gone.

I grew up essentially surrounded by apple orchards. We would routinely
go pick our own fruit -- fun as a kid where climbing was more recreation
than chore. Now, I think I\'d rather someone else do the picking!

Upstate NY was apple country so fall was a great time. There were a lot
more cultivars available since everyone hadn\'t homed in on mass market
favorites. My favorite for eating were the Northern Spys.

It\'s amusing to see how quickly people want *power* -- but how strenuously
they avoid WORK and RESPONSIBILITY.

Power is fun! Taking responsibility is something else.

 

[server]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 08:23:40 -0600, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 06/09/2022 01:11 AM, Don Y wrote:
Now, of course, Spanish would have been a considerably better choice
(living in the southwest). But, I can often get a clue as to what
is being said based on *some* similarities to French.

Latin theoretically would be helpful. I don\'t know more than a few words
in French which led to some amusing moments while working in Quebec.


facility. I recall a tour of Pratt & Whitney. Mystic seaport. Local
newspaper. etc.

My \'tour\' of P&W lacked a lot. I was given a minder who escorted me the
the machinery I was repair. It was surrounded by welding screens so I
couldn\'t get nosy. At lunch time he gave me two choices. We could go to
the office cafeteria where all the pretty secretaries hung out, or we
could go to the workers cafeteria where we could get two bottles of
beer. He was relieved when I chose the beer. Times have changed and I
doubt that beer is on the menu anymore.

We visited a Fellow of United Technologies and had a working
brainstorm session and a cool tour of Pratt in Hartford. One
stadium-size room was a training center for visiting engine mechanics,
and there were dozens of engines on the floor in various states of
disassembly.

We also walked around inside an engine test cell that could test an
engine at full power and simulated temperature and altitude. That was
about a city block or three, including the gigantic array of exhaust
fans and refrigeration machinery. I think they have retired that
facility and now strap the test engines onto a special 747 and
actually fly them. Low presssure and temperature are free up there.





--

Anybody can count to one.

- Robert Widlar

 

[Don Y]

On 6/9/2022 7:23 AM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/09/2022 01:11 AM, Don Y wrote:
Now, of course, Spanish would have been a considerably better choice
(living in the southwest). But, I can often get a clue as to what
is being said based on *some* similarities to French.

Latin theoretically would be helpful. I don\'t know more than a few words in
French which led to some amusing moments while working in Quebec.

In theory, it would help with roots of words. But, I wonder, in
practice, how many folks actually *use* that skillset (assuming they
took Latin AND remember enough of it).

facility. I recall a tour of Pratt & Whitney. Mystic seaport. Local
newspaper. etc.

My \'tour\' of P&W lacked a lot. I was given a minder who escorted me the the
machinery I was repair. It was surrounded by welding screens so I couldn\'t get
nosy. At lunch time he gave me two choices. We could go to the office cafeteria
where all the pretty secretaries hung out, or we could go to the workers
cafeteria where we could get two bottles of beer. He was relieved when I chose
the beer. Times have changed and I doubt that beer is on the menu anymore.

Local company, local kids, good for PR. Kids aren\'t particularly nosy
(show them something *big* so they can say \"Wow!\" and that\'s about it).

I recall seeing some 24\" diameter bearings marked \"scrap\". Gotta wonder
who\'s weeks pay THAT was!

Calculus was part of the college prep curriculum, senior year. As my
\"schedule\" was accelerated, I took it as a Junior -- after having had
two semesters at college (nights).

It seems to have gotten pushed back to high school. The standard fare for
senior year in my high school was spherical trig. I didn\'t take it because of
the calc path. Again in retrospect I can\'t remember the last time I used
calculus but I do a lot of GIS work where spherical trig is somewhat helpful.

Most of our high (and jrhi) curriculum was preset. E.g., if you were a
freshman, you were taking geometry; a senior, calculus. Likewise for
\"science\" (biology, chemistry and physics, in that order -- I forget the
freshman science course as I skipped it).

Requirements for English meant everyone got the same dosage. But, if you
opted for only 2 years of science, you could likely pick WHICH two subjects
(by planning which YEAR you were going to take them).

[Oddly, I don\'t recall 4 years of science or math being required. But,
*do* recall 4 years of english and PE as I had to bring proof that
I\'d taken them at college in order to graduate high school. Silly
system!]

I remember taking lots of \"standardized tests\" but can\'t recall what
they were for (other than SATs). Being a good student meant the tests were
just inconveniences for me.

We had the Regents exams, the SATs, and the National Merit Scholarship exams. I
was a mediocre student, then came the tests. I had the highest score on the
Regents scholarship test in the county. When that was announced over the PA
during homeroom period the general reaction was \'Who is that?\' I wasn\'t one of
the bright academic lights. Not only did that net me a scholarship but the
opportunity to work for the NYS Dept. of Education summers. The was a runner up
for the NMS, but didn\'t get that and the SAT scores were similar. All of a
sudden they were adding another name to the National Honor Society induction
ceremony.

I was awarded a NM scholarship. Plus some dinky little ones \"locally sourced\".
I never got to take the PSATs as my counselor essentially told me I had to
leave school due to lack of remaining courses -- and rushed to get me into
a SAT sitting Junior year. (I remember being sick when I took them, in an
unheated cafeteria, wearing a winter coat -- but had no alternative for
scheduling as I needed to apply for schools THAT year)

Because of the performance on the Regents test I also got a prize for
excellence in biology. It was all of $50 but it pissed off a girl who thought
she had it in the bag. I\'d been unsuccessfully pursuing her and that completely
put an end to that.

Heh heh heh... we had a group of students that would \"compete\" in
math \"tests\" around the state (math jocks?). My teacher made the
mistake of registering me as a Junior (which, technically, I was,
as it was my third year of school) instead of a Senior (which could
also be claimed as it was my LAST year of school). So, instead of
getting a $500 scholarship as highest performer, I got some silly
calculator (um, isn\'t that like giving a bicycle to a champion sprinter?)

In college I resumed my gentleman\'s C performance for most courses that didn\'t
capture my imagination.

I enjoyed much of the material to which I was exposed in college.
Not keen on the election of 8 required \"humaities\" courses to
graduate -- so, I took things like American History and Amer Literature
(\"gee, I already know this stuff!\")

[Thankfully, my American History professor was an economist. So, I
got reexposed to history without the patriotic bias but with an
economic basis. Actually made it considerably more interesting!]

I would LOVE to have a brake. And, spot-welder. But, prefer having
the space they would otherwise occupy.

I\'d like a welder although I\'d probably go with gas as being more versatile. I
was semi-competent with a stick back in the day but it\'s been decades.

I rely on friends for those things. As space is at a premium, I have
to be careful which \"big\" things I acquire as that means lots of
LITTLE things will have to be shed. That means lots of decisions to
make. By contrast, shedding a big thing is a *single* decision! :>

[Local maker house doesn\'t have a brake else I would probably join.
Most of the other tools they\'d offer I could work-around, but not
a brake!]

The new library has a lot of nice toys, scanners, 3D printers, laser cutters,
and so on but I don\'t know if they have a brake. The library opening was
delayed because of the plague and when it finally opened masks were required so
my exploratory tour was brief. At least so far they\'ve dropped the masks. I
just heard on the radio that they\'re now required for Federal buildings at
Glacier NP.

Nothing beyond PCs at our libraries. Though color prints are only a dime
(which makes it silly to own a color printer!)

Maker house has laser cutter, CNCs, 3D printers -- plus metal and wood
shop stuff. But, they\'ve been unable to acquire a brake (relying
largely on donated kit/money) or spot welder.

I\'ve adapted to whichever toolchain clients have used to make the
incorporation of my documents into their \"process\" easier. There\'s
a lot of variation in terms of quality and ease of use that most folks
never experience (cuz they stick with ONE toolchain)

I was an early adopter of \'portable\' (a 21 pound Osborne 1) computers. I could

I had an Otrona back in the day. Eventually a Compaq Portable, then Portable
386 and a Sun Voyager. I still have the latter two (Portable 386 has a 2-slot
ISA \"bag\" that I can use for ISA add-ons)

bring my happy little environment into a client\'s plant rather than using
whatever weird lashup they had. Compared to using a cross compiler on an
elderly PDP11 that was hogged by the bean counters it was heaven.

First products were developed on an \'11 \"owned\" by accounting. So,
you learned to use a \"pocket assembler\" (crib sheet you kept folded in
your wallet). But, the i4004 was such a toy that it wasn\'t rocket
science to do this stuff in your head.

First \"development system\" was MDS800 which was infinitely better -- and
incredibly worse! (cuz now you adopted fancier development methodologies
and were dependant on the tool chain more) We\'d get two turns of the
crank in an 8 hour shift (by the time you burned a set of EPROMS,
erased the previous set and reassembled/linked your new image)

I quickly learned to start designing with SRAM compatibility to
download code images into RAM (which you could then write-protect with
a physical switch) to get more iterations per unit time.

[Now, I PXE boot products so it\'s a one-button effort!]

It wasn\'t until the early/mid 80\'s that i was regularly using a PC for
engineering. And, most of my work at the time was in hardware and
semi-customs chips.

I\'ve had the same problem with \"gaming\" -- esp as I\'ve worked in both
interpretations of the term (video games and gambling).

I don\'t know if they\'re still in business but there was a video poker company
out in Bozeman that I sniffed at but I couldn\'t work up a lot of interest.

The appeal of pai gow poker is the learning opportunity it presented.
Poker is well understood. Ditto black jack, etc. Pai Gow Poker is
something you have to really think about before developing a strategy
to codify.

[Interesting aside: not all \"card games\" have to obey the rules of
probability embodied by a regular deck of cards. Local gaming commissions
decide how \"card images\" can be used. E.g., the aces can be equivalent to
cherries -- there\'s no need for there to be exactly four of them with
a probability of 4:52 of appearing. Players who think in those terms
can be thusly manipulated]

I\'m *really* (REALLY!) good at finding bugs in people\'s designs because I
can easily think of everything that *could* happen instead of just the
things that SHOULD happen.

My day will probably be looking at some code that was based on optimism. A
crash was reported by one of our ops people training at a new site about 1700
yesterday. I took a brief look and I think it\'s been a problem for the last 5
years but nobody ever used the \'feature\' twice.

What\'s that say about your firm\'s testing strategy? <grin>

I write specs (increasingly as \"manuals\") and enumerate all of the \"what ifs\"
before writing any code or designing the host hardware. This sort of top-down
approach makes the subsequent efforts pretty straightforward; you KNOW how
it has to resolve, from the user\'s perspective (even if the \"user\" is another
service/device).

It also gives folks a script for designing test suites as they can see the
cases that have to be exercised and the results expected.

The university prides itself on being the only school in the country
with a mountain on campus --

We\'ve got the southernmost ski slope! :

Mt. Lemmon doesn\'t count...

Sure it does! Snow, hill, lift... what more do you need? :>

I am cautious when walking the neighborhood after dark. It\'s not
uncommon to
encounter coyote, javelina or bobcat. Alarming to find them in your
(walled)
backyard! :

When I wintered at Why AZ, walking in the dark was interesting. My favorite was
the sidewinders that would run out of gas after sundown and curl up wherever.
Even in the day it was hard to figure out exactly which direction they were
headed in.

I\'d left some weevily rice outside that I was going to take to the dump the
next day. While reading I heard noises outside and found a herd of javelina
helping themselves. I treated it as a photo op and they didn\'t seem to mind.

They\'re practically blind. As long as you aren\'t threatening (or they with
cubs), you\'re safe.

But, they\'re dark as the night so easy to stumble upon and STARTLE if you
can\'t *see* them!

Our front yard is covered with wildflowers (seasonally). They apparently
like the *flowers* (blossoms) but ignore the rest of the plant. Annoying
to come out in the morning and find all the blossoms chewed off!

The park is called Coyote Howls and that isn\'t overselling. At the end of the
season when there weren\'t many people around I\'d be reading and a coyote would
casually stroll by like a domestic dog.

We see them in the neighborhood periodically. Have had a few \"bedding down\"
under our citrus trees at night. Again, I want them more scared of me (and
high-tailing it out of the yard when I turn on the flood lights -- rather
than stumble over one!)

I hear them at night sometimes but they\'re shyer up here. When I hear the
yipping I figure another cat done gone.

Or dog.

I grew up essentially surrounded by apple orchards. We would routinely
go pick our own fruit -- fun as a kid where climbing was more recreation
than chore. Now, I think I\'d rather someone else do the picking!

Upstate NY was apple country so fall was a great time. There were a lot more
cultivars available since everyone hadn\'t homed in on mass market favorites. My
favorite for eating were the Northern Spys.

The equivalent, here, is sampling fruits at the local nurseries. Figs,
citrus, pomegranates, saguaro, etc. But, I\'d much prefer apples.

It\'s amusing to see how quickly people want *power* -- but how strenuously
they avoid WORK and RESPONSIBILITY.

Power is fun! Taking responsibility is something else.

I don\'t mind responsibility -- if given AUTHORITY. The idea of being
tasked with implementing someone else\'s \"mistakes\" just doesn\'t fly, with me.

OTOH, I\'ve no problem asserting \"THIS is how it\'s going to be done\" -- and
then making THAT happen!

 

[rbowman]

On 06/09/2022 01:42 PM, Don Y wrote:

Most of our high (and jrhi) curriculum was preset. E.g., if you were a
freshman, you were taking geometry; a senior, calculus. Likewise for
\"science\" (biology, chemistry and physics, in that order -- I forget the
freshman science course as I skipped it).

I\'m drawing a blank too.

[Oddly, I don\'t recall 4 years of science or math being required. But,
*do* recall 4 years of english and PE as I had to bring proof that
I\'d taken them at college in order to graduate high school. Silly
system!]

English was interesting. One teacher applied her makeup with a trowel.
Another was semi-senile and half deaf. The crueler students would
whisper their answers until she cranked her hearing aid up. Finally the
creative writing teacher, a young guy, eventually was fired for
inappropriate relationships with female students and embezzling funds
from a student club.

I enjoyed much of the material to which I was exposed in college.
Not keen on the election of 8 required \"humaities\" courses to
graduate -- so, I took things like American History and Amer Literature
(\"gee, I already know this stuff!\")

I wasn\'t very interested in being in an engineering school. Like many
blue collar families the first generation to go to college is expected
to become engineers. If I\'d had my druthers I\'d have gone to Columbia.
Fortunately that didn\'t happen. I was 16 in my freshman year and
becoming a bit wild.

The new library has a lot of nice toys, scanners, 3D printers, laser
cutters, and so on but I don\'t know if they have a brake. The library
opening was delayed because of the plague and when it finally opened
masks were required so my exploratory tour was brief. At least so far
they\'ve dropped the masks. I just heard on the radio that they\'re now
required for Federal buildings at Glacier NP.

Nothing beyond PCs at our libraries. Though color prints are only a dime
(which makes it silly to own a color printer!)

The old one had a minimal make space but they went all out with the new
one. I would prefer more books rather than some of the fancy areas but
it\'s the way libraries go these days. The chief driving force for me to
vote is if there is a bond or mil levy on the ballot for the library or
open spaces. The city does well on both counts. They\'ve acquired quite a
bit of land to head off the developers.

I had an Otrona back in the day. Eventually a Compaq Portable, then
Portable
386 and a Sun Voyager. I still have the latter two (Portable 386 has a
2-slot
ISA \"bag\" that I can use for ISA add-ons)

I don\'t remember the Otrona, just the Osborne and KayPro. I even bought
a couple of Osborne Executives the Boston Globe was selling when they
went to PCs. They worked fine for my purposes since I was targeting
embedded microcontrollers.

First \"development system\" was MDS800 which was infinitely better -- and
incredibly worse! (cuz now you adopted fancier development methodologies
and were dependant on the tool chain more) We\'d get two turns of the
crank in an 8 hour shift (by the time you burned a set of EPROMS,
erased the previous set and reassembled/linked your new image)

One company I worked for had a couple of Mostek development systems I
tried to ignore. That was my day though, put the EPROMs in the cooker,
make coffee, work on the code until the EPROMs were ready.

I quickly learned to start designing with SRAM compatibility to
download code images into RAM (which you could then write-protect with
a physical switch) to get more iterations per unit time.

I loved SRAM particularly when designing a board so I didn\'t have to
jump through all the DRAM refresh hoops.

My day will probably be looking at some code that was based on
optimism. A crash was reported by one of our ops people training at a
new site about 1700 yesterday. I took a brief look and I think it\'s
been a problem for the last 5 years but nobody ever used the \'feature\'
twice.

What\'s that say about your firm\'s testing strategy? <grin

With a 25 year tail of technological debt? We have a PM who groans when
I start with \'Well, in 1997 Andy decided to...\' The crash did turn out
to be two separate areas of code worked on by two different people. It
was a homegrown Motif date picker that I doubt many people knew about or
used.

It also gives folks a script for designing test suites as they can see the
cases that have to be exercised and the results expected.

We\'re trying to develop some sort of testing automation. Something like
Puppeteer looks interesting but I can hear the arguments. Testers can\'t
write scripts and programmers are lousy testers.

Mt. Lemmon doesn\'t count...

Sure it does! Snow, hill, lift... what more do you need? :

I\'ve never been to the top. Sometimes if I was staying over in Tucson
I\'d drive out Catalina until I found a quite place to car camp in the
pickup. The last time I had the Yaris and a tent so I went up to
Catalina SP.

Our front yard is covered with wildflowers (seasonally). They apparently
like the *flowers* (blossoms) but ignore the rest of the plant. Annoying
to come out in the morning and find all the blossoms chewed off!

Every year I think about a garden but then I realize it would be a war
all summer with the deer, skunks, raccoons, and so forth.

The equivalent, here, is sampling fruits at the local nurseries. Figs,
citrus, pomegranates, saguaro, etc. But, I\'d much prefer apples.

Fresh figs are fine. Pomegranates are a lot of work. I prefer them
squeezed and in a bottle. Every now and then my timing was right to find
ripe prickly pear tunas.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/9/2022 10:36 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/09/2022 01:42 PM, Don Y wrote:
[Oddly, I don\'t recall 4 years of science or math being required. But,
*do* recall 4 years of english and PE as I had to bring proof that
I\'d taken them at college in order to graduate high school. Silly
system!]

English was interesting. One teacher applied her makeup with a trowel. Another
was semi-senile and half deaf. The crueler students would whisper their answers
until she cranked her hearing aid up. Finally the creative writing teacher, a
young guy, eventually was fired for inappropriate relationships with female
students and embezzling funds from a student club.

I was not a fan of English, in any variety! I was in the orchestra pit at
an award ceremony (played an instrument) and heard *my* name called. \"For
English? What idiot made THAT determination??!\" (Math and Science were
foregone conclusions but someone must have screwed up with English!)

I enjoyed much of the material to which I was exposed in college.
Not keen on the election of 8 required \"humaities\" courses to
graduate -- so, I took things like American History and Amer Literature
(\"gee, I already know this stuff!\")

I wasn\'t very interested in being in an engineering school. Like many blue
collar families the first generation to go to college is expected to become
engineers. If I\'d had my druthers I\'d have gone to Columbia. Fortunately that
didn\'t happen. I was 16 in my freshman year and becoming a bit wild.

I was planning on attending UMinn as I had been doing some research with a
professor, there, and they\'d already accepted me as a sophomore (skip *two*
years!). I was actually putting my registration letter in the mailbox
when the acceptance letter from MIT arrived. At that point, the decision
was out of my hands -- any attempt at logical argument fell on deaf ears...

[It\'s too cold; it\'s too far; it\'s just as expensive as MIT when you
factor in travel costs (did you think I was going to *commute* from
here??); etc. Parents can be vain -- esp when they didn\'t have an education]

<shrug> OTOH, I *truly* enjoy my career -- but, largely because I\'ve made
it what *I* want and not left that decision up to employers. I have to
imagine I would similarly have \"adjusted it\" if I\'d gone into a different
field.

And, I had a sh*tload of fun at school! So, it wasn\'t all that bad...

The new library has a lot of nice toys, scanners, 3D printers, laser
cutters, and so on but I don\'t know if they have a brake. The library
opening was delayed because of the plague and when it finally opened
masks were required so my exploratory tour was brief. At least so far
they\'ve dropped the masks. I just heard on the radio that they\'re now
required for Federal buildings at Glacier NP.

Nothing beyond PCs at our libraries. Though color prints are only a dime
(which makes it silly to own a color printer!)

The old one had a minimal make space but they went all out with the new one. I
would prefer more books rather than some of the fancy areas but it\'s the way
libraries go these days. The chief driving force for me to vote is if there is
a bond or mil levy on the ballot for the library or open spaces. The city does
well on both counts. They\'ve acquired quite a bit of land to head off the
developers.

We have to vote on something nearly every year -- sometimes twice in
a year. I \"do my duty\" and make the effort to read up on whatever
they are proposing.

But, I *refuse* to sign petitions to PUT things on the ballot! \"You
get the required signatures and I promise I\'ll study the issue and cast
a vote when/if it\'s on the ballot\" (but, no, I\'m not going to sign
your petition just because I was unfortunate enough to have been noticed
as I climbed out of my vehicle...)

I had an Otrona back in the day. Eventually a Compaq Portable, then
Portable
386 and a Sun Voyager. I still have the latter two (Portable 386 has a
2-slot
ISA \"bag\" that I can use for ISA add-ons)

I don\'t remember the Otrona, just the Osborne and KayPro. I even bought a
couple of Osborne Executives the Boston Globe was selling when they went to
PCs. They worked fine for my purposes since I was targeting embedded
microcontrollers.

I had a \"Mega Board\" on which I could develop Z80 code (a Z80, a few
DARTs/SIOs, CTCs and 512KB or DRAM that you could set up as a RAMdisk
*or* 8 contexts for MP/M) I still have it -- and the 8\" floppy drive
that I used with it. I\'d have to tip(1) into it, now, though.

But, I never got around to putting it in an enclosure... just some ceramic
standoffs along the sides.

First \"development system\" was MDS800 which was infinitely better -- and
incredibly worse! (cuz now you adopted fancier development methodologies
and were dependant on the tool chain more) We\'d get two turns of the
crank in an 8 hour shift (by the time you burned a set of EPROMS,
erased the previous set and reassembled/linked your new image)

One company I worked for had a couple of Mostek development systems I tried to
ignore. That was my day though, put the EPROMs in the cooker, make coffee, work
on the code until the EPROMs were ready.

Zilog ZBoxes were the bane of my existence. I actually developed a
small development system that we manufactured for our own internal
use. And, managed to convince employer to buying a low-end ICE
for me to use (previously, all our debugging was done via home-grown
multitasking monitors -- very effective but crude)

I quickly learned to start designing with SRAM compatibility to
download code images into RAM (which you could then write-protect with
a physical switch) to get more iterations per unit time.

I loved SRAM particularly when designing a board so I didn\'t have to jump
through all the DRAM refresh hoops.

I designed a board with a 16K chunk of address space that mapped onto
a bank of \"?x1\" DRAMs. If you stuffed it with eight 16Kb devices, you
had the basic 16KB of memory. But, you could replace any of the
devices with 64Kx1 devices and the software would treat the extra 48K bits
in that bit position as \"mass storage\" (serializing data into that
area and deserializing on retrieval).

Hardware costs were always a concern so recurring dollars had to be
spent wisely.

But, I learned to always design the hardware to directly support SRAM
in place of the EPROM that was commonly used -- to make development
easier (with our monitors, you could live-patch the code in a
running system). In the past, I\'d make SRAM modules that could plug
into an EPROM socket and fly-wire to /WR with a test lead. But,
these were really fragile and the last thing you wanted to be
doing is troubleshooting your program memory!

[It was also essential that you remember to write protect the
SRAM as we often wrote code that wrote to ROM *relying* on the
fact that the contents wouldn\'t be altered.]

My day will probably be looking at some code that was based on
optimism. A crash was reported by one of our ops people training at a
new site about 1700 yesterday. I took a brief look and I think it\'s
been a problem for the last 5 years but nobody ever used the \'feature\'
twice.

What\'s that say about your firm\'s testing strategy? <grin

With a 25 year tail of technological debt? We have a PM who groans when I start
with \'Well, in 1997 Andy decided to...\' The crash did turn out to be two
separate areas of code worked on by two different people. It was a homegrown
Motif date picker that I doubt many people knew about or used.

Can you spell \"dead code\"? Or, easily MADE dead? :>

It also gives folks a script for designing test suites as they can see the
cases that have to be exercised and the results expected.

We\'re trying to develop some sort of testing automation. Something like
Puppeteer looks interesting but I can hear the arguments. Testers can\'t write
scripts and programmers are lousy testers.

There\'s no glory in testing. So, the only way to encourage it is to humiliate
writers of buggy code! But, this often has a long lag associated.

Mt. Lemmon doesn\'t count...

Sure it does! Snow, hill, lift... what more do you need? :

I\'ve never been to the top. Sometimes if I was staying over in Tucson I\'d drive
out Catalina until I found a quite place to car camp in the pickup. The last
time I had the Yaris and a tent so I went up to Catalina SP.

Not much there besides the ski (ahem) \"resort\". Summer time its a great
place to escape the heat in the valley. But, there are no conveniences
up there (gas station, medical care, etc.) so \"a nice place to VISIT
but you wouldn\'t want to LIVE there!\"

[Many residents have a \"summer place\" either at Summerhaven or Pinetop.
I can\'t see the value in maintaining TWO homes!]

Our front yard is covered with wildflowers (seasonally). They apparently
like the *flowers* (blossoms) but ignore the rest of the plant. Annoying
to come out in the morning and find all the blossoms chewed off!

Every year I think about a garden but then I realize it would be a war all
summer with the deer, skunks, raccoons, and so forth.

Most recently, the front yard was covered to a depth of ~30 inches in lupines.
And, by covered, I mean you couldn\'t see the soil ANYWHERE!

Very impressive to look at. But, a colossal PITA to clean up when they
go to seed (and become eyesores).

We\'re now trying to get rid of the poppies and bluebells but there\'s so
much seed \"stored\" in the ground that it will likely be many years for us
to win that battle! (both varieties have really tiny seeds, producing
hundreds per plant)

The equivalent, here, is sampling fruits at the local nurseries. Figs,
citrus, pomegranates, saguaro, etc. But, I\'d much prefer apples.

Fresh figs are fine.

Not a fan. Grandpa grew them in N E and put a lot of effort into
keeping the (1) tree alive, despite the climate. I never understood
why (as they didn\'t appeal to me)

> Pomegranates are a lot of work.

As are pistachios. I think that\'s part of their appeal.
OTOH, I quickly meet my fill of pomegranates but will only
stop eating pistachios when my fingertips scream at me!

[One year, my folks bought me *48* pounds of Zenobia pistachios.
Finestkind! I shit red for weeks!]

I prefer them squeezed and
in a bottle.

Yeah, I was in the habit of drinking a short glass of it each morning.
Costco sells it. But, it\'s a rude thing to do to your mouth right
out of bed! (my attitude towards most juices -- save the sanguinello)

Every now and then my timing was right to find ripe prickly pear
tunas.

 

[rbowman]

On 06/10/2022 02:52 AM, Don Y wrote:

On 6/9/2022 10:36 PM, rbowman wrote:

I was planning on attending UMinn as I had been doing some research with a
professor, there, and they\'d already accepted me as a sophomore (skip *two*
years!). I was actually putting my registration letter in the mailbox
when the acceptance letter from MIT arrived. At that point, the decision
was out of my hands -- any attempt at logical argument fell on deaf ears...

[It\'s too cold; it\'s too far; it\'s just as expensive as MIT when you
factor in travel costs (did you think I was going to *commute* from
here??); etc. Parents can be vain -- esp when they didn\'t have an
education]

RPI was a done deal but I visited Clarkson University. My father and I
drove up during the Christmas break and the last pavement was seen
somewhere around Lake George. The freshmen dorms were over a mile from
the campus and a dog sled would have come in handy. No thanks.

The guidance counselor was a Dartmouth alum and was pushing that but I
wasn\'t interested. In retrospect it might have been the better choice. I
would have learned BASIC rather than FORTRAN IV. Dartmouth was ahead of
the game. RPI considered the 360 as a glorified slide rule that you
might use someday rather than an end in itself.

shrug> OTOH, I *truly* enjoy my career -- but, largely because I\'ve made
it what *I* want and not left that decision up to employers. I have to
imagine I would similarly have \"adjusted it\" if I\'d gone into a different
field.

And, I had a sh*tload of fun at school! So, it wasn\'t all that bad...

The most worthwhile part was four semesters of Resnick and Halliday. A
good grounding in physics takes you a long way. I also picked up quite a
bit of experimental psychology -- neurophysiology and Skinner
behaviorism, not the \'how does that make you feel?\' crap. The rats
wouldn\'t have answered anyway. 20 years later I would have gotten into
cognitive science. I played with neural networks in the \'80s but
ultimately went in a different direction.

We have to vote on something nearly every year -- sometimes twice in
a year. I \"do my duty\" and make the effort to read up on whatever
they are proposing.

But, I *refuse* to sign petitions to PUT things on the ballot! \"You
get the required signatures and I promise I\'ll study the issue and cast
a vote when/if it\'s on the ballot\" (but, no, I\'m not going to sign
your petition just because I was unfortunate enough to have been noticed
as I climbed out of my vehicle...)

School levies come up about every six months and usually get shot down.
Wait another six months and try again. Sooner or later... The problem
is the voters are interested enough to ask exactly what they plan to do
with the money and the answer seldom has anything to do with improving
the classroom experience.

Zilog ZBoxes were the bane of my existence. I actually developed a
small development system that we manufactured for our own internal
use. And, managed to convince employer to buying a low-end ICE
for me to use (previously, all our debugging was done via home-grown
multitasking monitors -- very effective but crude)

My warped sense of humor got me into trouble. The company was Orion
Research and a completely unrelated company named Orion made a 8048 ICE
that I saw in a magazine. At a meeting I made a quip about with a name
like that it must be good and they bought it. Interesting thing with a
FORTH interface but not exactly ready for prime time. iirc ZAX made one
that worked.

[It was also essential that you remember to write protect the
SRAM as we often wrote code that wrote to ROM *relying* on the
fact that the contents wouldn\'t be altered.]

/dev/nul ... AIX had a good sense of humor about trying to read or
write 0x0000. Porting the code to Linux, which was completely humorless,
was interesting.


> Can you spell \"dead code\"? Or, easily MADE dead? :>

Some of it isn\'t as dead as you might think.

There\'s no glory in testing. So, the only way to encourage it is to
humiliate
writers of buggy code! But, this often has a long lag associated.

Too long... One programmer received his share of humiliation but he left
about a year ago. Now everything is his fault. To be fair he made design
decisions based on an ill-defined and moving target.

Like most projects when I mentioned we\'d all learned quite a bit and it
was time to start fresh using our collective experience I was treated as
a leper for a while.

Not much there besides the ski (ahem) \"resort\". Summer time its a great
place to escape the heat in the valley. But, there are no conveniences
up there (gas station, medical care, etc.) so \"a nice place to VISIT
but you wouldn\'t want to LIVE there!\"

No, if you want a little cooler locale going to Flag makes more sense.

Most recently, the front yard was covered to a depth of ~30 inches in
lupines.
And, by covered, I mean you couldn\'t see the soil ANYWHERE!

This morning I noticed a mushroom growing in the lawn I\'d mowed a couple
of days ago. Not a good sign. June typically is high water for the river
and the report is rain all weekend.

As are pistachios. I think that\'s part of their appeal.
OTOH, I quickly meet my fill of pomegranates but will only
stop eating pistachios when my fingertips scream at me!

[One year, my folks bought me *48* pounds of Zenobia pistachios.
Finestkind! I shit red for weeks!]

https://www.thespruceeats.com/red-pistachios-overview-1807049

I wondered whatever happened to red pistachios. I haven\'t had any in the
shell for a long time but I recall taking several passes at the low
hanging fruit until all that were left were closed up as tight as a clam
at low tide.

Sunflower seeds are another thing I never mastered. They grow a lot of
sunflowers around Jamestown ND and they\'re not all for export. I went to
the races there and everybody in the bleachers had bags full. They
looked like squirrels and the area around their feet looked like one of
those stumps where a squirrel has sat shelling pine cones.

The most creative way to handle tedious tasks was explained to me by a
Navajo. Packrats love pinion nuts and will shell the cones and cache the
nuts. So you find the rats cache and steal the nuts, making sure to
leave enough corn for a fair trade. No wonder why the rats decorate
their nests with cholla joints. I\'d love to see one in the act of
gathering the joints.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/10/2022 5:02 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/10/2022 02:52 AM, Don Y wrote:
On 6/9/2022 10:36 PM, rbowman wrote:

I was planning on attending UMinn as I had been doing some research with a
professor, there, and they\'d already accepted me as a sophomore (skip *two*
years!). I was actually putting my registration letter in the mailbox
when the acceptance letter from MIT arrived. At that point, the decision
was out of my hands -- any attempt at logical argument fell on deaf ears...

[It\'s too cold; it\'s too far; it\'s just as expensive as MIT when you
factor in travel costs (did you think I was going to *commute* from
here??); etc. Parents can be vain -- esp when they didn\'t have an
education]

RPI was a done deal but I visited Clarkson University. My father and I drove up
during the Christmas break and the last pavement was seen somewhere around Lake
George. The freshmen dorms were over a mile from the campus and a dog sled
would have come in handy. No thanks.

My dorm was literally across the street from the main (practical) entrance
to the building complex (almost all of the buildings are interconnected so
you can get to any of them without ever going outside -- save some of
the outliers like the magnet lab)

We used to stand on the roof and throw snowballs at cars who ran the
light (no intersection there... just an extremely WIDE crosswalk that
was NYC-busy with students crossing into the complex)

The guidance counselor was a Dartmouth alum and was pushing that but I wasn\'t
interested. In retrospect it might have been the better choice. I would have
learned BASIC rather than FORTRAN IV. Dartmouth was ahead of the game. RPI
considered the 360 as a glorified slide rule that you might use someday rather
than an end in itself.

My first exposure to machines was with an ASR-33 and 103 modem at
the previously mentioned science center. Interpreted BASIC on a Nova
(located in a movie theater at the base of the mountain... no idea why
the theater owner thought it good business to timeshare a minicomputer!)

Night classes was FORTRAN, flowchart template, punched cards, etc.
Somehow, that didn\'t seem unusual -- despite the prior/continuing
interactive use at the science center. As the machine was
right there, I guess I rationalized it as being bigger and, thus,
requiring that sort of usage.

shrug> OTOH, I *truly* enjoy my career -- but, largely because I\'ve made
it what *I* want and not left that decision up to employers. I have to
imagine I would similarly have \"adjusted it\" if I\'d gone into a different
field.

And, I had a sh*tload of fun at school! So, it wasn\'t all that bad...

The most worthwhile part was four semesters of Resnick and Halliday.

Ha! I knew it as Halliday and Resnick. Took me a moment to make
the connection.

But, I wasn\'t fond of physics as it seemed like a digression from
my primary courseware. One of those courses you had to take to
\"round out\" your education (instead of being directly pertinent)

A good
grounding in physics takes you a long way. I also picked up quite a bit of
experimental psychology -- neurophysiology and Skinner behaviorism, not the
\'how does that make you feel?\' crap. The rats wouldn\'t have answered anyway.
20 years later I would have gotten into cognitive science. I played with neural
networks in the \'80s but ultimately went in a different direction.

I never had any of the \"liberal arts\" type courses. We were required
to take 8 or 9 (?) elective courses (round out, etc.) but opted for
things like material science, american history, etc. I treated those
as sort of check-off requirements -- like PE in high school.

We have to vote on something nearly every year -- sometimes twice in
a year. I \"do my duty\" and make the effort to read up on whatever
they are proposing.

But, I *refuse* to sign petitions to PUT things on the ballot! \"You
get the required signatures and I promise I\'ll study the issue and cast
a vote when/if it\'s on the ballot\" (but, no, I\'m not going to sign
your petition just because I was unfortunate enough to have been noticed
as I climbed out of my vehicle...)

School levies come up about every six months and usually get shot down. Wait
another six months and try again. Sooner or later... The problem is the voters
are interested enough to ask exactly what they plan to do with the money and
the answer seldom has anything to do with improving the classroom experience.

Here, the trick is to identify which \"temporary sales tax increase\" is about to
expire and then try to convince the voters to repurpose it (for the next 10
years) on something else -- as it \"won\'t raise taxes\". So, lots of things
that would never pass if they required that same *increase* in sales tax
squeak through.

There is also a deliberate effort to find times to put it on the ballot
when folks aren\'t motivated to vote (e.g., off years)

Zilog ZBoxes were the bane of my existence. I actually developed a
small development system that we manufactured for our own internal
use. And, managed to convince employer to buying a low-end ICE
for me to use (previously, all our debugging was done via home-grown
multitasking monitors -- very effective but crude)

My warped sense of humor got me into trouble. The company was Orion Research
and a completely unrelated company named Orion made a 8048 ICE that I saw in a
magazine. At a meeting I made a quip about with a name like that it must be
good and they bought it. Interesting thing with a FORTH interface but not
exactly ready for prime time. iirc ZAX made one that worked.

ZRDOS was actually a well thought out OS, given the sort of boxes it
was deployed on (desktop processing). But, the hardware was incredibly frugal
(hard sectored 8\" floppies... I think the floppy disk controller was little
more than a shit register attached to the read/write head)

By contrast, the box I designed was considerably faster and a small fraction
of the ZBOX\'s size. And, of course, cheaper.

OTOH, we had to do a fare bit of massaging of our sources as assemblers
are notoriously not portable.

There\'s no glory in testing. So, the only way to encourage it is to
humiliate
writers of buggy code! But, this often has a long lag associated.

Too long... One programmer received his share of humiliation but he left about
a year ago. Now everything is his fault. To be fair he made design decisions
based on an ill-defined and moving target.

We had a guy who regularly RE-bugged the math library. Jeez, what\'s your
goal, here? A 0.3% increase in performance? Rearrange some of the conditional
jumps so the default action was a few T-states faster??

People really can get micro-focused on stuff that doesn\'t matter.

At the other end of the specturm, I saw a guy use an 8Kx8 EPROM as a logic
array -- that could be replaced with a NAND *gate* and an inverter (another
NAND gate). Really? You want to put all of that cost AND LABOR into
the product, just because you didn\'t want to think about the function
BEFORE you laid out the board?? <rolls eyes>

Like most projects when I mentioned we\'d all learned quite a bit and it was
time to start fresh using our collective experience I was treated as a leper
for a while.

One place I worked treated software \"modules\" as components -- and assigned
part numbers to each. The thinking being that a good portion of each new
design could quickly be built from previously written AND DEBUGGED
\"components\".

But, the idea never went far enough cuz there was always application
specific code (that had no part number to be called up). And, invariably,
the \"premade\" modules had to be tweaked in some way (cuz we were
really sensitive to cost, size and performance)

[I blush when I think of how many machine cycles I now throw away without
blinking an eye!]

Not much there besides the ski (ahem) \"resort\". Summer time its a great
place to escape the heat in the valley. But, there are no conveniences
up there (gas station, medical care, etc.) so \"a nice place to VISIT
but you wouldn\'t want to LIVE there!\"

No, if you want a little cooler locale going to Flag makes more sense.

Too far. Even Summerhaven is an ~hour trip up the mountain.

Most recently, the front yard was covered to a depth of ~30 inches in
lupines.
And, by covered, I mean you couldn\'t see the soil ANYWHERE!

This morning I noticed a mushroom growing in the lawn I\'d mowed a couple of
days ago. Not a good sign. June typically is high water for the river and the
report is rain all weekend.

First spattering of rain, tonight. I suspected we\'d see it, today, as we
topped 110F and that much energy in the atmosphere has to go somewhere!

Of course, now it\'s just humid, afterwards. But, nightfall keeps it
from being steamy.

As are pistachios. I think that\'s part of their appeal.
OTOH, I quickly meet my fill of pomegranates but will only
stop eating pistachios when my fingertips scream at me!

[One year, my folks bought me *48* pounds of Zenobia pistachios.
Finestkind! I shit red for weeks!]

https://www.thespruceeats.com/red-pistachios-overview-1807049

I wondered whatever happened to red pistachios. I haven\'t had any in the shell
for a long time but I recall taking several passes at the low hanging fruit
until all that were left were closed up as tight as a clam at low tide.

No longer red but I suspect still just as good as past experiences:

<https://www.myspicesage.com/collections/zenobia-nuts/products/zenobia-turkish-pistachios-5-pound-bags-1>

Sunflower seeds are another thing I never mastered. They grow a lot of
sunflowers around Jamestown ND and they\'re not all for export. I went to the
races there and everybody in the bleachers had bags full. They looked like
squirrels and the area around their feet looked like one of those stumps where
a squirrel has sat shelling pine cones.

Yeah, I never liked those nutmeats. I\'ll do pistachios, cashews and peanuts.
Almonds and pecans in baked goods or ice cream.

Walnuts? ick. Hazelnuts? double ick. Macademia? <frown>

[I use a lot of sliced almonds in SWMBO\'s biscotti. And, a fair bit of
walnuts in homemade \"walnut bark\". Brownies without walnuts just don\'t
taste correct -- despite my dislike for them]

OTOH, Italian chestnuts don\'t seem to register as \"nuts\", for me, and I\'ll
gladly take my fill of them (which is easy as they are so big and *rich*)

The most creative way to handle tedious tasks was explained to me by a Navajo.
Packrats love pinion nuts and will shell the cones and cache the nuts. So you
find the rats cache and steal the nuts, making sure to leave enough corn for a
fair trade. No wonder why the rats decorate their nests with cholla joints. I\'d
love to see one in the act of gathering the joints.

 

[rbowman]

On 06/10/2022 10:13 PM, Don Y wrote:

The most worthwhile part was four semesters of Resnick and Halliday.

Ha! I knew it as Halliday and Resnick. Took me a moment to make
the connection.

I think they switched the order when it became \'Fundamentals of
Physics\'. It was a two volume set just titled \'Physics\'. Robert Resnick
was a professor at RPI so he got to come first.

Here, the trick is to identify which \"temporary sales tax increase\" is
about to
expire and then try to convince the voters to repurpose it (for the next 10
years) on something else -- as it \"won\'t raise taxes\". So, lots of things
that would never pass if they required that same *increase* in sales tax
squeak through.

Montana does not have a general sales tax. One recent ballot had two
marijuana excise tax questions. Medical marijuana has a 4% excise tax
and recreational is 20%.

We had a guy who regularly RE-bugged the math library. Jeez, what\'s your
goal, here? A 0.3% increase in performance? Rearrange some of the
conditional
jumps so the default action was a few T-states faster??

People really can get micro-focused on stuff that doesn\'t matter.

My pet peeve is people who write complex code to handle any foreseeable
future requirements. That would be well and good but in many cases the
potential future uses never happened in the last 20 years.

One place I worked treated software \"modules\" as components -- and assigned
part numbers to each. The thinking being that a good portion of each new
design could quickly be built from previously written AND DEBUGGED
\"components\".

But, the idea never went far enough cuz there was always application
specific code (that had no part number to be called up). And, invariably,
the \"premade\" modules had to be tweaked in some way (cuz we were
really sensitive to cost, size and performance)

We have a rather important object id that was originally a short to save
all those bits. Going to an unsigned short bought a little more time.
Like the 32-bit time_t everyone is studiously ignoring bumping the size
means pain as all the structs change. Hey, it was a good idea in 1997...

[I blush when I think of how many machine cycles I now throw away without
blinking an eye!]

First spattering of rain, tonight. I suspected we\'d see it, today, as we
topped 110F and that much energy in the atmosphere has to go somewhere!

I think we may almost make it to 70 tomorrow. 110 is a bit much even if
it is a dry heat.

OTOH, Italian chestnuts don\'t seem to register as \"nuts\", for me, and I\'ll
gladly take my fill of them (which is easy as they are so big and *rich*)

Speaking about work, peeling chestnuts is right up there. I have fond
memories of NYC street vendors selling chestnuts they roasted over
repurposed 55 gallon drums. Somehow the ones I cook are never as good.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/10/2022 11:51 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/10/2022 10:13 PM, Don Y wrote:

Here, the trick is to identify which \"temporary sales tax increase\" is
about to
expire and then try to convince the voters to repurpose it (for the next 10
years) on something else -- as it \"won\'t raise taxes\". So, lots of things
that would never pass if they required that same *increase* in sales tax
squeak through.

Montana does not have a general sales tax. One recent ballot had two marijuana
excise tax questions. Medical marijuana has a 4% excise tax and recreational is
20%.

We have a state sales tax, county sales tax and city sales tax. I think
these total to something over 8% (if you are in the city+county+state).
It adds up.

E.g., we went looking at a chair, today. If we buy it at the store that
we visited (nearby), it will cost $100 more (due to the addition of the
2.5% city sales tax) than if we buy it at another branch of the same
store located just outside the city limits. Buy a car, and that $100
becomes $1000.

Of course, the item purchased isn\'t any different -- just WHERE it was
purchased.

We had a guy who regularly RE-bugged the math library. Jeez, what\'s your
goal, here? A 0.3% increase in performance? Rearrange some of the
conditional
jumps so the default action was a few T-states faster??

People really can get micro-focused on stuff that doesn\'t matter.

My pet peeve is people who write complex code to handle any foreseeable future
requirements. That would be well and good but in many cases the potential
future uses never happened in the last 20 years.

When I designed my latest RTOS, I looked at a variety of other (microkernel)
designs -- many of them from academia. It was obvious that most were
\"camels\" (designed by committee) and lacked a cohesive strategy. As if
they were collections of exceptions and not clean from the ground up.

I was most heavily influenced by Mach but it was completely bloated.
Function calls to do all sorts of things that seemed to be afterthoughts;
as if they were trying to fit a particular application (e.g., hosting
a UN*X) and kept finding blemishes in their original implementation
that needed to be patched. IPC/RPC had argument lists that made native
X APIs look simple!

At the other extreme, you had offerings that tried to do as little as possible
(e.g., L4) and fit their solution to specific platforms (yeah, that\'s always a
winning strategy -- NOT!). So, to make them useful, you ended up having to
build additional layers atop their primitives. (And you know there will be
folks who will want to short-circuit those layers and BREAK the stuff on top)

So, figure out what you *really* want and how to cleanly implement it
so you don\'t end up with these bloated kludges that require lots of
man pages for a developer to sort out what he wants to do and how the API
expects him to do it.

One place I worked treated software \"modules\" as components -- and assigned
part numbers to each. The thinking being that a good portion of each new
design could quickly be built from previously written AND DEBUGGED
\"components\".

But, the idea never went far enough cuz there was always application
specific code (that had no part number to be called up). And, invariably,
the \"premade\" modules had to be tweaked in some way (cuz we were
really sensitive to cost, size and performance)

We have a rather important object id that was originally a short to save all
those bits. Going to an unsigned short bought a little more time. Like the
32-bit time_t everyone is studiously ignoring bumping the size means pain as
all the structs change. Hey, it was a good idea in 1997...

I have a relational database that tracks ALL of the files that I have,
on all of the media (spinning rust, optical, etc.). It\'s a simple
schema:
ID bigserial
Name text
ContainerID big
I.e., an ID for every file, \"folder\" and volume. (additionally, all \"archive\"
file formats are treated as volumes -- so each file/folder/archive! within an
archive also gets an ID)

No question -- use \"bigs\" (longs).

OTOH, I store hashes of each *file* in a RELATE-d table. Using a GUID data
type is considerably more economical than trying to create a 16byte data type
(due to alignment issues in the DBMS). If you\'re going to be storing billions
of file handles, then an extra 8 bytes per handle adds up really quick!

[I blush when I think of how many machine cycles I now throw away without
blinking an eye!]

First spattering of rain, tonight. I suspected we\'d see it, today, as we
topped 110F and that much energy in the atmosphere has to go somewhere!

I think we may almost make it to 70 tomorrow. 110 is a bit much even if it is a
dry heat.

When folks make that comment, I reply:
\"Tell that to the turkey on Thanksgiving!\"

This is the worst time as humidity is climbing as heat is peaking.
Worst THI possible. Once monsoon sets in, the rains should lower
the temperature.

OTOH, Italian chestnuts don\'t seem to register as \"nuts\", for me, and I\'ll
gladly take my fill of them (which is easy as they are so big and *rich*)

Speaking about work, peeling chestnuts is right up there. I have fond memories
of NYC street vendors selling chestnuts they roasted over repurposed 55 gallon
drums. Somehow the ones I cook are never as good.

It\'s a matter of luck. I cut a cross (+) in each before firing.
Then, try to peel back those (now flared) corners around the incisions.
Sometimes the meat just falls out, nice and clean. Other times, the shell
sticks and has to be chipped away. Or, worse, that inner \"furry skin\"
clings to the meat and has to be scraped off.

But, as with pistachios (some of which open easily), part of the appeal
is the effort invested in eating them. Shelled chestnuts (or pistachios)
would be boring. While peanuts in the shell are similarly fun to eat,
shelled peanuts don\'t take away from that experience!

 

[rbowman]

On 06/11/2022 02:15 AM, Don Y wrote:

We have a state sales tax, county sales tax and city sales tax. I think
these total to something over 8% (if you are in the city+county+state).
It adds up.

E.g., we went looking at a chair, today. If we buy it at the store that
we visited (nearby), it will cost $100 more (due to the addition of the
2.5% city sales tax) than if we buy it at another branch of the same
store located just outside the city limits. Buy a car, and that $100
becomes $1000.

30 years ago except for the basics a trip to Spokane was required. Most
stores like REI wouldn\'t charge the sales tax if you produced a MT
license. Now we have the full selection of big box stores -- and ID and
WA license plates in the parking lots.

It\'s a 400 mile round trip on I90 but if you\'re shopping for $3000
refrigerators or similar items it can be a profitable day trip. Or at
least it was. Feeding $5 gas to the F150 SuperCrew can persuade you to
shop locally.

Whispering \'sales tax\' is political death although the marijuana excise
tax didn\'t have a problem passing. That says something about the
demographic. The majority of the voters were fine with legalizing
marijuana and equally fine with the stoners kicking into the state
coffers. Only fair since there is an excise tax on beer and wine. The
state runs the liquor stores so there isn\'t a direct excise tax just the
markup.

I was most heavily influenced by Mach but it was completely bloated.
Function calls to do all sorts of things that seemed to be afterthoughts;
as if they were trying to fit a particular application (e.g., hosting
a UN*X) and kept finding blemishes in their original implementation
that needed to be patched. IPC/RPC had argument lists that made native
X APIs look simple!

At the other extreme, you had offerings that tried to do as little as
possible
(e.g., L4) and fit their solution to specific platforms (yeah, that\'s
always a
winning strategy -- NOT!). So, to make them useful, you ended up having to
build additional layers atop their primitives. (And you know there will be
folks who will want to short-circuit those layers and BREAK the stuff on
top)

Liedtke might have gotten a little carried away when he took an ax to
Mach. I remember some of the commercial 8051 RTOS offerings. \'Er, did
you leave me any memory to use?\'

OTOH, I store hashes of each *file* in a RELATE-d table. Using a GUID data
type is considerably more economical than trying to create a 16byte data
type
(due to alignment issues in the DBMS). If you\'re going to be storing
billions
of file handles, then an extra 8 bytes per handle adds up really quick!

We have one programmer who is in love with hashes. He uses hashes
extensively to prevent the same data from being sent again. Very
efficient except when you want to send the same data.

This is the worst time as humidity is climbing as heat is peaking.
Worst THI possible. Once monsoon sets in, the rains should lower
the temperature.

If... There\'s that delicate balance between the gulf and the Pacific
that determines if and when.

I spent one winter, \'96 I think, when the balance worked out so it
rained most of November and December. At one point the washes were
running so high I could neither go up to Ajo on 85 or get very far on
86. No big deal for me. However there were people living out Tanque
Verde that couldn\'t go home because of those cute little places where
the wash that is never supposed to actually have water in it runs over
the road. That\'s the year when people learned what \'rio\' and \'hundred
year flood plain\' meant.

Spring was gorgeous. Even the seldom seen wild garlic Ajo is named for
bloomed.

It\'s a matter of luck. I cut a cross (+) in each before firing.
Then, try to peel back those (now flared) corners around the incisions.
Sometimes the meat just falls out, nice and clean. Other times, the shell
sticks and has to be chipped away. Or, worse, that inner \"furry skin\"
clings to the meat and has to be scraped off.

I get a high proportion of fur or even worse a meat that looks like
roquefort cheese. Some batches are excellent but I\'ve never found a way
to assess the quality. Still, they\'re worth the hassle.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/11/2022 11:22 AM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/11/2022 02:15 AM, Don Y wrote:

We have a state sales tax, county sales tax and city sales tax. I think
these total to something over 8% (if you are in the city+county+state).
It adds up.

E.g., we went looking at a chair, today. If we buy it at the store that
we visited (nearby), it will cost $100 more (due to the addition of the
2.5% city sales tax) than if we buy it at another branch of the same
store located just outside the city limits. Buy a car, and that $100
becomes $1000.

30 years ago except for the basics a trip to Spokane was required.

Ouch! I gripe when I have to drive across town to buy oriental
food supplies.

Most stores
like REI wouldn\'t charge the sales tax if you produced a MT license. Now we
have the full selection of big box stores -- and ID and WA license plates in
the parking lots.

I would buy on my business (resale) license. But, that meant more
record-keeping in case I ended up consuming the articles. And,
periodic \"Transaction Privilege Tax\" filings. (though you only
had to file with state/county so could save a few points on the city!)

It\'s a 400 mile round trip on I90 but if you\'re shopping for $3000
refrigerators or similar items it can be a profitable day trip. Or at least it
was. Feeding $5 gas to the F150 SuperCrew can persuade you to shop locally.

Stores located just outside the city limits tout the 2.5% savings.
Particularly effective for car dealers (though I suspect they just
fold that into the price, elsewhere).

Whispering \'sales tax\' is political death although the marijuana excise tax
didn\'t have a problem passing. That says something about the demographic. The
majority of the voters were fine with legalizing marijuana and equally fine
with the stoners kicking into the state coffers. Only fair since there is an
excise tax on beer and wine. The state runs the liquor stores so there isn\'t a
direct excise tax just the markup.

They tried to pass a $1B bond issue for roads. Failed (despite the roads
needing repair). OTOH, let\'s reappropriate 0.5% sales tax revenue -- for
the next decade -- and it passes. Tells you how much clout homeowners
have in avoiding property tax increases! (let the renters and winter
visitors foot the bill for the roads!)

I was most heavily influenced by Mach but it was completely bloated.
Function calls to do all sorts of things that seemed to be afterthoughts;
as if they were trying to fit a particular application (e.g., hosting
a UN*X) and kept finding blemishes in their original implementation
that needed to be patched. IPC/RPC had argument lists that made native
X APIs look simple!

At the other extreme, you had offerings that tried to do as little as
possible
(e.g., L4) and fit their solution to specific platforms (yeah, that\'s
always a
winning strategy -- NOT!). So, to make them useful, you ended up having to
build additional layers atop their primitives. (And you know there will be
folks who will want to short-circuit those layers and BREAK the stuff on
top)

Liedtke might have gotten a little carried away when he took an ax to Mach. I
remember some of the commercial 8051 RTOS offerings. \'Er, did you leave me any
memory to use?\'

Yup. OTOH, if you rolled your own -- with YOUR criteria in mind -- you
can get performance and economy (if you are willing to embrace certain
tradeoffs)

It\'s just silly to bang your head against the wall to save a few pennies,
nowadays -- esp when those savings likely come with added complexity
(\"trickiness\") that brings along latent bugs.

E.g., my current project relies on nodes communicating over ethernet.
So, there\'s a support level required in the hardware for the NIC,
connectors, PoE conditioning, *wiring* (labor!), etc. Once you\'ve
put that in the budget, the differences between a dog of a processor and
something \"plusher\" tend to fall away.

Likewise, Liedtke\'s complaints about IPC \"times\" is silly, in the
absolute -- Mach *today* would perform with times better than L4 *then*
(of course, L4 *now* would also perform better but if N usec was
\"intolerable\" back then, it\'s clearly not the case, now!)

And, Liedtke\'s design required hand tweeking each implementation
based on the targeted processor. Yeah, that\'s a fun thing to do...
folks AVOID using ASM for a reason!

Finally, Liedtke required you (me) to add layers atop his \"bare bones,
nothing more than IPC\" (what about RPC? resource accounting?
capabilities? timing services? deadline handling? etc.) so what
value to his \"solution\"? (why not skip it completely and just
do everything on bare iron?)

I took the opposite approach; imagine what HARDWARE features you
would want in a processor and emulate them in software (because
designing BIG processors is complicated and costly and obsolete
in a year or two!).

Once you have gobs of \"surplus\" horsepower, you can come up with more
interesting solutions to problems! E.g., my \"garage door controller\"
uses cameras to determine if anything is in the path of the door\'s
closure -- not just an \"electric eye\" that only looks at one point in
the door\'s travel. And, if anything is located in the path of the
door\'s *opening* (e.g., if I\'ve left a ladder up so I can work on the
GDO and SWMBO happens to pull into the driveway while I\'m not in the
garage to inhibit the opening). And, anything located on the *floor*
in the path of the incoming vehicle that could be damaged or could damage
the vehicle.

You can design an enable/inhibit implementation with an MC14500 (!)...
but, trying to process live video in real time would take a metric
buttload of them!

[And, when there is no activity in the garage, you\'d have all of that
surplus computing power just sitting idle -- wouldn\'t it be nice to be
able to EASILY use it for some other task ALREADY RUNNING ELSEWHERE?]

OTOH, I store hashes of each *file* in a RELATE-d table. Using a GUID data
type is considerably more economical than trying to create a 16byte data
type
(due to alignment issues in the DBMS). If you\'re going to be storing
billions
of file handles, then an extra 8 bytes per handle adds up really quick!

We have one programmer who is in love with hashes. He uses hashes extensively
to prevent the same data from being sent again. Very efficient except when you
want to send the same data.

In my case, it\'s a win for verifying a file\'s integrity (I have a daemon that
periodically reads every file\'s contents and compares to stored hash to
verify it is (1) accessible and (2) intact) as well as locating duplicate
copies of a file (that may have been corrupted). E.g., taxes/federal/2021
and personal/taxes/federal21 can be the exact same file -- potentially on
different volumes -- without you being consciously aware of that! Until
one gets lost (accidental erasure, volume failure) or corrupted.

This is the worst time as humidity is climbing as heat is peaking.
Worst THI possible. Once monsoon sets in, the rains should lower
the temperature.

If... There\'s that delicate balance between the gulf and the Pacific that
determines if and when.

I used to plan on July 4 as the practical start of Monsoon. In the past,
there was some obscure criteria (the FIRST of three consecutive days with DP
above 50?) which was *practically* useless (you don\'t know Monsoon has
started UNTIL the third day??). Now, they\'ve determined a fixed range of
dates, regardless of dewpoint (imagine defining Vernal Equinox based on
\"observed conditions\")

I spent one winter, \'96 I think, when the balance worked out so it rained most
of November and December. At one point the washes were running so high I could
neither go up to Ajo on 85 or get very far on 86. No big deal for me. However
there were people living out Tanque Verde that couldn\'t go home because of
those cute little places where the wash that is never supposed to actually have
water in it runs over the road. That\'s the year when people learned what \'rio\'
and \'hundred year flood plain\' meant.

Yeah, we purchased flood insurance one year, back then. The 100 year
flood plain comes JUST to the property line (we\'re about 200 yards from
TV wash)

Road flooding is pretty commonplace, even in \"normal\" rainfall.
And, the inevitable \"dumb motorist\" rescue when some idiot thought
6 inches of water was easy to traverse.

Spring was gorgeous. Even the seldom seen wild garlic Ajo is named for bloomed.

It\'s a matter of luck. I cut a cross (+) in each before firing.
Then, try to peel back those (now flared) corners around the incisions.
Sometimes the meat just falls out, nice and clean. Other times, the shell
sticks and has to be chipped away. Or, worse, that inner \"furry skin\"
clings to the meat and has to be scraped off.

I get a high proportion of fur or even worse a meat that looks like roquefort
cheese. Some batches are excellent but I\'ve never found a way to assess the
quality. Still, they\'re worth the hassle.

Yeah, \"pot luck\". You don\'t know until you actually are \"invested\" in it.

I used to drink a beer (/Augustiner Brau/) that was like that. Some bottles
would be smooth as milk shakes. Others would have a \"bite\" to them. Of
course, you\'d drink even the \"bad\" ones and then roll the dice, again,
hoping for a *good* one. This could quickly become a self-limiting process!

<grin>

 

[rbowman]

On 06/11/2022 06:51 PM, Don Y wrote:

There\'s a large produce area (two or three times what you\'d find at
a regular supermarket) full of the odd fruits and vegetables you\'d
expect at such a market. I don\'t think you can find *celery* :

I\'ve wondered about the source of the produce. Somewhere there must be
farmers specializing in a niche market. There is a local Hmong community
and the extended Moua family has taken over the farmer\'s market as far
as produce goes but there is nothing exotic. They may grow some for
their own consumption.

That\'s another lesson in adaptation. They ran a restaurant that was
mostly Thai, that being a safe bet. It was better than the other Thai
restaurant that was run by an actual Thai but so it goes.

They ran a food truck operation in parallel with the restaurant for a
few years, sticking to the Thai motif. The pad thai was excellent. Then
they went fully mobile and dumped the restaurant expanding the truck
fleet. The Thai emphasis slowly moved to teriyaki since there was a
vacuum in that market for fairs, concerts, and festivals. Still Asian
although a Japanese might have burned the truck down for cultural
appropriation.

And then... Dutch funnel cakes from Sua Moua\'s old family recipe.

Sort of like the folks coming from south of the border! Amusing to see
all of the \"Sonora\" plates in the local Costco parking lot.

Ajo had what may have been the last Sears catalog store and Radio Shack
collocated. Tony played guitar so there was guitar stuff too. A lot of
his business came from Sonoyta. They\'re a captive audience. It\'s on
Federal Hwy 2 but there\'s a whole lot of nothing on that road until you
get to San Luis south of Yuma. Going east you can sort of get to Nogales
eventually.

It is surprisingly easy to code under such an environment -- but, only if
you\'re writing in ASM.

What else is there? Okay, I\'m lazy and even when I messing around with
the Atmel chips on the Arduinos I use their version of C.

\"Ah! A byte! I can get 8 bools in that! And, if bool#1 is used in
routineX, which NEVER runs when routineY is active, then I can effectively
give it a second name for use in that \'other\' routine!\"

Yeah, we\'ve got a couple of places where flags are cunningly set in a
bitmap. Why stop at 8 when there a 32 perfectly good bits in an int? To
really ice the cake we have places where the same resource can be
referred to as the arithmetic value or the bit position:

foo 0x0001 1
bar 0x0010 2
baz 0x0100 3
bam 0x1000 4

Try explaining that to a support person. \'Well here bam is 8 but over
there it\'s 4 and if you want both foo and bam that\'s 9 except when it\'s 5.\'

When I interviewed for my present job one of the questions started
with \'assume unlimited memory\' and I thought \'Oh, hell...\'.

It is a VERY different mindset. You focus on what you want to do
instead of
always trying to tweek things for efficiency.

GUIs were another learning experience. Driving a custom LCD display is a
bit different than building a Motif blivit.

Network traffic has been a problem for us. It\'s gotten a lot better
but in the past sites with iffy networks would complain \'your software
is too slow\' and we would answer \'your network is a pos\'. Not exactly
a productive discussion. However VM\'s have also gotten more prevalent.
Sure, you can spin up 5 VMs on that server; now about that one NIC...

Yup. I have 4 NICs in my ESXi server just to ensure there\'s no network
bottleneck. Likewise on the SAN that hosts the VMDKs.

The bottlenecks keep moving. Back in the day of single core processors
I\'\'d remind people that no matter how slick it all looked it was one
processor running one instruction at a time. I\'ve had to change my rant
to \'sure it\'s got eight cores. That service is single threaded and only
runs on one of them\'.

I\'ve not found any problem coming up with \"work\" for them to do.
Detecting commercials in broadcast TV/radio programming, training
speech models based on recorded phone conversations, training
neural nets based on observations of users\' actions, etc.

I suspect the days of \"dumb\" devices (previously misnamed \"smart\"
devices) will quickly be drawing to a close. It\'s just too cheap
to buy resources, nowadays (and too many younguns are using
these \"framework\" environments that aren\'t particularly lean)

No, they\'re not. Angular will happily eat you out of house and home.
When I got a new machine with 16GB of ram I thought I was in tall
cotton. Then you try to open a link in Brave and it says \'sorry I don\'t
have enough memory to do that\' before the box crashes.

I\'m on the Windows Insider dev channel for 11 so I expect little
annoyances like that but one of the testers inadvertently went to the
production 11 and saw the same thing last week. A couple of people got
11 and we\'re not exactly sure how but I think it was an innocuous little
question during the windows update like \'do you want to destroy your
life\' that got clicked.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/11/2022 9:19 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/11/2022 06:51 PM, Don Y wrote:

There\'s a large produce area (two or three times what you\'d find at
a regular supermarket) full of the odd fruits and vegetables you\'d
expect at such a market. I don\'t think you can find *celery* :

I\'ve wondered about the source of the produce. Somewhere there must be farmers
specializing in a niche market. There is a local Hmong community and the
extended Moua family has taken over the farmer\'s market as far as produce goes
but there is nothing exotic. They may grow some for their own consumption.

I suspect you can buy damn near anything, if you are a produce buyer
(and willing to pay \"the going rate\"). We are increasingly seeing
more exotic items even in mainstream grocers -- dragon fruit, lychee,
kiwi, jicama, leeks, bok choy, coconuts, etc. There was an excellent
produce market in one of the Chicago suburbs that I used to frequent
as they seemed to have damn near anything you could want, and at any *time*
you wanted it (obviously drawing on suppliers from around the world
to compensate for different growing seasons). It\'s not just \"blueberries,
lettuce and celery\", anymore.

It is surprisingly easy to code under such an environment -- but, only if
you\'re writing in ASM.

What else is there? Okay, I\'m lazy and even when I messing around with the
Atmel chips on the Arduinos I use their version of C.

I strongly resist writing anything in ASM, nowadays. I\'m forced to,
of course, for some of the \"locore\" stuff, context save/restore, etc.
But, even ISRs get written in HLLs. It\'s just too much of a PITA
to port anything else!

I often have to resort to using fixed point (not integer) math in
places (e.g., Qm.n) when I can\'t count on having floating
point hardware available (and when a FP library is just too damn
slow). But, that\'s still tolerable. Esp if expressed in a HLL.

When I interviewed for my present job one of the questions started
with \'assume unlimited memory\' and I thought \'Oh, hell...\'.

It is a VERY different mindset. You focus on what you want to do
instead of
always trying to tweek things for efficiency.

GUIs were another learning experience. Driving a custom LCD display is a bit
different than building a Motif blivit.

IME, folks opt for OTS solutions when they are faced with \"traditional\" UIs
(vs. \"dedicated buttons\"). They seem intimidated by the notion of writing a
BLTer and building an image from component parts, glyphs, etc. Likewise,
the notion of an up-down keyboard confuses; seemingly unable to think in
terms of anything but \"keystrokes\".

I\'ve seen lots of designs that opted to be \"PC-based\" simply because
the developer was hoping to leverage the user interface hardware and API...
and, chose to ignore just how many hoops he\'d have to jump through to
make the code act in the way they *needed* it to act under that OS.

Network traffic has been a problem for us. It\'s gotten a lot better
but in the past sites with iffy networks would complain \'your software
is too slow\' and we would answer \'your network is a pos\'. Not exactly
a productive discussion. However VM\'s have also gotten more prevalent.
Sure, you can spin up 5 VMs on that server; now about that one NIC...

Yup. I have 4 NICs in my ESXi server just to ensure there\'s no network
bottleneck. Likewise on the SAN that hosts the VMDKs.

The bottlenecks keep moving.

Of course. But, they are effectively of the same type. Some resource
(memory, MIPS, time) that has to be shared and against which too many
\"leases\" have been assessed. As long as you don\'t stop thinking
about the details of what\'s under the hood, you can continue to make
intelligent design/usage choices.

My current design is \"open\" in much the same way that a personal computer
is open; I have no control over *what* a user will decide to add to it.
And, no control over how those things will behave.

So, I have a \"workload manager\" on each node that admits and ejects
processes based on its observations of how under/over-loaded the
node\'s resources happen to be. A developer who is piggish can
shoot himself in the foot by being too greedy; if the node is
overloaded and the workload manager can\'t find another node to
reduce some of the local needs, the \"fat boy\" can be unceremoniously
axed to enable other, less greedy processes to continue to run.

I.e., I can\'t force you to be benevolent/cooperative -- but I
can punish you if you aren\'t! :>

Back in the day of single core processors I\'\'d
remind people that no matter how slick it all looked it was one processor
running one instruction at a time. I\'ve had to change my rant to \'sure it\'s got
eight cores. That service is single threaded and only runs on one of them\'.

I\'ve not found any problem coming up with \"work\" for them to do.
Detecting commercials in broadcast TV/radio programming, training
speech models based on recorded phone conversations, training
neural nets based on observations of users\' actions, etc.

I suspect the days of \"dumb\" devices (previously misnamed \"smart\"
devices) will quickly be drawing to a close. It\'s just too cheap
to buy resources, nowadays (and too many younguns are using
these \"framework\" environments that aren\'t particularly lean)

No, they\'re not. Angular will happily eat you out of house and home. When I got
a new machine with 16GB of ram I thought I was in tall cotton. Then you try to
open a link in Brave and it says \'sorry I don\'t have enough memory to do that\'
before the box crashes.

But you don\'t tend to find those sorts of bloat in *appliances*. There\'s
a different mindset in terms of how the hardware can be used in that it
often can\'t be upgraded after the sale.

> I\'m on the Windows Insider dev channel for 11

My condolences. :> I *tolerate* using windows but draw the line at
developing under it! I much prefer a stationary target than one
that (seems to) change on a whim. (I avoid Linux for similar
reasons -- if it ain\'t broke, don\'t fix it!)

so I expect little annoyances
like that but one of the testers inadvertently went to the production 11 and
saw the same thing last week. A couple of people got 11 and we\'re not exactly
sure how but I think it was an innocuous little question during the windows
update like \'do you want to destroy your life\' that got clicked.

I don\'t understand how folks can NOT have control over the software
that they are exposed to -- whether it\'s on their PC (routine updates
of OS, apps, etc.) or in their appliances (cars, TVs, etc.).

I can much easier learn to live with a set of problems than I can
continually have to adapt to changes (which introduce yet-to-be-seen
problems)!

I particularly enjoy looking back at the detailed justifications
MS wrote for various UI/UX issues... and, how they \"suddenly\"
changed, over time. (\"And what makes you think THESE are the
final verdict?\")

 

[rbowman]

On 06/12/2022 04:04 AM, Don Y wrote:

I suspect you can buy damn near anything, if you are a produce buyer
(and willing to pay \"the going rate\"). We are increasingly seeing
more exotic items even in mainstream grocers -- dragon fruit, lychee,
kiwi, jicama, leeks, bok choy, coconuts, etc. There was an excellent
produce market in one of the Chicago suburbs that I used to frequent
as they seemed to have damn near anything you could want, and at any *time*
you wanted it (obviously drawing on suppliers from around the world
to compensate for different growing seasons). It\'s not just \"blueberries,
lettuce and celery\", anymore.

I wouldn\'t call coconuts exotic. I remember dueling with them as a kid
and the coconut usually won. A couple of the local markets have durians.
I knew what they were because a friend married a Thai woman whose family
had a durian plantation. It shares the honor with surströmming as being
a food banned on some public transportation but with durian it\'s
strictly the smell not the danger of the cans exploding.

If nothing else it keeps the supermarket checkers on their toes if the
stuff isn\'t barcoded. They have enough trouble telling a butternut from
a buttercup squash. The latter is being displaced by kabocha around here.

I\'m on the Windows Insider dev channel for 11

My condolences. :> I *tolerate* using windows but draw the line at
developing under it! I much prefer a stationary target than one
that (seems to) change on a whim. (I avoid Linux for similar
reasons -- if it ain\'t broke, don\'t fix it!)

Market forces and all that. The original target was AIX on RS6000
systems. Y2K helped end that. The IBM patches required fairly recent
hardware. Many sites looked at the cost of upgrading the IBM boxes,
rolled the dice, and went to Windows. We used Linux internally for
development but only two sites used it and that was only for the servers.

MS possibly made the same mistake as IBM with Windows 11 and its
hardware requirements. So far I see no compelling reason to go to 11
particularly if it means buying new hardware.

I don\'t understand how folks can NOT have control over the software
that they are exposed to -- whether it\'s on their PC (routine updates
of OS, apps, etc.) or in their appliances (cars, TVs, etc.).

The showstopper for my personal laptop is the requirement to log on to
your Microsoft account to set up 11. When I set up the new 10 laptop it
was not even connected to the net, and I run as a local user. It whines
every now and then about not being connected to an account but that can
be ignored.

I particularly enjoy looking back at the detailed justifications
MS wrote for various UI/UX issues... and, how they \"suddenly\"
changed, over time. (\"And what makes you think THESE are the
final verdict?\")

A lot of developers are gun shy. UWP has been widely ignored. MS would
love to get rid of WPF and WinForms but it\'s not happening. They could
shoot Silverlight but that wasn\'t all that popular.

MS has Apple envy but never developed the fanatical fan base that will
jump through any hoop.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/12/2022 11:28 AM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/12/2022 04:04 AM, Don Y wrote:

I suspect you can buy damn near anything, if you are a produce buyer
(and willing to pay \"the going rate\"). We are increasingly seeing
more exotic items even in mainstream grocers -- dragon fruit, lychee,
kiwi, jicama, leeks, bok choy, coconuts, etc. There was an excellent
produce market in one of the Chicago suburbs that I used to frequent
as they seemed to have damn near anything you could want, and at any *time*
you wanted it (obviously drawing on suppliers from around the world
to compensate for different growing seasons). It\'s not just \"blueberries,
lettuce and celery\", anymore.

I wouldn\'t call coconuts exotic. I remember dueling with them as a kid and the
coconut usually won. A couple of the local markets have durians. I knew what
they were because a friend married a Thai woman whose family had a durian
plantation. It shares the honor with surströmming as being a food banned on
some public transportation but with durian it\'s strictly the smell not the
danger of the cans exploding.

It depends on what the local population (customer base) wants to buy.
Growing up, never any demand for coconuts, plantains, dragon fruit,
kiwi, etc. You saw generic fruits and vegetables (tomatoes, cukes,
various melons, turnips, radishes, romaine, etc.) nothing like arugula
(but endive!) or napa cabbage or jicama or...

Similarly, you wouldn\'t find Gouda but would find various Romanos,
some Swiss and maybe \"American\". And, far more cheeses that were
aged long enough to be used for grating. Hot dogs/sausage were
made by local suppliers -- but ne\'er a taco in sight!

If nothing else it keeps the supermarket checkers on their toes if the stuff
isn\'t barcoded. They have enough trouble telling a butternut from a buttercup
squash. The latter is being displaced by kabocha around here.

I\'m on the Windows Insider dev channel for 11

My condolences. :> I *tolerate* using windows but draw the line at
developing under it! I much prefer a stationary target than one
that (seems to) change on a whim. (I avoid Linux for similar
reasons -- if it ain\'t broke, don\'t fix it!)

Market forces and all that. The original target was AIX on RS6000 systems. Y2K
helped end that. The IBM patches required fairly recent hardware. Many sites
looked at the cost of upgrading the IBM boxes, rolled the dice, and went to
Windows. We used Linux internally for development but only two sites used it
and that was only for the servers.

Vendors want a platform that:
- their customers have adopted or will adopt
- that will continue to evolve to address new technologies and hardware
- that won\'t \"go away\" (GEM, anyone?)

*Users* want products that don\'t significantly change (!)

[SWMBO still runs Office 2K as she has no desire to rebuild all
of her Access DBs just because MS wanted to make changes to it!]

[[I won\'t move beyond W7 as I\'ve far too many tools that I *know*
run on it (after losing some that only ran on XP) and I\'ve no
desire to repurchase the capabilities that I already have, nor any
interest in learning yet another way to do the same thing!]]

[[[I develop SW under NetBSD largely because I can maintain the
OS and tools. No compiler extensions/non-portable pragmas -- my
code has to build under at least three different ecosystems
(x86, SPARC, ARM) and I\'m not keen on getting in bed with just
a single toolchain as I can\'t assume folks using my codebase
will be keen on that!]]]

MS possibly made the same mistake as IBM with Windows 11 and its hardware
requirements. So far I see no compelling reason to go to 11 particularly if it
means buying new hardware.

I\'ve not seen any need (as a user) to move forward on MS\'s OS
offerings. I don\'t develop for that platform so don\'t care if
the platform evolves beyond me. And, I don\'t see any compelling
*features* that it offers as a user environment nor any compelling
APPs that are only hosted on newer versions of the OS

[If I did, I would likely just set up a small VM and not bother
moving/upgrading any of my other tools... too much inertia!]

My workstations are older but still reasonably competent (six of
them: dual CPU, 6-core Xeons, 144G RAM, 6T rust -- there\'s just
THAT much inertia to overcome!) and I *know* the machines spend
more time twiddling their thumbs waiting for my meatware to decide
what to do next!

[Also, growing up with dog slow development systems means my
work habits are inherently multitasking -- don\'t sit waiting
for a machine to finish a task, move on to some other task!]

I don\'t understand how folks can NOT have control over the software
that they are exposed to -- whether it\'s on their PC (routine updates
of OS, apps, etc.) or in their appliances (cars, TVs, etc.).

The showstopper for my personal laptop is the requirement to log on to your
Microsoft account to set up 11. When I set up the new 10 laptop it was not even
connected to the net, and I run as a local user. It whines every now and then
about not being connected to an account but that can be ignored.

My Windows machines are all HP/Dell so SLIC with a \"genuine HP/Dell install
DVD\" gets me past the need to activate licenses, on-line. Download the
updates of interest. Run machines air-gapped and you can largely ignore
future updates.

Other machines run NetBSD and don\'t have the need for \"activation\" (and
the updates I pursue are usually major release updates, nothing incremental)
E.g., I keep a little netbook to which I attach an external USB drive and
periodically rsync my \"distfiles\" archive. Then, take the netbook and the
external drive and put them back in a desk drawer. What need to update
that \"appliance\"? :>

I opted not to upgrade my Adobe suite (to \"CC\") for similar reasons.
What do I *gain* from that to justify the cost, time and *risk*?

I particularly enjoy looking back at the detailed justifications
MS wrote for various UI/UX issues... and, how they \"suddenly\"
changed, over time. (\"And what makes you think THESE are the
final verdict?\")

A lot of developers are gun shy. UWP has been widely ignored. MS would love to
get rid of WPF and WinForms but it\'s not happening. They could shoot
Silverlight but that wasn\'t all that popular.

MS has Apple envy but never developed the fanatical fan base that will jump
through any hoop.

Windows is a Chevy; if it still runs and gets you from point A to point B,
then there\'s no real NEED to replace it.

Of course, all software vendors (and product vendors, in general) WANT you
to think you need the latest and greatest. Otherwise, you might be happy
with what you\'ve *already* purchased! :-/

Sunday lunch: oriental meal. Finestkind!

 

[rbowman]

On 06/12/2022 01:20 PM, Don Y wrote:

Similarly, you wouldn\'t find Gouda but would find various Romanos,
some Swiss and maybe \"American\". And, far more cheeses that were
aged long enough to be used for grating. Hot dogs/sausage were
made by local suppliers -- but ne\'er a taco in sight!

Tacos were some sort of Califoria in-joke like Knotts Berry Farm that I
didn\'t get as a kid. For that matter pizza was something you got from
shady looking taverns run by gangsters. We did have a variety of cheeses
and I was adventuresome although my go-around with Sap Sago (Schabziger)
was puzzling. Gjetost was much more satisfying. I still get that from
time to time.

https://wnyt.com/news/hazmat-situation-tobins-first-prize-demolition-colonie-albany-county/6418399/

Tobin\'s was the major hot dog supplier although there were several
smaller stores that made a variety of wursts. Fortunately the hazmat
situation was only ammonia from the cooling apparatus and not a trove of
heavy metals mixed in with the hot dogs.

There was a bar/eatery in Kitterey ME that catered to the shipyard. We
were working on refinishing a wooden hulled yawl at a boatyard also in
Kittery and went there for lunch one day. \'Taco\' was on the chalkboard
and seemed a little expensive but I figured why not. The taco came in a
bowl with the shell in the bottom layered with the lettuce and meat
sauce. It was like they\'d read a recipe but had never seen a taco and
played it by ear.

Not surprising for Maine. My lead tech asked me one day what you did wit
those shiny black things that were starting to appear in the vegetable
section. This was an intelligent woman in her 30\'s with a family that
had never encountered an eggplant.

I did eventually make it to Knotts Berry Farm in the \'90s. It was
entertaining and not as disappointing as when I made it to Haight
Ashbury 20 years too late.

 

[Don Y]

On 6/12/2022 6:12 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 06/12/2022 01:20 PM, Don Y wrote:
Similarly, you wouldn\'t find Gouda but would find various Romanos,
some Swiss and maybe \"American\". And, far more cheeses that were
aged long enough to be used for grating. Hot dogs/sausage were
made by local suppliers -- but ne\'er a taco in sight!

Tacos were some sort of Califoria in-joke like Knotts Berry Farm that I didn\'t
get as a kid.

I never heard the term growing up -- the \"communities\" were all composed
of european descendants so lots of \"ethnic\" foodstuffs in THAT sense.
I probably knew 30 different pasta shapes (and the advantages of each)
and at least that many different pasta *dishes*, sauce styles, etc.
Galobki, pierogi, potato pancakes, etc.

My favorite pasta shapes being cavatelli and fusilli col buco. The
former I make, from time to time. The latter are a technological
wonder, to me!

For that matter pizza was something you got from shady looking
taverns run by gangsters.

Pizza was either NY style (purchased) or \"italian bakery style\"
(the latter being far superior and considerably less greasy).

We did have a variety of cheeses and I was
adventuresome although my go-around with Sap Sago (Schabziger) was puzzling.
Gjetost was much more satisfying. I still get that from time to time.

One thing I noticed, later in life, was that many dishes that we made with
ricotta were, instead, made with meat, in The West. This was a delightful
revelation as ricotta falls in the \"I don\'t like cheese\" category!

My first homemade raviolis were meat made and I had three helpings.
(By contrast, my folks had to buy meat ones \"special\" for me
growing up as I wouldn\'t eat the cheese ones that they all ate)

Likewise, my first \"western lasagna\" was made grinding up a *roast*
to get the ground meat for the filling -- with just a nominal
amount of ricotta as window dressing.

Tobin\'s was the major hot dog supplier although there were several smaller
stores that made a variety of wursts. Fortunately the hazmat situation was only
ammonia from the cooling apparatus and not a trove of heavy metals mixed in
with the hot dogs.

Martin Rosol\'s was the local vendor for most \"sausage-like\" items. You could
pick up \"fresh\" and eat, that evening.

There was a bar/eatery in Kitterey ME that catered to the shipyard. We were
working on refinishing a wooden hulled yawl at a boatyard also in Kittery and
went there for lunch one day. \'Taco\' was on the chalkboard and seemed a little
expensive but I figured why not. The taco came in a bowl with the shell in the
bottom layered with the lettuce and meat sauce. It was like they\'d read a
recipe but had never seen a taco and played it by ear.

Too funny.

Not surprising for Maine. My lead tech asked me one day what you did wit those
shiny black things that were starting to appear in the vegetable section. This
was an intelligent woman in her 30\'s with a family that had never encountered
an eggplant.

For me, the OhMiGosh moments have been encountering \"produce\" in its natural
state. E.g., you KNOW citrus grows on trees but seeing them is a different
story. And, more exotic varieties even moreso (e.g., the sanguinellos are
actually *red* skinned, at maturity)

\"Gee, that\'s garlic!\" \"Wow, is that how artichokes grow?\" (if you\'ve ever
seen one in bloom, you\'d lament the fact that it was harvested before that
time)

We grow sage and rosemary (but not to harvest) and the dogs would come in
the house *stinking* of those scents (a little bit goes a long way!). You
had to wonder if it was deliberate, on their part!

Pineapple is a surprise when you see it \"native\". As are cashews.
Pomegranates are interesting to watch mature as you can see the vestigial
flower in it\'s \"ass\".

I did eventually make it to Knotts Berry Farm in the \'90s. It was entertaining
and not as disappointing as when I made it to Haight Ashbury 20 years too late.

That;s about the timeframe I visited KBF. \"Oh, a DisneyLand wannabe!\"
I\'d been to DisneyWorld some decades earlier. And, of course,
Riverside Park, Lake Compounce, Catskill Game Farm, etc.

Didn\'t make it to CA until the early 80\'s (traveling for work). Recall
standing in the back of a pickup -- in the rain -- driving to San Rafael
(Guide Dogs for the Blind) singing GD songs (no room in the cab as the
two passengers were blind and we obviously needed a sighted driver!)