I did a stint at Ameriprise in the early 2k's. They let most of us go and farmed out the jobs to IBM when American Express divested us. We used to be a division called "American Express Financial Advisors" (or AEFA internally - which was formed from the remnants of IDS Advisors for you Minnesotans familiar with the IDS tower) but when they spun us off into Ameriprise all of IT was axed. Who IBM got to do all the tech work, I don't know. Maybe it was Infosys or maybe they came later. It was all foreign contractors though.

Oh man, that's peanuts compared to my job. Our Cicso IP Phone VOICEMAIL has to be a 7 digit or longer password. And they block repeating numbers, obvious guesses like 867-5309 (or your own phone number). They block patterns like pressing the keypad diagonally or all the corners twice or whatever. AND you have to change it every 30 days. You better believe everyone keeps a post-it with their voicemail password right on their phone. It's a self-defeating system it's so complex.

Good for him, he hit all the buzzword checkboxes. K street will have a lobbying job lined up for him when he's ready to golden parachute out of there.

Hmmm, if DivX is to Xvid, then CurrentC is CtnerruC? Doesn't have the same ring.

According to court rulings, you actually own the first 83 feet. The most famous case of this kind comes from 1945 when a chicken farmer named Thomas Lee Causby sued the US government for flying approximately 83 feet above his property, the noise of which caused a bunch of Causby’s chicken’s to accidentally kill themselves by running into walls. Causby won his case and the courts agreed that although a property owner wasn’t entitled to own all of the air above their land, they were entitled to enough so that planes flying overhead wouldn’t kill their chickens.

As the FAA considers 500 feet and below non-navigational space, it has been assumed that you own that too, but that part has never been tried in court, and you can't count on it.

Mod up! If only I still had some points left!

Mmmmm. Nootropic smoothie. I've got to re-read some Mondo 2000 sometime.

My $3 generic eBay FTDI clone USB->Serial cable (that I bought to program my Baofeng radio via Chirp) came with no drivers and Windows pulled down the real FTDI driver. Over the summer, it only worked sporadically. Usually didn't work. Swapping out the cable for a $12 legit cable from Trendnet solved all issues. It isn't just that these chinese places are making a clone, it's that they are making a crappy sort-of compatible clone and passing it off as the real thing, and directing you to use the FTDI drivers. It totally makes FTDI look bad. I didn't find out until after researching with some guys from chirp that my cable was a knock off. I thought I was buying a supported chipset. Might not be legal or ethical, but I'm all for anything that stops these crappy chinese cloners in their tracks. I spent way too much time and hassle on a problem they caused.

Putin and the quest for the holy grail? I'd watch that SyFy special.

There's the tokenization too. Instead of using your card number, you get a one-time use number for that transaction from your bank to process that transaction.

Didn't even need the paint scraper if you had a kitchen spatula :-)

I even did the dual deck CD to SSD upgrade with the special tray on my '09 mini.

Agreed, of the linked articles... one is a blog entry from 2012 predicting the end of the app store without really anything concrete to say - just opinions, and one is from a developer who acknowledges that Apple gave them personalized help above and beyond the call of duty, and admitted that their app was a "worst case scenario" for sandboxing, and they are shipping outside of the MAS due to time constraints rather than solve the remaining sandboxing issues. Both are hardly damning of the app store.

I still hack around in Pascal from time to time. Kyan Pascal produces good results on my Apple IIe when I'm in the mood, and I dink around on System 7 from time to time on my old Quadra and all the libraries and toolkits for the Mac from back then are better supported in Pascal.

I don't think it has any practical use nowadays, even with Lazarus out there, but it's still fun if you're into the vintage scene.

These are the only ads I still see. I can't seem to get rid of them on youtube. And let me tell you, they are crazy off the mark. I think I've finally done enough random clicking on stuff that they can't possibly pigeon hole me. I routinely get this ad with a gay couple (white guy and asian guy) drawing hearts in a steamy bathroom before I can click skip (something about AIDS testing), the others I routinely get are a crazy panic truther ad about flouride in our drinking water, an ad about something for kids learning (some baby einstein knockoff product), and some country music band.

So apparently I'm some crazy chemtrail believin', flouride drinking, country boy, worried about AIDS with my asian partner, while shopping for baby goods.

Yep, the random clicky's have Google thoroughly confused. Proud moment :-)

Heck no. As someone forced to use Moodle by college it is hands down the crappiest e-learning platform I've ever had to deal with. Even worse than blackboard. All those other MOOC's do pretty well, and I happen to love the interface Udemy provides, but for heaven's sakes don't torture people with Moodle. The *ONLY* thing it has going for itself is that it's free.