This sounds a bit like the old Microsoft Courier. I really wanted one of those at the time but it never came to life

I had forgotten about my copy of the Veronica Mars movie until I saw this article. That triggered a search of old email and sure enough, it was distributed through Flixster/ultraviolet. Some more digging around and recovering accounts and I got it transferred to Vudu/MoviesAnywhere This is why I buy movies I care about on disc. Streaming movies can disappear at any moment.

My first job out of grad school in 1981 was with the University of Wisconsin clinical cancer center. We built a DB to track clinical trial data. I was 1/2 the programming staff and we wrote the code in MUMPS running on a special purpose OS that ran on a Data General minicomputer. The base of our code was a DB-like program written by the VA and distributed all over. The OS was the truly terrible part. The disk was formatted into 1K blocks and these blocks were the closest things to files that it had. The blocks had names and were organized alphabetically. Programs that didn't fit in 1K had to be broken into multiple blocks, executed in a chain alphabetically. Mumps had some OK features like good string pattern matching and the array like structures were handy. Each array was the equivalent to a DB table and each row a tuple. No query language though. To effectively use the ridiculous 1K block structure, all reserved words were 1 character and so where all variable names. A legal statement was I I W W So, as others have said, just writable but un-readable. I gave a talk at a MUMPS conference and was one of very few trained programmers there. Most were medical professionals who did some coding. Some of the people who had worked on this project before me had gone off to form Epic Systems. I wouldn't want to code in it again, but it was a good job.

I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado. We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days. Good luck to everybody there.

My pacemaker should be replaced in 2-3 years, what should I ask my cardiologist about the new one to address security concerns? Are there vendors, models or features I should request?

I was there and the whole day was unpleasant due to the insane crowds drawn by a chance to see Shatner and company. However, whenever the PA announced the ex-Governor Rod was signing, you could hear thousands of people booing. I saw people taking pictures, but almost none going up to see him. I doubt he made much money.

I have taught intro programming classes in VB, C, C++, Java, C# and Pascal. VB is clumsy and it is awkward to say some things. Besides, the .Net version looks too much like C#. C# and Java are interchangable in this sense. Java wins by portability. But you have to jump a bit into the deep end. I have to explain OO programming almost before discussing variables. Pascal has too many types. C and C++ are great languages but it's a bit like teaching intro to wood carving using chainsaws. I have only looked a little at Python but have a hard time getting by the use of whitespace as syntax. So I suggest JavaScript (or ECMAScript). Everybody has the development toolset already on their computer. The console in FireFox is handy for error discovery. Working in a web page is more fun than most IDEs. The basic syntax is the same as C, C++, Java and C# so the skills carry over. Pretty weak on OO programming, though. Good discussion.