In one Solaris environment there was a problem of searching through a list of ~ 100,000 names for each of ~ 1000 names. Perl let me do it in 3.5 minutes which beat the old method that took hours. Yes, the old method was bad for this operation but it' what they had.

One book I read on Perl showed three different ways to do the same thing. It then said they all compile the same so write however works for you. So most of my Perl looks like shell script or basic with lots of comments. It's easy to support that way. I'm dating myself when I say I also use Pascal mostly because it's easy to read my old code. With the Borland compilers it's really fast code. With it I could get deep into Microsoft's OS and do things that I read couldn't be done like change the ID on floppy disks or hard disks. I could even add multiple IDs to disks though only one would show. Fun times messing with the low level stuff.

I would like to see my metal roof barn painted with this stuff. The south side of the roof is 16 by 44. That would probably power a lot of my house, at least the coffee maker.

Important systems should have redundant backup/restore options.

Where I worked (now retired) as sysadmin, every system had two boot disks. If a system was patched and failed on reboot for any reason, the system was booted off the unpatched second disk. Now if the second disk failed because lightning struck the system we would boot to the unpatched hot spare system which also had duel boot disks. We also had multiple levels of remote backup to restore every system.

I don't know at what level Delta made their decisions on backups but I am sure they didn't treat their critical systems as important as my former employer did.

The PBHs were saving money by going to the cloud. I could have saved money in the server room too. All I would have to do is skip the backups and redundant servers like the cloud servers were doing. That would have cut my server room costs in half. Considering how often we lost a server no one would have noticed for a year or so.

The Brits also make a great marmalade. The American stuff is over sweet and under flavored. Covid seems to have stopped the imports and wife and I are disappointed with everything else we've tried so far.

A lot of the circles around here are so small that the semi trucks can't go around the circle without their trailers spending the whole time riding in the center block. For car drivers the decisions come too fast to make safe choices for someone not used to the flow of traffic. For me, I don't care if I bang up my car a little in these tight circles. I will just pull into traffic and hope. On the other hand my wife is a very cautious driver and finds these small circles frightening especially the 6 lane intersecting with a 4 lane road with a small circle and no signage.

I've had firefox lock up with so much cpu usage so that there wasn't enough cpu to let me move the mouse to get to a terminal and kill it. A power kill and reboot was all that I could do.

Connections by James Burke. I remember it was on the Learning channel but wouldn't bet money on that. The DVD set was available at one time from TLC.

The last company I worked for had us IT guys scattered around the country so we had weekly conference calls with the boss. Every now and then they had a "jump" call where the bosses boss hosted the converence call and the boss wasn't supposed to be there. That way anyone could complain without the boss knowing who said what. My trusting nature was on strike that day so I suggested that one company change that was mentioned meant that I should start looking for a new job.

Not one minute after the call ends my boss who "wasn't listening in" called me to reassure me that my job was secure. Since I was the only one of our team in the entire state, I was reasonably certain that was aready the case.

I quietly let some of the team who I trusted know that the anonymous calls were anything but.

I could have left then but I was 60+ years old and desided to just ride it out until retirement. They re-orged shortly after and I ended up with a new boss so it worked out for me anyway.

In Detroit my new business was burgled and vandilized. When I called the Detroit police they said they don't send their people out for those type of crimes. If I wanted, I could go into the station and fill out a report for insurance claims.

Another time I called about a man who colapsed in the street. When I checked he wasn't breathing and had no heart beat. I called 911 and told them there was a dead man laying in the middle of the street. She asked what I wanted them to do. I was thinking: you're the professionals and you don't know what to do about a dead body.

No one showed up. No police, no ambulance, no EMS, no one at all. His friends loaded the body in a car an left. No one ever came by for any kind of statement or investigation.

So what "retarded country" do I live in where the police don't respond to theft? That would be Detroit, USA.

I would guess this just a play for more money so a bunch of these guys can sit around surfing the internet pretending to look for offensive comments and get paid for it. Gotta check those porn sites for bad behaviour now.

So does that mean Scientology isn't a real religion also? After all Hubbard started it as a bet and not because he believed it was real. Of course I can't prove that Hubbard started it as a joke/bet but neither can I prove Pastafarianism was started as anything other than a serious religion. Since Scientology has its little alien in a space ship circling Neptune controlling the religion it sounds just about the same as the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The company I worked for 20 years ago bought some expensive software and the people who came out to install it couldn't make it install. A call to their own tech support was no help. Boss called me up to look at the problem. When I looked at their install batch file I saw the problem was the install script assumed the hard disk was at C:. When you have more than 2 floppies in the system the first hard disk is at E:. The system had three floppies. I modified the install script while the two company reps watched and the install when fine. A forum having other people with a similar hardware setup might have been a help.

I cut and hand split a couple of cords of wood every year. There are some woods such as poplar (in the video) or willow that split really easy. There are other woods that can be cracked open at the top by three inches and still need a sledge hammer to split the two halves apart. Without seeing how it works on the tough woods I can't tell how useful this new axe would be.