I learned a week ago that Becky K., the mother of Elyse passed away last Saturday, after a battle with cancer.Some of you know about Elyse…she is my daughter; Becky and I were work colleagues in the early ‘80s; after working closely together for two yrs, I accepted a job offer to relocate (from Detroit) to Los Angeles. About a week or two before I left Detroit, Becky and I spent a night together. … [Read more...]
Statement of beliefs and values – election 2024
July 26, 2024 By
You gotta know by now (after 8-9 yrs since the 2015-2016 presidential campaign trail), that I’m a liberal; I’m a democrat; I support gay rights, and same sex marriage; I support a women’s right to choose; I support women who have to make an agonizing decision, and that decision is theirs alone to make; I do not ‘get’ people who feel the need to stick their nose into someone else’s pregnancy. I … [Read more...]
Documentation and procrastination at work
July 10, 2024 By
Close to exactly two months ago (May 13th), I asked “Luetta” at work for copies of three specific MS-Word documents that I needed to update for a project I’ve been working on for last few months. One is called a user’s guide - and it’s a couple of hundred pages, a shorter one is called the programmer’s guide - a much smaller doc [Sorry, I didn’t write down the exact page counts]. The third one … [Read more...]
Working with a colleague, trying to determine why “Read-only” checkbox is checked on MS-Windows file.
July 4, 2024 By
Just another short blurb tonight (lol). Just another fantastic day at work today; a colleague had issues with a program he had developed, and QA (quality assurance) was testing; he was informed by QA either late last week or this past Monday that ‘something was wrong’, and I’ve been helping him try to determine the root cause. The irony here is he’s a seasoned cobol programmer (and I’m not), … [Read more...]
The question was “what exactly was/is a mainframe?”
April 3, 2024 By
So - in my opinion, “back in the day” - BEFORE windows/Linux/unix/intel/dell (from 1950s thru, let’s say: 1985-1990 - before Unix/windows NT servers came into existence), and take this (at first) with a grain of salt: A mainframe was not ‘commodity’ hardware; each computer manufacturer (before AND during the advent of the seven dwarfs / BUNCH), had their own proprietary hardware AND OS software. … [Read more...]
Modrl Railroading – structure building summary for 2023
January 31, 2024 By
Since late last summer I’ve been beating myself up with regard to my model railroading ‘structure building’ hobby. It all had to do with me finally getting motivated last yr around this time (Feb/2023), getting back to my hobby table building my “kits” (I hadn’t done anything project-wise during all of 2021 nor 2022). So, it was a big deal to getting back and start making things again. Then, … [Read more...]
Programming in Assembler and/or using JCL
October 27, 2023 By
So I’ve joined a few Mainframe computer FB groups “recently” (last few weeks), and since the market was 80-90% IBM, most of the posters to the group are former “users/programmers” of the IBM System 360/370, etc. platform. They are dozens of gobble-gook acronyms which seem to be some sort of commands, and they then talk about programming in Assembler Language and they “seemed” to love it, … [Read more...]
Model Railroading – kit building – LaserKutModels
June 7, 2023 By
It’s pretty tough starting a mom & pop business out of your garage these days. Decades ago, you could put an ad into the various hobby related mags, announcing your new model railroad kit manufacturing company, and hopefully, via these magazine ads, as well as by word of mouth, your mom & pop business just might get enough customers to make your start-up a successful one, like Art’s Bar … [Read more...]
Me – master paper clutterer
April 23, 2023 By
Hopefully this will be a short one. ===== No, it’s definitely turned into a long blog post. You will, and should, just skip to another post or whatever from your FB ‘feed’. This is long, and, very boring. You’ve been warned. ===== I’m a clutterer. I hoard misc papers (no, not newspapers - who reads physical newspapers there days?). Just papers, not going to explain any more but some of … [Read more...]
Model Railroading – recent thoughts – motivation
March 29, 2023 By
So…as some of you have noticed, I’ve been sharing my recent builds (after almost two yrs of being in a funk and not having any motivation to work at my project table). And, I’ve been getting the “likes” as well as some nice comments. But, the following comment this morning truly surprised me: “I am never going to be a great scale modeler but your work is inspiring.” This following (after the … [Read more...]
