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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

A long one, folks. You can read and be bored, or you can skip - doesn’t matter to me. I’m not ranting this time, nothing to rant about; all my ranting was expended last week. With this post, I start on a topic because something I read “just now” (ha, an hour or two ago) stirred some memories from my childhood. It later progresses into misc thoughts of my adult life... ====== I’m reading a … [Read more...]

Hertz car rental bankruptcy. How can a company with “only” $9 billion in annual revenue even think it will ever be able to pay off ~$17 billion in debt? Their debt load is almost twice as much as their annual revenue. Either way, even before the virus situation, the expected average annual earnings (profit) of a Fortune 500 company is around 8-10 percent of annual revenue. So, let’s round that … [Read more...]

“Reopening everything and pretending like the pandemic is all over is like when you're watching a Friday the 13th movie and you think it's safe for the campers to come out of hiding after Jason is "killed", and then he jumps back out of the lake with a butcher knife. Stay safe. We're not out of the woods yet.” … [Read more...]

Vigilante/cold blooded murderer/redneck: (paraphrasing) “well, I thought he had a gun, he reached into his pants”. The young man in question, was out jogging, and had shorts on. Here are my thoughts: When I wear shorts to go to the store, i usually carry my cell phone and my wallet in my short’s pockets, having just those two items tend to weigh down the shorts at times, causing me to have to … [Read more...]

What is the world (i.e., these United States) coming to? A small business owner runs an ice cream parlor, and re-opens his business with social distancing rules for ordering, etc., and within the first day (or evening), people coming into the place are so rude to his staff that he has to then close it up again. It’s just ice cream, folks. You can live without … [Read more...]