It was excellent! Especially since I didn't have to travel to see it. It's the third eclipse I've seen but the first totality. I just wish I had borrowed, bought or rented a better camera. My phone was able to record the event but the professional pictures are much better...except they do not have my family or my house in them. I set up a video camera pointing at the sky through some trees, keeping the sun close but out of view. I thought I would capture the whole 2 hour process then play it back speeded up. Unfortunately, the camera shut itself off when the totality occurred. That corrupted the file so I wound up with nothing. I'll be better equipped for the next one. Expect me in Calgary on August 22, 2044.

I've been against non-print advertising since cable television became widespread. Prior to that, television was free (to use) because advertising paid for it. At least here in North America. Today, you pay your cable or satellite provider who pays the content providers who still collect the advertising revenues. The consumer now pays way more and still has to watch advertising. Now the streaming services are going to start advertising. If you pay for premium service, you will get fewer ads. Advertising must work or advertisers would not continue to advertise. Print advertising has never bothered me because you can turn the page without losing the train of thought in the article you are reading.

My range hood used an interior venting fan. When I started the kitchen renovation, the range hood came out. The only difference I noticed in interior pollution was that the smoke alarm closest to the range does not trip as often. This may be because the air disperses throughout the kitchen now, instead of along the ceiling. When the reno is complete I will be venting through the roof. Not ideal, but side walls are too far from the range location. I live in a rural setting where natural gas is not available and propane costs to much. If natural gas was available I would bring it in for heating (Canadian winters get cold) but keep my range. I really like its induction cooktop and convection oven.

To give a vague indication of my age and to show how far I need to go. For a long time my learning curve was like this / but I dropped out for a couple of years. Now my learning curve is like |.

I am impressed. I'm just trying to find a paradigm I can use to approach this technology. It's easier to adopt if I'm coming from somewhere familiar. --- I just spent the last two hours playing with ChatGPT and I'm even more impressed. I am building a personal-use application for wine making. In that 2 hours I got further along than I had in two days of conventional programing. It didn't take long to learn that the secret is telling it what you want rather than how to do it. The most important thing is to be able to describe your requirements in unambiguous terms. That's something we've been trying to get our users to do as long as programming has been around. The role of dev may evolve to that of translator but will take on much more importance because bad translation may affect hundreds of thousands of lines generated code. I'm not a convert. At least not yet. But for small projects I see the potential and will continue to study the catechism.

I haven't used ChatGPT, yet, but could there be an analogy between the current AI tools and high level languages when they were first introduced? The language of the high level language had to be learned before you could generate correct code. Even with the correct language the compiler often generates machine code that an assembler programmer would reject. Unfortunately the language of AI is not as clearly defined as, say, COBOL. Devs are teaching it the language. In five years it may have evolved to the point where you can describe and get exactly the code you need.

tl;dr A bad cable on a parallel dot matrix printer caused a still unexplained error that cost two days of frustration to disagnose and correct. Years ago I spent a weekend helping a client install new accounting software and uploading their financial data from the old system. On Sunday we printed all their financial statements and compared them to the reports they had printed on Friday. Everything was good. Two weeks later they gave me a call. The balance on one of their monthly reports was out by 10 cents. The balance was supposed to be $15,260.00 and it appeared that way on screen. The printed balance showed $15,260.10, I could not find anything wrong with the software or the data. We hooked the printer up to another computer that ran the same software and it still produced the wrong printed total. We printed several other documents with no problem. We printed other statements (where the balance was not .00) and they worked fine. That led to another couple of hours down a dead-end rabbit hole. Okay. So computers are good, software is good, data is good, printer is good (except for the extra dime). What is the problem? After two days of head scratching I finally decided to swap out the printer cable. The discrepant dime disappeared. I have no idea how a bad parallel cable between the PC and the dot matrix printer could cause such and issue.

My experience was similar to your first paragraph. Small company (10 employees, < $10M revenue), raises only if you asked and could justify it. No COLA. No pension plan. Limited health care. There were annual bonuses that helped at Christmas time but were totally unpredictable (generally between 1% and 3% of your salary). If you discussed your bonus with other employees you could be terminated. Executive bonuses were much higher, of course. A manager might get 10% to 15%. Executives 25% to 40%. Overtime was uncompensated. Requirements and specifications for software projects were defined by sales people. They were the only ones allowed to talk to the customers until the software went into support. Project estimates were reduced by non-technical executives to meet the company's cash flow requirements. Better to apologize for not delivering that lose the contract. I was well beyond the age where I could expect to find employment elsewhere. When I was much younger I appreciated that companies in technical fields preferred youth over experience. Now I can't understand why. With today's high turnover rates, experience should count for more. I eventually retired. I miss the work and most of my former co-workers but I am much happier now. Turns out there is more to life than programming. Although, this Arduino and Pi stuff is kind of interesting...

A lifetime ago I used Javelin. It was a spreadsheet that had an inherent understanding of date and time. A simple script let me select a project task then start, stop and pause a timer. At the end of the billing cycle for a client I ran another script that generated an invoice. This barely scratched the surface of what Javelin could do but it worked well for me. Some time during the early 80's my drive ate one of the 5.25 inch floppies and I was not able to find a replacement. I switched to using recipe cards. That was okay except for the transcription needed at the end of the billing cycle.

Last Friday and Saturday Canada experienced one of the downsides of capitalistic monopolies. The Rogers Communications network was upgraded early Friday morning and immediately crashed. It was not resored until Saturday. Rogers is the sole provider of Interac service in Canada. All POS ATMs instantly became unusable. Customers had to use cash (who carries that anymore) or credit to make purchases. Or walk away leaving the goods on the counter. Since the ATM network was down, you had to go to the bank in person to get cash. One pundit suggested that many Millennials (and later generations) would not realize that service was still available. Pearson International airport, the largest in the country, uses Rogers exclusively. Staff and passengers lost their Internet connections. Incoming foreign passengers could not access their on-line documents. They were denied entry until they could find alternative means (remember fax?) of producing them. Some passengers were held on their planes to avoid overcrowding the airport. No one has an estimate of the damage yet but it is expected to be extremely high. I'm glad that I still had enough room on my credit card for my weekend groceries, beer and wine.