I do not know of anyone who is happy with Temu. Various acquaintances say what they ordered did not match the photo and description. They also say they have difficulty with returns and refunds. Just rumors, through. I do not have any experience with the site.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

Thank you. :rose: I installed Thunderbird and it works great!!! I found messages I had lost track of. It allowed me to clean up my accounts on the mail server. :) :) :) I love the local folders for archiving messages, sorted any way I choose!

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

When they replaced Windows Mail with Outlook, I quickly ditched Outlook for Thunderbird.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

For me, it was mostly assembler - first for the PDP-8, then the IBM 360 and PDP-11, and lastly, the Motorola 6800 and Intel 8xx8 processors. Of course, in those days I specialized in operating systems, device drivers, system utilities, and hardware diagnostics.

Most of my peers used COBOL or FORTRAN. :-D

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

I use them also. I have not had any problems so far. I use them mostly for email, but I also have a starter website on the service.

I use Thunderbird as my email client; my wife uses their web email client. I am not sure what interface my children use.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

Sixty years ago, my parents raised German Shepherds for sale. They are by nature very loving dogs and very protective dogs. They do need training and challenges, however. They tend to be very curious and will easily cause problems when their curiosity gets them into mischief. With proper training, they make excellent service dogs for the disabled. They can make excellent herd dogs, as long as there is a shepherd to direct them. Left alone with a herd, they get bored and, in their curiosity, they tend to stray too far from the herd to properly protect it from coyotes and other predators. This last point is why we do not use them with our herd. We use Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees crosses. They bond with the herd and stay with it. When a predator appears, one or two stay with the herd while the rest chase the predator. They are team fighters and instinctively face the predator from two different directions. When the predator attacks one, the other attacks the predator from behind. When the predator turns to face their attacker, the first one attacks, again from behind. If the predator does not turn and run, I am left to clean up the carcass, if I find it. More often, I find scattered bones months after the altercation.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” - John Wooden

Yes. While working in Waco maintaining a large electronic health record code base (This was years before the American Recovery Act mandated it.), Micro$oft Windows was doing a major upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 7. Since the code base was built starting in the 1990s and long before I joined the company, there was a fair number of Windows API changes that had to be worked in, and this is the killer, a huge amount of duplicate code and reliance on the side-effects of various subroutine and function calls.

The "common code" was a huge DLL that took forever to load and it contained code that was only occasionally used.

My boss, who learned to program in the Navy over twenty years earlier, was one of the programmers who originally built the program. While he was a good programmer, he moved into management and his skills became very rusty and out of date. He could not see why the existing code had to be changed.

This left me with the dilemma: update it on my own time without telling him or try to patch the code and pray that nothing breaks irrevocably.

I came up with a plan:

1. I dropped the duplicate subroutines and functions, then recoded the calls to use the ones that remained. I hunted down all of the dependencies upon side effects and removed them. Many were functions that returned a single value of True or False, but modified other data. These I changed to return a data record with the data changes. I released this update to the huge common code DLL.
2. I split the common code DLL into a three level structure with all the non-UI Windows API calls in the bottom layer. Depreciated API calls, of which there were many, were replaced with the current ones. The code to set up for API calls, such as letter generation, print formatting, data base record construction and whatnot in the middle layer as multiple DLLs. The top layer contained the business logic, with separate DLLs for Mental Behavioral Health, Mental Retardation Developmental Disabilities, insurance processing, billing, and client demographics. I released this revised common code as an update. I received praise from the clinicians because the whole program loaded much faster. My boss provided no feedback.
3. I split the main UI code removing rarely used paths to separately called programs. The main UI code handled all of the windows that everyone used. The separate programs handled billing and report generation, behavioral health unique logic, and developmental disabilities unique

[sarcasm] Nothing like a little greed....

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

My thought is that it boils down to economics. Your ISP is, for obvious reasons in the current economy, reluctant to raise the price of their core services. However, the cost of doing business is rising and they need to at least break even, even though their investors would prefer to see a profit. Letting advertisers to allow them to solicit their customers is an easy revenue stream, allowing them to hold the line on prices.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

No. With any mechanical system, failures happen. For safety, there needs to be a human available to adjust for the failure. According to the Smithsonian Channel's Air Disasters series, there are many times when the instruments, sensors, and automation indicate normal operation, but the pilot's seat-of-the-pants instincts as an aviator tell a different tale: something is wrong. This instinct or feeling has made the difference between life and a fatal crash.

During an emergency, if the airplane needs to land now!, the automation will look for an airport. A human pilot can, and has, considered other options, including highways, river levees, beaches, a farmer's field, and even the Hudson River. In each of those successful cases, no one was killed, there were no serious injuries, and the airplane was repaired and back in service within a month or two.

On longer flights, it is imperative that the task of piloting the airplane be switched of between at least two pilots to relieve strain, stress, fatigue, in some cases boredom, and to allow the pilot to stretch, move, and take care of other human functions.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

Yes.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

This act is a staple of small circuses everywhere. Chimpanzees like to play and show off; the biggest problem is getting them off of the motorcycle after their performance is over. :laugh: Food usually works: but as my wife and I saw at Vidbel's Circus in the late 1980s, the chimp took off down the midway on the motorcycle. :laugh: We did not see how they caught him.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

In my experience in over fifty years, I have observed that the type of person who earns a BBA or an MBA and aims to rise into corporate management often becomes a problem rather than becoming an asset. Many have either an ego problem or a hubris problem or both. The Business Administration coursework leans heavily on case studies and simple-case problems. They usually start in sales, marketing, or finance. They have little-to-no practical experience in the complexity of running a real enterprise. Their best skill is selling themselves to human resources and middle management -- employees who are desperate for someone to fix the mess left behind by the last idiot they hired and who just left to screw up another company. They think they know what they are doing, but in reality, they are starting way out of their depth.

A few of these BBA and MBA idiots will survive and even thrive, but most will move on to another company, leaving a significant amount of damage to the company they are leaving.

Why does upper management allow this to happen? Because upper management consists of those that thrived and learned. Often, they have the eternal optomism of a salesman or a marketeer.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

Here on our ranch, we havae about a dozen hens (unfortunately, a coyote got our rooster. Then the dogs got the coyote.) We have lots of free breakfast eggs and make a little money selling the extra eggs.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

It opened for me, no messages. What browser are you using??

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

My choices are:

• Critical Error - A red letter X
• Warning - A yellow triangle with an exclamation point (!)
• A green checkmark for "all OK"
• A "men working" icon for busy, but no report
• A blue question mark for no status whatsoever

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

As I remember it, C was the new kid on the block when I got out of college, designed and developed for the new UNIX operating system being promulgated by the Bell Telephone Company. Unlike FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/1, each line of code compiled into only a few assembler instructions. But it had it's shortcomings. Because of the lack of strong typing and need to use explicit pointers, it was also an error prone language. Programmers had to really understand the hardware and how to use pointers effectively.

Advances in language theory and the advent of visual interfaces, such as Vermont Views, Windows, and OS/2, C was enhanced with strong typing, creating C++, and the Windows Forms visual UI libraries were added by Microsoft, creating C#.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

Maintenance programmers are not likely to be replaced by AI in the next decade. I am given to believe that some organizations are still using IBM 7040 code emulated on ancient IBM 370s. Other organizations are emulating IBM 370 COBOL code on newer machines.

Much of this legacy code is so convoluted and patched, that only a live person can understand it and fix it. The documentation of the original functionality is often lost and, if available, usually has not been updated to reflect the bug fixes, enhancements, and other code changes.

What AI may do, however, is quickly generate new replacement code for the entire package. It will have difficulties in places where the original programmers relied upon a side effect, rather than straight-line code, to accomplish something. Many of these side effects are not well documented.

AI will excel at regression testing.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

Honestly, I never thought about printing directly on disks. When I cut a disk, I print on a label sheet, including the title and a brief list of contents, then apply the label to the disk afterward.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock

I am a big fan of Epson EcoTank ink jet printers. I currently have an ET-2850, which I use almost daily. No ink cartridges. You connect an ink bottle for each of the four inks and fill each reservoir; no muss, no fuss. Replacement bottles are inexpensive: you can get them at Office Max, Office Depot, Staples, and occasionally, Wal-Mart.

__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock