As I get older, I find it painful to deal with stairs. If I'm more than halfway up or down the first flight of stairs, any lights I left on are just going to stay on until the next time I'm up or down there again. I will not be making a special trip just to turn off a light that might cost me all of 2 cents in the meantime. I've been thinking about upgrading to Alexa-enabled switches and outlets, but so far laziness and cheapness are winning.

That's an issue for my successor to deal with - I'm retiring in no more than 3 years from now, so I'll just keep going with VB.Net. The programs I'm dealing with were here before I was hired, and I have no doubt that they'll still be around after I'm gone, so I don't feel a pressing need to change anything.

Is it better to have the situation I ran into? I had a package (64 GB of RAM) going from Dallas TX to Cincinnati OH. I got a lot of tracking data - I got to watch it go to most of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest states before finally heading to the Midwest (St. Louis, MO), then it took a side trip to Philadelphia before heading back to the St. Louis again. The final steps in the delivery to Cincinnati were from Indianapolis, IN to Columbus, OH, then to Louisville, KY (presumably passing through Cincinnati on the way!), back to Indianapolis, back to Columbus and then finally to Cincinnati and final delivery. The package was fine, but it took 2 weeks and close to 4,000 miles to get here. I did feel like I got my money's worth for the shipping cost, though!

My reading of the license is that 6 people can use it, and each of those 6 people can be logged in on up to 5 devices simultaneously. I know that my family license for it is normally logged in on anywhere from 10 to 12 devices across 5 different users.

I actually went in to the office for the third time in the last two years, because we had a severe storm come through Tuesday night and the power at home was out. We're supposed to be returning to the office one day a week in September, and the office is open now for anyone who either wants to go in or has to go in. Yesterday, there were a total of six other people in the office, spread over two floors of the building - the office manager who has to be there to keep the office open, two people who told me that they actually want to be in the office and feel lost trying to work from home and three who had to be there because of a focus group they were running, one of whom actually prefers being in the office. Pre-covid, there would have been two hundred fifty or so people in the office. My personal plan is going to be to just keep working from home; by the time they notice I'm not going in, I'm figuring that my wife will be eligible for Medicare and if they try to force the issue, I'll just retire instead. It makes absolutely no sense for me to spend an hour commuting each way to sit in a wide open noisy cubicle farm instead of sitting in my nice quiet office at home when I have better hardware, faster internet access and larger monitors at home than in the office. Over 95% of my interactions are with people who aren't in the same city as I am; roughly 45% are with folks who aren't even on the same continent.

Unfortunately I don't get quiet morning hours for work these days. My work laptop is set up to show who's online, and there's no way I've found yet to prevent that aside from unplugging the network cable. Therefore my quiet morning hours simply don't involve anything for work that can't be done offline. I get a lot of reading done, mostly Stuart Woods, Randy Wayne White, John Sandford and Janet Evanovich these days.

Unfortunately I don't get quiet morning hours for work these days. My work laptop is set up to show who's online, and there's no way I've found yet to prevent that aside from unplugging the network cable. Therefore my quiet morning hours simply don't involve anything for work that can't be done offline. I get a lot of reading done, mostly Stuart Woods, Randy Wayne White, John Sandford and Janet Evanovich these days.

I've also used GreenShot for years - mostly to copy a region on the screen to paste into Teams chats, and occasionally to get save an image I want to load into Gimp for modification. You can change GreenShot's hotkeys, which is useful when Microsoft decides they want whatever choice you made for their use instead.

Cincinnati OH - WinHost 6.571 secs, SmarterASP 0.883 secs Through our corporate VPN (somewhere in Texas) WinHost 4.603 secs, SmarterASP 3.468 secs (but our VPN is slow at everything)

In 77 and 78 I was working as a 2nd shift computer operator for a small company while taking programming classes during the day, and I spent many an hour converting the Star Trek game from David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games to RPG so I could play it in the unused partition on the IBM System/3 we had there.

Is someone lying here? Yes, both sides are lying. The cloud platforms aren't as secure as they'd like you to believe, and the companies selling products to secure it aren't securing it as much as they claim either.

If you're the cause, please set up a budget for an annual jacket purchase! My creaky old knees prefer warmer temperatures, and my new EV appears to hate the cold even more than my knees do - I lose 50-60 miles of range when the temperature drops below 35F.

Looking at my 2022 Bolt EUV which will be returned in October 2024 when the lease ends; I typically buy but figured that a) technology for EVs is changing rapidly right now and b) there was too much I didn't know about EVs to make a long term decision on one. Now I have a better grasp on what I want in my next EV, which is likely to be the last vehicle I'll ever buy. The Bolt replaced a 20 year old F250, that wasn't being used as a truck much anyway, and an 11 year old Smart ForTwo, which needed too much work at Mercedes dealer rates to be worth keeping.

And those who can't teach become department heads/deans/administrators...

I recently leased a Chevrolet Bolt EUV; one of the nice things about it is that I can check the status of the battery, etc., remotely. As of September, they're dropping that access from the website; it will only be available via an app. That app is particularly obnoxious; about every 3rd or 4th time I try to use it, it just hangs on startup. So far, the only fix I've found is to delete the app and reinstall it. In addition, to be prepared for any trip beyond the base range of the car, I've had to add 7(!) apps to my phone - MyChevrolet to talk to the car, ABetterRoutePlanner (ABRP) to plan the route including charging stops, PlugShare to check to make sure that the charging stops ABRP picked actually exist and are working, plus Blink, ChargePoint, Electrify America and EVgo so that I can actually use the chargers. Apparently very few of the chargers are set up to allow you to swipe a credit card; they all want you to use their app instead. I really enjoy driving the car, but I'm less than thrilled with having to depend on a smartphone to be able to do much beyond local trips. At least the car has wireless charging capability that works with my phone, and Android Auto to let me mirror the phone display on the car's much larger screen.

This is one of my major complaints with the local big & tall clothing stores - why do they put the smaller sizes up high, and the larger ones down low? Why are the XL shirts on the top shelf while the 4XLT shirts are on the shelf that's 3 inches above the floor? I complained to them about it for years (decades, even), but now I usually skip the local shopping altogether and order online.

Given some of my coworkers, broccoli voting just might be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

Why not go to the source, and park outside the Apple store?

I've got a Surface Pro 7 (16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) and it's fine for carrying around. One nice thing about it is there's a micro SD slot behind the kickstand, so you can add additional removable storage space (maybe to hold movies?). I occasionally use mine to slice STL files for my 3D printer, when I'm away from my desktop. I got the Typecover, Arc mouse, pen and recently got the Surface headphones (version 1) from Woot for about $100. They're the best headphones I've ever had; I had to get another pair of them for my wife so I could get my pair back. The Typecover's OK for light typing, but nothing more than that. The pen's probably not worth it unless you're doing a lot of drawing; mine spends 99.999% of it's life sitting idle. With the power supply and all the accessories added to the bag I carry it around in, it's still lighter to lug around than the Dell Latitude laptop I've got from work.

When I started, the first project I was on used a Honeywell 200, a Four Phase mini, a Perkin-Elmer (later Interdata) 8/32 and an IBM 370/158, with languages including Assembler (3 different flavors), Cobol, Fortran, PL/I and RPG, plus MVS JCL. Somewhere around here I still have the textbooks and manuals for the IBM side of things; the others have all thankfully vanished into the mists of time.