See Griff's response; it says a lot. A friend of mine has about 4 or 5 Ender-3 printers, and he recommended an Ender-5 Pro, so that is what we got. I have not ventured into 3D designing my own items; I find pre-made models I like and use them. My wife makes soap and personal care products like lip balm; so I found a screw-thread dragon egg mold and printed it at about 2 inches high. She put the lip balm in it and sold it at a ComiCon/DragonCon type craft fair - they went over well. We 3D printed a LOT of small dragons, gnomes and fairies to give away to the kids; they were quite happy. I like to play table top games, so I 3D printed a dice tower for myself. When we got married 20 years ago, my wife and I took the same size wedding ring; her hands have swollen and she can't where her ring. She asked me to 3D print one. I found a model and printed rings from 19 mm to 25 mm diameter; she picked one, and I picked one. I have been wearing it and the gold band for months now. The material we use is PLA and we like to try different color schemes; either single color, bi-color or rainbow (color shifts through the spool). We have it set up in our living room on an old desk (heavy) with a table top screwed down into the desk (raised edges to stop items from rolling off and bigger than the desk). There is NO fan or other breeze near it; I can watch it print throughout the day. And, yes.. it is a lot of fun.

Saw the 6502 reference in the newsletter, so, got to here. In 1980, my high school got 3 Commodore PET computers - 16K each. Commodore had a deal - buy 2 get one, so a number of teachers or parents pooled their many and bought them. A friend's dad bought one, so we had ready access to it. Not sure how we got access to the programming manual, but we did.. and taught ourselves. Jim Butterfield wrote an assembly program that we got a copy of and the assembly code list, so we taught ourselves 6502 assembler as well. The following year, the school got 12 more computers, so access to more people. Still, we simply taught ourselves. Programs I remember writing: a two-person shooting games with cowboys, solitaire Hearts, a Star Trek type kill the aliens game, and, in assembly, fill the screen with random characters and execute a bubble sort to sort the screen characters.

Very good... enjoyed it!

Nope... I'm saying the number of registered users doesn't necessarily reflect the number of CURRENT users. It is the polling booths responsibility to adjust the record of eligible voters, merely to ensure the voting process is a level playing field for all.

5 out of 13,467,580 that have ever logged on and registered. Have the voter registration polls been purged of those that are no longer alive?

Is that vote turnout higher than it was for Brexit?

Thank you; I can see where it would be beneficial. I've largely spent my career in the local world and largely avoiding web development. Now, if there was some way to compile it... but that is a whole other barrel of fish.

Having never heard of a 'minifer', I followed the link that you said worked; OK, I understand what they are now. The next question is: does the page/site load noticeably faster when using the 'minifer'ed version? If so, what percent increase was seen?

Even if it is a public holiday, on any holiday, I tend to check CP daily... even on the weekend. While I may not be able to solve the CCC, it is a fixture that others enjoy. So... post it anyway; if no one gets it, repost it on Monday. For me, tomorrow and Monday are work days; my next holiday is the end of May.

Is that how long the baristas are in training?

In a moment of clarity, I recalled the answer: they are applying the Maunder Minimum. 8)

It was in the paper mill, up a set of stairs, behind the paper machine; the felt on the machine is washed down with kerosene, so a lot of residual kerosene in the air (ants didn't like it). As I understand it (I've been gone from there since late 2011), a new computer room was finally built in the admin building, so that is no longer an issue. But, yes, the lack of planning on locations is sometimes... disturbing.

TheGreatAndPowerfulOz wrote:

Better to refactor the code and move the different cases into different functions.

I absolutely agree with this... The worst If/Then block I ever had to write was in Fortran for some equipment routing in an automated factory. The 'If' statement was 23 lines - and that is just the 'If' portion, not the code executed if the statement was true. I had a block of comments preceding it explaining what it was doing and why with a warning that 'if you break it, you get to maintain it'. But, if was an if/then/else block to determine an action; it wasn't multiple nested blocks within each other.

The whole thought of processing the exception first upon returning from a call is so counter intuitive to the way we think; we process good/expected results first, THEN proceed to look at the outliers. When I read the code, I think the developer is expecting an error so prepares to handle it first. It all goes back to the maxim: write clean code; there is nothing wrong with indentation or else statements. Also, write comments on what the process is doing and why, don't assume the code is so well written its intuitively obvious what the desired result is.

A few weeks back, a friend stopped at the grocery store on his way home. While inside, a rainstorm blew through. When he left the store, the temperature had dropped by 19 degrees F.

When I worked at a paper mill, some of the servers were very low on the rack and some server (VAX/VMS) were sitting on the floor in the computer room. So, yes, there was some 'stooping' to physically reach the nodes. One night while on call, a VMS node crashed; I had to call the person who generally maintained them for verbal assistance (he had bypass-surgery and couldn't climb stairs, so was physically unable to help). He directed me in powering down the 'spare' node, physically swapping the hard drives and restarting the 'spare' node as the desired node. All of that work was done while sitting on the computer room floor. So... yes, those can be valid requirements for employment.

A_Griffin wrote:

everything is the dog's fault

only if the dog is male.

My toaster was a gift from my mother-in-law 12 years ago (our daughter's first Christmas). It has plates on the inside to leave a pattern of Winnie the Pooh on one piece and Tigger on the other. I have no idea what the brand is. But... it has been in almost daily use for over 12 years and is still going strong. The toaster will not leave the bread down if the toaster is unplugged (my wife regularly unplugs it to use the outlet), which means I don't put the bread in, push it down and come back later to find it has not starting toasting. As for the crumb tray? Like most tools, regular cleaning required. Would you expect to run an automobile and never service it?

Not necessarily insane, just immoral.

I are a dinosaur and I, too, have avoided PowerShell. Having said that, I do find myself using it. Over time, I've seen scripting done in various tools: VBScript, PERL, etc... but PowerShell seems to be the emerging tool. Last week, I had to find a method to get the amount of memory installed on a computer and store that value; I COULD have done it in VBScript with WMI, but PowerShell was available and not that difficult to use. I Googles the various pieces: get the installed memory, how to store the value in the system I'm using... and put them together into a single entity... and it worked the first time I ran it.