It varies but today it's mid-50s doo-wop...Frankie Lymon, Jarmels, Moonglows, Cadillacs, some of the best street corner harmony ever recorded. Fast rhythm Speedo to wake you up, followed by slow ballad Sincerely to mellow out. And those lyrics...Rama-lama-ding-dong, sh-boom sh-boom Other days it's jump bands (Louis Jordan) or swing (Benny, Artie and Glenn). And every few months I take in an opera (Wagner and Bizet).

Sad to see the Okie From Muskogee is gone. Local radio station played a lot of his songs yesterday. The appeal? It's blue collar, working class, no pretense (I'm excluding the pop star crossovers here). Haggard wrote songs that related to everyday life: "We don't wear our hair long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San Francisco do" Course I was one of those long haired types back then but I still liked the song.

What I do is pull some of the requirements out of the ad as quotes and then explain how well I fit. It puts the right terms in for resume filters and for the HR manager without a clue as to what the terms mean it makes life easier.

Congratulations, you've learned a new skill...Real-World Programming. Sorta like Real-Time Programming, except someone else wrote all the code, nothing ever works, so it doesn't matter if the tasks finish within the allotted time slot. Any Real-World programmer knows that return 97 means error 96 with one argument, what's the problem? And yes, that print routine should have been one base class with 23 levels of inheritance piled on, sloppy programming there, sure to bring down your cyclomatic complexity score. Set some realistic goals and all will be well. Myself, I'm working on getting that cyclomatic complexity score to overflow and crash Visual Studio.

If it's any comfort you are not alone. I'm on the third "clean up after the cowboy programmer" mess in five years. "Comments are useless clutter", and "documentation? look for it in the toilet", direct quotes from the original coder. Think of it as a job of reverse engineering, pretend you are Turing cracking the Enigma, anything to keep your sanity. Console yourself that there is a special circle in Hell for cowboy coders, where they will spend eternity unraveling spaghetti code and infinitely deep inheritance classes. Learn to love the zen of Ramen. You can vary the noodle diet with cans of Vienna sausages, two for $1 USD at Walmart.

If you ever used RS-422 or RS-485 you'll never go back. And if you've used old process control protocols like Modbus upgrading to CAN protocols like CANOpen or J1939 makes life a lot simpler. Forget all about request-response, peer to peer objects are much easier to use once you get up the learning curve. The real trick with CAN is tuning your soft timers (you need a lot of them for a good CAN stack). Get the transmit slots right and you get a phenomenal thruput compared to RS-485. Any bets the VW hack was accomplished through the car's CAN bus connection? It's extremely easy to spot a tester being plugged in with CAN and J1939.

Both are just tools of the trade. Does it make a difference if you use a left-handed screwdriver instead of a right-handed one? Arguing over tools is akin to angels on a pin, good way to waste time but ultimately unproductive. If you know how to use programming tools you can work with just about anything, and if you don't know...well, there's always cowboy coding for some tiny startup that doesn't care what it turns out as long as there's an IPO in there somewhere.

All very well to argue about risk management and apparently timid actions, but when it involves peoples' jobs and the consequences of a bad decision is personally telling 20 people they are being laid off indefinitely your perspective may change. And if you happen to be one of those 20 people called into the conference room on a Monday morning that risky management decision suddenly isn't bold but utterly stupid. The civil engineer who designed the Tacoma Narrows bridge knew about wind loading but took the risk it wouldn't matter. The calculations were Engineering 101, very basic but he didn't bother. The classic pictures of the bridge tearing itself apart illustrates how bold and daring he was. Would you drive over one of his bridges on the way to work every day, knowing he didn't bother to make sure nothing would go wrong?

It's an analog solution, don't think in digital terms...unless you are well-versed in three-state logic. And yes the solution will work with CFL or LED bulbs, none of them are 100% efficient.

I have two IMSAI 8080's in the basement, circa 1977, both in good condition. The last one was retired from embedded programming development (8048, 8051, Z80) in the early 90's. 500 watt linear (!) power supply with a transformer that weights 15 lbs. Does that qualify as "big iron"? They sit next to a real IBM AT. Jack Peacock (computer dinosaur, from the days when IBM and the Seven Sisters dominated MIS)

IMSAIs really were "big iron". Half the chassis was the power supply, a giant transformer and caps the size of beer cans. The transformer, all iron, had to weigh 20 lbs. or more. But they were reliable. I still have two of them. I used one for embedded development for over 15 years.