I have been working in various aspects of IT since 1966 after taking a programming course in college. Along with copious math & engineering classes, I took a programming class each semester and continued to work doing programming (I had to work my way through college, being the oldest of seven children & family no wealthy). Las year in school I got an off campus job doing programming for the company I eventually went to work for after graduation. I had intended to get into control systems work after graduating with a BSEE. Things being what they were in the US in 1970 when I left college, I ended up taking a job with a small company working in the electric power & steam power control field. Moved around a bit & ended up working for a company that was making aircraft simulators. Learned a whole lot about building device drivers, OS internals, etc. Job eventually moved me to Norfolk/VA Beach VA. During the 1980's I gradually moved away from pure programming. And worked out of town & traveled a lot. had a house to pay for. Fast forward to the nineties, back in VA, not much market for software developers in this area. Got into networking with DOS/NetWare & gradually networking token ring, ArcNet, Ethernet. Moved between jobs a lot businesses seemed to hire for a project & let you go. I also got involved with WIndows programming & eventually Windows NT. I eventually picked up some skills in working with wireless bar code devices. In 1997, landed at my present job working at a shipbuilder. First assignment, more barcode devices, and wireless (pre Wi-Fi), but also did all work on the architecting the system, building servers, installing databases, installing application software, and interfacing to SAP & mainframe. This naturally led to system engineering (in the IT space). Today, I am putting together High Performance clusters for this company. The first one I put together involved actually building out the facilities to turn a large room into a datacenter. This involves being a technical lead and being able to have a conversation with people with many different skills and get them working as a team to pull these things together in a working system. So this is a long winded preface to a couple of observations. Be able to communicate, both verbally & in writing. I worked a number of proposals where you have time limits, page limits, etc. You have to get your information to the customer in a way that they can understand and still stay within the limits. Being flexible; doing what you h

My solution is to go with cheap readers for the computer work, liberally scattered about the house along with backup pairs. Since I use a slightly different prescription for reading magazines, etc. I have several pairs of Photogray readers in case I want to read outside or on the beach of course). Lastly, I have my glasses for driving (for distance) also Photograys.

I personally prefer the "you've just stumbled into an FBI honeypot".

I've always thought about debugging in terms of tree pruning. Start at the top of the tree and eliminate branches that do not get you to the root of the problem. In order to do that, you must have a mental picture of what the "tree" looks like. I think that is part of the problem with debugging today, the systems are so complex that no single person can put together that mental picture. Think any big software system, Windows, Linux, AEGIS, Space Station, etc. Many moons ago on a super minicomputer I had a hardware problem that occurred once every 2-3 weeks, on a system doing millions of instructions per second. The problem was easily to see (I was working in assembly language); the machine had word & half word instructions. If a half word instruction was followed by a full word instruction the assembler automatically generated a right hand half word NOOP so that the word instruction fell on a word boundary. If everything is working properly, the RH half word NOOP was skipped during instruction executions by the machine. Except that every 2-3 weeks it didn't skip the RH NOOP (PSW was screwed up and pointed to the NOOP). I had a pretty good mental picture of what was going on, wrote a program to exercise I/O devices based on front panel switches and display each time the RH NOOP was executed in the front panel display (this was back in 1973-1974). After fiddling to find the right combination of switches that would cause the counter to increment, the tech came in I ran the program & he fixed the issue in less time that it took to show him the problem. Turned out to be a tap on a delay line that had to be moved to the next tap (5 nsecs).

Where are the packed decimal instructions when you need them.

Chris, If you have VS Professional MSDN you can put in a ticket. I had a problem where 2019 wouldn't install, kept erroring out on the same errors & repaired same & rerun & get same errors. Got some local help & we still weren't able to get it to install. Finally in desperation, put in a trouble call to MS through my MSDN subscription. Took the fellow about a week, but finally got the 2019 update installed. You can also put in the ticket w/o the subscription; costs about $400. Either way I was very pleased and the money was well worth it.

I gave up a VERY long time ago on the default search in Outlook. Somewhere back around Office 2007 they hid the Advanced Search feature (removed it from the menu). I found that you still can get to it with . Haven't used anything other that that search.

Good stuff, but the AZ DevOps 400 course had errors in it in the example YAML code. First one I encounter was a simple syntax error. Second one stopped me in my tracks. From what I was able to get from others who'd taken the training, they make changes to Azure DevOps and the training isn't necessarily updated accordingly. I provided MS feedback a month or more ago and have heard nothing.

Label printers are the bane of our existence. Every manufacturer has their own proprietary printer language. You would think that in today's world they'd all be using Postscript. There's a lot of off the shelf software that will take a label design and generate the correct instructions for the label printer. What are you trying to do that requires you to dive into the coding of the label?

We get many thunderstorms where I live. Power is glitchy even w/o the storms. I used an APC 1400 SmartUPS for many years. One thing to make sure you a unit with the capacity to handle the load you have on it. I replaced the tower machine I used at the time with an HP Z800 with an 1100W power supply. Never gave the size of the APC unit a thought until the Z800 killed the UPS. Discovered that HP recommends a 2200VA unit for the Z800. I got the APC 2200 SmartUPS unit. It gets delivered by a tractor trailer on a skid. Unit weighs 110 Lbs. Took two people to lug it up to my ROG. And they typically take a special power cord. Mine required an L5 outlet. Normally, you'd want that load on a 220V circuit, since the ROG is the 4th bedroom I didn't think it would be too wise to have a 220V circuit in what might at some point (after I am out of the house) revert back and become a child's bedroom. Even if you aren't using a machine as large as the HP, best to make sure that you match the capacity of the unit to the equipment you are plugging into it. And keep in mind the UPS will likely outlast you computer, so it is probably wise to get a unit larger than your immediate need.

You could always format the USB stick with NTFS.

Our company got onboard with .NET in ~2000. When it came time to learn PowerShell many years ago (yes, 2.0) we had an instructor led class with a mix of developers & Windows and Linux Admins in it. Developers (me included at the time) seemed to get PS, while the Windows and Linux struggled with it. Linux admins especially since they are heavy duty scripting folks. Problem for them was it so very different than the shells they used on Linux. Fast forward to the present, those same Linux admins are using PowerShell and are quite good at it. Syntax always seemed a bit "clunky" to me, but the concepts were quite natural to me because of leaning .NET and C#.

We're using JIRA on a project we're doing with AWS. For the work we're doing internally, we're using Azure DevOPS. Nice thing about it there a FREE course. All you need is a Microsoft account. Exam AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions - Learn | Microsoft Docs[^]

Yeah, every time I reply to a message it gets flagged as spam at least for a period of time.

Sander, Outlook client lets you view the email source and the Internet headers so you can see where the email actually came from (see sample below). I do not use Gmail I do not know if it has the same capability. _________________________

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No one has mentioned the unbearable numbers of ads that load with what seems like every site. Nor the videos that start w/o you asking them to. Faster browser may help too. AS soon as the MS Chrome Edge came out, I tried it. It was so much faster than IE that I switched after a few days of confirming I had no issues with it.

Where I am working at is located in a downtown and the company employs 25,00K people. There's not parking for everyone, and the company hasn't built enough lots or parking garages to handle everyone. Only employees above a certain grade get assigned parking; below that they get a tag let's them park in the associate tag's lot. Before becoming an employee I was a contractor. Contractors did not even get a tag. Often had to drive around for 1/2 hour to find parking.

I had my house wired by a couple of professionals. Wall plates in rooms have two or more network drops. Wall mount rack in a "wiring Closet" holds switches, 8 port KVM, two NAS devices & of course Fios Router. Only thing that is a bit messy is the patch cords & power cords running from the wall to the equipment. Just haven't taken the time to clean that up. TV, and its audio system are all Internet connected (they update their firmware). Made similar provision for an audio system in den should I ever replace that.

SharePoint or Team Foundation Server?

Sounds very much like the US Patent office deciding everything that was useful, had already been invented. :-) I do agree that finding an application that hadn't been done already and was useful is difficult.