One year ago today: April 13, 2019, Shazam @ Opryland.
Five years ago today: April 13, 2015, Pete the Cactus & batbike.
Nine years ago today: April 13, 2011, Meyers, victim of the State.
Random years ago today: April 13, 2018, who invented bankruptcy, anyhow?
Monday the 13th. Disaster looms. What? It’s supposed to be what? Friday? Okay, you win. In one of the weirdest news stories I’ve ever read, an unemployment office bureaucrat described COBOL as “difficult to learn”, when in fact, it is one of the easiest of the easy. I’ve got ten bucks says the guy is a millie. Logic is most difficult to people whose brains have been turned to mush by years of government-approved schooling. A tax man complains it was “not designed for the Internet” and adds college grads like to “learn something easier”. When I stopped laughing, I began to realize these jerks were actually more right than they realized. I’ll explain.
Properly written COBOL has one master module that calls subroutines. Each sub-routine has one logical purpose. The key issue here is that if you did NOT follow these rules, you failed the course. That’s where it hit me—how one large group came to dominate computer languages. They were the dropouts and failures. They are not about how well code works, they are about majority rule. And C+ is their vernacular.
Aha, that explains to me why they don’t at all like the logic and structure of COBOL. They find it hard because good code requires deep thinking. Of course they would think COBOL is messy. Instead of “spaghetti code”, they invented “spaghetti logic”. Those who fail at logic love bad code—and it has a sinister side benefit for them. It makes it hard to point at who is responsible when the overall product fails. Oh, and forget about me hiring on, I just found out what they are paying. To me, $35,000 is some kind of joke so bad I thought it was a misprint.
The picture above is the thermal chimney frame. I could not maximize the angle toward the average summer sun without making the structure overly tall. So, I angled the glass at what created a convenient 6” wide flue for the hot air to escape at the top. For now, I think I will use tarpaper as the absorbent material to test the unit. It if works, I’ll invest in metal and paint it. As of now, the entire cost of the project is around $14 since all but the framing 2x3” lumber has been scrounged. For siding, more fence panels since they are cheap and easy to work with.
These frames are not all that sturdy, even after using screws instead of nails. I’ve learned the cedar picket siding adds considerable strength in itself and is quite solid when fastened correctly. Compare today’s photo with the recent diagram.
Who’s doing the dumping?
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Meet the Marscopter. Lunching in a few months, this probe is slated to make Mars around February next year. at which time it will do a NASA and just sit there for about ten weeks. The prime directive is to find sites of interest for the accompanying rover during five scheduled flights. Forty years overdue, the craft embodies NASA's long-standing tradition of never undertaking a mission that will be completed before the potential end of the current administration.
Putting the next crew on the Moon will cost, by my estimate, $50 billion. That’s comparable to the Apollo program, except back then $50 billion was real money. This time, however, there are none of the spin-offs and breakthroughs that changed the world of the 1960s. Other than a few refined techniques, the Artemis program uses most everything off-the-shelf. During the Apollo program, 60% of the integrated circuits in existence were used in the space program. Expect no such technical marvels any more. Imagination, inventiveness, most things of this kind have been educated out of the American mindset.
Contract tracing. Finally, I was wondering where all this privacy invasion over this virus scare was heading. Cell phone tracking of everybody, everywhere, all the time. I knew it. Kiss good-bye to any notions of privacy ever again. Google has promised the app will have “ethical constraints” to collect only “necessary” information. This from a company that would not know what an ethical constraint is if one came along and bit them in the armpit. This might be a good time to remind you that the Obama administration started laying the groundwork for this ominous program with his so-called bio-ethics commission.
It basically gave health “officials” the power they dared not give the police. Namely the right to know where you’ve been even if that is against your will—and you would have no right to an attorney. Database tech has changed the game to where it no longer matters where or how the information is gathered. They will all get their hands on it sooner or later. This was my original objection when I required my first medical treatment of my life back in 2003. The doctor demanded tons of information that had no medical purpose. Does a doctor really have to know your date of birth? Your home address? Your next of kin and their contact info? Does he need this data under threat of withholding medical treatment. Why can’t he treat you with a first name and your age—because if he can’t, he ain’t much of a doctor, now is he?
Oh, they will always tell you it is for billing purposes. Nonsense, it is to stick you with the bill if they perform any treatment not covered by insurance. Bull donkey on that, I contend it is their business, not yours, to know what is covered. Doctors sometimes say their insurer needs the info, but if so, it should be the insurer who does the asking so you have the right to say forget it. The last people on Earth you want knowing everything about you is an insurance company. They have no morality whatsoever.
Fortunately, by then I knew exactly how to deal with such questions but I will point out every last thing I ever told a doctor found its way onto the Internet. That’s what led up to the confrontation with my cardiologist. I foolishly thought he was working with me over a period of years to find out who was leaking my private information. Hell, the bastard was covering for her. And technologically, he was living in some pre-Internet cocoon with no concept of the need for security. I wonder if he knows except for that required by law, everything he has on file about me was bogus. That does not change the fact he failed at safekeeping it.
ADDENDUM
Caronavirus issues, but not the virus itself. The media is again blathering that nonsense that the Internet is a right, a utility. Hey, it worked for cable TV, now every lazy welfare douche in America has cable. I say no, if you want to live in the bush, you can pay extra for city services. IBM is talking about publishing a COBOL course on-line, showing that obsolete code is probably here to stay. Reading posts by former COBOL programmers, I see RPG (Report Program Generator) is still out there. I passed that course as well. Most are warning that replacing COBOL is not the answer, and you know why?
Because to make COBOL work, you have to understand the manual system it is replacing. The programs still in use all these years later have an immense amount of “institutional knowledge” that would be lost if you try to replace it using today’s slipshod techniques, where too often the code-writer has zero first-hand knowledge of the system. We’ve heard enough horror stories of what happens when you let such people write code, with their attitude that making it look like it works is the same as making it work.
