One year ago today: September 5, 2019, in the key of Eb.
Five years ago today: September 5, 2015, Admiral vs. typhoon.
Nine years ago today: September 5, 2011, a factor of 10,000.
Random years ago today: September 5, 2008, remember Peggy?
The Florida hot allowed me two and a half hours work before ducking inside. That let me fill the bird feeders, week the yard, open the shed and crank the scooter, which doesn’t like to start after sitting. Hey, I wish I could report great adventure and more every day. But this is a journal, not a dime novel so you get what high points there are. I am in a dialogue with Elliott, who reads this blog and is in disagreement with my “Rule of 55”, even though I’ve admitted many times it is a theory, not a rule. You get to hear about it, we use e-mail as a very slow chat service, a few post per day.
This is a picture of Trent & I in St. Aug. a month ago, soaking up the morning sun waiting for the restaurant to open. This is on the west side of the tourist area. The city has not as liberal as Miami, so they can leave things like park benches on the sidewalks and find them still there next day. Back to Elliott.
He says since I travel long distances often, that I’m being unfair judging others as “inactive”. My reply is that “frequency and distance” is a broad term I use in many areas, such as music and writing, and that those criteria are an excellent barometer to tell if someone is living life instead of just talking about it. He comes back that many people do not see travel and hobbies as the payoff in life after 55, to which I respond that is my point—they are not active. Round and round she goes, we’ve often good-naturedly square off about such topics quite a lot. Shall I continue? Why not, unless you want some details of how I cut down six foot tall yard weeds.
Okay, Elliott says 55 is not an age to judge because he knows a lot of people who traveled a lot and quit when they got older. To which I point out that is true, I’ve seen how such types are so humdrum they never find what they are looking for and eventually give up. It may sound like I’m egging the guy on, but this is how you get to the nitty-gritty with Elliott, who is a Brit. They like to play the moderate regardless of their often strong personal opinions. I say that is hypocrisy which needs to be peeled away. He says okay, what about the many who never travel and then start when they are 55? Again, I retort that they’ve left it too long, while recognizing they “are legion evidenced by the afternoon patronage at stripper bars and whorehouses”.
Where this is heading is his disagreement is based on a few personal acquaintances. And my theory is intended to generalize. He often forgets I know some of the individuals to which he refers, and they fall into two categories. Those who talk about traveling but can’t get to the nearest beach without maxing out their credit cards, and those who think a trip to the next county Wal*Mart is a major safari. We rarely agree and usually drop such topics unresolved as he moves closer to specifics and I tend toward the big picture. As Ann Coulter said, a few exceptions don’t change a statistic.
And that statistic is that if by age 55 you don’t have something going, you never will. Elliott has spend less than 1% as much time on stage as myself and only travels to England and back, hence his European outlook. My experience is that most people talk about travel when they are older and by then they can’t hack real adventure. They book itineraries and watch cable TV in hotel rooms. So, if there are enough exceptions to negate my Rule of 55, I ask that Elliott or anyone point to where they congregate and I will go take a look. But I know they do not have the same hobbies or interests as myself, they do not go to the same museums, or movies, or boat, airplane, and science shows. They don’t even seem to travel on the same roads, airplanes or trains that I do.
[Author’s note: if it ever transpires that my hand-written material is published, this is the same Elliott I’ve known since the mid-80s. There are vast differences in our experiences which otherwise are surprisingly parallel. He plays guitar, but the same songs as when we first crossed paths. He actually knows who Alex Lifeson and Thurston Moore are. Nor do we share his predilection for siding with the underdog at street level where I’d give them a break at the national level, within broad limits since I find their sob stories so repetitious..]
Statistics.
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The shed has extended my work day by several hours so there will be measurable progress in the next stretch. Put a coffee machine out there and we may see a project completed every day, like back at the trailer court—but this time I mean big projects. Like finally testing the weed whacker to discover it is a carburetor problem. If I was smart, I’d take a week off and build boxes for all my often hard to find tools like that spark plug tester and my adjustable pin wrench. The neighbor was over to chat and I did not know that Howie and the former building inspector built that barn of shed he’s got. It’s goy more square footage than my cabin. Here’s a photo of cleaning a spray nozzle. See the tiny plastic chip? The shed allows me to do this kind of fine work outside, so to speak.
Incels are just a reflection of how the Internet speeds things up, allowing all manner of such losers to form pathetic on-line communities. From behind a computer, they can now demand recognition. The anonymous links supply a thin veneer of virtual belonging. This is evidenced by how many fringe groups are now demanding love and attention as an entitlement. That part is a new phenomenon but otherwise the personalities remain historically the same. Before the Internet, despite the fact these types were everywhere, they existed in social isolation. I mean, not many of them then or now dare stand up in public to announce they can’t get laid and scream, “Who’s with me?”
Let’s see if we have tech news. A Dutch company has revived the old V-shaped flying wing concept, designed in Germany in the 1940s, they say it may fly by 2040. That’s the Dutch for you. But nothing beats the US governments decision to put all defense data into one big storage facility, the JEDI project. They’ve become our modern Janissaries, they’ve forgotten nothing but learned nothing. And just you listen to Amazon whine how they lost the contract. True, it is cronyism, but the only difference is Trump doesn’t sneak around like the Democrats who use “competition” to fatten the kitty.
Why, here’s more articles concerned with on-line privacy. Sorry, dudes, you are 10,000 computer light-years too late. Now you have an Apple phone about to rout the entire “app industry”, which was loathsome to begin with. And an opposing rack of billion-dollar shadow industries going ballistic to stop Apple. But you are not saved. The sad news for most of you is even if the new Apple phone blocks tracking, the CreepMasters already have enough on you and your kids to betray your privacy for ten lifetimes. Not me, though, I spotted the danger back in 1996. The last pop-up or targeted ads I ever see is movie suggestions when I log on to youTube and even then they are off half the time because they think I’m a Polish grandmother.
I’ll tell you one thing you can begin doing to throw the system off your trail. Next time you move and you get mail for the former occupants, like trial offers or free samples, continue to fill them out and mail them back as if that person still lives there. Don’t ever buy anything, just make some mistake on the form, like not specifying how much life insurance you want. It drives them bonkers.
Tomorrow I begin looking at COBOL development environments. If they are available for download on a desktop, well, I’ve always wanted a good one. My memory is beginning to unfold about COBOL because it is more suited to my needs than even BASIC. I’m certain that since IBM has touched the language, there’s a hodgepodge of versions and half-baked options out there.
ADDENDUM
I’ve gone through a number of samples of government COBOL code and I’m not impressed. They shamelessly hired the bottom of the class by droves. While the code works there are procedural and convention errors all over the place. COBOL uses English verbs but that is no excuse to skimp on documentation. There are a lot of what we called EFL errors, which meant the spelling mistakes and typos were in English. One plus is at least back then the government did not have the option to have the coding done overseas and I hope they are not that stupid nowadays. (In Asian countries where EFL, English as a First Language is not a given.)
I downloaded some payroll programs to see what gives. It seems like everybody was an amateur back then. The code works but it lacks polish. A good programmer arranges his IF-THEN-ELSE comparisons so the logic always flows in a consistent direction (are you listening OOPs people) and confines fall-through to CASE segments. Since fall-through isn’t a common term, I’ll elaborate.
Fall-through is where a programmer makes a series of comparisons in a manner that if the variable does not match, the logic will “fall-through” to the next line of code. An example might make this clearer. Where I would hard code the program to specifically the target value, notice in this example it never actually states we are seeking to print the number 3. Notice 3 is never actually mentioned—that’s how C+ logic works. On a good day.
If X not <=0 and
If X <> 1 or 2 and
If X <> 4 or 5 and
If X not >= 6
Then print X
Else continue.
[Author's note: in real COBOL all letters are CAPITALS.]
Not only is the logic contorted, in more complex examples there always exists the possibility that some rogue value* will slip through the obvious crack. The biggest drawbacks I saw were code that had been repaired instead of re-written and all of it was 2D. The original people seem to have avoided any of the advanced features. I will presume, however, if they had me on the team, I would not be dealing with this level of code, which brings me to the next conclusion.
The code works, obviously. They’ve been running it for 40 or more years. What is it that they need? I got it—more modern output. Civil servants have gotten progressively dumber while the tax laws ballooned in that period. The COBOL isn’t spitting out the reports they need to operate in the Internet climate. I suspect the software is working as fine as it ever did, but the bureaucrats are being slowed by having to pick their computer information off output that was designed for another era.
And who do we know who wrote the book on report design? I think I’ll focus on generating reports, which I do on almost a daily basis though you rarely see it. But my long term readers will have seen snippets here, one of which I will now repeat. In COBOL, here is the process for centering a report title at the top of the page.
A) Issue a feed command to spit out a new page
B) use the length function to count the chars in the title
C) subtract the length from 80 (old printers were 80 char per line)
D) divide the result by 2
E) use the space command to indent that number of spaces
F) print printing the title
G) issue two line feeds
I could enhance the style, such as overprinting the title to make it bold and allowing for the date to print on the same line over on the right side. Judging by what they seem to want, it means this sort of logic is a lost art. Plus, I could just team up with somebody who knows JCL and CICS. I stress to the reader I am only just looking at this time, noticing the good jobs all want more than 5 years COBOL experience and wondering where they will find that? The arithmetic mean pay is $43 per hour, still not good enough. And they are still demanding “unpaid extras” like SQL experience, team leadership, and support groups which have little to do with actual code-writing. Top programmers interact with groups, but don’t join them.
Also, I have a strong aversion to “hiring agencies” that predates even Internet snooping. Want to see your life history on a washroom wall? Upload your resume. And fill out the additional profile sheet the agency gives you with details about how much you can comfortably lift, do you rent or own, and whether you have a valid driver’s license. What the hell, why not? You never know when your programming job will need that information.
It was interesting to notice two of the IBM examples used a very similar syntax to the column ruler system I developed for my Arduino sketches. It’s probably coincidence. Again. I’ve downloaded some COBOL tutorials, but at 600+ pages, I wonder. COBOL is just not that complicated, so I’m certain they’ve enhanced things since I last programmed any. I got to the level of sorting data files and creating reports with control breaks. But that’s 90% of most business activity.
*rogue values like 2.9 or 3.1. If the variable was declared wrongly in a separate section of the program, you could get false positive results. Integer 2.9 could get rounded up to 3, or 3.1 could be truncated back to 3, however the correct values are still stored in memory.
