It was an Old Detroit kind of weekend, when it all wrapped up. Saturday night at the Players Club Invitational, a guest of my friend Michael. This is a different Players Club than the one on 8 Mile, a strip club. This is a more than 100-year-old men’s club in the tradition of Hasty Pudding, and those men’s theatrical clubs of a bygone era.
“Men joined this club to get away from their wives,” Michael said. Very Babbitt, actually. They do a production every month or so (I think), for members only, no ladies allowed. But twice a year, in spring and fall, there’s an invitational, when XX chromosomes attend, but only to watch. All parts are played by men, just like in ol’ Bill Shakespeare’s time. And so you get a slamming-doors farce like “Boeing, Boeing,” where Gloria, the American flight attendant, looks just a little…tall:
I mean, even in kitten heels.
Michael said he’d been in one production so far, an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” It so happens he bears a strong resemblance to Brian Dennehy, and I assumed he’d been cast as the Skipper. No, he said.
“A rather stout Mary Ann.”
Now that I’d have liked to see.
Anyway, a very enjoyable evening. Seating is dinner-theater style, and guests bring picnic baskets of food and drink. It was a stitch.
Sunday was ladies day at the Schvitz. It was a perfect day for being outdoors, riding a bike, raking leaves or otherwise being under the sun. I considered all this and went to the dank, steamy Schvitz. I’ve been feeling a little, how you say, tense. And one of the other schvitzers said she was inviting a massage therapist, a stronger lure than any sunshine.
“I think this election is driving me insane,” I said to the woman who invited her.
“You’re telling me,” she said. “I’ve been dreaming about people chasing me around, telling me who to vote for.”
We both got massages. The therapist said my back felt pretty knotted. You’re telling me.
She also told me I needed an adjustment. But I’m not much of a believer in chiropractic, so I said nothing. The few times I had it, nothing much seemed to change, and the doc gave me a big anti-vax pitch toward the end of our course of treatment. Ugh.
Hope the rest of you had a pleasant weekend. Adrianne saw this ad during a football game yesterday and was appalled. Juuuuust a wee bit anti-Semitic.
But of course, this is the big news of the weekend – Hillary’s emails, cleared. Who is scripting this ridiculous movie, anyway?
beb said on November 6, 2016 at 11:02 pm
Saw a Hillary ad tonight, a bit longer than normal but only talked the things people need changed to make this a better world. A wonderful ad giving reasons for voting for Her instead of against him.
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Sherri said on November 6, 2016 at 11:35 pm
I see the long lines of people waiting to vote, and I think, the GOP wants it to be hard to vote but easy to get a gun.
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Linda said on November 7, 2016 at 12:48 am
OMG. A really weird thing just happened. There is a fake news story going around that the FBI agent who leaked Hillary’s email investigation died in a fishy murder/suicide. When I pointed out the fakeness of the story to a cousin who was discussing it on Facebook, she told me it was true–a big spread about it in her hometown paper. It was easy to check and find out that what she told me was a big fat lie.
Somehow, the fact that my cuz would make up a dumb lie to give fake veracity to this story is disturbing on so many levels–my cousin lying to me, the hive mentality of True Believers, etc. I wish I could unsee and unknow everything I have seen and known about my loved ones in this election cycle.
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Jean Shaw said on November 7, 2016 at 1:32 am
Just tell your cousin Vince Foster did it.
On a happier note, Pantsuit Nation has me actually enjoying Facebook at the moment.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 1:37 am
I’m pretty sure my niece, one of my FB friends is voting for Trump. She kept it very quiet, as her mother, who’s my right wing sister doesn’t approve. My niece’s husband, a Minnesota farmer probably convinced her, I don’t know him very well, have only met him a few times, he always seemed like a nice guy. Now that I know this about the two of them it makes me feel ill.
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 3:05 am
Thanks to no FB account, I can stay firmly in denial about all my relatives who are voting Trump. Yes, I come from an extended family of “I’m not a racist, but” types and even more sexists, including one uncle who gets very upset if he flies on a plane with a female pilot. I’m pretending that all had a bout of temporary sanity and did the right thing. Denial is sometimes an appropriate coping mechanism.
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Suzanne said on November 7, 2016 at 6:38 am
I had to “correct” somebody about that fake guy tied to Hillary’s email story last night, too. This was a very intelligent friend from college who is very successful in her career, but at least she believed me. But did she delete the post? No. Ugh. So more people scroll through, just see the headlines, and, well, you get the picture. I’ve had others just tell me my fact check source is biased.
This American Life did an excellent bit on Hillary’s emails, server, etc. According to the story, she is a complete techno-illiterate and just does not get how computers, & the like, work. When she started at the State Department, they were just getting up to snuff with technology, having been way, way behind for years. I know I’ve worked with a few people over the years who simply do not get computers. You can show them & show them, but it does not sink in. My brother-in-law is very smart, but retired early because of the rapid rise of technology on the job. He just couldn’t do it. So the Hillary story was not a surprise to me. Listen to the podcast. Very informative.
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adrianne said on November 7, 2016 at 6:58 am
With all the paranoid conspiracies out there, it was heartening to see Obama smack down Trump over his ridiculous lie about how he treated a Trump protester at Friday’s rally. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m getting a good feeling about the election, at least at the top of the ticket. The FBI interference is apparently having a bad effect down ticket, with millenials in particular saying f this, I don’t want to vote at all. So the Senate is still in play.
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Julie Robinson said on November 7, 2016 at 7:27 am
We caught about 20 minutes of TAL and it struck me as an unfortunate intersection of non-techies with a very poor State Department email system. Don’t forget, it wasn’t that long ago that making it to middle management meant you got a secretary, who took care of anything with a keyboard. Using them yourself was viewed as a waste of your valuable time.
Early voting times here ran 2-3 hours all week. That means I’ll be waiting once for myself, and once for my mom, and hoping for shorter waits. The precinct our daughter oversees in Orlando has already had 54% of the vote come in. People are engaged.
Finally, I’ll just leave this, the verses that popped up in my daily devotion today, from Malachi: “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 7:32 am
My husband who is very intelligent got a graduate degree from Harvard doesn’t understand computers either. He uses them but if something doesn’t work he asks me to fix it, it’s always user error. And he does everything the long slow way even though I’ve shown him many shortcuts. It drives me crazy. I don’t get a lot about computers either but I get it better than he does which is pathetic. For instance I can never remember how to make short links here in comments, even though you guys have described how to do it many times. I think it may have something to do with the age people were when they started using computers. I was in my late 30s when we started using them at work. My husband didn’t start using them until he was in his 50s because he always had junior people to do that kind of work for him.
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Suzanne said on November 7, 2016 at 8:08 am
Oh, Deborah, my husband is similar. When we got our first home computer, he thought you could only get emails when it was on. He could not get that emails were held on the server until you turned on your computer and downloaded them. He’s had way more viruses than anyone I know, and it took him years to get that you had to pay attention where you were putting a document when you saved it.
I am sure the Donald doesn’t understand any of it either, but he has no public service record to go by. If he is elected, who gets to take away his Twitter account?
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Bitter Scribe said on November 7, 2016 at 9:10 am
I despise Donald Trump as much as anyone, but you’d have a hard time convincing me that he’s anti-Semitic, given that his son-in-law (who by all accounts is running his campaign) is an orthodox Jew and his daughter converted when they married. My guess is that the anti-Semitic overtones came from the Breitbart bros, and no one else noticed or cared about them. (If by some hideous misfortune Trump does win, there will be a lot of things he won’t notice or care about.)
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jcburns said on November 7, 2016 at 9:17 am
I guess I was born at the perfect time.
As a teenager, one night, I stopped by a nondescript building next to the BBF on West 5th Avenue where the back door was propped open and inside, 3 or 4 geeky guys in shirts and ties were bent over Model 33 Teletype terminals typing, sitting back, watching the excruciatingly slow printed responses. This one guy—turns out he was the head of the company, showed me on his terminal he was playing chess. With a computer. That opened a world for me.
Compu-Serv. (Later, Compuserve.)
Yeah, I get computers.
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Charlotte said on November 7, 2016 at 9:46 am
I had heard via the Cisco grapevine that a big part of the State Department mess was due to ancient servers being or needing upgrades. And boy, all y’all are making me feel young with your computer stories! I’m not quite a “digital native” but I have spent my entire working life on computers, well, with the exception of failing typing tests on IBM Selectrics in every major publishing house in NYC.
NYT had an interesting demographic map this morning — I was honestly surprised to see that all of my beloved big rural Western states out here in the Intermountain West have higher rates of college participation than Indiana-Ohio-Pennsylvania. Land grant universities? State policy? I know in MT, if you graduate with a pretty lax grade point average you’re guaranteed admission to MSU/UM … and while prices have risen, college is still attainable here even if you don’t have help from your parents. Here’s the link even though I think the title is dumb: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/07/us/how-trump-can-win.html
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Bruce Fields said on November 7, 2016 at 9:48 am
Very much a computer person, but we’re not immune to similar issues.
When I’m called out of retirement to fix bugs in my code in 2038, the kids will probably crowd around to watch me use my antiquated tools.
We can all get a little set in our ways….
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Judybusy said on November 7, 2016 at 10:37 am
Voting lines here have also been very long. My wife voted Saturday and wiated an hour 40 minutes.If she felt more confident finding her way around downtown, she couldn’t have been in and out at the government center. That’s where I voted in 5 minutes a couple weeks ago. It helps that I work there!
I did end up door-knocking yesterday. Very few people home, heavily Democratic neighborhood. It was gorgeous–sunny and about 70. At one point, a gust of wind brought ap a huge layer of leaves, swirling them up and around, while making more leaves fall off the trees. I was memerized. I alter saw a little group of golden finches on the ground.
Saturday night was Lisa Fisher with another couple. Before the show at 9, we went out for a bit to eat at a new place. Food and drink were good, but they blasted heavy metal the whole time, so we left after an hour to a quieter place. When I asked the server if it could be turned down, she somewhat snottily stated it was policy and they’d be changing the volume all the time if they complied with requests. I’ve never had a place not turn music down if I’ve requested it.
Fisher was great–so beautiful and soulful. She sings “I can’t stand the pain” with such feeling and it brought up so much for me–family stuff and the state of the country. She stays after the 9 o’clock show to mingle and I just thanked her for her music again. We gave each other a long, sisterly hug and hse hummed in my ear. We sighed, then parted. Our friends went up to her tow, got hugs and told they were a cute couple! If you ever have the chance to see her, just go. Deborah, she comes to Chicago quite a bit.
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Jerry said on November 7, 2016 at 10:48 am
Speaking as someone whose working life started as a programmer on a 16k mainframe I feel a good deal of sympathy with those who struggle with computers. After about ten years in Data Processing (and that shows my age) I worked in other areas away from computers.
Now I often struggle myself. My erstwhile knowledge of Easycoder and COBOL is no help at all. I’m better than my wife, who is fairly technophobic, but I often find I’m desperately wondering what the hell is going on and what I’m supposed to be doing.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 10:59 am
As designers both my husband and I use Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. He never learned CAD and neither did I, it wasn’t required for either of us but boy I wish I had. I never learned any of the computer rendering programs and ditto, wish I had. Now that I’m retired I don’t have other people around to do that. Whenever I upgrade to the latest versions of the programs I use I have to go through a frustrating learning curve. I have a really old version of the Adobe Creative Suite (which has Illustrator etc) because they’ve completely changed the way you get it. My husband has the latest and it’s very expensive and weird now. He hasn’t retired and uses it way more than I do now.
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Icarus said on November 7, 2016 at 11:04 am
speaking as someone who grew up with computers and works in IT now, I often forget how much the non-techies don’t understand about the subject. To be fair, even the techies don’t know it all; no one can know everything about everything. In fact that’s one of my pet peeves: when I tell people I work in IT, it is assumed I know everything from the hardware level, to the Kernel and everything in between.
I troll the Matt Walsh FB page and he wrote a piece saying that we allow too much time for early voting. I just cannot believe that he actually believes the crap he spews there. It’s gotta just be pandering to his base, right?
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Julie Robinson said on November 7, 2016 at 11:07 am
It’s easy to fall behind. A family member worked for Apple in the early years but then moved to other jobs where he didn’t use a computer. Now he doesn’t even know how to use email, and has a crisis when his flip phone dies and he loses the grandkids’ photos. His wife’s business is dying, in part because she refuses to learn social media.
I mostly learn from my kids, then teach my mom, but there’s a lot that escapes me. So far scanning slides is still mostly a mystery, and I’m contemplating lending out the scanner to our 14 year old nephew, handing him our boxes of slides, and donating to his class trip fund.
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basset said on November 7, 2016 at 11:37 am
I’m old enough to have used Compuserve over a 300-baud modem, and I can get along reasonably well in the apps I use, but if I ever have to learn to code I’m gonna be in big trouble… something else mathematical to fail at and I want no part of it.
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 11:37 am
I get computers and tech, and while I don’t write code anymore, I stay more or less up to date with the issues in the field because I find them interesting. My husband works at Microsoft, and even if he didn’t get paid to do computer work, would,code as a hobby. Even so, there are regularly mysteries in our own setup at home that we can’t figure out even if we can fix; in other words, we don’t understand what the solution has to do with the problem. Or, we can’t solve the problem and have to come up with a work around.
I get annoyed with these techies who laugh at people who have difficulty using tech. The problem isn’t the people, the problem is your crappy user design. It’s even worse with security. All the people saying, well, they should have used two factor authentication forget what a pain it is to use when it’s something getting in the way of what you need to do. For most people, computers are just a tool, not the whole point.
I remind the young techies I encounter with this attitude that if they’re lucky, someday they will turn 50 and 60 and 70 or more, and they won’t be right at the center of everything tech and it just might be harder for them, too.
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Icarus said on November 7, 2016 at 11:38 am
Julie @ 20 — there’s a service called LegacyBox that will do that and more. Not sure of the pricing options but I’m gonna look into it myself for the big box of photos, film negatives and VHS tape of school plays I have somewhere.
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Scout said on November 7, 2016 at 11:44 am
This Twitter post from Chris Hayes pretty much sums up today for me: “Feels like a combination of Christmas Eve, and the day before major, possibly life-threatening surgery.”
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Julie Robinson said on November 7, 2016 at 11:51 am
Yes, poor design along with techies who are impatient and often churlish. I’m a good teacher because it’s all come hard to me and I can be sympathetic and patient. I’d love to give some of the techies I’ve worked with a stack of fabric and pattern and watch them try to produce a garment without assistance. Then perhaps they’d approach people differently.
Icarus, we’ve been using a service through Costco to digitize our videos and have some slides with them now. It runs up fast though, and if we can help fund the class trip, I’d be happy to spend the money that way instead. Plus I’d hope he have a few sessions to help me learn.
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Julie Robinson said on November 7, 2016 at 11:54 am
Whoa. I just looked at Legacy Box. It would be 5K to digitize all of Mom’s slides. Nephew is looking better and better!
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Suzanne said on November 7, 2016 at 11:57 am
“For most people, computers are just a tool, not the whole point.” So true! This has a conflict I’ve seen for years between the tech sorts and the rest of us. Tech sorts (God love ’em)get so excited about the inner workings and all the cool things a computer can do and then there is me, who just wants to know how the heck to make the spread sheet add up the numbers or something equally simple. How many times has an upgrade resulted in what always took 3 clicks now taking 10? And don’t get me started about when the programmers move the buttons around!! I spent ridiculous amounts of time when Word came out with a new version searching and searching for the print button…
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Icarus said on November 7, 2016 at 12:04 pm
Julie, can I get your Nephew’s email. (mostly kidding).
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Jakash said on November 7, 2016 at 1:03 pm
BBF, JCBurns? Whoa, hadn’t thought about that place in years… decades. But I remember it! Also the Red Barn, Sandy’s and Burger Chef. IIRC, the one I was familiar with was called “Borden’s BBF,” officially. Don’t know if that was affiliated with the Jeff Borden who sometimes comments here, who seems to have been AWOL lately. I’ve been waiting for him to chime in re: his delight in the Cubs – Indians World Series he was hoping for a couple months ago…
Count me as another husband who relies on his wife for most of the computer-related expertise. Not proud of it, but that’s the way it is. Also, I have the most basic kind of cellphone and when I need to use hers in a pinch, have no idea how to proceed… But, hey, I may be clueless, but I’m not voting for Rumpy! And I’m not clueless enough to NOT vote! ; )
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Hattie said on November 7, 2016 at 1:13 pm
Funny to imagine that all that stale old male chauvinist stuff still goes on.
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jcburns said on November 7, 2016 at 1:20 pm
BBF was bought by Borden and became “Borden Burger” after a brief transition as “Borden BBF.” Elsie the Cow! Burgerized! Sad!
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 1:27 pm
A FB friend reminded me of where we were 8 years ago the night Obama was elected. A bunch of us were at his place watching the returns on TV until my husband and I decided to go to Grant Park to watch it there on some big Jumbotrons they had set up. Lots and lots of people were there, when Obama won, when that state was called (can’t remember which state) people were crying their eyes out, including us. Obama and his family came out on the stage way far away from us, his daughters were just little kids. People just hung out on the streets after that. We walked slowly up Michigan Avenue back to our place. It is a night I will never forget. Electing the first woman president should be equally moving, I will probably cry and so will my husband. In fact it’s making me tear up just thinking about it now.
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Jakash said on November 7, 2016 at 1:41 pm
Don’t know why I associate the Borden so strongly with the BBF, then, if that was just a short phase. “Borden Burger” doesn’t even really ring a bell. Perhaps I’d transitioned myself by that point, to the evil and hated Golden Arches, as, one by one, the other smaller chains I had frequented faded away…
Cool that you were in Grant Park that night, Deborah! I’ve always partially regretted not going down there when I see video of it, but would make the same decision again. We watched on TV while celebrating on the phone with assorted family and friends in far-flung locales. An unforgettable night, indeed.
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Peter said on November 7, 2016 at 1:46 pm
Some years ago when we were on a college tour, we were led through a computer lab that had a machine that all the young kids just stared at. My wife offered to explain:
“It’s an IBM Selectric”
“It’s a typewriter”
“You put in a sheet of paper and then – here, I’ll show you” And she started typing while the high schoolers gathered around and watched in amazement. One of them asked my wife where you stored the file when it was done “You put it in a file folder, then you put it in a file cabinet. That’s why they’re called files”.
Have a great day tomorrow. Don’t forget to vote early and vote often. I’m an election judge and I just got a call that the judges should set up a nap schedule because it looks to be a long night.
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nancy said on November 7, 2016 at 1:57 pm
I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old I even know what BBF stood for.
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jcburns said on November 7, 2016 at 2:07 pm
I think anything is improved by the addition of ‘-o-rama’ at the end.
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 2:20 pm
Having observed Microsoft software development one step removed for some 13 years now, it’s a wonder anyone can use their products. Not to pick on Microsoft particularly, because I don’t think they are significantly worse than anybody else with a ton of legacy software, but there’s not a holistic design process. Instead, there’s a scenario based design process, where a set of cases for how someone might use the software are imagined, and those are coded up. That make it easier to sell into enterprise, where the buyers are looking for a checklist of supported items, but harder for people to use the software, because there’s no overarching model that makes sense.
Nobody else is much better, though. Apple’s hardware design is beautiful, and their software may have beautiful icons, but the software itself is as crappy and buggy and inscrutable as everyone else’s, and they’re even more indifferent to fixing bugs. It’s far easier to sell features than to sell a good design, and a good design takes longer, so we get crappy design and feature creep as every piece of software tries to be the platform you never leave. (I have opinions about software design, in case you hadn’t noticed. Boys with toys isn’t the right way to design software, but that’s the way it’s done.)
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brian stouder said on November 7, 2016 at 2:22 pm
Man-Bites-Dog, or – Time for Fox News to preserve a little bit of credibility…
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/07/fox-news-poll-clinton-moves-to-4-point-edge-over-trump.html
an excerpt (or: rightwing-nut-graph:
Trump continues to best Clinton narrowly on being seen as honest and trustworthy (+4 points). At the same time, she significantly outperforms him on having the right temperament to serve as president (+23) and being qualified for the job (+18) — plus, she has an advantage on personal favorability (+4).
PS – While I don’t know what a BBF* is, I DO know what a BFF is, or where BFE is, or what the BEF was…
*Uncle Google was no help, there
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Jakash said on November 7, 2016 at 2:35 pm
It’d be a shame for a swell bit of snark to go to waste, off-target though it ended up being, so I’ll throw this out there. Still, I gotta imagine there’d have been quite a number of disgruntled Tribe fans joining the crushed Cubs fans if THIS had been the “image that would lead the Sports section front when the Indians won the World Series”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/insider/the-world-series-sports-page-that-wasnt.html?
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 2:54 pm
I want to note for the record that while agents of our nations highest law enforcement agency were stumbling all over themselves in their haste to find the nearest reporter to leak details true or false about Clinton, nobody from the IRS ever made a peep about Trump’s tax returns. The few pages of Trump’s taxes that were leaked were not Federal, but state returns. Maybe that’s because they’re all secret Trump supporters, though given how much the GOP hates the IRS, it seems unlikely, or maybe they feared the consequences more than the FBI agents did. Either way, the result is they showed more integrity than the FBI.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 3:06 pm
When I was still working in the corporate design world every once in a while I’d have to change a drawing someone else had done before and inevitably I’d find that whoever did the original was really lazy and they’d in essence make a really dirty file. For instance if they were drawing a dog (not that I ever had to redraw a dog, this is just an example) they’d first draw a circle for the head and then a half circle for the snout and then say a triangle for the ear. These were rastor files and each of those shapes was a separate entity that they’d butt up to each other to look like the whole head. If you needed to go back in and change the color of the dog later you’d have to find each individual piece of it and change them all instread of just clicking on the dog’s head and changing it in one swoop. It’s a little more complicated than that, but it was really aggravating to find a dirty file like that. I always took the time to make it clean, which could be very time consuming if there were lots of parts to it. I often think that’s the way code ends up, somebody might be lazy and make a patch instead of cleaning up the whole thing properly and that’s why there are so many glitches. An I wrong about that?
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Jakash said on November 7, 2016 at 3:08 pm
Brian,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Badminton_Federation
Happy to help out… ; )
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brian stouder said on November 7, 2016 at 3:14 pm
If D.Trump wins the presidency, I will sincerely (if grudgingly) wish for his success; and if he loses, I hope he’s gracious enough to drop all the “rigged” talk, and get behind (metaphorically speaking) our new president, so as to discourage (for example) Russian adventurism…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-election-of-1864-and-the-last-temptation-of-abraham-lincoln/2014/09/11/e33f99aa-345b-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html
On Aug. 23, he committed his pessimism to paper.
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
Lincoln folded the memorandum and elaborately sealed it, then asked the members of his Cabinet to sign the back of the paper without reading it. This oddly theatrical gesture would forever remain a bit enigmatic. One plausible interpretation is that he thought the memorandum would be politically useful after the election, but he didn’t want word to get out that he already was making contingency plans for his defeat.
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brian stouder said on November 7, 2016 at 3:20 pm
Jakash – you could have given me twenty guesses, and I’d never have come up with Belgian badminton!
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 3:24 pm
Yes, Deborah, that’s a lot like how it works, though it’s not necessarily laziness. Patching the bug might take an engineer a week, while redesigning the system to solve the underlying problem might take a whole team 6 weeks, or 6 months, and during that time, they aren’t building things that bring in revenue. Sure, in the long run, they would save expenses, but it’s always hard to sell future cost savings against revenue today.
One thing to realize about most tech companies is that they are more focused on the top line than the bottom line. Profits matter, but revenues matter more. The stock price reacts more strongly to revenue growth than profit growth.
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Icarus said on November 7, 2016 at 3:25 pm
” make a patch instead of cleaning up the whole thing properly and that’s why there are so many glitches. An I wrong about that?”
You’re not wrong but there is usually more to it than that. Sometimes you only have the resources for a patch. Or the access level to fix your section of the code. As an analogy think of the tax code. It would take years to fix it all the way through (we should scrap it and start fresh but that takes time too) but sometimes all you can do is fix a few loopholes.
One example of lazy code writing is what’s called hard coding. It can solve a problem quickly when you say X= 100 instead of X = [whatever the user has passed in the interface and then convert it to the correct type]. But it creates problems down the road.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 3:34 pm
Yes, Sherri, you’re right it’s not always laziness, in fact probably most of the time it’s some poor soul who’s under the gun by a superior not giving them enough time to do it right the first time. Never enough time to do it right the first time, but usually has to be done over later taking way more time because of the sloppiness. I’m so glad I’m retired.
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Suzanne said on November 7, 2016 at 3:56 pm
That seems to be the way the world works now, Deborah. Put as few resources and staff as you can upfront and hope for the best. I’ve had several jobs where half the time was spent cleaning up messes that could have been avoided with proper training and adequate staffing, but no. That costs too much. I don’t know what anyone thinks it costs to correct problems, but apparently, they think that is free.
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Connie said on November 7, 2016 at 4:16 pm
I just bought a groupon to digitize 500 slides for $100. Way better than the very first quote of .59 per. Most of my life up to 18 ison those slides.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 4:45 pm
I signed up a few weeks ago to make calls for Hillary somewhere up on Wells that would have required a cab ride because of my foot. Normally I would have walked there. This morning I had to go back to my Dr and she wants me to have an MRI which I refused to do earlier because of the cost. The last time I had a stress fracture they found it on an MRI and put me in a boot for 9 weeks after I walked on it for 2 weeks because it didn’t show up on an X-ray. This time when it happened again and they put me in a boot as a precaution I determined that I would not end up paying for whatever Medicare won’t pay for the MRI and just wear the boot for as long as I need to. I really don’t get what the MRI is for, it makes no sense to me. I walk 6 miles a day on hard pavement, and I’m borderline osteoporosis, it’s a no brainer what is going on. Especially since it’s happened before. I’ve learned my lesson, I will cut back on my daily mileage but I really don’t want to go through the expense of another MRI. All of this to say I canceled my session for Hillary and I’m doing laundry instead. Feeling guilty about that but not feeling guilty about not getting another MRI.
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 5:16 pm
I will also say that stress fractures are hairline fractures that rarely show up on X-rays. But if you’ve had one or two before and you know what they feel like it should be obvious to you especially if you know what you’re up against.
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Charlotte said on November 7, 2016 at 5:34 pm
Suzanne @48 — one of the big reasons I quit my Cisco gig was the way they were forcing us to work with broken tools. The authoring tools that were pretty good for authoring traditional books in English didn’t scale particularly well to localizing into 15-34 languages (my part of the job). And then they wanted us to use the same unscalable tools to create not books, but small discrete chunks of info that could be thrown quickly up on “knowledge base” sites (think those maddening FAQ sites most companies have now instead of proper support/help). The tools we had that wouldn’t scale x 15/34 were certainly not going to scale when you blasted a book into 40-100 discrete chunks then localized — in “real time” on a continuous basis. They wouldn’t invest in new tools. They wouldn’t invest in engineers to fix the broken tools we had. I didn’t really mean to quit the moment my house was paid off — but really, working like *that* was insane. And not atypical …
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jcburns said on November 7, 2016 at 6:07 pm
If you click on the BBF link in my comment above and read the sign, you will have translated this mysterious fast food acronym.
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nancy said on November 7, 2016 at 6:10 pm
Let’s sing along with Lucy!
“Everybody’s goin’ to the BBF
and takin’ their appetite
Everybody’s goin’ to the BBF
at the whirling satellite
Now if you’ve tried the rest
And now you want the best
Just go-go-go to the BBF
The Burger Boy Food-o-Rama!
‘Cause everybody’s goin’ to the BBF…”
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Deborah said on November 7, 2016 at 6:30 pm
Ok folks, I’m about to blow a gasket about this election and the healthcare system. I need to lay low for a while. Did I mention that Little Bird faces another surgery soon, maybe as early as next week. Arrrrgh! I can’t stand the fact that if Trump wins, what will happen to her coverage? Over and out for me here until Weds.
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susan said on November 7, 2016 at 6:34 pm
The Rude Case for Hillary Clinton
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Dave said on November 7, 2016 at 7:32 pm
I was a BBF employee briefly in Reynoldsburg in 1967. Briefly.
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Deggjr said on November 7, 2016 at 7:51 pm
This very intriguing ad being run in Illinois for several local candidates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_mEYf02LWo Kathleen is identified as a single mom. She is very attractive, has perfect makeup, hair, polished teeth.
Who in the world is the target audience for this ad? Post 60 males? Unattached 30 somethings? I have no idea.
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 8:19 pm
Samantha Bee went to Moscow last month and interviewed some trolls: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/07/how-samantha-bee-s-full-frontal-tracked-down-russia-s-pro-trump-trolls.html
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Diane said on November 7, 2016 at 9:03 pm
Brian @43, I thought of you earlier today when a friend emailed me: “‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, . . . to bind up the nation’s wounds, . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace’ This is how I voted, early. Abe Lincoln approved this message earlier, in 1865”
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Suzanne said on November 7, 2016 at 9:47 pm
Strange conversation with a co-worker today. Guy is smart & well educated but very steeped in evangelical culture and listens to Beck, Limbaugh, & the like. Today, he mentions Hillary’s fainting spell of Sept. When I pointed out that it was nearly 80 in New York that day, she had been standing for several hours, & was likely wearing a bullet proof vest, he said, “But did you see how she completely collapsed?” Well, yes, when one passes out, one collapses. Then he proceeded to say he was sure she has neurological problems (why? We don’t know) but she was able to “hold it together” through the debates and mentioned the coughing fits as evidence of her ill health. I did point out that she had pneumonia & doesn’t seem any less healthy than any other nearly 70 yr old woman I know.
Where do these people come from??
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Bruce Fields said on November 7, 2016 at 10:08 pm
“Patching the bug might take an engineer a week, while redesigning the system to solve the underlying problem might take a whole team 6 weeks, or 6 months, and during that time, they aren’t building things that bring in revenue. Sure, in the long run, they would save expenses”
Often true, though there’s also a risk the redesign just ends up wrong.
Those crufty old complicated buggy systems often get that way as a result of solving problems that have since been forgotten–but that will suddenly resurface when the new design doesn’t take them into account. Ideally you find some way to perform a redesign one incremental step at a time. But that’s hard too….
I’m reminded of that issue every time people bring up, I don’t know, replacing welfare by the universal basic income, or converting wholesale to single payer health insurance. I mean, I’m sympathetic, but–these systems we want to sweep away are systems that people depend on every day, and we need to figure out how to get from here to there without killing people in the process.
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Sherri said on November 7, 2016 at 10:23 pm
True enough, Bruce. The product my husband works on has by one estimate around 16 million lines of code, and it’s not nearly as big as something like Windows.
When I was at the caucus way back in March, a Bernie supporter told me that he couldn’t support Hillary because she wasn’t in favor of single payer. Besides pointing out the obvious political problems of fighting the insurance companies, I asked him what was supposed to happen to all the people who worked in the insurance industry if we magically could make it happen. He hadn’t thought through the implications that far.
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Colleen said on November 8, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Re: chiropractic. I was skeptical, but I had a pain in my neck that would not go away. Decided I’d give a chiropractor a shot at it. All I know is that my neck hasn’t hurt in months. I go once a month, he manipulates my neck and back, and I am good to go. He IS big on peddling nutritional supplements, so I am wary of that.
I know enough about computers that I can get them to do what I need them to do. I spent a lot of time doing audio editing on computer in my previous career, and that helped me increase my comfort level.
Voted last week. An hour and 45 minutes later….I got to push the button.
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