I knew that if I didn’t manage to stay away from the family farm this day would finally come, but I had kind of put it out of my mind. Today it hit me. You would have to understand a little bit about the situation to understand why. I grew up on a family farm back when being a neighbor actually meant something. Some of my earliest memories are of when I finally became old … Today Is the Day I Really Missed My NeighborRead more
Posted inInformation Technology
New Life for Old Software
DOS software will be with us forever. It seems that Microsoft can never get away from it no matter how many names they put on the OS. Since I’ve had some down time, I decided to work on an annoying matter. I have probably blogged before that I have some older expense files written with a C/Pascal code generator called DataBoss which had its own proprietary file system. These files are well past the window … New Life for Old SoftwareRead more
Posted inThank You Sir May I Have Another
Loud Cell Phone Addict 0 Universe 1
On Saturday I finally got to fly back from New York. Nothing makes one miss home like being in New York. Yes, it was a trip from hell involving a bout with the flu, an accident in a cab, and a host of other bad things. All pretty typical. The flight home allowed for a brief moment of joy though. I arrived at the airport 3 hours early and spent my time napping at the … Loud Cell Phone Addict 0 Universe 1Read more
Posted inInformation Technology
Vendor Management Systems = Price Fixing and Wire Fraud
Price fixing is rampant in IT since Vendor Management Systems were introduced. Indeed, price fixing is the primary reason the systems were adopted. Recently I had an interesting discussion with a pimp about a contract opening. They had posted the contract opening on Dice and tagged the entry as “market rate”, but when the called me, they were offering a billing rate well below half of market rate. Several other pimps had called about this … Vendor Management Systems = Price Fixing and Wire FraudRead more
Posted inInformation Technology
Substring Exists in String
Today I got to burn about three hours looking online for an answer to what F$LOCATE() makes a simple task. What simple task you ask? Why, I was trying to verify one string existed inside of another string while working in Bash under Linux. You see, I learned to write software on robust systems. Yes, I know, the Linux/Unix developer motto is “test nothing, just let it fail”, but I was taught to write good … Substring Exists in StringRead more