Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 I happened to catch a news story on CNN this morning that says HBO - an entertainment organization - is producing a "documentary" (CNN's words) on the " Time Bomb Y2K " about the Y2K problem in computers back then. I haven't seen the show - obviously - and I'm not likely to, but from the write-up in CNN, it sure seems like the CNN writer and the the directors of this ... thing are saying that the Y2K Problem was all made up.  Given that I was an adult IT technician and manager at the time, I do think that their opinions are certainly their own, but sadly, the "entertainment" value of this show may be just about as much as the accurate content. Why do I say that, you ask?  In late 1998 when I was asked to evaluate a few things, I had to develop a test plan and check out my organization's systems.  And I was working on what was rather widely acknowledged by the technical industry as the trailing edge of that evaluation.   Many of our systems...

 Yeah, probably a Minnesota joke most folks won't get.  But that's how today's "Monday" went. Without violating the various health care privacy laws, I'll pull a little curtain aside for my Day Job.  As an Authorization Specialist, I'm the guy who talks to insurance companies and other folks who pay for medical services, on your behalf.  That means I have access to an awful lot of information that the insurance company is going to want to see to justify the expensive (in their terms, anything more than $0.02 can be that, depending on the organization and direction of the current breeze). So in basic terms, I'm asked to look at the prescription your doctor wrote.  Thank all that is Holy that most doctors these days use computers to generate those things, so I'm not often left looking at some twisted art project trying to turn it into a twelve-letter name for a medication.  Or something along those lines. Anyway, as my employer pretty much focuses on...

 Got up this morning at the crack of ... 8:45 am.  A place where my body very much said "roll over and go back to sleep" but the wee puppy, Frejya, who was rather considerate in telling me "OK, Pops, enough laying around, I have a finite-sized bladder..."  She didn't step on my face, though, which I did appreciate.  In thankfulness, I got out of bed, and then stepped closer to the open Bedroom Window.   Yeah.  I like to sleep in a cooler bedroom, which is, when you have a bedroom in the basement with a window almost always possible.  During the summer time our central air conditioner does do a fine job of keeping the basement a bit above "hanging meat locker" temperatures (which is below forty, for those wondering), but in the winter I usually take advantage of our natural cooling.  Which, last night, being that very special of nights each year, didn't see much.  In fact, yesterday, I'm told our high temperature was 47.  Our overnig...

 Merry Christmas.   In my 60 years celebrating Christmases with my first family and the family I made with my wife, there are so many memories and a fair number of regrets.  I do not think that you reach this age and manage not to have a single regret - though if you do, I expect it's not a very well-examined life.  But your life is yours, mine is mine.  And I can look back and see where I did things wrong or poorly, and I can see some successes, as well.   But I will tell you that my first 25 or so, before I was with my wife, were both memorable and challenging.  For many reasons.   My mother told me some years before she died that she well-remembered the first Christmas in the house which I remember as my first "home".  I was 11 years old when we moved from the house in Kutzman's Addition (they named it, I didn't) to the house my Grandmother had lived in along the river.  Those first years are filled with memories of get...

 No that's not what's kept me busy for the last few weeks.  I had no intention at all of staying away that long, but computers being computers... So, true story - my main machine is nothing to ... well, burp at, honestly.  Back about twelve years or so now I was in a position where I needed to replace the daily use computer with something ... well, something that booted up.  Because the one I had had decided to follow the dodo down the rabbit hole and not come back out. So I ran to Bloomington, my favorite used-computer shop, and spent a whopping $40 on the computer to my left here.  It was a huge improvement over the 1 GB box I'd been using, as this has a whopping 4 gigs of RAM.  Which was, ten years ago, impressive.  Even more so about twelve when I picked this one up. But as things do, this one is now rather long in the tooth.  It does what I need, which is fine for early morning and late evening browsing.  I have little time for much else...

 Tomorrow is December 9th.  Back in 1980, it was a school day.  It was a Tuesday morning, the morning after a Scout meeting for me.   My days started around 6:00 am.  I had to get up, get cleaned up enough to spend the day with 750 other kids spread across four buildings, and that took a fair amount of doing.  At 7:10, give or take a few minutes, a bus would appear at the end of our road - a good half mile or longer away.  Fortunately, it was a road that ran maybe a tenth of a mile straight then turned to the left - or north, after running east towards the river, then headed down towards us.  Typically, there were two other houses where kids also got on the bus, then came our house - before the bus headed on into the end of the road where a dead end formed a turn-around spot big enough for a full-length school bus. Then we headed back down the road, out onto the main road, and made a few more stops before we got to the first drop off - which ...

It occurred to me the other day that there is a pretty short list of jobs that AI would be absolutely well suited to perform. My first suggestion would be to have AI filter e-mail.  For example, have the AI check the originating address of the email.  Does it exist?  Does the remote server confirm it?  Does the email require the response to go to another email address?  Is the sender's address ridiculously long?  I mean like 20-or-more character spelling nothing in any language?  Drop the message in the bit bucket.  Don't bother passing it onwards. Another job - verifying backups.  As in, once the backup completes, check a random file.  One that was somewhere on the tape, not at the end or the beginning, just somewhere.  Validate it against the source.  Verify it can be copied off the tape, onto a hard drive, and the restored version is exactly the same as the original file still out there. Verify user behavior patterns.  ...