I could have retired. I could have wasted the rest of my life. I could have been out of the rat race.
There is something I'm supposed to accomplish. MY GOD told me this.
My god is nature, and nature doesn't speak English.

Nature makes you hungry, makes you have children and then protect them, all without words.
Nature's told me there's something I'm supposed to do, in the form of an instinctive feeling. I'll know when I've done it.
Then I can fade away. I give my body perhaps 10 more years.
Whatever is going to happen, it'll happen in the next couple of years.
It won't be me doing it though. It'll be nature doing it through me. I'll just doing what I've been told to do.
Maybe it's my destiny to save someone's life, I don't know yet.
Hopefully, I won't be a pawn anymore in ending other people's lives. I hate being the messenger of death.
For some reason, I've been given the understanding of what life is and why we are here.
But I can't share it with anyone, simply because, they just can't see it. You have to know it.
You have to listen to the god that created every cell in your body.
And God doesn't speak English.
I still don't understand why people don't marvel at a blade of grass.
I saw that it was a miracle when I was a child. Why would god have to do a magic show better than that?
We all have been risen from the dead. Why is that so hard for people to see?

They both left me with a negative feeling about myself.
Dad, once again, compared me to the person whose roof he lives under.
His wife's son is a computer professional. According to Dad, he gets contracts all of the time.
So, what's wrong with me.
I could try to tell Dad that I'm not a coder, I'm a designer.
My goal is to create a product that doesn't need my high rates, or a high level of competency to maintain.
If I get contracted to write a report on a system, it won't be just a report.
It'll be the most efficiently written report in the entire system. It will be the best report they have.
I would consider part of my job to be writing a report in such a way, that a 6th grader could modify it.
I could write code that only I could modify. I could even write code with hidden bugs in it.
But that's not my style. I don't want to make a living off of a set of programs.
If his wife's son is always getting contracts to make updates on the same set of programs, it's probably crappy code.
He's making a living off of being sloppy. His code is unmaintainable by anyone else.
My legacy to Las Vegas is a series of Tandems that sit in the basement somewhere.
One person updates it. He does't need any eduction. He runs a menu.
There is no programming expertise needed to maintain it.
I talked to Mikey. He said talked to Kevin.
Kevin told me there wouldn't be anything out there until after the holidays.
He told Mikey something was coming up in Washington and that they'd be willing to train Java programmers.
I put that together like this, fuck em. I've never used headhunters in the past, except for this one time. I learned their tecniques back in the 70's. I know what they do. I know how to they get jobs for people. It's not rocket science.
But I'm not looking for a job right now.
If I was, I wouldn't be using a headhunter. I'd be using my time to make my own contracts. I'd cut the middle layer of incompetency out of the process. A headhunter, an employment office, a job councellor, none of these people are necessary in obtaining work. If they get in the way, they are useless.
About the Raymond James interview, one more time.
I was glad that I didn't get a job working there. They seemed too slow and too incumbered by unnecessary details to be a place where I could be creative. If I worked like that on this website, I'd be spending most of my time filling out forms I created. On this site, I can create more in one day, than I could in one year working there.
About M2, one more time.
It may be fine, for someone else to sit at a desk, and write code exactly as they had been told to do. To me, doing that would make me unnecessary for the project. Why wouldn't the person who wrote the code and showed me exactly where to put it, just write the code herself? Billing comes to mind. They need a body to say that they wrote the code, so they can bill for that person's time. In other words, I'd be useless following marching orders like that.
I'd be last chair, last clarinet, in the band. And that is just not my style!

Every day in this life should count. We have 30000 days to live here. We can decide to waste or not waste each day.

That would be my formula for a good life.
I wanted Becky to be involved in the evolution of this website.
We went to Walmart and bought some cheap desks. Now they are sitting side by side in the bedroom.
I want Becky to help me accomplish something cool. Any female can give birth to a child. Thats as natural as breathing.
Very few people give birth to ideas.
She's already helped me bunches and she doesn't even know it.
Becky's biggest contribution to this sites development, is her not understanding how to use it. |
Everyone has talents. I need her talent to finish this site. If this site can be broken, she can show me how.
She'll try to do things on it without reading the instructions. She doesn't see the functionality of this site, she see's the flash and pizazz of it.
Henry Ford was a genius of sorts. I think they called him "The Father of the Assembly Line". 
His accomplishments wasn't so much the Ford vehicle, it was the assembly lines where the Fords were built. To make the assembly more efficient, he didn't study the hardest worked, he studied the laziest one. The laziest people figured out how to do the same amount of work, with the least amount of effort. They thought about what they did.
He turned Mass Production into the science it is today.

I got irritated at Becky because she didn't seem to know anything much about setting up my website.
I told her we have a choice.
That's to be poor, or not to be poor. The way to be poor was to waste each and every day.
The way to get ahead, is to make each and every day count.
If its spacing out the days until the end that she wants, then we should go into truck driving now.
To me, that is slow suicide.
I want to make each day count. I want to do things most people don't do. I do not want to be normal.
Life is a gift. We have a choice. We can appreciate it, or we can take it for granted.
I think most people take life for granted.

It seemed to me that I'd be a good fit for one of those boats. I can deal, maintain their systems, and fix things. Everything there was so familiar. I know I could improve their marketting strategy too. The boat had mainly drive bys (like us), and bus people on it. Most of the people their would never be the targets of a Las Vegas casino.
I was dying to fix half the things I saw. I was this || close to fixing one of their toilets
Their slot enrollment wouldn't let you combine points. It couldn't handle joint memberships. Data entry was rough.
Their cruise reservations was clunky. After signing someone up, you had to search for their name in the database and pull up a change screen to see what you had entered. It looked like a cheesy system.

Reloading my laptop has left me with some strange feelings. I keep asking myself "What am I doing?".
There is no right or wrong way to do anything in this life,
and in a sense, the future is as much written as the past.
But still, trapped in the present, I feel like I may be doing the wrong thing.
I wonder what would have happened if we never came here. I wonder what would have happened if I didn't quit M2.
I only proved one thing by quitting M2, which was to myself. 
I won't let anyone demean me for any amount of money. I'll alway choose to keep my integrity intact.
The direction I'm headed doesn't seem to be as clear cut as I'd like it to be.
I'm wondering though the present.

Hi Babe
I had a great time last night at the dog race. I would like to go again
but let's try the one in Daytona it is a lot bigger. I was very suprised
that we won. You are right about the people there were pretty wierd
looking. I liked the Aquarium with the big fish at the Oyster Bar. The
guy Smitty was a nice there.

Love Ya
becky

0A0B0C0D0E

Possible linux bootable os from disk or imige for furtur? kanotix is nica.  run os off disk entire no installation, parting.
Hey , this is old posto, 2005, never mend.  Mebbe you bios was scared of wat it see when u flashed it , he he.
anyways, its me, wRren.  Im not loaded yo, jest baked.  like by the mother of all suns.  hey what a nutty place ..
im watching a nice dvd on Lenny bRuce.  Lenny, Jimi Hendrix, Layne Staley, such courageously naked people.
anyways. peace. 

To use words like OOP in a sentence even sounds stupid.
OOP is not a computer command. Its not a program. Its not a language.
It's a magazine's description for something we've been doing for years.
Just because someone says its new, doesn't make it new. It only makes the word new.
Until this century, Shakespear added more words to the English language than any other entity.
Microsoft and Ibm have more than doubled the number of words in the English Language.

Tuesday at noon - Lunch with Enricci 407-551-1319 or 213-408-0236
Tommorrow at noon - Raymond James interview in Tampa.
Remain calm, if they ask about M2, say:
- M2 wasn't what I was looking for.
- I'm looking for personal growth in a challenging environment.
- I'm also looking for stability and long term employment.

Jimbo, man, you look marveloussss.....lol.
Shoes, suit, pants, and two ties cost $160. That's not a bad price to pay to look snazzy.
We also got a portable Dvd/Cr Reader/Writer.
If I don't back up some of this stuff, I'm going to lose it.

What a great guy! We think alike. Its nice to talk to a like mind.
I needed to find some kind of solace in my decision. He gave it to me.
He was a Tandem guru since it first came out, so he understood everything I told him.
And it was nice to hear from another developer.
He said he absolutely.hated doing maintenance code.
He did it at Bank of America on Base24.
Same thing I was doing...add a chunk of code, then talk or document it for days.
He said he talked to Kevin McDonald and he's the head of some IT department for BOA.
Good ol Kevin. What a die hard. I should call his butt an give him a hard time.

Hmmmm. Its nice to be known by people in high places.

So there.......haha

With this job, I saw myself doing the same thing I was doing on the first day I started:
-  30 minutes: Being told about a line of code they want added
-  10 minutes: Adding that line of code and recompiling.
-360 minutes: testing that line of code

-  25 minutes: documenting it that line of code, in the code (5 lines), in a document, a time sheets and a task list.

-  60 minutes: talking about that line of code, if I did anything other than exactly what I was told to do.
From the times above you can see that one programmer who just coded could replace all of the other programmers.
But, that's what maintenance programmers do, I guess. They don't code, they test and document. Thats messed up.

Development programmers use their time as follows:
- Designing and programming are interactive with the user and takes up about 90% of the time.
- The users are almost always happy to create the documentation. The design specs change in the development cycle.
- It's typical to write several hundred lines of code each day.
I can honestly say I didn't learn anything new in the last month.
If I stayed, I would have learned how to mindlessly write sloppy code. I can't do that. I care about the quality of my work.
The worst thing I saw about this job was: myself slowly going broke with no reputation to show for it.
In programming, if you don't gain new skills, you are almost worthless.
The only way to keep a job without learning new things is to lock yourself in. You can do that working for the government, or some big corporation where noone knows what or how you do what you do.
Usually, the people who have seniority in a programming shop, are the people with the fewest skills.
They haven't learned other ways of doing things, and they usually think their way is the only way.
They almost always say, "Thats not the way we do it here". 
Any programmer who reads this, should realize it is the truth.
Bad coders get promoted, while the good coders move on.
About job recruiters. They're great for when you don't know anyone, and you haven't established a reputation.
However, once you've been at a place for awhile, if you do exceptional work, people will talk about what you've done. When you leave a job, people will call you wanting to hire you. If they don't, then you have either a bad reputation or none.
We all sell ourselves by what we do. If we don't care about what we do, others will see that.
And there was no way I was going to get a good reputation at a place that controlled every thing I did.

I got a call from Pete Strickland (702-425-413-1580)

I have an interview on Monday 11/7 12pm, at Raymond James
Ask for Lisa Tomberlin in the IT Contracts Group, she works with Brian
It's at 880 Carillon Pky, St Petersburg, Fl 33733
I should dress up and the interview may be somewhat technical.

                  

It seemed like the third part of the task was missing, forgotten or unassigned.
I asked Jeff about it and he told me he had the third part of it.
No one told me, and I've learned I'm not supposed to assume anything.
Now thats just fucked up.

Once again, someone has said something demeaning about Smoking
I've known hundreds of smokers in my lifetime. Of them, only one has died from cancer.
Only one. I don't know if she smoked, but she almost died at my house on Gabriel Drive.
They've died of heart attacks, accidents, sucide and pneumonia.
In my opinion, several of them would have lived longer if they didn't have surgery.
But, that's just what I've seen with my own eyes.
Please note that the following does not mention deaths caused by old age, or deaths occurring after major surgeries.
Leading Causes of Death in the US (2002):
 1-Heart Disease: 696,947
 2-Cancer: 557,271
 3-Stroke: 162,672
 4-Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816
 5-Accidents (unintentional injuries): 106,742
 6-Diabetes: 73,249
 7-Influenza/Pneumonia: 65,681
 8-Alzheimer's disease: 58,866
 9-Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 40,974
10-Septicemia: 33,865

11-Suicide: 31,655
12-Liver Disease: 27,257
13-Hypertension: 20,261
14-Homicide: 17,638
15-Pneumonitis: 17,593
Other Causes: 407,900

What you don't see is this:

http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Editorials/Vol-1/e1-4.htm

Journal of Theoretics Vol.1-4
Oct/Nov 1999 Editorial

Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

(According to WHO/CDC Data)*
By:  James P. Siepmann, MD

Yes, it is true, smoking does not cause lung cancer. 
It is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer.
I initially was going to write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective. (No, I did not get paid off by the tobacco companies, or anything else like that.)

When the tobacco executives testified to Congress that they did not believe that smoking caused cancer, their answers were probably truthful and I agree with that statement.
Now, if they were asked if smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer, then their answer based upon current evidence should have be "yes." 
But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is much less than anyone would suspect.  
Based upon what the media and anti-tobacco organizations say, one would think that if you smoke, you get lung cancer (a 100% correlation) or at least expect a 50+% occurrence before someone uses the word "cause." 

Would you believe that the real number is < 10% (see Appendix A)? Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer (see Appendix A). 
In fact, the data used is biased in the way that it was collected and the actual risk for a smoker is probably less. 
I personally would not smoke cigarettes and take that risk, nor recommend cigarette smoking to others, but the numbers were less than I had been led to believe. 
I only did the data on white males because they account for the largest number of lung cancers in the US, but a similar analysis can be done for other groups using the CDC data.

You don't see this type of information being reported, and we hear things like, "if you smoke you will die", but when we actually look at the data, lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths worldwide and only 3% in the US.**

  

- My last day at M2 is Friday.

- Next week I want to finish our tour of Florida.

- I may end up getting a job at Raymond James working on Web Development. I want that.
- If I don't find work, I'm going to work on my website, with marketting being my goal.

- If, by January, I haven't made any money off of my sites or found work then I'm going to take a Truck Driving School. 

- We'll live either here or in Las Vegas, depending on our money situation.
- If do go into Trucking, my goal will be to own a truck, then a fleet of trucks.

Dang...I really wanted to talk to Mike Muscato (the owner).
His resume reads exactly like mine.
All I wanted was 5 minutes of his time, but it doesn't look like I'm going to get even that.
I think I'll bust a nut to see the man.
I know if we talked about the old times with the ATM's and the switch networks, he'd place me someplace more appropriate than the change one line of code and talk about it for an hour position I've been in. There's a chance he's even heard of me. The Inn switch is probably as well know as the Star Network in Nevada (I think).

The condo was nice, but I felt like we were imposing somehow. It didn't feel right.
Plus my aunt wouldn't let us pay for anything. She insisted on paying for 2 lunches and a dinner.
It was hard to get her to smile. I was being my perky self, and Becky's always perky.
She like Becky a lot, but, I suppose all of the things she'd heard about me from my Dad and Kelly got in the way of things.
I bought her a Billy Bob Big Mouth Bass Plaque. She said her cats would like it.
She kept going on about how we were killing ourselves by smoking.
Both her and her husband had smoked. She still drinks a little. He died this year.
I kept saying that we all die from something when we get old. Old age is never listed as a cause of death.
She implied that I wanted to die. I just told her, no...I'm just not afraid of living.
Then we got on the thing about the medallion. She said her mom made a mistake by letting dad have it.
Then she said she was surprised Sonny let me take it out of his safety deposit box. My jaw dropped.

We openned the box and put it in there. It got stolen when I was documenting it. Someone broke a window to get into my house. I have a police report...sheesh!
When we talked about Kelly, I mentioned how Kelly could be dangerous.
She told everyone, including people I worked with that I dropped LSD and drove 24 hours her to Colorado Springs, which is stupid. I said, I had tried LSD, but that was long ago, and that Kelly mistook NoDose for drugs.
Kelly was badly mistaken.
My aunt got stuck on the LSD part. She asked why I did it and I said, everybody was doing it back then. She said, her kids and grand kids never did drugs, but her son might have smoked pot. I wanted to say, yea, right.
Then she got off on how poorly my Mom must have raised me.
How I must have gotten a lot of my traits from the Rogers.
I told her the Rogers were basically dull but very dependable people.
They'd get a job and work it all their lives, and they were very predictable.

I don't think Becky heard a lot of this because my aunt is such a low talker.
I doubt we'll be going back up there to visit any time soon.

I reduced the code by 66% in RCBHLD. By removing cluttered logic.
In SCBHLD, I reduced the code by 41%.

And, I added functionality.

We're ordering it, we pay for it and  I'm surprised I don't have to pay for all of it, since I'm the new guy.
I still haven't been introduced to everybody yet. Not even at the meeting today. wow.
Oh well.

 
It's dracuala or is it a Batman? 
This was cute. Hope you like it?

                              Love Bexky

Wow. I just mentioned a couple of things of buggy things I found.
I'm actually afraid to mention any errors that I find anymore.
I showed someone an error that basically said "The Tandem Transaction System isn't working".
I mentioned that since it came from the Tandem and transaction processing is mostly what the Tandem does,
that it probably wouldn't ever be displayed, because the Tandem System would be down...DUH!!!
The response was "Nah, that could happen. If the server got too many transactions."
I wanted to say "Saddam Hussein could get the Nobel Peace Prize too."

This server processes one transaction, then dies, which in itself is queer.
But in this case, the 50 (not 3) lines of code used to display that crap causes this program to be spaghetti.
I asked Mikey if I should point anything out anymore, he said he gets an att-a-boy when he does at times.
I keep getting, naaah, we need that, or we shouldn't change that.
If I stayed here, I'd end up being SO depressed.
I'm depressed now.

This is cool 

You Brighten up my life Babe.
                       
Thank you for lunch today it was good. I'm watching 
Got Mail Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan.  

                           Becky

I suppose I'm gonna get reamed again today.
Instead of adding a ?SAVE PARAM, ASSIGN in my program I put

?SAVE ALL in the program I'm working on.
There is no local docs saying I have to do it either way.
Something will be said about it, and if I am told to change it to ?SAVE PARAM, ASSIGN,
its going to cost these guys money when they finally discover STARTUPTEXT exists!!!
I don't think they're aware of that. The only program I've seen use it is a C program...which is pathetic.
LOL

I'm sure he'd understand the significance of a decision that cost him $200.
It was just one email, one decision, and another day of management error.
Add that up over a year and you get $5,200.

It almost happened, but it didn't. Everything wend gracefully, like I'd hoped.
I knew I was pushing the line when I put down zero hours for last Friday.
Jeanne asked me if I worked Friday
I replied "If I wasted our time on this project, I can't, in all honesty, bill for it. My loss."
Now, I know damned well its their loss, probably to the tune of over $200.
She came back and said "Let's split the difference, put down 4 hours".
Jeanne is so funny. She's lost her focus.
I may have lost $120, but the company lost at least $200.
And I would call that another bad management decision. LOL.

Friends are people who offer you unconditional positive regard.
They don't take sides against you.
If they do, then they are not being your advocate, and they are not being your friend.
Good ol' Mikey told me today if I wanted to say somethings to try to improve M2 on my way out, not to expect anything.
I told him I wouldn't expect anything, I'd be leaving...but if there was some kind of suggestion I could make on my way out, let me know, and I'll voice it. That I'd like to do something good for the people at work.

Once again, Mikey said, sure, that's all well and fine, but don't expect anything.
And once again, I said, I don't expect anything. I'm leaving.
Then there's Jeff, saying he didn't have any trouble working on the progam I'm working on.
I didn't tell him I knew how many hours he put on the same program I'm working on.
He needed help keying in the input using the editor. I tried to help him, and finally let Mikey explain it to him.
As far as M2 goes, there is no team, and there was supposed to be.
I see a bunch of people who work together that don't communicate with each other.
The email to Phil about his coughing, sent by JoeSmith@Yahoo.com is enough to indicate that.
BTW - I like how Mikey backed up JoeSmith. That makes me think he did it.
But there is too much pressure and ambiguity for this simple application.
And I would have quit the first day, after I sized the place up. Phil knew I wanted to.Mikey didn't.
Now, all I want to do is leave. Honestly, when I said I resign on Friday, they should have let me go.
I will never understand this system because of how they are using it:
   They use params, not pathway, to control a server that has three different functions in it.
   Those three different functions having the same paragraph number in the program.
   The program has 10,000 lines of code in it.
   Documenting the program indicating each and every day a programmer worked on it...EG: * 103105 Continued
   Securing the DDL source (the heart of the file system) so no one can read it.
   Not documenting testing procedures, when thats 90% of what they do. 
   I've been told expanding a PIC 9(8) comp field to PIC 9(16) comp was out of line. That's just ridiculous.
   I worked over a day on a program that wasn't even used. It was someone elses junk.
  I've been reprimanded for not increasing a table size to 3,000. Jeanne said I didn't test the program.
  She was looking at a table that represented a small subset of the table need to be increased in size.
  BTW - That was the program that I took all of Mikey's code out of. I restarted it from scratch.
  He had no idea what he was doing. 
  Man, I sat back and took her insults.

I've got a bunch of them in there.
I need to contact the president of this small company here. I worked with him at Caesars Palace.
He may something for me.

He said it'll last through October, and it is always followed by a six month drought.
Can you place like a put on Orange futures?
Hmmm.

Hurricane Wilma is all over the news out there, so I suppose its national news. Wow...cool...

This server that I'm working on in Pathway is actually three batch programs in one. What it does is determined by by someone actually changing parameters set in pathway. Pathway's purpose, the very reason its named pathway in the first place, is because requesters are supposed to determine which program to run, not fixed parameters.
I've been so overwhelmed by how these people use pathway.
I'm not even sure why they use the Tandem to do this processing.
Almost everything I've seen so far is batch, it is not online processing.
The Tandem is an online processor, it's terrible at batch processing.
People use it for EBay, Wall Street, ATM's, 911, medical and even Airline systems.

I asked someone at work recently, what are they calling programmers theses days? Software Engineers?
This guy said, there are no such things as a programmers or software engineers any more.
They all have a degree in something else, programming is expected. lol.
I scanned Orlando's ads for programmer positions, and there seems to be a lot of them here.
One that caught my eye was an openning for a gaming programmer.
I should point out, that my interest in working here never ever had anything to do with money,
especially since my current contract sets me back 20 years in scale.
I was looking for job satisfaction. If I wanted to be a grunt, I could have worked in Las Vegas.

She lives near Daytona Beach. Anyway, she sounds exactly like someone I know...wow.
Anyway, we're coming down for the weekend...next Friday at 7pm...
Once again, Yeeehaaaaa.
Also, I was thinking about tommorrow...should we come in or not?
In my case, what are they going to do? Fire me? lol.