BXLE_1-1-BitIs1's comments

The surgery is not fun. The worst part was the cannula for the subtenon block - not painful, but my anxiety at something being poked into my eye socket went through the roof. My sister opted for sedation after she heard of my experience.

The second operation was easier as I told the surgeon about my reaction to the subtenon block and he put some topical in the right place making it much easier. However the residual anxiety from the first operation remained. All that said, I've had rougher times at the dentist.

I opted for optimal vision at arm's length with a monofocal lens. We spend most of our days around the house. Bifocals with plano below work fine for outdoors, driving and flying (check with your aviation doctor before lens selection as aviation authorities are strict in what lens options are allowed). The depth of field has turned out better than I expected, but I use 1.25 diopter drug store readers when I'm using my tablet at home and put it at arm's length in the coffee shop.

The results are absolutely wonderful and I feel gratitude every time I step outside.

One of my boys was invited out by some classmates, then beaten up in a back alley. I called the police who visited their homes. They got the message that they'd be in court if they did anything like that again.

End of problem.

If your kid is bullied, call the police. Most school authorities are bully enablers.

Netanyahu recently spoke that Israel needs to become a Super Sparta as the world is turning against it.

Sparta periodically declared war against the Helots.

In between those "wars" (it's not really a war when a helpless population is subjected to killings) the Crypteia assassinated Helot leaders.

I agree with Netanyahu in characterizing Israel as a Super Sparta.

My favourite Pixel feature is Screen Call.

My primitive security precautions:

1. DO NOT use your Gmail for recovery. Use another email provider.

2. Use a family member's phone number for recovery.

3. DO NOT install your bank's app. Somehow the Royal Bank of Canada's app was used as an attack vector. If the RBC app can get hacked, smaller banks are even more vulnerable.

4. Use incognito mode on your browser for banking so a thief or hacker can't use your browser history to find out your bank.

Having worked in Toronto and Calgary, I vastly prefer Calgary's +15 system. Daylight in Calgary's +15 second floor retail spaces is the only daylight exposure an office worker gets in the depths of winter.

The Tick Key, www.tickkey.com, does the job quite well. You put it over the tick and slide the narrow slot from behind until the mouthparts are in as far as they can fit.

You may be surprised at how hard the tick holds on, but work slowly until it pops off, preferably into a container that you can put in the freezer.

Etick.ca can be used to identify and report the tick.

My cat has brought in three ticks this spring and summer that I found crawling about while he was on my lap. Cats grooming themselves seem to prevent ticks from embedding.

Doctors can prescribe doxycycline as a precaution.

You don't need explosives to take down a helo,just a good enough length of strong rope with weights to put the rotors out of balance.

20- & 30- somethings in the 80s are now mostly past retirement age. Actuarial attrition is a fact.

Abdul Azziz al Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, received supplicants on a near daily basis as all his subjects believed they had a right to bring their complaints to him.

In the early years of his reign, he was involved in military campaigns to expand his kingdom.

I spent several years with DCF, Document Composition Facility, and markup languages - including one of my own. At Xerox I worked on software to enable DCF output on Xerox printers.

Much preferred Optima to the sans serif fonts.

Printer and screen resolution have a large effect on the appearance of fonts. Low resolution favors sans serif, but Garamond was pretty good on earlier IBM laser printers.

Perhaps the question is how much misery are you willing to tolerate to prolong your life for how long?

Certain treatments take weeks to recover from while giving you months, years, even decades of life expectancy with good quality.

Other treatments of late stage terminal cancer only give you a few more weeks in the hospital.

Axial flow made more demands on metallurgy of the time than centrifugal flow. The Viscount was the first turbine powered civil aircraft using RR Darts with two centrifugal compressor stages.

I enjoyed flying on the Viscount. It offered a much nicer passenger experience than the current crop of sardine cans.

Decades later I got in a lot of time flying the simulator that Air Canada donated to a tech school.

http://www.vickersviscount.net/Pages_Technical/Rolls-RoyceDa...

I am reminded of my time at Xerox: Financialisation, making numbers, frequent reorgs, looking down on software...

But the biggest was coming up with nice new technologies, selling to customers; then not that many years later dropping support and leaving customers without a path forward.

Started programming over half a century ago. The insurance company I was working for gave me a joint life actuarial evaluation problem for which I wrote a Fortran program, picked up from a book. My uni student buddy let me use his ID so I could drop decks into their IBSYS. Turnaround was about a day. My career as a professional manual reader began.

Well yes, my high school maths were in the high 90s - more than my language scores in French, German and Latin with some off curricular Russian. I guess being a polymath helps.

Unless you are doing an engineering or mathematical application you don't need much math, especially as you can just call a function in the vast majority of the time.

I did a number of software products and operating system modifications without using any math beyond arithmetic operations.

I was a resource for other programmers including the odd math PhD.

The helo route was likely instituted decades ago when traffic was lower. The NTSB incident database search turned up a close call between rotary and fixed wing just about every month in the last several years. This was a accident waiting to happen.

This is not by any means the only midair collision where a crew was avoiding a different aircraft.

I wonder why Oz Customs didn't simply seize the shipment as it seems it was declared on the invoice or packing list. Given the miniscule amount, the authorities would not have known otherwise.

On a similar note a Canadian prosecutor in Halifax got seriously concerned about the large amount of dihydrogen oxide in a hobbyist's container.

If you can't hack STEM, the legal system is a good career option

Nice puzzle with a twist of Zugzwang. Took me about 8 minutes, but it's been decades since I was doing chess.

Played it on the mainframe in the 70s. It took many plays to make Adventurer Grand Master.

Another game at the time was Lunar Lander. I finally achieved a landing with only three commands: Retrofire, Coast, Final fire.

There was also a Formula 1 race car game and a chess game that I tried out. The chess game was clueless in positions.

2nd Amendment and self defense arguments could be argued if you shoot plainclothes officers in fear of your safety.

z boxes use a flavor of VM to run all the LPARS and allocate memory and devices. z/OS, z/VM and Linux all run as VMs.

Then there's CMS which runs under VM; theoretically it could run as an LPAR, but I've not seen that as running DIAGNOSE (VM system call) to the LPAR hypervisor could be disruptive. It would be interesting to drop DIAGNOSE into a z/OS environment, but I suspect it would be intercepted.

I much prefer z/VM to z/OS as a development environment. At one shop, I developed products under VM for deployment under both VM and MVS.

Many early S/360 installations ran 7070 and, I guess, 1401 emulators.

Eventually with VM, the SIE (Start Interpretive Execution) instruction appeared. A form is running LPARs.