Allegrippus

I always hated when the apple cobbler or other sugary dessert bled over from its section of the tray into the main course of salisbury steak and mashed potatoes or whatever. Of course, thinking back now -- the mashed potatoes always tasted awful like cardboard, so perhaps I shouldn't have cared that the stuff was getting all mixed :-)

We did have video tape recorders, though. Setting up and running them for classes was part of my college work-study job around 1971-72. The units I operated were made by Ampex and were about the size of a suitcase. They used a wide tape which had to be threaded onto the take-up reel, similar to an audio reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape head had to be cleaned with alcohol between each use, and there was a tracking control which you often adjusted to avoid getting a stripe across the picture.

And what's a "gathering rug", anyway? Are desks too rough on their little sissy rear ends?

Some years ago before I retired, I ventured into my local senior center to get a free flu shot, and nearly got sucked into a big square dance while trying to cross the room (it was mostly women and I guess they needed more men for partners). A functioning light sabre would have come in mighty handy that day!

Doesn't really bother me. Every year during Lent I hear, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." So I figure my house and I are slowly fulfilling biblical prophecy.

When I worked in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, I had coworkers from the Latrobe area, and since I'm from east of the Alleghenies (where lah-TROBE tends to be popular) it always took some conscious effort on my part to say LAY-trobe, which I understood to be correct :-)

Due to ever increasing development, squirrels can no longer travel the nation by jumping between successive trees as their ancestors once did. Today it involves much more work and danger: crawling down, scampering across open ground, climbing back up, running the wires, and dealing with those high voltage pole pigs. Actually, squirrels have been mad as hell at us for many years now. Thus far they haven't overtaken us because (a) we've appeased them somewhat by tossing them peanuts and filling bird feeders with sunflower seed, and (b) they haven't quite mastered the "opposable thumb" thing just yet. But they are known for adaptability and persistence, and there are reports they are making major advances with (b) by secretly observing our finesse at eating chicken wings at outdoor picnics and festivals. Really, it's only a matter of who gets there first: squirrels and thumbs, dogs and doorknobs, cows and upright walking, or cats figuring out the internet backbone. We'll soon be paying homage to our new overlords, and they won't even be from an alien planet.

I remember original RPG as being the electronic descendant of the old IBM unit record machines, with their plug boards and mechanical processing cycles. That heritage likely predates even COBOL. IBM added many extensions over the years, and at one of my mainframe workplaces we even did online CICS programming with RPG (not fun at all!).

Also, much of the actual time-sharing control on those GE's was handled by a separate communications processor (e.g. Datanet-30) with its own memory space and registers.

I'm single and 63, and that often happens to me, too. You just have to watch they don't try to stick you into an undesirable small table next to the kitchen door, etc. I find this occurs most often with younger, less experienced hosts, and I simply won't put up with it. The instant I realize I'm being guided to a poor table or a noisy area, I quickly look around and request another one of my own choosing.

I worked up until last year, when at age 62 I decided to retire -- mostly because I could! A good portion of my career was in traditional, more hierarchical industries such as rail and steel, where a sizable number of older employees were often the norm. I also tended to specialize in legacy applications that other (mostly younger) staff didn't really want to touch -- products like PowerBuilder or IBM (Lotus) Notes. Yeah, I also did work with newer technology, but I never really let go of the older stuff because 1) it was the core of my earlier experience and I didn't mind working with it, and 2) there always seemed to be a need for someone to do maintenance, updates, or conversions.

I'm aware of several prominent companies in the Pittsburgh region that were on centralized mainframes and now use Micro Focus or some other "modern" COBOL for their core systems. These aren't legacy but are actively developed and extended. To look at the screens, etc., you'd likely never guess that the underlying code is COBOL. If it does the job and serves the business well, why switch?