poobear22

I read earlier that the funding of this would not be from "educational funding" so I wondered it a high school student defaced it, or removed it, as high school students would do, would the punishment be from "educational funding"?

It may, but you can't give this to minors.

I had a nice Philips blue light system, really well designed. It changed nothing for me, and I ended up giving it to someone and I don't think it did anything for them either. $300 wasted? Yeah, limit light before bedtime, no caffeine, and concentrate of getting a good first few hrs of sleep as the subsequent hrs have diminishing returns.

I liked what I saw. I would love for you to have a simple filter so I could just examine, say Ruy Lopez games (I know this is more complex for your back end). Right now, you present my chess games, but I may only be interested in a particular opening. If you allowed a filter option of just a few moves, that would simplify what I want to look at. Otherwise, I need to do a fair amount of work to identify the types of games I want to analyze.

So, if you could support giving me a tool to see where I go wrong in my commonly played openings, that would be great.

Suggest bushes, water fountain or a noise-generating water source Probably a losing battle but perhaps something like cork or wood lattice-type structure to absorb sound - that is commonly used in noisy places? Try talking with you neighbor to see if the children's play area can be slightly relocated. It's not worth a lot of conflict. Having kids play and hearing the fun can be nice too. If the sound it inside your house, there are more expensive things like double wall windows, check out house in area in airline flight paths. They have several noise reduction issues that have applied. The teenagers next door played basketball late into the night. We were glad to see the kids having fun and let them know it. It subsided after a few yrs. No conflict. Your issue is very different from my first house where having a stupid neighbor that plays loud music and blows up firecrackers in your front yard and drives his truck on your yard and knocks your fence boards out so his dog has a little more space to run. For that problem, you may want to move.

Turn your screen so it faces your office door or towards your co-workers. If it is on your phone at work, stop using the phone or just use the phone in the hallway. When you are at your desk/computer work.

My adventures solo thru Europe and N. Africa were outstanding and I grew so much in self confidence and an understanding of my personal abilities. I wish I took more trips, and hit up the 1980's music scene in England. Small towns were the best.

I had a good time with R for statistical process control. I don't think I used any libraries at the time (this was a long time ago) except maybe Pareto charts, but I primarily worked with mean time between failures of events. My issue was I did not control the faulty applications, but received a lot of "blame" for their failures as we managed the high performance computer systems. I wanted to be able to shine a flashlight on the various operational jobs and the frequency of their failures. I generally felt the application owners were often times lazy in getting to a root cause analysis, and it was never my job to do this with their specialized applications. It did a pretty good job taking the heat off my team, the results were automatically generated and always available. But, changing the culture was always difficult.

It may be worth investing in a vocabulary-expanding thesaurus, either HTML- or React-based.

I’ll take a stab at this. For similar projects, or variations of similar projects where you need to select an optimal strategy for a specific project, I’d have a multi preference objective model which would be a customized project template with key performance parameters in columns and the rows would help specify specific design options. E.g. a column could be “vehicle range” with values 1-5 (1 = 100 miles, 2 – 200 miles, ….). Dont get carried away with too many key parameters for a project. The rows would specify various implementation scenarios for this project (less range & less weight & cheaper tires; greater range & greater weight & more expensive tires). Then for that project you would have to evaluate your optimal decision. This presents a level of fairness with your team in evaluating various decisions. This needs to get linked back to your strategy so you do not get carried away. (I wrote some VBA to generate readable reports of the spreadsheet info).

Ok, that kinda works for a project, but you will have a bunch of projects, so, presumably these need to be linked to a strategy. What good is implementing a project perfectly if it is not in line with your strategy. So, it would be really good to clearly articulate your strategy and to review this over time.

So, it seems you need something at a higher level which defines your strategy of your organization and this should help drive you toward the general projects you need to consider. You need to consider project risks, the risk of inactivity, etc. I’m out of date on this stuff, but check out Project Management Institutes books on portfolio management and strategy alignment. You want to consider the risks associated with highly technical projects, projects that need to be rolled out at many locations (because mistakes are expensive to correct).

I somewhat followed Markowitz efficient frontier portfolio management (very notionally) with my results and felt I had something to explain in my organization. Simple is better, its easy to get overwhelmed with spreadsheets and charts. Bubble charts helped differentiate the various projects.

I think a few thousand more PhD's need to be granted in this field. Then, any time after that. I will be standing by to admit I was wrong in being doubtful.

I read so many business books, and they are hard to get rid of after you have amassed a large collection of several hundred. On reflection, many seem like crap, or maybe a good few points what could be summarized in a few pages but somehow turned into a long book. I'm still glad I read them, and the jewels have always made it worth the adventure. I really like looking back at the discredited books I've read and in hindsight, asked myself how I was fooled at the time in not detecting the the weaknesses in the books. It has always been a point of reflection to improve these detection skills when reading new material. For me, at the time of reading, the books: "In Search of Excellence" and "Think and Grow Rich" seemed great, but in hindsight, "What was I thinking".

Love VI. I should research this, but in my day, I would occasionally mistype a VI command and somehow sort my code. It was really easy to "undo" as I had not saved changes, but I had many an "oh shit" moment.

I had about 14 yrs of R exposure and really liked it, but it was time to try something new. I cut over to Julia with my "retirement" and I've had no issues at all with it. With LLMs, it is different, as I needed to learn R from the ground up, "the hard way" and with LLMs, I find myself working at a more elevated level, knowing Julia less than I know R, but getting things accomplished in a quicker manner. It does seem the ecosystem of libraries is a more limited, but from my experience, its just been a little more work on my part and I have resolved what I needed to. When I look at my finished code, I fine it more readable and supportable than my historical R code. Again, my experiences are different with the LLM support offered today. A side note: I really wanted to avoid Python, it just never resonated with me. But, when I compare my Julia code with what I'd have in Python, Julia wins for me hands down. So, for me, over all, I have no complaints and have no reason not to be with this language for a long time.

The other concern would be attending an international conference or training session in Canada and for some reason, have your aircraft re-routed to a US airport. Next thing you know, your burner phone is confiscated.

So, I'd have to reconsider any international conference in North America.

I managed the system administrators for a high performance computing center. We took a lot of blame for the applications when in reality, often times it was poor programming on the developer's part. So, I got really tired of taking the blame and implemented statistical process control to track the mean time between failures of the jobs. I was really just shining the flashlight on production jobs and was hoping it could change the culture. It was not my job to fix their code, and the applications were developed by a different group of people with a very different culture. I thought the process control worked really well, and it did allow me to take the heat off me for random blaming of my team, when I could respond with "your job is failing XX times per year" and from there, push for a root cause analysis. But pushing against that culture was really hard, and there was a lot of "set the job to complete and I will look at it on Monday". If they do not want to conduct a root cause analysis on the failure modes for their code, I can't do much. So, even implementing some type of monitoring can have little effect if the ones who need to fix something do not support the culture. And, as I read your post, I'd think people would be looking at these business metrics a little closer or develop more sensitive metrics to catch these issues.

That is cool! If I competed, I could gain quite a few rating points with such a board and a better bandwidth network connection.

We help the homeless in a mid-sized city on the west coast. The county's efforts for the homeless have been pretty impressive, and when we help with the weekly clothing giveaway, some of the people are in such dire shape. I think these people I see are really in need of food, clothes, socks, blankets and towels, etc. For the most part, they are incredibly thankful. Some have obvious drug issues. I like the little houses in the article, I'd be happy in one. I think in our community there are about 35 of the little houses and costs including security and leasing the space, approaches just north of $600K per year, which to me seems a little expensive. The nearby tent city looks way too much like a garbage dump, and a body was found last year in an ice chest in the tent city. That clearly is not a safe environment. I'm still thinking many of the homeless could be put to work in some manner. I would love to see graffiti removal and litter pickup on a regular basis for the county as a whole. If free food and housing is provided, it seems a lot of people could be put to work in a positive manner. I'm not sure if any communities are doing this.

In all the fields I worked, we would have these really passionate people who cared about the area they worked. And they would crawl over broken glass to go to these conferences. The overreach is amazing.

You need a sign to the effect, all unattended dishes will be found in the bin next to the trash can.

Kona Coffee! Hawaii. We bought some once, it was about $48 a pound (and a very long time ago). We all huddled around it and evaluated the taste, and honestly, we could not tell that it was that much better from Navy coffee. I guess it will be $96 a pound soon! We will become a nation of Tea drinkers.... oh wait!

I used to love this company but now its pretty close to not being needed for me. I'd rather go down to the local FedEx Office store and rent their PCs to use Adobe products. It is just less icky.

I like them but I still feel like I am employing a bunch of over confident narcissist engineers and if I ask them to do something, I am never really comfortable the result is correct. What I want is a work force where I can pass off a request and go home in confidence that the results were correctly implemented.

Flip the script and convey you just could not rationalize $2K a month for rent and you are saving for much more. My first job, after my house purchase was 73 miles away and in hindsight, I wish I slept in my pick-up a few nights a week to lessen the commute. So, you are not homeless but saving money. Get a gym membership and shower there. Eat healthy food at work (when you get a job).

I managed many people and had at least two people sleeping in their offices. They had to be secretive about it, sometimes there would be nighttime office inspections and they would always respond they were analyzing a complex problem, which fit in with what we did at work. One guy stupidly was walking the hallway in his boxers once, and a federal officer caught him, that took a bit of explaining to get out of that one. My co-workers that decided to live in their offices, also hung out at work all the time, but I think they had a little more flexibility as there were no fees associated with work.

My house caretaker takes care of our property in another state. He lives in the van I gave him. He was homeless for years and slept in a secret place at a local school, complete with an electrical outlet. He went thru great pains to not get detected. After I gave him our old van, he has not been homeless for two years. He takes care of our property (external) in that remote state and has access to our garage for some equipment for his labor jobs. The arrangement works great, and I recharge his Starbucks card in return for his labor. I also have someone I can trust to check on the property and take care of things like fallen trees, flooding, etc. One thing with him, he is “homeless” with van, but since he does not have a 40-hr a week job, he spends a lot of time at Starbucks. That can get really expensive, but it is a tax he needs to pay to have a place to hand out. If my guy wanted to work from my garage, I'd have no problem with that. Perhaps you could create a prop office that looked like a real office from a Zoom/Teams camera view.

Do get a cheap gym membership to stay in shape. It will also keep you spending less money at Starbucks. Perhaps you can target an eventual job where you can really be dedicated to working a lot and sleeping in your office. This assumes you would get an office. Or a private area. If you could work 4 ten hr days, then you have a long weekend off. Or, work late and then sleep in your car. I think you need a full-time job with an office or work area. This will give you a place to hang out and ensure continuity in getting money. My experience (little) with gig jobs is there are not enough to string together for consistent income to get you into a better place.

Thank you for the below comments. I'm happy to admit when I am wrong.

This sounds like a disaster waiting to play out. I did not think they had much of an engineering culture anymore. I'll mark my calendar to see if I am wrong.

is there a Reddit link that explains what is at realforum?

Very dogebag indeed!

For this list, its about opportunity costs. I look at my life expectancy, and what I want to do and what areas I can reasonably obtain. It’s better for me to focus on those areas I can maximize enjoyment and avoid frustration. It also allows me to avoid getting drawn into projects because someone thinks I know something.

I love certain foreign languages, and have studied them, but I’ll seriously never get good speaking them based on my limitations, and where I live, and I have no plans to ever go to those countries.

I love road bike bicycling, but I’m too afraid of being on the road now-a-days with people on cell phones and their not concentrating on driving. I do still think about time trials on an isolated road.

I’ve reduced my goal of becoming a chess senior master to a chess master. That is good enough.

No python for me, R/Julia is good enough.

No need for world travel, been to a lot of places.

Oh! One project I will do in 2025, I have my dad’s lathe and will turn out a nice wooden chess set. But, it’s not about building a chess set, but being with the memories of my dad.

And an important thing I did was make a list of things I would not do, as I tend to get distracted trying to do too many activities and I do not want to fall down rabbit holes.

Helping the homeless. One night a week is a multi-church organization featuring clothing, blankets, etc downtown. The other night is a secular support group, similar activity.

We also have a former homeless person take care of our property, and he is quite amazing and we actually trust him way more than random people with jobs. We gave him our old van, and fund his Starbucks gift card. He does amazing work. Helping him to improve his living situation always gives us a nice feeling. But the connection of talking to him, helping him, it is very rewarding.

Developing a youth chess team in the city.

Trying to get to a master-level chess rating.

I’d like to find a local person to teach math/calculus/physics to but want to avoid the schools as they have a higher level of required paperwork that I do not want to put up with.

Making pizzas, trying to perfect artesian pizzas for personal consumption. I also started making Salsa, and that is really fun.

R/Julia programming, right now writing financial analysis software for fun.

I’m retired but am getting back into reading technical papers on machine learning.

Re-did the electrical outlets in two houses with more modern Leviton Decora plates. (That is a lot of work)

Became a patron ($25/mo) for a local Makerspace and may get involved with 3-D printing.

Visiting the gym, trying to get below a target weight threshold.