Rob #56, if you wanted to expand your McPhee reading, jump to The Control of Nature next, since it is three short essays on civil engineering, including the one about Iceland's struggle to save a good harbor, which is called Pissing on the Lava. Save Annals of the Former World for a couple of months when you want to dive into geology. It's an assembly of four books written about geologists, the history of geology as a science, and the geological history of the United States as it exists along I-80 from the Delaware Water Gap to San Francisco. I read each of the four books as they came out, but the combined volume (which will break your foot should you drop it thusly) is a tour-de-force of geological yumminess.
Or skip the hard sciences entirely, and go to Giving Good Weight which is a series of essays, including one on the people who run the New York farmers markets.
John McPhee is my favorite science essayist, ever. The first time I read Rising From The Plains, he replace Isaac Asimov in my heart. I give every newcomer to Southern California that I meet a copy of The Control of Nature so that the circle of debris basins around Los Angeles becomes understandable.
Quality assurance in software seems to me to require a peanut butter cup mentality. First, you have to have the analytical approach to testing, but then you must followup with the wild, blue sky, emotional understanding of where software gets messed up. I've loved doing it for many many years!
The biggest kicker in that ugly ugly ad is that the pictures are of two different people. The "fat" person has stretch marks, a more mannish rib cage and man-like hands. The second person has no stretch marks (which just don't disappear in one month!), a woman's rib cage structure and no visible hands.
The LA Times online has it on every single page, which is another nail in the coffin of a once-great newspaper.
Jim @9 -
Clifton's, Cole's, Original Pantry, and Phillipe's (100 years this week!) are all in downtown Los Angeles. Roscoe's is in a couple of places and it is a fabulous place to eat.
Phillipe's is famous for the french dip sandwiches, cheap coffee, long tables to sit at, and sawdust all over the floor. They had quite a celebration and served over 1,000 free sandwiches in less than 4 hours on their 100th anniversay.
By the way, our ex-mayor Richard Riodan is one of the owners of Original Pantry.
Roscoe's in Pasadena is where I first had the marvelous combination (amd their biggest seller) of fried chicken on a waffle covered with maple syrup.
The best place to eat in LA is a nice little Jewish deli in the Valley. Brent's Delicatessen won 5 stars from Zagat more than once, but it's just a deli. I usually have either a California Club sandwich with the best steak fries ever or a Monte Cristo sandwich. If you're ever in LA, I'd be glad to take you there or to Roscoe's for lunch or dinner.
Here's another wish for a speedy recovery from a mostly-lurker.
Pete @ 57, I worked for a bank that has since been completely consumed by a Very Large Bank, thus necessitating my transfer to software developing.
Our standard joke was that the Feds had three different audit outcomes - "pass", "we're warning you once", and "no more FedReserve access for you!" which completely destroys a bank's business. (You have to say it in the SoupNazi voice.)
VISA only has two audit states - "pass" and "you have shown us by your actions that you really don't want/need/deserve access to the VISA network. Goodbye!" (This one uses the Weakest Link voice.) Sometimes I think VISA is a tougher cookie.
I saw an archive recording of a lecture by Adm. Grace Murray Hopper when I was in college about the costs of data that was recorded sometime in late 1960s or early 1970s. She talked about the well-known costs of adding, deleting or modifying data in the database. She also talked about two costs that hadn't been considered before that time: the cost of doing without your data processing environment and the cost of being perceived as an organization that did not protect data that was part of the business of the corporation. She was a fabulous speaker and I think I can date my interest in Information Security to that very lecture.
One of the reason for the tension between line organizations and staff organization is the regulatory environment. (This is my area of expertise at the moment.) Sarbanes-Oxley, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, HIPAA, California SB1386, the various ISO standards used across the EU, and the CCITT all require various security standards with various penalties involved for lapses. Sarbanes-Oxley can get the CEO jailed. PCIDSS can get your access to VISA or Mastercard terminated. SB1386 can cost your company a lot of money in bad press.
Most of these regulations require strict control of the desktop environment, to prevent unauthorized access to data, to prevent unauthorized distribution of data, to ensure authentication, authorization, auditability and confidentiality. If as a corporation, we permit applications to be installed without an appropriate review process, we set ourselves up for trouble.
That's me speaking as a security person. Speaking as a vendor of software, (just to mess up some people's theories, our software is usually between $15,000 and $100,000 USD) we have to work with this security. We depend on certain DLLs, APIs, naming conventions and other Microsoft supplied or mandated resources. If you have a non-standard environment, our software, which your corporation is using for specific business reasons, won't run. We have 1/5 of our company devoted to helping users customize the software in these situations.
Picture me saying in a pleading voice "Please don't mess with your corporate-issued computer, that belongs to the corporation, that the corporation expects you to use with the software the company I work for has sold to the corporation. It makes my day a lot worse."
Bruce @10, et. al.,
I speak as an ex-IT security department member - not the best credentials in the world, since I now work as a security software vendor, but I was there when it happened. There is a reason why IT has to keep your machines tightly controlled. The reason is risk-coverage. If you remember back to the mid 1980s and early 1990s, you'll remember an environment where companies were being sued for having illegal copies of software on their corporate machines. It didn't matter if the company had authorized the software or not, the company was still considered legally liable for the copyright violation.
A lot of CIOs were told to make sure that their company's name was never part of a headline in the Wall Street Journal for this crime. The results are still felt today.
Classmates dot com does the same thing. I signed up when my terminally-ill mother wanted to find one old classmate. We found her three years ago. Every so often, I try to cancel.
This last time they actually had a "how to cancel" page. It had JAVA errors and didn't work.
The only on-line vendor I hate as much as classmates dot com is varsity books dot com. My son's school sets everything up through them. If I get started in time, I dump every ISBN and order through amazon. If it's too late, I have to order through them. Not once have they ever sent me an entire school year's order complete and within the shipping window they specified at checkout.
I hate them both.
There's a very interesting discussion of strokes by emergency medicine physician Jonathan Sullivan at
http://sullydog.com/sullysites/qm/brainischemia101syllabus/syllabus/index.html
Leah @5, I've been carrying Bagg Lady bags for more than ten years, and my oldest one still looks totally fine.
I have three sizes (really small, large and really extra large), three colors (navy, burgundy, and black) and two different styles (regular and sling back). They're all pleather or psuede, and I just wash 'em, throw them in a zip style plastic bag, squish out all the air, and store in the bottom drawer of my dresser when I'm not using them.
EClaire @ 87 , They Might Be Giants has several lullabies on their album "No!" and Sandra Boynton's albums Dog Train and Philadelphia Chickens also are lullaby rich. My favorite of all is I Need A Nap on Dog Train, which is a duet by Weird Al and Kate Winslet.
I live in Los Angeles. My current automated phone call total is 3 from Sen. and Mrs. McCain, 1 from Gov. Romney. Nothing from Gov. Huckabee yet.
Little do they know that I am a stealth Democrat as explained by Pat Greene in #3 above.
Altissimo rose is not a delicate flower in California. It is a brute, often referred to as Attila The Rose.
You can find it growing up the walls at the Huntington Museum, Art Galleries and Botanical Garden's Tea Room. Sometimes, it gets really hungry and has a patron for lunch.
Here's a URL for the Huntington's Rose pages.
Your EMT posts have saved at least one person who was in a bad situation from much worse. My mother's best friend called me one morning to tell me that my mom wasn't making sense, but she wouldn't let the friend call the paramedics, because she (my mom) was really ok. I told my mom's best friend to hang up the phone and call 911 and lie to my mom and tell her that she was just calling for a pizza or some such.
The paramedics found that my mom, who had no previous history of diabetes, had a temp of 104 and a blood glucose of 383.
Thank you, Mr. Macdonald.
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