It’s our 18th Anniversary tomorrow. Tomahawk steak, chips, cabbage, blue cheese sauce, green pepper sauce. Expensive (thanks 25% off 6 bottles) wine.
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The suburban city I live in has a strange emergency vehicle system installed to allow emergency vehicles to get through lights. Each intersection/traffic light has a sensor that watches for flashing lights; if it detects flashing lights, it automatically switches the light to green. Fantastic! Well, it doesn’t automatically switch other directions of traffic to red… so it’s entirely possible for all lanes of traffic in busy intersections to have a green light. The green-to-red response is handled remotely at a control center.
The best part is: it doesn’t have to be a specific kind of flashing light. Just turning a flashlight on and off a few times will trigger it at night.
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That sounds like a recipe for disaster, you would think the other directions at least would get an amber??
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And blue steak from the looks of it.
Congratulations
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Finally figured out a programming issue at work. We have an in-house program that creates particular barcode labels for our customers, done by scanning two pre-existing barcodes and referencing the data collected in a SQL database. Well, someone went and added more customers to our database, customers that already existed in another name (and customer ID) and as such, were not recognized by the in-house program, thus did not get their specific barcode labels.
So yesterday I booted up our development computer and got to work. Added everything that I could see, tested it out, and the program crashed after scanning the barcodes, between showing the information for the product, but before seeing a preview of the label. Went back to the code and changed a few things, but it was time to go, so let it sit for the night.
Came in today and tried again, same issue. Messed around more and just was not finding anything, other than a .NET unhandled exception showing up in the Windows Event Viewer for the crashing application. Finally decided I would try to just hard code the new customer numbers instead of making them default values in a settings file. But when I went to the settings file and looked over it one more time, I saw that there was a =" inside of a integer definition. A definition that I did not change or create this time around, and in fact was given a warning about when I first opened the file and had deleted already, unless it happened to be in more than one place.
Removed that and the program works as intended now.
Now I just need to go beat some people over the head regarding adding new entries for pre-existing customers without notifying IT about it!
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I remember debate about this in high school. A lot of kids would flash their brights to get the lights to change. We later heard that you needed about 30-50 strobes per second (which is what you see on the front of ambulances) to activate the system.
Sounds like you have some inside knowledge, though?
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Anecdotal, at best, but from first-hand sources that I trust.
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Well that’s me got covid. I feel like getting it at this point is soooo last season.
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Just fashionably late 
I hope you don’t feel too grim.
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My whole household has been sick over the last 1.5 weeks. Fever, nausea, congestion leading to cough. Two negative tests, so we’re just good old fashioned sick.
Only the littlest one is really still in it, though. She’s a COVID baby (2020) so her immune system is going to need a couple kickstarts like this.
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My oldest, 4, threw up three times on Friday, interrupting what was supposed to be a “kids stay at grandparents’ house for the night” plan that we all had been looking forward to. Instead, we take her home and she carries a mild fever all weekend.
This morning, 4 is feeling so much better and has all the energy of a 4-year old who wasn’t allowed to run and play all weekend. But her younger sister, 2, woke up this morning with a serious fever and has been refusing fluids and medicine.
Fortunately, the baby seems to be handling whatever it is quite well; <knock on wood>
So far COVID tests have been negative. A nurse friend of my partner’s suggested that we may be dealing with norovirus, which has been rampant recently in the area, but the symptoms don’t necessarily align.
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I am having a bad day. Just a no good, awful, terrible, very bad day. I have two exams due (one tomorrow, one the day after), and it’s like pulling teeth to work on them.
Fun aside: a buddy informed me that the university he works at is “desperately seeking applicants for a whole bunch of jobs.” I applied to all of them: no response. I think I’m literally unemployable at this point? That’s a great feeling.
Anyway. It’s a bad day. Best thing I can say about it is that it has the same 23.something hours in it that every other day has and so it can’t, by definition, last forever.
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All the best to you @GeeBizzle and @pillbox and @Acacia offspring, there is plenty going on. @Marx you may laugh at this, but you know what works wonders with your mental status before an exam? I remember I used to play a few hands of cards with friends when I was back in Uni, and it worked wonders. So maybe… boardgame?
With regards to unemployability, I am starting to think the same. I keep hearing that everybody is desperate for staff in the region, but so far I have applied to 7-8 jobs and only got to an interview. I guess being in my mid 40s does not help, or I need to really sit down and re-vamp my CV… my problem is I hate to write BS on it.
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I told my daughter of the existence of flash bulbs. I got the “you’re making this up, aren’t you?” look.
Now I feel old.
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Well, it’s not like they were in use during your lifetime, is it? But I admit that scene on the red carpet of the Aviator with all the bulbs exploding makes me feel really anxious, so I can’t imagine how it was for real, must have been tricky
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Little ones (flash cubes with four one-shot bulbs in them) were still in use in the 1970s at least.
I still remember the first electronic flash I used, late 1970s or early 1980s, branded WOTAN, with massive capacitor noise as it charged and a great “whump” as it fired.
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Now I feel ancient.
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The flash cube was invented in the lmid 60s, and improved by the magic cube, appearing on an instamatic in 1970. (The magic of the magic cube was not needing a battery to fire the flash). In the mid 70s, the flash cube was supplanted by the flip flash bar, which had four bulbs ready, then you flipped it over for four more. Later refinements added more bulbs, including one with bulbs on the front and back.
My first camera was a magic cube instamatic. The flip flash model was sold until the mid 80s, and flash sticks for it were still on sale at grocery stores in the early 90s.
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No I remember having something like this in the 80’s too. It plugged into the top of the camera and had like 8 flashes in it. You took the picture, then shoved this lever underneath the camera to advance the film…
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I can still hear the whine in my head of the oscillator circuit…
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