I have always asked the first part of your first question, but it never occurred to me to ask the second part as a follow-up. It reveals a lot about a manager - if there isn’t a thoughtful answer that’s a red flag for me.
Years ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.
We would have loved nothing more than to talk to him for hours. He was already calling in from England while on his vacation, so I didn't want to take any more of his time, haha!
7-Eleven’s will vary. Some are closer to the Japanese model, but in my experience the ones in the typical PTT/Amazon coffee/KFC clusters are more like their US counterparts than not.
Edit: should add except for an absence of overall sketchiness
I think CMoA acquired the contents of David Larsen’s museum in Floyd, VA. Larsen was one of the authors of the Bugbook series and the museum was kind of a snapshot of the mid to late 70’s micro scene. I’m glad the Apple I didn’t end up in a Goodwill bin somewhere.
Yes, this is still a thing. Last year I installed Linux on an old laptop to use while traveling in SE Asia. Had problems with TD Bank because of this, complicated by my account needing SMS to the US number for the extra verification.
A year ago I had a spring fail in my old/cheap system with tension springs. I was surprised to see the level of scamminess present in this particular area of repair.
After seeing that a set of replacement springs from a big box store was under $100 and wouldn't be that hard to do myself, I figured that it would be reasonable to pay an extra $100-200 just to have it done while I was busy with other things.
One guy over the phone tried to convince me that he would need to replace the entire cable system as well and lost any interest after I told him the cables were fine and the spring had failed from fatigue in the hook section where the cable was attached.
Someone else was "dispatched" from a local-sounding number and showed up with out-of-state license plates on his van. He quoted me $800 for the repair. I tried not to be a jerk and told him thanks, but I'll be looking around some more. He then dropped the price to $400, saying he'd do the job for that if he could replace only one spring. After another thanks, but no thanks he became aggressive and said that was a special one-time price that ended when he left my driveway. He later texted me with a $200 dollar price, but by then I had already arranged for someone to do a full conversion to a torsion system for about $500.
I’m (slowly and painfully) learning to read Thai and find myself wondering how a written language could naturally evolve without spaces between words. It adds a significant overhead since it requires learning the word boundary rules.
Spaces between words are a relatively recent addition to scripts like the Greek or Latin alphabets, roughly 1500 years ago. Early Greek was also written boustrophedon (“like an ox plows a field”) that is, left to right, then the next line is right to left, and so on. Sometimes a point (dot) was used to break words.
Spacing is hardly standardized in languages using Latin script; French typography, especially in older books is notably different from English or German, with spacing between sentences or certain punctuation being different. Then again phrases or terms which in English or French would be multiple words are written as single “words” in German („Straßenkehrgerät“ == “Street Sweeper”). And I find Russian spacing rules disturbing.
And look at Arabic which does have spacing but in calligraphy can grossly violate the bounds of what you might consider “running text” coming from a European background.
The boustrophedon has one more rule that you omitted and it’s extremely natural, – when you write from right to left you flip all the letters! My little daughter intuitively writes in this system even though no one taught her that nor did she see it somewhere. She explains that that way you know how to read longer passages that need to wrap over.
I just learned about the film in the recent book “Connecticut in the Movies” by Ileana Douglas. Burt Lancaster referred to The Swimmer as “Death of a Salesman in swim trunks”.
Ileana Douglas is one of my favorite character actors. Not familiar with her work? You probably are without knowing it [1]. She was a stand out in Cape Fear particularly. I'd no idea she had written this. Will check it out. Thanks
Such a timeless story. There's literally a murder suicide case being tried right now less than ten miles away from where the movie was filmed, allegedly involving a somewhat similar scenario. (I don't want to give away the plot.)
Similar scenario to what? Most of the plot is so heavily interpretive that it's hard for two people to come away with the same understanding of the plot.
Just a guy who lost his job and couldn't replace it because of pride, cheated on his wife (maybe with multiple women?), and maybe became homeless?
I have had similar thoughts, but I suspect this sort of accidental discovery will be less interesting to future generations because of the competing volume of online content. I remember stumbling across a supply of second hand amateur radio magazines (QST and 73) as an 11 year old in the mid-60’s that started me down the tech path. These days I would probably be in front of some sort of screen instead of poking around in my grandparent’s basement or a used bookstore.
Another vote for freetaxusa.com. The only complexity for my Federal returns is accounting for both refunds and taxes due to filing state returns in two states (as well as some 1099 income), but they handle those exceptions well.
For years I kept a Windows VM around just to run whatever the cheapest tax return software was for that particular year.
