u/ted_anderson

With the way that the Lyon Estates signs were just sitting in front of the curb instead of being permanently built into the lawns of the corner lots (as is done in most housing developments) it had me thinking about how these were probably temporary signs became permanent the same way that the "Hollywood" sign did.

The Hollywood sign was meant to be a temporary advertisement built by the developer which eventually became a landmark. So when I see the Lyon Estates signs just sitting out in the middle of the street (primarily because it's a movie prop) it had me thinking that if this was IRL, the developer would have taken them away sometime during the 1960's when the construction was fully complete. But somehow they became permanent as the bases of these signs got buried in several layers of asphalt with each course of road maintenance.

I know that this was meant to be an action/comedy type of film but would a "love scene" have ruined the movie? With the way that we find Marty asleep right before Doc calls him, it's not too far fetched that he could have done the deed with Jennifer knowing that they weren't going to the lake at that point.

When someone comes to you with a "business idea", business strategy, or some other gimmicky buzzword, just tell them that you'd like to revisit this in 3-6 months to see if they're still doing it.

6 months later they'll be out of it and doing something else.

They say, "Oh.. that thing I told you about.. Uhhh.. yeah.. it just wasn't right for me."

Today I was given the task of rebuilding a system that's a few years old. It has a Pro 3 processor with 3 of the C3IO-16 cards that's being used to monitor the status of automation equipment in the field. It's as simple as 30 dry relays closing the inputs on the Versiport connections and then it indicates the status of each piece of equipment on a touch panel. So far it's been simple and straight forward enough.

Anyhow the last hurdle that I'm trying to get over is being able to get the cards to work. The 3 slot lights on the front of the processor keep flashing steadily so I assume that I must be missing something in the process.

When I ran the debugger, I could clearly see the contact closures on the cards but I couldn't get it to indicate it on the touch panel. When I wired the relays directly into the built-in I/O card on the processor (Slot 7) it does everything that I need it to do.. not withstanding the fact that I need more than 8 ports. 😄 But nevertheless, nobody on the client's end can tell me if the system ever worked properly at one point.

So before I assume that the cards are bad, can anyone give me some insight on a possible missed step when configuring the cards? Thanks in advanced.

I'm in the process of rebuilding an older system from 2017 and reprogramming it from scratch. The touch panel has roughly 75-80 "buttons" on it... meaning not just buttons, but also sliders, gauges, and serial feedback.

Anyhow, rather than window flipping between VT-Pro and SIMPL as I work, I prefer to just do the whole SIMPL program and then I want to come back and do the touch panel. Being that I have a very good idea of what my SIMPL is going to look like, I'm sure that I'm not going to remember every single join number for my TSW-760 touch panel.

So before I attempt to reinvent the wheel, is there a way that I can print out an entire SIMPL object so that I have a reference to work by when I program the touch panel? Copying and pasting doesn't seem to work so as a last resort I might just take a screen shot and print that out. But if there was a way to capture the raw data, then I can change the font size and/or let it sit in a notepad window which will speed up my workflow tremendously. Any and all advice welcomed. Thank you in advanced!

For reference I'm using a CP3N with a TSW-760

Yesterday was labor day. Even though it's a day off for most office workers, tradesmen, specialists, teachers, etc. it happens to be one of the biggest weekends for most retail stores, and supermarkets so their employees are required to be at work. This is also the case for first responders, emergency workers, those in the service and travel industry, and in some cases small business owners who are still getting their operation up and running.

As such, I wasn't quite sure where Costco's business model fell into that range of holiday observance so I figured that I'd run some errands that I normally don't get to do during the week because I'm at work. But in my travels I figured that I'd swing by Costco on my way home and pick up a couple of things.

The parking lot was EMPTY. This was one of a few times when I didn't mind being inconvenienced by a store being closed because it showed that the company cares enough about their employees to say, "Go be with your families tomorrow. See you on Tuesday." That speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned.

In this age-old argument of privacy and people not wanting their children to be photographed or video recorded by strangers, (and posted online) I can see the need and concern for wanting to protect them. But what do you do when it's the children who are exposing the adults and disrupting their privacy?

The other day I was at the gas station convenient store. The pre-teen kid was holding a phone and recording his grandmother as she walked into the store. But once they were in the store the kid started to walk around a record other adults and started to follow one guy around the store who obviously did not want to be recorded. So what do you do in those kinds of circumstances? Do you call the cops and file charges against the parent or legal guardian? Do you snatch the phone out of his hand and threaten him? Or do you pull out your phone and start recording him recording you?

Now that the youth of today are starting to understand the monetary exchange between creating content and posting something that goes viral is putting them in a position where they see the almost instant gratification but their brains aren't developed enough to understand the potential consequences. Because you could end up recording the wrong guy at the wrong time and day and get in serious trouble that the laws can't save him from.

A few years back I was wrongly fired from my job but I had a better job lined up so I never pursued an unlawful termination lawsuit. But because it would be little more than a month to get on-boarded at the new gig, I filed for unemployment in Virginia. My claim got denied because the employer said that they had no record of me ever working there. So I sent in 3 months of pay stubs as proof but I never heard anything back or followed up. I started the new gig and never looked back.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I get an email from the HR department of a company that I had never heard of saying, "We have a couple of payments to be disbursed to you. Please send us your current contact information." It didn't quite look like a phishing email and it seemed like they knew enough about me to where the email was legit so I did some searching and found out that this company acquired the company I used to work for.

I'm a bit skeptical as to what their angle might be. I got paid out everything that I was owed (wages, PTO, sick leave) and the only thing that I might have left behind was my health savings account which I understand to be forfeited back to the employer for any amount of unused money if you don't use it by the time your health benefits run out.

To give some background, the company was running out of money and busy-work to do while waiting for the next major contract to get started. They tried cutting my hours and then they tried to make me quit. Eventually they fired me. They made up a bunch of stories about things I supposedly did wrong and/or refused to do. It was all lies.. but whatever. They didn't want me working there anymore so I said, "OK." and started making my way to the door.

The manager was like, "Wait! What? That's it? Do you have anything you want to say?" Well I was planning on quitting anyway. So I wasn't going to put any effort into starting an argument or begging for my job back. So I simply said, "Nope." Obviously they weren't prepared for my response because while they didn't try to stop me from leaving, their body language and facial expressions said, "Maybe we should talk this over."

A couple of weeks later HR leaves me a voicemail wanting to offer me my my job back. But I wasn't going to fall for the whole scheme of getting reinstated and then being asked to resign. So I ignored it, washed my hands of the situation and moved on. They've since called me a couple of times wanting to bring me back. But I moved on. No hard feelings.

So now that they're attempting to reach out to me again, I'm starting to wonder if I should contact their HR department to see if they really do owe me money, how much, and why, or if there's some other underlying crooked scheme that they're concocting to get themselves out of trouble.

I don't know if their Kirkland Organic Lemonade is being discontinued or what but it has a weird price. I think it was $7.79 or $6.79 or something like that. But anyhow my only issue with it was that it's very strong and very sweet. So I always pour it over ice and then sip it as the ice melts.

Well today after working in the hot sun I tried a crazy idea. I actually cut it down to a 1:1 ratio with the Kirkland bottled water. I had both in the cooler so it was ice cold when I drank it. I took a half bottle of water and filled it up with the lemonade... OH MY GOODNESS! It was perfect! Diluting it down gave that perfect balance of sweetness and tartness without the sticky mouth after-effect.

I'm going to try the same thing with the strawberry lemonade. I'm guessing that this stuff was really made to be put into a bunch bowl full of ice or something similar so that it doesn't lose it's flavor when mixed with other things.

One inquiry that has been bugging me for several years is that whenever I see a weigh station along the highway, there's a sign before that point that says, "All trucks must exit" or something to that effect. I see a lot of trucks pulling into the weigh station but then I see many others that just stay on the highway and keep on going. Why is that? Are some trucks exempt from being weighed?

When people approach me with something new that they learned about in the tech world and I debunk the validity of it, they always say something to the effect of, "You should know this! I'm surprised that you don't know what I'm talking about." when really I know 10 times more than they do in terms of it being a scam and not a viable component of this tech world that we live in.

With all of the different money-making gimmicks and get-rich-quick schemes that there are in the world today, the tech world has become a component of them in so many ways. With the obvious back-office side of it aside, tech has become one of those products that's pushed by multi-level marketing companies and businesses with a similar structure.

When I first heard about multi-level marketing, they were selling products that supposedly help you lose weight, give you more energy, make you more alert, etc. and then right around the early 2000's when accessing the internet became more mainstream, they got in on the action also.

Someone tried to recruit me into the Internet Phone program.. because apparently there's no long distance charges over the internet and this was going to revolutionize the way we talk on the phone. They kept telling me that I gotta get on this NOW because all of the landline phones were going away. In not so many ways I simply said that this was a joke and they've been had.

They said, "Ted! How could you think that! You're a tech guy and you should know about these things!" and I tried explaining to them that they were basically lied to. Without going into all of the details of me explaining why this would NOT work in the way they think it would, they somehow equated themselves to my level of expertise from a 3-hour sales training seminar and said I was dead wrong.

Then in another instance someone discovered top-level domains. They thought it was something new that the rest of the world didn't know about. They told me that since all of the good dot-com domains are gone, now there's .WS (for "web site" I assumed) and being that I knew much more about DNS than they did, I simply said, "Ummm you know that this isn't new.. right?" They said, "C'mon Ted! You should know this! I'm surprised that you don't! Are you sure you're a tech guy?"

Then the other day someone tried to get me into a crypto-currency gimmick. Their angle was that they use AI to invest your money and because AI is incapable of making a bad trade, there's no way you can lose. As ridiculous as that sounded, I allowed them to continue their pitch. And then I asked them, "If this is the case, then why are there still stock brokers in NYC buying and selling on the open market? Can AI really make everyone a winner and there's no losers?"

And that's when I really got them off balance because they just started throwing out a bunch of tech buzz-words with no real answers.

I thought this was a REAL movie until I saw that it was on Druski's channel. LOL

I know that we tend to drop or leave behind personal items with our personal information attached to it and we can't always prevent something like that from happening. And there are even situations where strangers overhear our phone conversations without realizing what we said that would tip off someone with malicious intent.

But one thing that probably gets overlooked too often is our old phone number if we decide to change or completely abandon it.

Understandably people tend to get frustrated with the excessive spam calls and so they change their number to start fresh and they know next time not to give their number out to advertisers. But when they change their number they most likely didn't keep track of everyone that they purposely gave it to and so the next person who has that number will start getting calls from the different businesses and organizations that the previous owner might have forgotten about or don't use very often. At least that's what's happening to me.

I got a second phone to help manage the madness of the telemarketers who call me at least 40-50 times a day. I kept my original number for all of those whom I've lost contact with over the years but at least when they resurface, they can make an attempt to find me. But everyone else who is not a business or some sort of data-collection entity, I give them the 2nd number.

What I find interesting is that I was able to learn all about the individual who had my 2nd phone number previously. In the few years that I've had this number I now know both the husband's and wife's name and where their kid(s) attend school. I've received phone calls about prescriptions, medical appointments, airline booking confirmations, school closings, and many other aspects about their lives that they're unaware that a stranger now has this information.

It's not like I went around digging up this information or doing any kind of deep dive investigation. When I get these calls, the person on the other end tells me too much information trying to make sure that it's a wrong number. They'll say, "May I speak with Shirley? No? Shirley Webster? You don't know a Shirley Webster who has an appointment at the women's medical center next Thursday? Well what about her husband Alan? Do you know who he is?"

And they'll just keep probing trying to make sure that I'm not who they think I am. But shucks.. I'll be him for the next 3-5 minutes if I'm getting something out of it. LOL And so I suggest that you find a way to keep your old number just so that friends, family, and receptionists, don't give away all of your info to the new guy that gets it with his new phone.

I had 2 incidents yesterday where I needed someone to be discreet and they just completely blabbed it out.

The first incident happened at work. I had to give my coworker the combination to the locked door where we keep important things locked up away from the rest of the workers. So I said, "This is the combination." And then I held out my hand and gestured the number 1, the number 3, the number 2, and the number 1 again. She said, "Oh.. ONE, THREE, TWO, ONE?" Arrrrgh! Did you not realize that I did sign language so I wouldn't say it out loud?

And then I had to go to the tire shop later in the afternoon to get some work done on my truck. I used my store credit card but because I hadn't used it in several months, the bank had to verify that I was the authorized user. And I figured that's what was going on when the clerk on the other side of the desk had to call it in. Well after being on the phone with them for a few minutes she says, "Ok. I'll let you talk to him. " She hands me the phone and says, "Sir, they need your street address and the last 4 of your social security number." Well... gee.... THANKS for that! Now everyone in the room will know what I'm talking about.

I have a couple of coworkers who have very NICE sounding engines and exhaust on their cars. One guy as a Caddy ATS and the other has a 5th or 6th generation Camaro. When I complemented those guys on their cars at different times, they both said, "Meh.. it's a 4-cylinder." but I'm reading that these engines are turbo charged.

If I can get my hands on one of these through a salvage situation, I'd love to drop this powertrain into my Silverado. Right now the cam is in bad shape and I want to do a complete engine replacement. I'm not looking for speed and power but I would love to cruise around town with that quiet and throaty exhaust which would make my truck "sound" like it's fast. And then I can tell people, "Meh.. it's a 4-cylinder."

It never ceases to amaze me how the traffic on 301 between Bowie and the top end of Upper Marlboro always seems to move at a snail's pace when going south. Sometimes it happens on the northbound side but every single time I'm going south and I get stopped at the traffic light while passing Walmart, the traffic starts moving but it doesn't go any faster than 40.

And it's not like I can go around the slowpoke because there's someone in BOTH lanes moving very slow. So the other day I was 5th or 6th car back from the intersection. When the light turned green it seemed like nobody was interested in getting themselves down the road. It was a slow start and then everyone just topped off at 40.

Today is June 7th. I'm glad that the phrase lost its popularity. Otherwise the kids would be having a field day yelling it out everywhere they go.