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This week's reading - light and heavy


Ralphie

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I an really enjoying this little amusement.  The author is aboot a decade younger than me, so he did his road trips in the 70s and as opposed to my 60s, but it is still a very similar shared experience across the boomer spectrum I think.  And ya gotta love the title. :D

 

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Then for the heavy reading.  I almost stopped reading this because it is tough sledding, but I am getting into it now and I think it has some pretty interesting ideers.: Speaking of non-fiction, hey petite, how is Atomic Habits so far?  I have read a lot of books on habits, yet I still have more bad than good ones. :D :( 

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On 12/2/2018 at 3:27 PM, petitepedal said:

I think I finished "Atomic Habits" on Monday..

I like James Clear's website, so the book should have been decent.  Learn anythin'?

I highly recommend Don;t Make Me Pull Over!  Short, light, fun, AND informative.  I hope this first time Arthur decides to write more books.  I'm off to check oot his website now.

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16 minutes ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

Great!  Full speed ahead!  You have dottles and golden design for help if needed. 

PDP8 , 11 and CDC Cyber machine code.  CDC and 6800 assembler.  Basic, Pascal, C+, Fortran.  A couple of flavors of PLC rung programming languages (henceforth known as chutes and ladders).  Why oh why did I decide to venture down this path at age 72 with yet another language.

Somehow I thought I missed this.

Is today Tuesday?

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8 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

PDP8 , 11 and CDC Cyber machine code.  CDC and 6800 assembler.  Basic, Pascal, C+, Fortran.  A couple of flavors of PLC rung programming languages (henceforth known as chutes and ladders).  Why oh why did I decide to venture down this path at age 72 with yet another language.

Somehow I thought I missed this.

Is today Tuesday?

It'll be like Ike riding a bike. :)

After fortran, some assembler, and basic in the Vic-20, I am happy to stick with small batch files.   Excel vba was fun but I am out of practice with that now  

 

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14 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

PDP8 , 11 and CDC Cyber machine code.  CDC and 6800 assembler.  Basic, Pascal, C+, Fortran.  A couple of flavors of PLC rung programming languages (henceforth known as chutes and ladders).  Why oh why did I decide to venture down this path at age 72 with yet another language.

I hope that by your age, I've forgotten everything about SQL Plus, PL/SQL and shell scripting. Of course "select * from table;" will be hard to forget. 

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1 hour ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

It'll be like Ike riding a bike. :)

After fortran, some assembler, and basic in the Vic-20, I am happy to stick with small batch files.   Excel vba was fun but I am out of practice with that now  

 

At one point in my career I created the program structure and wrote much of the Programmable controller program that ran the test cells at P&W Aircraft.  130 subroutines and over 2500 rungs of code in pictographic (looks like electricians prints) form for Square D's Symax PLCs.  That was perhaps a year with the most fun I ever had working.  That was also the time of the "dreams" in the middle of the night.

PLC stuff looks like this. (left half of screen for me)

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I'm rereading a book I first read in the 1970's, The Star Diaries by the great Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem who writes from a really crazy, almost Kafka-esque viewpoint. In 1976, while he was a little overlooked in the USA, he was called the most widely-read Sci-Fi author on the Earth with books translated into 41 languages and he wrote into the 2000's. Other acclaimed books of his are: Solaris (made into a 2002 George Clooney movie and a 1972 Russian movie), The Cyberiad, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.  I haven't read Solaris or The Cyberiad, but many consider them Lem's best works, so they are next.

The Star Diaries begins with a guy traveling alone in a spaceship who is awakened from sleep by himself.  Himself says "Get up, we have to fix the rudder."

Knowing this can't be real, he refuses to get up.

The next day he realizes the rudder is broken and it takes two people to fix it.  He realizes he's close enough and has control enough to enter a star system that has strange time-bending qualities.  Maybe he can go there, meet himself, and the two can fix the rudder.  So he enters the system, hears snoring behind him, wakes himself up and says, "Get up, we have to fix the rudder."

I gets crazier from there.

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