Category: Musings

The Shame!

I have not been accepting of any of the Trump agenda. It is because I have never liked bullies. The bully talk has now escalated his “vote-fraud” lies to the point of inciting riots in Washington. I have watched this all day. The formality of the Electoral College vote acceptance was caused to move when the riot spilled into the Senate chambers. Late in the day after 4 PM, the President held a video in the back yard of the Whitehouse telling everyone to go home. The formal acceptance was crushed. The respectful acceptance of his loss has escaped Trump since election day. His destructive rhetoric has come to finish his presidency exactly as it has been; tell them what they want to hear then do what you want through lies and intimidation.

The media and Trump’s PR folks will have some difficulty “covering-up” the mob rule Trump has drummed up. I am sure Trump will blame the “liberal press”.

The next thing will be moving this “liberated” mob out of the Capitol building. Mob behavior can go either way. Trump thinks telling them at 4PM that they should go home will suddenly disband and go home. This too shows his leadership shortcomings as he does not understand the energy and unpredictability of a mob. People are going to be hurt. Our trust in the system is going to be hurt.

Don, of all the things you have done, this is the most despicable.

Bernard Lambert – January 16th 2021 14:49 MST

About H1B

The email brought me this chart from Dice.Com. It is meant to show what H1B visa workers are making in big American corporations. Take a look:

Company# of H-1B FilingsAverage Salary
Microsoft32,735$135,535
Vmware4,910$139,299
Apple11,543$139,457
eBay4,635$143,313
Google24,896$144,285
GM Cruise330$145,243
Spotify468$145,800
Twitter1,794$149,188
Bloomberg2,914$149,863
Waymo591$157,591
Facebook13,471$159,597
Doordash274$160,444
Lyft1,174$167,650
Airbnb1,451$168,306
Dice extract of Labor Department Stats

Demand for code producers is high. The methods are myriad. Individuals that make timely, solid code are richly rewarded. The individuals that keep up with the ever-changing platforms for that code are also in high demand. They too reap rich rewards.

I’ll take you back to a time when Digital Equipment was in market favor and the language folks at Maynard were in high spirits. A young fellow from Redmond came and hired everyone at salaries unimagined up to that time. App and OS development stopped at Digital. The fellow from Redmond got the first iteration of Windows NT from the effort.

Paying performers in this IT business is de rigueur. It is also not as common as this chart indicates. Let’s dissect these stats a bit. Small and medium businesses cannot come close to this rate. The organizations hiring these workers charge the entire cost off as employee pay expense. That is the number you see above.

In the case of many H1B workers they actually get paid from the agency that brings them into the country as their sponsoring employer. Their employer bills the hiring corporation. Of course there is an employer’s/sponsor’s cut taken from that total billing. The aim of the sponsoring employer is to bring individuals that produce income for them. They also aim to just undercut what the “running cost” the client corporation is experiencing trying to acquire the same talent. It also allows for the quick “fire and hire” scenario when an individual does not pan out. That total cost is the big corporate “employment” cost shown above.

So does an imported worker enjoy those numbers shown above? No.

Your thoughts please???

Intel Optane in HP Desktop

I was using an HP Pavilion Desktop that had the Intel Optane SSD synched with a Toshiba SATA drive. The customer just bought it 4 weeks earlier and had gone through the Office 365 add and other data recovery jobs to get all the working files and Outlook going. The move was from an older slower Win 10 machine to this faster one.

It stopped booting and displayed the HP messages to try different function keys for Recovery, Setup and the like. Once HP was contacted and the standard tests done, the RMA was made to ship it back to them to fix. Great service, but what about the data.

The Optane SSD and the Toshiba HD normally synch so that often used data is cached in the much faster solid-state memory. There are complex software algorithms to keep the data safely on the disk or SSD. Then the power blinks.

At that point, the data on the spinning disk and the data in the SSD cache cannot release each other from a fatal embrace made by the synch keys no longer matching.

The faux RAID feature of the Optane is used to pipeline the data to each volume; be it spinning or SSD. Its driver must already be in the Windows 10 install media used to recover the machine. But there is one last impossible problem.

Your data cannot be accessed until Windows installs on the drive. It refuses to do so when the install process runs. It will also destroy the drive contents as it installs.

The machine must have a healthy Windows 10 environment running before the RSTSetup resetting software, which brings the drive back into volume and data synchronization, can be run.

There is no tool to do this prior to Windows 10 installation attempts. Failure is due to the Optane and hard disk refusal to be altered until their volumes are synchronized.

Data is lost. That is bad. The inability to save it somehow is even worse.

Bernard Lambert – November 25, 2020

What?

You know there are the laws, morals, mores, and customs we live by. They can differ widely but generally true up to being socially acceptable.

I believe we are experiencing a human being reducing themselves to behaving like a cornered animal. He has a considerable following but not the popular or electoral votes and he is cornered and striking out.

Bernard Lambert – November 20, 2020

The Truth Is …..

Truth should be simple and lasting. Well, I can hope. I can listen. I can think about it. I can seek many sources of information. I can do everything in my power to gain insight into everything I need to survive. It gets complicated in a hurry.

My first concern about truth is time and timeliness. While we cannot get back a minute of time while in the pursuit of truth, we spend it lavishly. Some just wait for it. Some just chase it. All spend a considerable amount of time finding the truth. Learning of it late or when it is no longer relative allows the truth to disappear into the moras of lies in circulation.

My second concern about truth is simplicity. When the only paper document you get with a product or service is a legal agreement in thousands of words, we have successfully evaded the truth. The hate mongers on the Internet build sites just to peddle discord and are successful because of the ease of having such a large audience. None of them offer simple truth.

We have come to a time where civility has been stripped away from public behavior. So far as the individuals who are demonstrating and protesting are concerned, they have been civil. The bad actors amongst them have caused all of the damages. Obviously the truth is being seen by millions of eyes and each of us has a different opinion of what the truth is even then.

While we observe things this political season, let’s try to keep truth lasting and simple….somehow!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020

The Angst

I just put a young man on a plane back to his hometown. Our meeting was four days earlier where I found him sleeping in the alley behind my home. My dog had barked all night because of his presence. I asked if he was all right. I also asked him to move on. Initially he did but he returned in the evening.

The next day in the morning he walked by in front of my house and I asked him about his circumstance. He had worked until the pandemic closed his work. He had played out all his string. No money… hadn’t eaten in days. He was in trouble.

I brought him in, fed him, and got him access to get cleaned up and a place to sleep. The next day we got clothes and a phone for him. His had been destroyed. All the email and apps hooked up ok.

His desire was to return home to the midwest where he was from. He knew from checking the Internet that a plane ticket was $149. He wanted to go right away. The bargain fares were days away. We plied the net and found a Friday flight.

On Friday , the two hours after dropping him off to get checked in, I got a voice mail from the young man saying he was getting on the flight home. His mom and dad will be happy.

I asked him what he had learned in his year away from home. He realized that the network of support you have around you is vital. He never thought he would get in the position he was in.

The vigor of youth meets the wisdom of experience.

Bernard Lambert August 29 2020

At a Bad Time ….

The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.

I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!