In 2020, since the beginning of the Pandemic, the US Government has passed 5 stimulus packages for a total is about $ 5.2 trillion. But how much is that really? Well, it turns out, it’s a lot! Lets find out exactly how much.

So having recently gone back to the Mac after a 7 year hiatus to try out using Linux as a desktop environment meant getting 7 years worth of code working. Any Perl code I had would have been originally written on macOS, so it worked just fine. 3/4 of my C code was written on macOS originally as well. But Just installing some packages with Brew and it all compiled just fine. And of course, all the BASH and awk code was no issues either.

And that brings us to Python. For some inexplicable reason, the system python is still 2.7. As you’d guess, all my code is Python 3. But, you should never use the system python anyway.

In the early ‘90’s I had a student job that gave me my first taste of working as a System Administrator. I was working for the Law School’s library where I was taking EE in college. The Library had the only student computer lab for the law school. It was a mixture of DOS boxes and a few Macs. The workers in the library had either NeXT workstations, DOS PCs, and a few Macs.

For servers there were a couple of Netware Servers, a UNIX server, and a NeXT server and a Mac SE with a network card in it that was acting as the Mac server.

In 2019, it’s estimated that various industries spent as much as $180,000,000,000 on so-called Big Data Analytics. Everything from big pharma to advertising. But, based on my experiences, I have to wonder how useful this great spend is.

There is this old by internet standards, originally written in 1994 poem inspired by Dr. Seuss . Originally written by Gene Ziegler, a professor at Cornell University at the time, has been edited, shortened, and distributed millions of times. I first encountered the shortened version of this poem in the mid ‘90’s. Probably either on Usenet someplace, or in the many TEXT files I use to trade with friends on BBS systems around that time.

It was the 1990’s, and we were heading toward a disaster of biblical proportions, or so they claimed. For decades a known bug lurked deep in the heart of all the computers that ran everything. A time-bomb, no, nuclear explosion just waiting to go off. It was set to explode on 12:00:01 on January 1st, 2000. A new year, a new decade, and new century and a new millennium. The second coming surely has be be nigh.

On Trending Tech’s You Tube video explaining how to update the firmware, Most of what they cover is useful. But at one point in the video, they use a pre-canned version of the firmware all set up to run Arduino in Windows. Well, that will not work very well in Linux.

TH3D has an installer for Mac OS X, but they support is highly lacking. The directions are 1/2 backed at best. And they even say if you have issues, don't call us, this is unsupported, so just use Windows! Don’t get me wrong, I'm glad they released their code, but really, what it is up with that kind of attitude from a company that is suppose to be all about Open Source?

It’s SO weird and surrealistic saying that. The first time I saw Dio, on the Dream Evil tour in ‘88, Star Trek the Next Generation had just started, and their Holodeck was sci-fi. How things have Changed in the past 30 years!

As of the other day, I’ve been a UNIX or Linux admin for exactly 1/2 my life.  That’s 23 years of UNIX or Linux hacking. Can hardly believe it myself.   Anyway, in all those eons, I’ve made some predictions. As one would expect, some were spot on, some were close, but not quite, some were … Well … yea, I missed.

Sometimes my friends and co-workers made predictions.  One of the more interesting ones was from a co-worker that, after seeing my early iPod, said it would become it’s own platform and blow up like crazy.  He nailed that one.  Others were laughable like “Apple will be out of business next year” or “Windows will kill everything, even Linux”  But I had my many of my own and here are a few of me better predictions and how  how wrong, or right, I was.

Anyway, it’s always kind of fun to try and predict the way things are going, even if I’m not always right.

80 years ago, Orson Wells radio broadcast of War of the Worlds broadcast.  Legend has it that it produced in such a way to appear to be a real new cast and people supposedly panicked wildly.   Accounts of what happened vary.  But there were even congressional hearings over it.