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Yes, that spot does seem to suit the cat quite well.

Meh. This is my preferred kind of catsuit.

Not that kind of noise. I almost put that in the post. Looks like I should have.

Well, I'd never considered that a viable position before, but they must have worked out something new. To each their own ...

Well, some people (not me) will be going WTF...

Seeing those two together ... A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard.

The most important audience is you in few months - but don't overestimate your memory; if other programmer won't be able to read it, it's likely you wouldn't either.

And if you aren't actually trying to write unreadable code (and aren't writing in APL or Lisp) there are few things worse than to have some electrical-engineering calculations written in Cobol by a Fortran programmer and then patched into a Cobol program by a person who understands neither electrical engineering nor Fortran (and isn't all that great at Cobol either). Now add in that there's a suspected bug somewhere in that mess, and the person assigned to fix (not one of its creators) it is an immigrant whose skills as a Cobol programmer are sound but is unfortunately lacking skills in English. (She begged me for help. It took me all afternoon to figure out what those two pages of code were doing, then all the next morning to be confident I had deciphered it correctly. And even though I know almost nothing of electrical engineering, it looked wrong. So I sent my explanation of what it was doing to the clients, asking if it was correct. The next day I got a response back - the code was wrong and they provided the correct formula - and spent an hour writing a third of a page of straight Cobol to do the same calculation. I delivered that to the lady assigned, and she actually could understand it.) That was, oh, probably somewhere around 1995. Anyone just starting out in programming, take away this message: the MOST IMPORTANT audience for any given piece of code is NOT the compiler. It's the programmer who has to fix or alter that piece of code. You or someone else, in a few hours or in a few years. That person has to be able to read the code. If the code is readable, it can evaluated for correctness and can be fixed as needed. If it's unreadable, it can't be fixed and nobody can be confident that it's correct.

While it might feel like MacDinking, making sure that all your '&' marks are in nice vertical line in LaTeX document's tabular environment will prevent you from screaming at your poor little laptop. Both the Fox and the Civets1 give me a bad look when I do that. 1Wall papers for the laptop screen and the external monitor, respectably.

Well, which other kind then? He doesn't seem like the type that runs around with sharp things cutting each other's heads off.

Need to be careful about that sort of thing. Write enough scripts to make your job easy and all at once they don't need you any more, just some monkey to run the scripts. Then, of course six to eight weeks later they discover that not all of what you did was done by scripts. Good for a couple of bucks an hour increase in pay to return. The key is to write enough scripts to make your work fully automated BUT never tell anyone. People write in COBOL?

But Dan never implied that Zeus is not a real god. He simply stated that there are (in his fictional universe) beings who go by that name but are not real gods. You won't offend Moslems by pointing out that there are beings named Mohammed who are not prophets...

A bit of extra job security I can imagine. Need to be careful about that sort of thing. Write enough scripts to make your job easy and all at once they don't need you any more, just some monkey to run the scripts. Then, of course six to eight weeks later they discover that not all of what you did was done by scripts. Good for a couple of bucks an hour increase in pay to return.

A bit of extra job security I can imagine.

GPS: IMHO if the GPS satellites were taken out and putting up new ones were not feasible, at least for navigation in populated areas it wouldn't be a big deal. They'd just put scaled-down GPS "satellites" on existing cell towers... which would spur the more-rapid deployment of suitable towers to remote locations that currently have little-to-no cell service. That would be a lot more practical than putting up a completely-different replacement system AND replacing all the GPS-using devices. There would have to be some tweaking because of earthquakes and such moving towers around, but not much... with the current system, the GPS satellites' opinions on their precise orbital characteristics need to be corrected based on ground observation every month (iirc), because of orbital perturbations caused by pretty much everything in this solar system and maybe the next one over, and are corrected every week (so if something goes wrong on the ground causing a correction or two to be skipped, it isn't a big deal). Religion: The way Dan has used names from mythology, he has never made or implied anything about the truth of any part of that mythology. Pandora, in particular, is explicitly an ordinary human in the mythology - not an immortal being of any sort. And it's pretty plain that some immortals take the names of deities from mythology because those names are of deities from mythology - their mythological origin predates the immortals borrowing them. If you want a webcomic that touches a bit more firmly on mythology, try Gunnerkrigg Court. A number of mythological figures from several different mythologies have appeared there... one of them from the mythology most commonly known as Sesame Street (but not in the same role at all). So far, I think only one being that is explicitly a god has appeared, and one other has been referred to. Or I'd recommend Brat-halla if it were still going... the way it ended, it really looks like the artists just got tired of it and could be bothered less and less (the last several pages are as seen by a blind character, and then it just stops without anything resembling an ending). But that was after a run of more than a decade, and was a lot of fun for most of that run. It quite explicitly gets into religion and mythology, particularly Norse but also touching on several others on occasion. Wapsi Square doesn't directly get into religion or the standard mythology, but sort of crafts its own. Major characters include a guy who fought in the Trojan War, a part-phoenix, a couple of sphinxes... and then if you get into the fanfictions in the forum, there you'll find more religious stuff including an appearance by Hades and a few scenes where Jesus has a speaking part.

Luck, Prof, and please give our regards to Mrs. Prof. I hope things will improve soon.

I wrote this one management report (in Cobol 68)... they printed three copies of it, and that took between 90% and 110% of a box of fanfold paper. One copy got distributed. First few pages went to the head of the company. Next several sets of a few pages went to managers who reported directly to the head. Next sets of a few pages went to managers who reported to them. And so on down the line. I don't think there was anyone who got as many as 10 pages unless they were temporarily handling two positions. Another copy got filed in Accounting. And the third got filed in Information Systems. Accounting and Information Systems really loved one thing I did on that report... I figured out how to easily put page footers on it (in addition to page headers) so they could look at the bottom of a page and see where they were in the stack, rather than having to open the binder wide enough to read the page headers. I also did a really good job of guessing what should be in the page footers. Since I kept the code for the page handling separate, and could easily plug it into other programs, I got assigned to write a lot of reports after that.

Also helps with keeping things together. If Charlotte is reading code listing (which doesn't have natural pages), it would be very impractical to read it from separate sheets of paper.

Far more likely is a temporary Elliot-Grace hookup with Tedd's approval...