Automatic (?) truncation ruins a sale

Filtering through some long-ago crap at work some years ago, I found VHSes of subjects that were long ago filed and forgotten. One of them was entituled “The Attitude Virus”, meant to warn office workers about how they could ruin their work environment by bad attitudes that affect others. Made by CRM Films, here is the title screen:

The Attitude Virus / Curing Negativity in the Workplace / Government Version

CRM films still exists as CRM Learning, now bought by “Media Partners”, and they still make these sorts of things, though their website doesn’t seem to like the currently current (84.0) version of Firefox.

J. W. Gibbs will be mean to you

if you download thermodata but don’t at least visit CarnotCycle, who I digitized the information from. (I keep seeing exactly 1 download per day of this spreadsheet.)

Going through backups – Windows is happy again

I recently decommissioned an old Western Digital “MyBook” from before 2010 that had been my parents NAS when I lived with them, in the house they had where I grew up. Because I was not sure if there was something worth saving on the various backups and WD used I think an ext* filesystem, I had to restore it (1.51 TB) to a local drive to go through it.

I have a 1.81 TB drive as D: but it was half full of dashcam videos and also the most recent backups from before my parents and I went different directions. To get around this, I copied the oldest backup of my father (Windows 7 backup, using those opaque *.wbcat files) off the drive, deleting them from the NAS, and then removing obvious and large duplicates v. the most recent backup I had. I did this through 5 backup sets before getting to my mother’s backups, which used File History.

Somewhere in there I took a look at my dashcam footage and found that I had kept recordings of my back seat when the rear camera just sat on the cushions waiting for me to fix the mounting. I forget how many GB that was, but each video segment was maybe 300 MB for a few minutes.

Anyway, I have pared the duplicates (via SearchMyFiles, unpaid recommendation) across the 5 NAS + 1 prior (most recent) backups so that I have more than 10% free drive space on D:. This means Windows no longer colors the bar graph red instead of blue. YaY!

Pennsylvania got there first

Not often does a State one-up the feds and the rest of the 50+5, but Pennsylvania did that many years ago and on to the present.

I have never seen this before in a blog

Visiting by accident, the human recommendations blog of the Marion (Indiana) Publique Library, I noticed something actually unique: A total lack of datestamps.

I cannot find anything on the index page or the individual posts to show when they were written or publisht. The URIs are … found it!!

If you clique on the individual images of books, then it says when they were “published”, which means uploaded to the server.

Sadly, the blog hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years. Their idea of not making it easy to see the date makes it hard for an immediate visitor to know if it is all out of date, hence less immediately rejection-worthy. As far as I know this is unique to them.

Who are these people?

Any why do they keep turning up in my referrers list?

Creative will dryup

I have a problem that’s not quite writer’s block, but writing block. I have ideas to write, images to scan, comments to come up with on various old nonsense (InExObs), but no interest in doing so. Other things take time, even when they are completely pointless timewasters (like playing strategy games) that have no long term value, or really even short term value.

I promise I will try harder to get through my backlog of InExObs and similar matter. I need to somehow remind myself every week or so to do this for you who have subscribed to my blog and expect posts and not just deadness in return.

I don’t know if this is just me either. One of my favorite blogs, 8bitfics, has also gone quiet lately. Which is too bad since her work is quite excellent.

Also I discovered a blog on thermodynamics! Oddly, it is possible to blog about thermo. It is named carnotcycle. You kind of have to know about thermo to get much of it, but the available specific beauty of the science is visible in the graphs.

Update your technical requirements, companies with websites!

ITT owns a number of brands of fluid handling devices like pumps and valves, as well as more complex processes. I’ve been trolling their careers site for a while, looking for positions to apply for. Today, I followed a little link at the bottom of the page that promised information about using PDFs. Here’s what I got:

(Click to inlarge)

So, I should have at least Internet Explorer 3.0, Netscape Navigator or AOL Browser??!

IE 3 shipped with… (Hold on while I check WikipediA¹) Windows 95 and was superseded in 1997 by IE 4. Netscape Navigator is long gone from the scene and AOL doesn’t exist anymore. This page hasn’t been updated at least since Firefox, Safari and Chrome have become popular, which would be… (WikipediA again²) at least 2009, but almost certainly earlier.

Finally, I have to ask all web designers, without snark: Are “PDF reader download” pages like this really needed now? From what I understand, every major operating system on PCs and phones includes a native or preinstalled PDF reader.

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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internet_Explorer_3&oldid=633996337 ↩
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_%28Source_StatCounter%29.svg&oldid=134697581 ↩