The AH Coffee Shop and Reading Room 09

[Duleigh]

If I had to ditch three chapters, I think I would give up…I mean like literally!

This is a good thing, my revision keeps an associated story in the Erotic Horror category, but my original ending just wasn't me. It was a good ending, Steven King would sit up and say, "Dude! Seriously?" but I'm happy re-writing them, my original was twisting my guts around.

I've never had a bacon bomb go off

Bacon bombs don't make it past the initial safety inspection, the bomb loaders submit a Missing Weapon Report... right after lunch

Was it that way before?

I've never seen a UTC time stamp here. There's not a lot of people who live in Greenwich anyhow

 

[Duleigh]

Morning coffee is on! I've also put a pot of tea out to steep, none of that "powdered tea" for my fellow writers.

Is it just me, or is this forum slowing down? I seem to be spending more and more time waiting for that green throbber to finish its cycle before displaying the page contents. It's like waiting for a corrected submission to post.

 

[DarkRaven13]

Morning coffee is on! I've also put a pot of tea out to steep, none of that "powdered tea" for my fellow writers.

Is it just me, or is this forum slowing down? I seem to be spending more and more time waiting for that green throbber to finish its cycle before displaying the page contents. It's like waiting for a corrected submission to post.

God morning...and there is such a thing as powdered tea?

 

[Duleigh]

God morning...and there is such a thing as powdered tea?

It's from the show NCIS - Ducky, the resident Brit played by David McCallum, often calls tea bags "Powdered Tea"

 

[TarnishedPenny]

MrrrAwwn!

Emerging from den, scratching ear with hind paws...

So, coffee. Yes, please. I brought my own IV.

 

[Haulover]

I'm having a herbal tea with mint, liquorice and cinnamon as primary ingredients, and some added lemon and honey. In the dark.

God morning...and there is such a thing as powdered tea?

Another wall poster to be hung in the coffee shop:

View attachment 2182189

 

[MillieDynamite]

What annoys me just a little bit with the time zone selection on this site is that there doesn't seem to be an option to have no daylight savings adjustment. This means that I either have to select the wrong time zone for summer or live with the fact that it'll get my local time wrong (no daylight saving here, it would be pretty useless).

I'm guessing you're near the equator. My dad hates daylight savings on general principles. One, it doesn't save any time you can't bank time. Two, it is a distribution of daily routines. Three, in pushed sundown to such a lot hour, a staple of one industry he worked in (and still does) into oblivion, Drive-In movies. He hasn't run drive-ins since the 70s but always loved them. And four, he just doesn't like politicians telling him what to do.

 

[NotWise]

I wonder what would happen if we had a national referendum on stopping Daylight Savings Time.

Couldn't actually happen. The constitution doesn't allow for government by referendum.

 

[Duleigh]

You better check your news feeds, starting in March, Congress (which is the grammatical opposite of Progress) wants to make Daylight Savings time permanent.

I remember in the 70's when the Carter administration pushed for year-round daylight savings time, when people who lived north of Miami freaked out when they realized that the sun won't rise until 9:00 AM in the winter. That experiment didn't survive.

 

[TxRad]

Brunch time coffee anyone.

I like daylight savings time. I like tea bags. I'd love to watch TP scratch her ear with her hind paw. But then again, I'm just weird that way.

I was up late so I slept in late. The ladies just have too much energy. They are like those damned pink bunnies with tans.

 

[MrPixel]

The cost of such a change would be beyond enormous. Trillions. Non-techies don't understand that there are computers in everything now, and those computers typically need to know what time it is. DST changes are managed by a formula embedded into the software (a/k/a "firmware" in some systems), and many, many, many critical systems that operate relatively well are no longer supported by the likes of, say, Microsoft. Things like ATMs. Traffic lights. Elevators. Your car.

People will say that the brouhaha over Y2K was overblown. It wasn't - those people weren't in the trenches patching up millions of lines of code and running updates that in a lot of cases crashed systems. Bear in mind that was 20 years ago, and computers run our lives, intrusively, two orders of magnitude greater now than then.

The current US formula for DST was put into place in 2007. Considering the rapid integration of computer-based tech into our daily lives since, changing DST rules now would be a disaster.

 

[NotWise]

I just wasted a few cycles trying to turn a colon into a period. I was getting frustrated then realized that the upper dot was a fleck of something on the screen.

Have you ever heard of E-prime? Using it is a style setting for fiction writing on my grammar checker. E-prime avoids all forms of "to be." I decided to give it a try, and so far it looks good. I've come across one case where it wanted me to remove "were," and I thought it was better to keep it. In most cases the "to be" form can be replaced with a better verb.

 

[Duleigh]

Working on the new chapters of WaWW to replace the once that the new ending ate. Plot bunnies abound (⁎˃ᆺ˂)

I took a look at E-prime and realized that the half million words I've posted here would be pared down to about 8,500 I know a troll or two who would enjoy that.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

I'm guessing you're near the equator.

Yep. Between 12 & 13° Latitude

My dad hates daylight savings on general principles. One, it doesn't save any time you can't bank time. Two, it is a distribution of daily routines. Three, in pushed sundown to such a lot hour, a staple of one industry he worked in (and still does) into oblivion, Drive-In movies. He hasn't run drive-ins since the 70s but always loved them. And four, he just doesn't like politicians telling him what to do.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

The cost of such a change would be beyond enormous. Trillions. Non-techies don't understand that there are computers in everything now, and those computers typically need to know what time it is. DST changes are managed by a formula embedded into the software (a/k/a "firmware" in some systems), and many, many, many critical systems that operate relatively well are no longer supported by the likes of, say, Microsoft. Things like ATMs. Traffic lights. Elevators. Your car.

People will say that the brouhaha over Y2K was overblown. It wasn't - those people weren't in the trenches patching up millions of lines of code and running updates that in a lot of cases crashed systems. Bear in mind that was 20 years ago, and computers run our lives, intrusively, two orders of magnitude greater now than then.

The current US formula for DST was put into place in 2007. Considering the rapid integration of computer-based tech into our daily lives since, changing DST rules now would be a disaster.

I don't really understand. It's quite easy to change Time Zone & DST settings on both my phone and computer. I don't see why it would be such a problem.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

Another wall poster to be hung in the coffee shop:

View attachment 2182189

My herbal tea is very much an evening drink.

 

[MrPixel]

I don't really understand.

You may not. It's not your computing devices, it's the millions and millions of computers you don't see nor have any control over that, in a way, influence your life.

DST is actually a case in point! IIRC, the 2007 rule change fubar'ed thousands of ATMs with Intel-based computers inside running an already-obsolete version of Windows XT. The then-current upgrade with the new DST rules couldn't run on the old hardware. Those ATMs' internals had to be upgraded, which setup a chain of changes at every level, in many cases requiring replacement of the entire terminal.

I was administering high-end region-wide traffic control systems at the time. It was a real scramble loading the new DST system on the two dozen controllers in my computer room. While the hardware was good, the changes that needed to be loaded had other pieces - we call them "dependencies" - that also required updating. It took about a month to get everything in order, gathering the pieces one glitch at a time. In the meanwhile I was manually adjusting times every day when the time sync routines activated on their schedule. Not pretty.

 

[DarkRaven13]

You may not. It's not your computing devices, it's the millions and millions of computers you don't see nor have any control over that, in a way, influence your life.

DST is actually a case in point! IIRC, the 2007 rule change fubar'ed thousands of ATMs with Intel-based computers inside running an already-obsolete version of Windows XT. The then-current upgrade with the new DST rules couldn't run on the old hardware. Those ATMs' internals had to be upgraded, which setup a chain of changes at every level, in many cases requiring replacement of the entire terminal.

I was administering high-end region-wide traffic control systems at the time. It was a real scramble loading the new DST system on the two dozen controllers in my computer room. While the hardware was good, the changes that needed to be loaded had other pieces - we call them "dependencies" - that also required updating. It took about a month to get everything in order, gathering the pieces one glitch at a time. In the meanwhile I was manually adjusting times every day when the time sync routines activated on their schedule. Not pretty.

I agree that it can likely be a huge effort to get the new coding into things that are web-based or into new machines, etc.

However, given that back in 2007 this happened ... shouldn't companies and governmental agencies have realized that another change could come? Including a change to end the switching of DST? If it were me back then and I had to code new things based on the 2007 change, I would have coded in a future feature that would make it easier to modify in the future.

(Okay, I totally get I don't understand any of the tech portions of it. All I know is I hate having to figure out if I can sleep an extra hour, or if I have to wake an extra hour! lol.)

 

[MrPixel]

The complication is that all this doesn't happen in a vacuum. There are zillions of other changes to systems along the way, and not all of them make it to older systems, so installing the latest update to DST (or whatever) is dependent on whether The Powers That Be deem older systems worthy of the specific update, like that ATM example. Then there are "embedded systems" such as the traffic light controllers I'm familiar with. That controller the gov't bought in 2008 may no longer be supported, where the solutions are ignore the difference and let the chips fall where they may, or spend tens of thousands (or more!) on something new. This is the "installed legacy" issue.

Coding systems for "what might happen... someday..." is usually not in our playbook. Some accommodations are made for the known unknowns, but unknown unknowns like a political shift pushing permanent DST are just simply not funded.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

But why hard code DST? Machines should just hard code UTC and then anything else should be made adaptable depending on the place where they are used/installed.

 

[TxRad]

Not to mention making everything backwards comparable doesn't allow the computer giants from selling whole new systems. Microshaft is bad about abandoning perfectly fine systems for their newer stuff.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

Not to mention making everything backwards comparable doesn't allow the computer giants from selling whole new systems. Microshaft is bad about abandoning perfectly fine systems for their newer stuff.

Microsoft has had perfectly fine systems?

 

[DarkRaven13]

Well, regardless of time changes due to DST, all I know is, because of Lit (and other social media where you can interact with people around the globe) .... I am soooo much better at world time!

NY City = 3Hr ahead
Italy = 9 Hr ahead
Australia = uhm ... okay, I still am learning them. Stop judging me.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

Well, regardless of time changes due to DST, all I know is, because of Lit (and other social media where you can interact with people around the globe) .... I am soooo much better at world time!

NY City = 3Hr ahead
Italy = 9 Hr ahead
Australia = uhm ... okay, I still am learning them. Stop judging me.

You're (US) West Coast then?

 

[DarkRaven13]

I need to work on keeping my posts free of clues! lol

(I was going to go back and delete the 3 hour part...then realize, waiiit. I'd have to delete all the hourly things.)

Yes ... west coast.