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The Briz pawnshop in downtown Vancouver, Washington specializes in musical instruments. Over the phone they estimated the could lend me $150 for them, but that won't be definite until they can inspect them. Both are in mint condition though.

I'll use the money to promote my business, mainly postage for junk mail to potential clients, as well as printing of business cards and PO box rental.

Yes I now live in Vancouver now - but I still work in Portland. No one needs to know that I work from Shari's Restaurant and Pies. If I purchase a $2.35 coffee, I get a power socket, wifi and restroom all night long.

Plus I get to flirt with a special lady. ;-)

• Read It And Weep

A great many - not just here at SN - have harshly criticized my amateurish website design. While presently it's an experiment, it's inspired by the websites of many world-reknowned coders, such as Ward Cunningham and Bjarne Stroustrup.

Somewhere I found a free webhost that specializes in technology professionals. I don't recall the URL but those guys are definitely Rocket Scientists. Every last one of them has a website just like mine.

At least my website has a logo.

The actual response I've received is entirely from hard-core techies. My experience is that those folks are the best clients.

I used to get a lot of work from non-technical people, such as some marketing chick who made bank in the dot-com boom, but every last one of those people gave me grief - including the sole owner of a $200,000,000.00 hedge fund.

Well - I work in a plastic factory. Production makes thousands of identical parts, every night, some of them to be assembled with other parts before they leave the plant. Parts need to have flash trimmed off of them, sometimes, and various other tasks have to be performed before packing the parts into boxes for shipping. All light work - the worst part of the work is the heat. Plastic has to be melted before it can be injected into a mold, so it's hot. That really is the worst part of the job.

Well - this week, we've had THREE new hires walk out of the plant, mid-shift, literally CRYING! Crying, because they can't perform the tasks. Worse - it was one female, whom I can overlook, and TWO MALES, which is very damned hard to overlook. Women have always had license to cry, but GUYS?!?!?!

I might understand, if the job were difficult. It really isn't though. No one in production lifts weight over - ohhhh - maybe twenty pounds. There is no physically demanding task to be done. Well, aside from standing on your feet for eight hours. Just a little moderate coordination, just a little bit of strength, and just the tiniest bit of perseverance, you get through the shift, and then you can sit and rub your tired feet all you want.

And, three millennials walked out of the plant, CRYING, because they couldn't handle it.

FFS, what is this nation coming to? I'm beginning to believe that we DESERVE to be eclipsed by the rest of the world, where they still raise young men and women willing to work.

My first paying job, for which I needed a Social Security number? A place that was competing with McDonald's. I spent my sophomore year in high school working there, but when summer came, I wanted a REAL JOB. A few months of wimpy-assed work, serving burgers and wiping counters was enough for me, I wanted a MAN'S JOB! So, the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I got a job with a roofer.

How many of you knows what a bundle of shingles weighs? Typically, people want 270 weight shingles on their roofs. 270 pounds per 100 sq ft of coverage, each bundle covers 33 sq ft, so a bundle weighs 90 pounds. Here I am, an 85 pound runt, looking at those 90 pound bundles. Hmmmm - heft one onto my shoulder like the other guys are doing, and head on up the ladder. Holy SHIT people, my legs were flaccid rubber by the time I got up there! Did I walk off crying? FEK NO!! Ease on down the ladder, look at that next bundle, flop it up on my shoulder, and off I went again. THIS WAS MAN'S WORK! If they had tried to run me off, I'd have fought them! It took a couple weeks before I built up enough strength to carry ten square of shingles up on the roof without panting like a winded horse.

I haven't spent all of my life doing such strenuous work, but I've always done work that involved some physical labor, at least.

Plastics. This work is EASY! There's just nothing to it. My mama did this work when she was 70 years old. A little bitty tiny woman handled this at 70. Mama was tough as nails when she wanted to be, but she wasn't some hulking Amazon!

And, this week, I see THREE apparently healthy youngsters walk out of the plant, CRYING, because the work is "to hard"!!!

I just don't have the words to express my contempt for the people who are going to be running our country in the years to come. I simply can't imagine how they are ever going to make anything of themselves. Flabbergasted, I am.

I guess it's payback time. The US has exploited much of the world over the past 100 years or so. With candy asses like these set to take over this country, I expect that the US is going to be exploited right up the ass. China is already showing us that they are able to work their asses off. India as well. Korea, and much of the Pacific.

Maybe I'll join all the damned fool progressives who promise to renounce their citizenship if Trump is elected. I can't stand to watch weenie babies trying to do easy work, and failing. I don't have much in common with Koreans, or Indians, but I could stand to spend my last years watching honest men and women earn a living. Watching crybabies whine because simple tasks are "to hard" may just drive me to suicide. Or, drugs, which amounts to the same thing.

After many months of negative pregnancy tests, a couple weeks ago I was woken up to my wife smiling from ear to ear with a positive test in hand. Things are happening and if everything goes well, I should get to meet my son/daughter early 2017. I still have a hard time believing it.

I've since been reading all about pregnancy, and educating myself. I know we have all learned about it in school, but I didn't really care at that time. Now, when I am reading up on everything, it's an absolute miracle how everything happens. It's magical to think that inside my wife is a little grape with a beating heart and that grape will form in to a living, breathing baby.

My wife is so happy. Her breasts are sore, she is eating like a horse, and goes to bed early. We have our first ultrasound at the end of June. It's an exciting time.

I told my mom (things are still early, and the chance of a miscarriage is still there), and she cried with joy. She is having a hard time not telling anyone and keeping it all inside. My dad doesn't know yet (he is on vacation), but I plan on telling him when he returns.

I'm still seeing the girl I wrote about in the last entry. She has been really busy, and it has been tough finding time to spend together. We saw each other last night, and had a great night of talking, play, and cuddling. I let her know that my wife was pregnant (she knew we were trying), and she was happy for us.

I really like this girl. She is definitely someone that I could (and am) fall hard and fast for. She is smart, sexy and level-headed -- the same things that I love about my wife. I think we may be looking for different things though... I am looking for a full relationship. I would like to see her regularly and ideally grow a deep relationship. I think that she is ideally looking for something more casual, but really enjoys the time she spends with me. I think that there may be an imbalance of power (I think I'm more invested that she is), but I just can't stop myself -- I really like her. I'm really enjoying this ride, but I have a feeling that I'm going to have my heart broken.

Ten years ago I wrote a humorous article titled “Useful Dead Technologies” about technologies that are no longer used that I sorely miss, like furnaces that still worked when the power went out, or things made of durable steel instead of today’s fragile and short-lived plastics.
        A couple of the things on the list have improved since then. Shoelaces, for instance. Ten years ago I wrote:
        “Shoelaces have been designed for hundreds of years to keep your shoes on your feet. No longer. Today's shoelaces are designed with one purpose in mind – to annoy you.
        “What are they making shoelaces out of now? Nylon! Good old frictionless nylon ‘because of its strength’. One wonders if today's engineers even need a college degree, as it seems that some things, like today's shoelaces, were designed by “special ed” students.
        “Because now, not only are they made of a friction-free material, they're round rather than flat, further eroding their ability to stay tied.”
        Since then, they’ve been making them of both cotton and nylon woven together, with all the friction of cotton and the strength of nylon.
        And they’re flat again.
        Another item was knobs on car radios. At the beginning of the century they had buttons for tuning and volume, so you couldn’t turn it up or down without taking your eyes off the road. It was dangerous. Thankfully, they’ve gone back to knobs, even though they’re digital rather than potentiometers.
        The radio in my car now really annoys me, because the morons who designed it stupidly put the volume knob right above the tuning knob rather than the time tested volume on the left side of the radio and tuning on the right. Often when I try to adjust the volume, I’ll grab the wrong knob.
        I also miss the way presets worked back in the analog age. They were simple to operate: to set a preset to a station, you tuned the radio to that station, pulled out on the button, and pushed it back in. These days you simply cannot tune a station to a preset while you’re driving, at least unless you’re a suicidal maniac. What’s worse, every radio has a different way of tuning a preset button, and many are impossible to figure out without an owner’s manual.
        The worst thing about that radio is I can’t change the time on the clock. The car came with a manual, but they put three different models of radio in those cars, and the manual lists all of them. But each of the three says to push a button that simply isn’t on the radio!
        And I just discovered by watching a commercial where they were trying to sell new cars – the morons took the knobs away again, and now it’s even worse than the buttons. Now they have touch screens. There’s no way possible to change the station or volume without taking your eyes off the road!
        I’m all for hiring the handicapped, but I wish they wouldn’t hire idiots to be engineers. Touch screens for automobile controls are brain-dead stupid.
        The following items haven’t all become extinct in the last decade, I simply didn’t think of them when I wrote it. Here are some more.

Thermostats that don’t need batteries
        In the twentieth century, thermostats were simple yet clever devices: a mercury switch on the end of two dissimilar metals. The metal would bend one way or the other depending on temperature. When the metal reached a certain shape, the mercury would roll down the inside of the switch and close the circuit.
        Shortly before the turn of the century they came out with programmable thermostats, and they were indeed superior despite the one disadvantage of needing a battery; perhaps it could be done, but I don’t see how you could have a programmable thermostat without one. But they could be set to turn themselves down at bedtime, then warm the house back up before you arose in the morning. More comfort, lower heating costs.
        Fast forward to a couple of years ago when the landlord had a new furnace installed in my house. With the new furnace came a new thermostat. The old thermostat was programmable, the new one isn’t.
        But it’s digital and still needs batteries.
        At first I thought they had to be digital because mercury has been shown to be toxic, but on second thought you could simply have a copper ball replacing the mercury. Such a switch would be easy to engineer.
        Folks, digital thermostats have been in use for a couple of decades now. Why aren’t new homes designed to have a low voltage DC supply to thermostats so batteries wouldn’t be needed?

Sticky Menus
        When GUIs first came out they were a great improvement over the old CLIs. Easy to use and hard to screw up. Click on a menu heading and the menu drops down. Nothing happened until you clicked somewhere. If you clicked on an empty space the menu closed. Click on a different menu and that menu opened.
        So some moron had the bright idea that if you had the file menu open and simply mouse over the edit menu, File closes and Edit opens.
        This incredibly stupid change drives me nuts, especially in Firefox and GIMP. I have nested bookmarks in Firefox, and after clicking a folder I have to slowly and carefully slide the cursor over, making sure the cursor never goes over a different folder, as the folder I want will close and the one I don’t opens.
        GIMP drives me nuts, too, especially trying to select the “rectangle select” from the “selection” menu, as the “filters” menu will open when I’m trying to navigate to “rectangle select”.
        Folks, losing sticky menus was an incredibly stupid, productivity killing thing. BRING THEM BACK!

Rectangular cabinets
        Stuff used to have cabinets made of wood. The better stuff had rounded corners, because they were safer.
        Every large CRT TV I ever owned was rectangular, before 2002 when I bought a forty two inch Sony Trinitron. It takes up a huge amount of floor space, and you can’t set anything on it because it’s stupidly shaped. My DVD and VCR and converter box should be able to sit on it, but nothing can.
        The rectangular shape is far from extinct, but more and more things seem to be eschewing it.

Useful user manuals
        Some would criticize me for this one, saying user manuals always sucked, and they would have a valid point. When I was young, user manuals were complete – and completely unreadable to many if not most people. I had trouble making heads or tails out of more than one, and I could read at a post-doctoral level at age 12 (although I didn’t understand the math).
        DOS 6.2 came in a box with two floppies and a thick user manual. Windows 95 came with a very thin manual. I don’t remember what XP’s was like, but the manual for this old Acer laptop was really thin.
        Then my phone. Honestly, come on, now, a smart phone is a complex, sophisticated piece of equipment but its user manual is three by five inches and a dozen pages?
        The worst was the “Seagate Personal Cloud”, which is really a network hard drive. Tiny pamphlet with pictures and few words. Look, folks, pictures are good for illustration but lousy for information. I spent twenty useless minutes studying the thing, then finally just plugged it in and turned it on. It didn’t even need a manual!
        I did find a detailed, very good manual for it online. Its printed manual should have added its URL.

Automobile hoods and trunks that didn’t need props
        Before the 1970s, to open a hood you opened the hood latch, and springs opened the hood and held it open. It was an ingenious design where it didn’t spring open, you lifted it a little first. Trunks worked the same way. It didn’t matter if it was a Volkswagen, a little Plymouth Valiant, or a big luxury Cadillac.
        Then the Arab oil embargo hit in 1974 and the price of gasoline doubled in a matter of months. People started replacing their American gas guzzlers with compact Japanese cars that had far better mileage.
        The more weight a vehicle carries, the worse its mileage is. Part of the raising of gas mileage was replacing the heavy steel with a lighter material when possible, and those springs and the rest of the steel assembly for them were jettisoned, replaced with that stupid hood prop.
        Soon American auto makers started following suit. I don’t know if big sedans and luxury cars ever went to hood props, but I know my ‘67 Mustang had no hood prop, nor did my ‘74 LeMans. My 76 Vega did, though, as did every other car I owned until I bought an ‘02 Concorde. Rather than springs or a hood prop, it had lightweight hydraulic struts for both the front and back.
        It was far better than a hood prop, but not as good as the spring mechanism. Those springs lasted forever, but the struts fail in a few years and you wind up propping up your hood and trunk with a stick. Either that or shell out for new ones.

Bumper Jacks
        All cars and trucks used to have bumpers, and there was a slot on each end of each bumper. The slots were for flat tires. If you had a flat, you got the jack out of the car, hooked it into the slot, and jacked it up with its handle like you were pumping water out of a hand operated well pump. This was easy on the back, as you were standing up. It took very little effort to jack up the vehicle.
        Now they all have scissors jacks, and I hate them. You have to get down on your hands and knees to slide it under the car, and jack it up by cranking it. It always takes skin off of your knuckles and takes twice the effort and three times the time.
        Yes, the new jacks take up far less space, but the trade-offs simply weren’t worth it.
        I miss the full sized spares, too. If you had a flat, you changed the tire, got the flat tire fixed, and simply put that one in the trunk instead of having to change the “doughnut” to put your real tire on.
        At least we have fix-a-flat now.

Ex-Chemist In Massachusetts Was High On Drugs At Work For 8 Years

Nearly every day for eight years, a former chemist in Massachusetts was high on drugs — drugs stolen from the lab where she worked.

An investigation by the state attorney general found that from 2005 to 2013, Sonja Farak, 37, heavily abused various drugs including cocaine, LSD and methamphetamines and even manufactured her own crack cocaine using lab supplies. Though Farak was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to jail in 2014, the findings from the state's investigation into the scope of her misconduct were just released Tuesday.

During her career as a chemist, Farak worked for two years at the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain, Mass., and then for nine years at the state drug lab in Amherst, Mass. According to the attorney general's report, "her responsibilities involved testing, for authenticity, various controlled substances submitted by law enforcement agencies" and testifying "in court as to her test results, which served as evidence in criminal cases."

Applicant Tracking Systems suck, and not just for the dehumanizing data entry process, but for the user interfaces themselves. iCIMS is one of the more popular ones, yet inexplicably has some incredibly unfriendly behavior.

1) iCIMS does not treat the applicant as a service-wide user. So each instance of iCIMs they host requires both a new login account and reentry of all submitter data. So all that nice info that you've meticulously input at Acme's iCIMS portal must be re-input at Beta's iCIMs, etc. Recruiters generally prefer candidates who are working. How does this siloed account system serve those valuable candidates if they have to re-enter all their information each time they apply via iCIMS?

2) To make up for this, iCIMS has LinkedIn integration, but it wants to be a data vacuum:

iCIMS would like to access some of your LinkedIn info:

        YOUR PROFILE OVERVIEW
        YOUR FULL PROFILE
        YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
        YOUR CONNECTIONS
        YOUR CONTACT INFO
        NETWORK UPDATES
        GROUP DISCUSSIONS
        INVITATIONS AND MESSAGES

How does LinkedIn define these options?

Other members won't be able to see any of your profile information that isn't already available when browsing around the website.

With your consent, applications may also take actions on your behalf such as sharing content, sending invitations, and sending messages.

By installing the application, you confirm your acceptance of our User Agreement. You also acknowledge that your use of the application may be subject to the application developer's terms of use and to the application developer's privacy policy.

Some application developers may request permissions to access the following, in order for their applications to function:

• Your Profile Overview - Name, photo, headline, current positions.
• Your Full Profile - Overview above plus experience, education, skills and recommendations.
• Your Email Address - Primary email address you use for your account.
• Your Connections - Your 1st and 2nd degree connections.
• Your Contact Info - Address, phone number, and bound accounts.
• Network Updates - Retrieves and posts updates as you.
• Group Discussions - Retrieves and posts group discussions as you.
• Invitations and Messages - Sends messages and invitations to connect as you.

That's way more than what's required or even asked for via their manual process, but there's no way to limit this data gobbling. If this application posts as the submitter, wouldn't the content posted give a hint that the submitter is job searching? That's a kiss-of-death in some places, and another thing to drive casual, employed candidates away.

3) If you do submit your resume as a file, the results are not shown to you. So however the system mangles the data isn't something you can see or correct! Entire sections of your resume can be eaten by this process and you'll be none-the-wiser. Due to the over-reliance on ATS systems, having a plain resume with no formatting, no tables, and in plain old Microsoft Word .DOC format is essential.

4) iCIMS does not notify you when there is a status change on your application, such as LinkedIn can do. There's no option to enable this either, only to unsubscribe from "mass emails" that I have never seen.

5) The Profile page has a time zone option that is mercifully optional. The full list of entries is 461 items, just in case you're in "Eastern Greenland Summer Time" or "South Georgia Standard Time".

6) At least in the version I used today, there's no option to upload letters of recommendation. There is a text field for the cover letter but no upload option.

Health watchdogs has approved a groundbreaking trial to test if it is possible to regenerate the brains of (brain) dead people.
The biotech company BioQuark in the USA got ethical permission to use 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test if parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life. A combination of therapies will be used, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas. The trial participants have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord -- the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat.

If they succeed, they will have open a box of a lot of interesting questions.

Introducing the disposable laser: Ultra-low-cost, easy to fabricate 'lasing capsules' made with inkjet printer

Researchers from France at the Center of Microelectronics in Provence at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne in France and in Hungary have invented a way to print cheap and disposable lasers using organic carbon containing materials. That are easy to fabricate.

Inorganic lasers, are used in laser pointers, DVD players, and optical mice. Organic lasers offer benefits such as high-yield photonic conversion, easy fabrication, low-cost and a wide range of wavelengths. They do however degrade relatively quickly.

The disposable part of the new laser is the printed gain medium. And a proposed use is analyzing chemical and biological samples.

It's that time again. Time to pay tribute to those willing, nay eager, to say that which a lot of people do not want to hear. Be their motives sincere or simply to wind you up, they are the souls brave enough to be unpopular with the masses. Here are the top ten by sheer number of times modded Troll and (of the top 50 of the previous group) the top ten by percent of their comments that have been modded Troll. These are not an "all time" list, only the ones that haven't fallen off the end of our moderation log table. By count: NickTrolls%Troll Ethanol-fueled50117% Runaway19562617% jmorris18412% The Mighty Buzzard18111% aristarchus1558% Hairyfeet1459% frojack1262% zugedneb8624% khallow706% VLM672%

By percent: NickTrolls%Troll zugedneb8624% Ethanol-fueled50117% Khyber2015% jmorris18412% The Mighty Buzzard18111% jasassin3010% Hairyfeet1459% aristarchus1558% Arik418% TLA148%