1983 was the year when my tech job kicked into high gear, with a lot of traveling while mastering a slew of additional duties. I enjoyed all of it, except for the pay, which was equivalent to $40,000 today.*
One of those duties was evaluating and approving peripheral devices for use at hospitals. These included “dumb” terminals, printers and modems, about which I became something of an expert.
I didn’t see this installment of The Computer Chronicles in 1983. If I had I would have been very interested, because the discussion was about the changes in printer technology that I knew quite well were taking place. Most notably with laser and inkjet printing. There were also high-speed band printers that were later replaced with dot-matrix models.
Here in the present at home, I have my new Epson ET-2980/2985 multi-function inkjet printer. I’ve figured out how to optimize scanning so the results are as good as they were with the old Canon MP600.
The black ink clogs up the Epson’s printhead after not much idle time. I’m a bit concerned that a single cleaning hasn’t yet done the trick. This scan shows the first check, then after the first cleaning, and the second, deeper cleaning.
* Average salaries increased at the lowest rates in more than 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ March 1984 survey of pay for professional, administrative, technical, and clerical occupations in medium and large firms.
On the morning of July 17, a redditor who normally pays Amazon Web Services about five cents a month opened their inbox to a wall of billing alerts and a running tab of $2.5 billion. Their whole setup was a single S3 storage bucket, untouched since 2023 and not even public.
I pay AWS about fifteen cents a month. (At first it was $5/month. To Amazon’s credit, they weren’t kidding when they said costs would be greatly reduced.) Like that redditor person, all I use are S3 storage buckets, but some of mine are public.
AWS has greatly increased its security protocol, which I have completed. The fact that an internal problem at Amazon can cause such a billing mess is disquieting. I don’t need this sort of a hassle.
For a while, I’ve been contemplating cancelling my AWS account that I’ve held since almost the inception of the service. This event has given me the sense of urgency to do that.
A follow-up to yesterday’s post about the breakout of Cyclospora illnesses. It seems that Taco Bell was, in fact, a primary source of infection, albeit not at all their fault.
The blame apparently is with an outfit called Taylor Farms. With such a strong, verifiable link, it shouldn’t have taken so long to figure this out.
More than 400 cases in four states (Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky) seem to be linked to a common source, which has not yet been identified, according to the C.D.C.
Can we stop trying to evaluate and explain events based upon pre-Trump criteria? The CDC of the not too distant past would have certainly, by now, identified the specific source(s) of the Cyclospora contamination. Instead, they’re leaving it to Taco Bell to take action without guidance.
The CDC no longer has enough competent epidemiologists, or sufficient funding, to do its work. Because of Donald J. Trump, and no on else. RFK, Jr. wouldn’t be where he is without Trump. It’s his fault, so please stop claiming the difficulty is primarily a matter of the bacteria being “tricky.”
The timing of today’s Jumble is perfect. Except the water in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is in danger of falling low enough to reach the dead power pool level. Leaving it without the ability to generate electricity, so Hoover will be sucking air like the other namesake. California announced today it will do what it can to keep that from happening.
