Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Real Liberals Walk Strike Lines

Professor Alex Fraser on strike at the University of Cincinnati.  Real liberals walk strike lines; they don't break them.

- Insert long-winded editorial on NAFTA and globalization -


Yep, that's my ol' Dad.  Proud of you, old guy.


I didn't see the article with the pic but someone sent it to me with this circled and the caption, "Who is this man?"

He cast a long, long shadow and it took years working for the University before I was anyone but Fraser's kid.


WYLBUR was a popular mainframe teleprocessing system of the Ancient Age and the academics loved it while systems support was done on TSO, the IBM standard for basic teleprocessing.  As you may have guessed, WYLBUR had all kinds of style and TSO had zero but both were effective in providing the tools whichever audience needed.

After some time in academia (i.e. my life), I was familiar with WYLBUR and wound up providing the tech support for the product.  At one point I was tasked with increasing the security of the system to defend against SCOPE, the incipient hackers of the future but hackers were much more entertaining back then.  The way to increase security was to limit the number of attempts on passwords.

I didn't think all that much of it since those types of controls were being tightened across the system and WYLBUR was just one more component.  I set the number of password attempts at three and, on failing the last one, I issued the message WE CAN'T DO THIS ALL DAY and logged them off.

The profs went into low-Earth orbits over that one and they were absolutely furious.  How dare you?

That was not the time for the literal answer of, well, I know assembler programming so I modified the code and I did it.  Que sera sera.


There's no punchline to the story since it went to management immediately and usually management folds faster than a dish towel so I probably had to back it out but that doesn't matter now.  It was hilarious at the time.


Here's one as maybe some of you geezers remember Professor Hans Jaffe from the Chemistry Dept and he was legendary.  He hung out quite a bit with my ol' Dad due to the magnetism of general madness and he came up with the wizard idea that he and Alex should trade kids.  If each raised the other's kids then maybe we would all get along.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Science.

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