Hacking Linux Mint

[yogi]

Walgreens does get some things right. All the notifications you get from them can be set on their website. The first thing I shut off was SMS messages from them. All of them. That didn't stop the e-mails, but I then killed all the auto-refills. Doing that eliminated a lot of the e-mails reminding me that a prescription is due. Unfortunately, that did not stop them from auto-refilling certain scripts. I managed to fix that too to a great extent. Whenever they auto-refill I get an e-mail telling me to come and get it. I do if I need it, but that's seldom the case. They are about a month ahead of the refill cycle. So, I just let it sit until the pharmacy calls me on the phone to tell me to come and get it. That's when I give it to them. Most, but not all, of the scripts now await my input before anybody refills it. That way I have control of the notifications I get. It seems that just ignoring them works the best. I know that is what they do to me.

I guess you got to see some of the world us peons cannot afford. When my wife and I celebrated our 50th anniversary that is exactly what we did. Money, literally, was no object in our choice of places to celebrate. I found a place in South Carolina not too far from Hilton Head where the average cost per day was around $1,200. You can't believe what kind of service you can get for that price. LOL And, interestingly enough, we got little bags of mints placed in our room while we were at dinner. It never occurred to me to ask for something additional. I have no doubt I could have gotten it too.

[Kellemora]

My Walgreens no longer fills a prescription unless I reply to the e-mail or say so on their website.
I have a few things on auto-fill, but only because they are always late and I run out, all the time.
The sad thing is, some of the pills they send, I'm at least a month ahead on, and I've never skipped a dose.
While the most important ones, I'm often a week or two behind on getting a refill filled.
Part of that is the insurance say they won't cover it yet.
I did figure out one of the problems. I get a 90 day supply, which the insurance company figures is a 3 month supply.
Trouble is there are usually 92 to 93 days per quarter. So you run out.
I'm a whole two months ahead on my Atorvistatin, because there are always 2 to 4 extra pills per bottle. Why I don't know.
Either that or they refill them a whole week ahead of schedule, and it adds up.
But as I said, the ones I keep running out of, I even asked my doctor to prescribe a double does for one time to help me get caught up. He said he would, but I haven't needed a new script from him yet. Still had 2 refills since my last visit.
On my own, to try and catch up, I was taking only 1/2 of the recommended dosage. So doing that on every Wednesday should have given me at least 12 pills ahead at the end of the quarter, yet once again, I'm always out before I can get more.
I honestly think they are shorting me a pill or two in each bottle, that's the only way I can figure I can come up short.

When Debi and I went on a Bahama Cruise a few years ago, I got s special dispensation permit to bring my own cans of soda.
They allowed it because they did not have any brand of diet cola that did not contain Aspartame in it.
The airline would not let is fly and bring it, even in a separate bag. So we drove to the shipyard, unloaded, then parked the car.
I had to show my permit letter like 5 different times before I got to our room on the ship too.
Since my wife and I do not drink, the Casino gave us like 250 extra chips each for free. Then every time the server lady came buy and asked if I wanted a beverage, I would show her my own, and she would then hand me a dollar chip.
I was running low on my own soda, so got a tomato juice a few times, or OJ, near the end of the cruise.
Don't laugh, I saved all of my empty cans to bring back home with me too.

One other place we ate at while we were doing restaurant evaluations was the Danielle Hotel Restaurant.
Although it was an expensive place, I met an old school friend there who was one of the cooks who prepare meals at your table.
He needed extra brownie points to move up in the chain that owned the restaurant. So gave me some buy one get one free coupons, the only thing about them was, I had to use them when he was there, and sit at a table he was assigned to.
The gist of this is, I had to ask to be seated in a section he was assigned to. I would call him to find out what times he was there if we intended to go. He kept our bill down by showing on our ticket a lower priced item than what he brought us too.
We were able to do that until he finally got the promotion he was after and moved to another restaurant, one we could never afford to go to even at half price, hi hi.

[yogi]

Continuing a thought from my previous post wherein I stated that at one time in the past I had all my prescriptions fill via mail order, I was able to get way ahead of the game on pill supply that way. This is the mail order company which I believe Walgreens bought at some later date. Even back in those days the insurance company I dealt with wanted me to get 90 day supplies. That was fine with me, but the mail order house would notify my that a prescription was due about two weeks prior to the end of the 90 days. Over a period of time I was able to accumulate a reserve of 90 pills for each prescription. At that point I just ordered pills when I needed them and ignored their notifications. I no longer deal with the mail order people but I still have 90 pills reserve of everything I take. There is a risk with new scripts running out, but Walgreens seems to be doing exactly what the mail order house did. They notify me about two weeks prior to the end of 90 days and refill it willingly. I can only assume my insurance company is agreeing to this because the co-pay has not changed.

It is possible the pharmacist is shorting you, but that can be verified when you bring the pills home. I doubt they will believe you after the fact, but it might give you an idea why you are running short. If they are shorting you, then you can demand they count the pills while you wait and watch what they are doing. Do that a few times and I'm certain you will never be shorted again. LOL

That's a very amazing story about your experiences on a cruise ship. I would never expect a refund for "free" drinks I did not accept. And, I did laugh over your bringing home the empty cans of soda. You are perhaps the most frugal person I know.

[Kellemora]

Many of the meds I'm taking are not covered by insurance at all. My doc has looked at their list to see if there was a comparable one, there is, the one that caused me to have a second heart attack because it doesn't work.
I'm about 45 to 60 days ahead on many of my meds, but not the ones I need the most.
Then there are the MUST HAVE meds I'm supposed to take, but cannot afford the co-pay for them.

That's a good idea, except, many of my pills are still in the factory sealed containers, not from bulk packaging they put in their little amber vials.

Most cruises with free drinks do not include alcoholic beverages, but this cruise did, which is why they gave non-drinkers a stack of bonus chips. They know you will just spend them on-board, hi hi. I never expected the extra chips from the servers though.
I had to bring my own soda, they didn't have any soda that did not contain Aspartame, and I won't touch that stuff.

[yogi]

Walgreens did it again. I told you how I fixed most of the problems by ignoring what Walgreens wants to do and the messages they send me. That indeed does work for me, but it's not perfect. As I noted earlier, I turned off all auto-refils. Yesterday I got an email about three prescriptions that are ready to be picked up; none of which I ordered. Two of them fall into the SOP for Walgreens where they ignore their customers' needs. The third script was special. I take a drug for hypertension plus an additional pill that works with the hypertension drug to create the desired effects. It turns out that the hypertension drug can be ordered with that second pill already blended in, thus turning the dose to a single pill instead of two separate pills. I got my doctor to send a script over to Walgreens for a supply of that single pill. That means I now have two scripts for the same medication. One is a single pill and the other is two pills.

As expected they filled that single pill order before I wanted it. I picked it up and explained to the pharmacist what happened but took the unwanted pills anyway. That put me ahead of that game by at least 90 days. About two weeks ago I get a call from the pharmacist asking for clarification about why I'm getting two scripts for the same thing. I told her to kill the script for the two pill version and I will call them when I need the single pill refilled. I thought I already gave that instruction in person, but apparently the pharmacists don't communicate with each other very well.

Yesterday's e-mail confirms that they ignored my personal instructions, ignored what I told them over the phone when they called me, and of course ignored what I already put on their web site. I can only come to one conclusion. The computer system they are using was written in LINUX.

[Kellemora]

I hear ya. I don't think Walgreens left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and they must have a third hand oblivious to the other two, hi hi.

I think Walgreen runs on Z/OS? They named their proprietary OS Intercom, and later Intercom Plus.
When they hire developers, they always ask for Developers V, whatever the heck that means.

[yogi]

Z/OS is an IBM product and it makes sense for an enterprise like Walgreens to use such a thing. I can't tell you what Developer V means but I did find this link which shows their salary: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/deve ... KO0,11.htm Looks like Walgreens is paying almost half than Apple computer for Developer V experience. Amazing.

[Kellemora]

Wow, the salaries shown there are much higher than listings I've seen elsewhere!

I wonder if this is what is meant by Developer V?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model_( ... velopment)

[yogi]

I used to work with software developers and went through most of those stages described in the wiki. Apparently what we did was the Waterfall technique which is linear and top/down development. I read the wiki and have no idea what the difference is with the "V" method of development. Project timelines exist in both methods and you better meet your deadline if you expect to be around much longer. I have a feeling the Developer V reference is something only project managers would be concerned about. All the peons still need to write the code no matter how the manager explains it to his boss. LOL

[Kellemora]

After posting that link, I discovered a fairly new programming language called V.
I read the documentation, and it seems like a well thought out new programming language.
And apparently many companies are jumping on it, because of speed and efficiency.
So that might be what all the ads for Developer V might mean?

[yogi]

I had a look at the V Programming Language after you mentioned such a thing exists. It's an amazing piece of work and, yes, I would agree that it is a unique discipline and has it's own developers. Having taken more than a few programming language classes I find it hard to believe the claim that "V" can be learned entirely in one hour of reading it's documentation. My guess is that they are assuming you already have coding experience of some sort and just need to learn the new rules of "V"

[Kellemora]

I looked at the codes also, not very many of them on the front row, but when you hit the codes that work with them, lots of them there. There were a few features, such as they only allow one way to do something, which keeps it fairly clean and understandable for those who understand programming already.
I remember a few ads from a couple of years ago that said they were looking for Developer GO. Never knew what that meant at the time, but now I see there is a programming language called GO also, hi hi.

But like I see with almost all programming languages. You have to know what to do with it, or how to use it.
Seems V needs to be compiled, just like C or C++, etc. and saved as a certain type of file.
That's where almost all of them lose me.

If you recall, when I first started trying to learn a simpler language.
All the examples I did worked great on the live program I was working on to do the instructions.
But I could never get one to work on my own computer.
Nowhere in all of the instructions I read did it say I needed to install server software on my computer, hi hi.
Once I installed LAMP, then all of the program examples I did from the site, then worked on my computer.
But that was as far as I got. For some reason, that type of programming won't sink into my thick skull.

[yogi]

Hmmm

There are two types of program instructions, interpreted and compiled. Both types end up going to the CPU which is the device that actually does the work it is instructed to do by the program. The CPU, as you must know, only knows about 1's and 0's so that any language giving instructions to the CPU must be converted to 1's and 0's somewhere along the line. A compiler does that conversion directly from the coder's interface. The interface is human readable, which makes no sense to the CPU, so that the compiler takes that human language and turns it into the digits for the CPU. An interpreted language is even more human readable and must be first converted to machine instructions before it can be compiled and sent to the CPU. It's a heck of a lot easier to deal with interpreted code such as BASIC than it is to deal with assembly language. But, alas, the interpretation takes up time and clock cycles which is why compiling is preferred.

The compiled set of instructions are saved in a binary file; those 1's and 0's needed by the CPU. Since there are more than a few CPU architectures floating about, compilers have to be used to match the CPU that you want to run on. Certain things are common to all CPU's but there are big differences that require different compilers for each given CPU family.

As far as the coder/programmer is concerned, they are dealing with instructions on a human readable scale. The coder needs to know what those instructions will result in, but there is no real need to know how they get translated to binary for the CPU to understand. When you write a "print" command, you expect output from the printer port and don't care how that happens most of the time. If you are writing the code for the "print" command itself, then you may want to know quite a bit about how the CPU processes data. Otherwise it's a moot point.

CPU's have their own unique set of instructions. They know nothing about program languages, operating systems, or computer architecture. A CPU is a box with two sides for input and two sides for output, and it's ALL 1's and 0's. So, when you write a set of program instructions in, say, php, the CPU is unaware of what php is. All it knows is to send data here or there and let the next set of silicon (memory) handle it. Thus the ability to run a php program is not within the CPU but something found in memory. If you are a developer that memory is usually local; you have php installed on your development machine. Or, in your case with LAMP, you were connecting so some remote server which had it installed and running from there. That is exactly how this website works. The php program is on the hosting services' server so that us viewers of the website do not need to have it installed locally.

GO is a language used to program robotics. I've read an article or two about it many moons ago and it does sound like what they are trying to accomplish with V.

[Kellemora]

From humanly readable code, I don't doubt there are a few steps it goes through before it becomes machine readable.
Now the guys who write that kind of code which compiles the machine code for the various processors must be geniuses!

I think back to my Heath/Zenith Octal Entry computer. It was a nightmare to get anything written and working.
Even so, I had a lot of fun with it before getting my Apple I motherboard.
But it wasn't until the Apple II, and Apple II+ came out that I began using them for more serious work.
Then again, all of my programming skills were in BASIC, but boy could I make it do some great things, for the era!

[yogi]

Octal entry on that Heathkit amounted to sending bytes of binary code directly to the CPU. You had to punch in the instructions in binary format and that went directly to the data bus of the processor. Push a button and that data got sucked into the CPU where it waited for the next byte. I worked with a PDP11 computer and that is exactly how it booted. We had to flip switches and toggle the data so that the CPU knew where to look for the program in memory. There was no BIOS back then and certainly no bootloaders. The programs were generally on rolls of punched paper tape. Silicon memory might not have been invented yet back in those days. LOL That's all Stone Age history. Good riddance is all I can say.

[Kellemora]

I actually bought a paper tape punch/reader for it, also from Heathkit, but there was no assembly required on that device, other than placing the paper on the spindle. It used the exact same size tape roll as ticker tape machines of the era.
What I liked about the way it worked was, the paper on the roll had creases, so as it fed out of the machine, it stacked in a trough like fan fold does.
The only problem was, when it was reading from the fanfolded paper tape, it could catch and tear the tape in half.
So I took a pill bottle and cut it in half lengthwise and placed it between the bin and the input roller, so it slightly cupped the paper to make sure it didn't snag and tear.
I never did get it to do much of anything other than say HELLO, or some other short phrases, which it punched out in that shape on the paper tape. I did get it to add some numbers for me, but it took hours of programming to get it to do that, hi hi.
I don't think it was designed to run any programs, since all the instructions had to be on the tape.

The Apple I used a cassette tape recorder, which I used on the Apple II as well, until I bought the 5-1/4 pair of drives.
Then I could finally get down to doing something serious on the machines.