I would imagine the Class 1 RR’s will still run Christmas Day? I think NS pretty much ran normal on Thanksgiving.
And, unrelated, I have a few 2020 calendars that are just too pretty to throw away. But I don’t want to become a hoader, either.
A coworker has a grandson who loves trains and I gave him a stack of magazines that were a year old. Kid loved 'em! He’s five I think. Maybe he’d like to make a train scrap book with my old calendars?
Like I said, I’m trying to avoid being a hoarder. It runs in the family.
Class 1’s treatment of Christmas has varied from full operation to nearly fully shut down and many levels in between.
In the past lines that operated Amtrak would operate Amtrak’s trains if nothing else over the Christmas holiday period.
Considering Covid and PSR operating theories it is likely some lines will have absolutely no traffic during Christmas (which in many places now includes Christmas Eve).
In the early day’s of my career, I recall working a location over 100 miles from home and going to work at 11:59 PM Christmas Eve and not getting the time and a half penalty for working the Christmas holiday - as my tour of duty did not commence on the specified holiday.
UP used to slow down over the major holidays. Most yard jobs, locals and junk manifests dodn’t work. Not anymore with PSR. Just about everything works, even industry jobs and locals where the industries are shut down.
The east/west main will slow down for a while. A large manifest derailed this morning near Dixon IL taking out both main tracks.
It seems any year can start on one of the 7 days of the year, Sunday through Saturday, so that makes 7 possible calendars for the month of January and all the months that follow will start on one of the 7 days, thus only 7 calendars are needed to represent the non-leap year.
But since February will have 29 days on leap year, each month after that will start on a day of the week delayed by one day from what the 7 calendars would have, that doubles the number of possible calendars. So all you need is 14 yearly calendars.
But in any 7 year span it is possible to have TWO leapyears. if the 1st year of the 7 is a leap year, then the 5th year will also be a leapyear. If the 2nd year is a leap year, then the 6th will also. Only if the 4th year is the leapyear will there be only one leapyear in the 7 year span.
There are only 7 days of the week that January 1st can occur. So there are only 7 different calendars
Not really, I am a computer programmer (retired) and a lot of my work was way before the present operating systems and such… I had to create the operating systems to run the programs I wrote to run automatic test equipment. I had to create the software to track the time and date on computers that didn’t have time-and-date hardware… just a peripheral that divided the power line frequency by 10 to generate an interrupt to the computer where my program would increment the seconds counter (and ripple it through the minutes, hours, date, month and year) then return from interrupt.
The computer was a very primitive one (compared to today)… only had 12 instructions (didn’t even have a Subtract math function, just Add and some logic functions)… And with limited memory for program AND data (all of 4K, 12-bit words [and NO mass storage, just a read-only mag tape to load all of memory once, at boot-up]) it was a lot of work to squeeze everything we wanted into the operating system.
I found that I often rewrote some unrelated section of code to use one or two less memory locations so that the routine I was adding could use that memory for what I wanted to accomplish.
I had to be very creative with how to handle the 28/29/30/31 days per month… simple look-up tables took too much memory… So I did weird math and logic functions to get the same thing in less total memory.
And then handling leapyear ended up being simple because the last 2 bits of the year number are “00” for a leapyear. But, that does not take into account the rules of if the year number is divisible by 100 is not a leapyear, unless it is divisible by 400. Never did work that one out, but all that hardware and software was long gone befor
A Christmas gift intended for my grandson, but which didn’t arrive in time, is the “Turing Tumble.” It rather resembles a Pachinko machine, but using various pieces, one can program it to sort the two colors of balls into various combinations. When it does arrive, I’ll pay a visit to deliver it, and to sit with him for a while to help him understand it.
It is, basically, a computer.
The “game” comes with a book with instructions for several outcomes, presented as adventures.
Was the ARC-171 ATE one of those? I was one of the test techs that got to run it- whenever we didn’t have radios to test, we played a game on it; IIRC, it was a primitive version of Star Wars.
Haven’t seen that nomenclature for years. But, no, that was an HP 2100 minicomputer. I wrote a lot of test software for that computer (and its offspring the 21MX and later the HP-1000 system), but that was not the computer I speak of… namely the Collins 8311, it was used for several other ATEs, most noteably the L1011 ATE, but also several “Burn-In” controllers that ran tests for many different products while in “burn-in” chambers.
Only game I knew of on the 8311 was one I played with the night shift tech in another building… but he didn’t know I was playing the game… I had him convinced the computer was sentient!
The computer ran different products in “burn-in” at opposite ends of the factory. He was responsible for some at one end and didn’t know about the stuff at the other end. The computer had two teletypes for terminals, one at each end. I added a feature (“COM” mode) that allowed what was typed on one teletype to be echoed to the other one at the other end.
Commands to the computer were in 3 character sequences. When 3 characters had been typed, it would interpret what the command was, but if it was not recognised it would print ‘DOES NOT COMPUTE’ and then re-print the prompt.
The tech had the habit of holding down one key on the teletype keyboard, such that after 3 characters, the computer would respond with the error message, But the teletype would combine the rapidly repeating keystroke from the keyboard with the letters from the computer and it would print random garbage. It was fun to see what it woulld type; sometimes the randomness would produce something almost intelligent… such as “DOE.S NOT-COFFIE”, but usually it was just total gibberish.
I was often there at night to install or test new software and I could see to the other end of the factory to see if he was there, “playing” his “game”. After he had do
Computer people like to have fun and some can be diabolical. Back in 1964, my employer was building a new generating plant and it had a process computer that used black paper tape with the code being punch holes for the code. So the coding process generated boxes of black paper dots. Come Easter, everybody in the office got a box with a colorful plastic easter egg in it. Naturally, engineers being curious, they would try to open the egg to see what was inside. One can not open a plastic egg filled with paper dots without making a mess!
Yes, Chads… very dry and can sort of glue themselves to the cornea of the eye… a bride that spent her honeymoon in the hospital with both eyes bandaged caused a change in company policy that “chads” (punch card or paper tape) were not allowed to be taken home.
