I like the new layout.

The new layout is a little difficult for these old eyes. Too many extra lines or bars or something. RoaneViews and BlountViews are easier.

Layout aside, KnoxViews is excellent!

I like the new layout better.

I vote for the new layout as well.

Visit us at

The Home

I vote for Change!

I like the new layout. But then, I like anything that is not like the old thing. Did I mention that I voted for change?

I like it. Am I the only person who imagines holes on the sides of that green and white striped column while hearing a very specific printer noise?

I still want an "all read" option for when I fall behind on my reading and need to start over.

Am I the only person who imagines holes on the sides of that green and white striped column while hearing a very specific printer noise?

Cool. Someone picked up on my green bar shout out to mainframe programmers!

(Are there any of those still around?)

Steve, yeah, I did that on purpose. I was mainly wanting to not have so many bulleted lists for other headlines and such. I made them alternating backgrounds, originally the same gray used for blockquotes. I decided there should be visual color cues for different types of content, then I joked to the Mrs. they should be green bar, tried it, and kinda liked it. Made blog post titles a lighter shade of the "site" blue to provide a different visual clue. I thought about using a different color for stuff in the sidebar that is on this site v. on other sites, but decided it would be too psychedelic to have that many background colors. Things you do when you're bored.

MDB: I still had a COBOL manual, a 370 instruction set manual, and a full series of system programming and IBM Green Books for consultants around the last time we cleaned out the garage. They finally went to the dump. Should have given them to a museum, I guess.

I worked on a large-scale banking system starting in 1983. We had lots of standards. One of them was that dates were all stored in Julian and included the full century, in anticipation of Y2K, seventeen years early. We were pretty forward thinking, except we didn't anticipate that accounts in Turkish Lira could be in the trillions.

Yeah, on the blue bars after looking at them for a day or so I'm starting to think they may be distracting.

I have written at least a little production code in COBOL (actually a LOT of COBOL in many flavors), 370 Assembler (plus a couple of other obscure assemblers), RPG, PL/I, FORTRAN, many flavors of BASIC, C, Javascript, and PHP that I can remember.

(The addition of pointers and DO WHILE/UNTIL in COBOL II were a blessing!)

My computer programming days are long over, but I started as a Fortran programmer who also used SAS a lot (I supported research economists). SAS was PL/1 based, IIRC.

I took a COBOL class at UT, and was always deeply grateful I never had to use it in the real world. Much, much, much too "wordy."

I left programming in the mid 80s when I moved to TVA's IT policy and standards group. After that I did database design (for awhile I was TVA's relational database guru) and then quite foolishly let myself be seduced into management.

I have probably asked you this before, but did we work there at the same time? I worked there briefly in late 1982 early 1983 before moving to Florida. I was the mainframe system programmer for the finance division, which had it's own separate little IT department.

Now I like it. Didn't like the colors in the posts (mjw speaks for me), but they look snazzy and help with sorting over in the "discussions" area. I didn't realize it, but I think the green did have the subliminal effect of the old printer paper. I never could do code, but I took the required Fortran, BASIC, etc. for engineering. Not fond memories.