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How can you make the stomach pumping less miserable, except perhaps by heavy sedation?

Yes, my father worked for one miscellaneous iron shop and started his own when his employer retired.  He and his (then) partner assembled the travelling crane, I-beam tracks and all, with nothing but a man-portable crane called a roustabout and a hose-type water level.

Take a look at the roof of 20 Exchange Place.  See that framework for the microwave relays?  I held the other end of the tape measure when he took the measurements for that framework.

Miscellaneous iron means both structural and ornamental work, in projects too small for the big structural and ornamental contractors.  He had a lot of work in the World Trade Center, including the structural core of the 'grand staircase' in Windows on the World and the 'brackets' that supported the landing between the escalator runs in the main entry/exit to the PATH station.

It also means a lot of alterations, where the drawings for the building are either missing or unreliable, where you have to cut your parts and weld them back together so you can get them into the space, and where you have to work around the building occupants.  Ever see photos of the NYSE trading floor?  He put the frames in for some of the overhead monitors.  When the exchange closes at 3PM the floor is three inches deep in flammable paper.  That had to be completely cleared before they began work, and everything had to be out before 7AM--the place had to be cleaned and spotless for the next day's trading.

Oh, and third shift and weekends get the union workers triple-time.

It means going in for surgery and realizing that you installed the tracks that the heavy machinery hangs from.

And in NYC it means seeing your work torn out, just as you tore someone else's work out.

One day I was discussing a programming problem with him and he said, "Microseconds and nanoseconds--I can't even get my mind around that."  I replied, "And I can't really grasp what 100,000 kilopounds means."

The tooltip on the button says "Print this content (all chapters)."  I rarely want to do that; I'd like to print the chapter I'm working on, without the other forty.  How do I do that?

TABBSSLCPO... isn't Beekay.  It's Mick Dee's.

I save it for when my muscles foment revolt.

I called in favors to get the LR shelves set up.  Two of them have shallow particleboard shelves standing on good-quality wire shelves (rated 800 lbs/shelf, 500 lbs/corner) and braced with brackets holding them to extended rear posts on the shelves.  The other is eight wire shelves, but the rear posts don't reach the floor.  Their load is transferred to the front posts by diagonal braces made from turnbuckles and link-type shackles.  The tip-back load that results is transferred to the wall.  Even with 250 lbs on each post, the geometry ensures that the wall braces need to support no more than about 30 lbs thrust, and no shear.

I call that shelf stack 'the structure'.

Once an engineer ... .

I needed to have the cleaning done last Thursday.  It's not done today.  I've been half-stalled on the hall bookshelves.  Worse, the dust is trriggering my allergies.  I've double-covered them (Zyrtec with Nasicort) but my body still thinks it's fighting a raging infection and if I don't get enough rest that will open the gates to a real  infection.

I've got stuff to do all over the place.  Friday I started carrying the old shelves out and discovered that the heavy disposal container was gone.  The first three shelves are in  the back of my car.  I've been promised it will be back later today.  I have problems with the hall light and just had to buy a work light for a few hours' work.  THAT hot halogen is the sort of thing that will give an inspector fits if he sees it.

I could go on.  (Some of that lumber is heavy ...)

"Is it possible in this day and age to lay down in a course rules for comma usage when the rules are in flux?"

Okay, where do the commas if any go in the sentence above?  And in the previous sentence is "if any" 'essential' or 'non-essential' information?

Am I missing something, or is it not possible to reply to inline items in X-lines format?

Marble and iron, shale, glass, even wood, can endure for hundreds of years without degenerating in such degrading fashion.

Heathkit ... ah, I think it was Spectrum magazine that carried an article of reflections on the idea that designing kits for Heath must have been the best job in the world.

If you naven't reviewed it, go ahead and do it.  I haven't had time to do much more than think and make a note or two.  If I'd had time, I'd have put another entry into the contest: what happens when Midlich and Forsa go into The Academy to withdraw some of Kirsey's gold.  The scene I envision--which might not happen--has Threckesrom rescuing them from his bed.

Whether I could do it a thousand words is another matter.

I just remembered what a physicist once told me: the difference between a physicist and a chemist is that a chemist washes his hands before he goes to the bathroom.

There are internal inconsistancies in the MS file formats.  If you try to use two different sets of controls on the formatting, you can get very unexpected and unreasonable results.

This, by the way, is why many people in the Open Source community believe that Penfield Jackson was right and Kotter-Kelly was wrong.  The MS file formats are not as precisely defined as a standardized programming language, and are effectively defined only by the MS proprietary programs that write and read them.  (The new C++ standard will be over 1300 pages and, in spite of 100,000s of hours of work, will surely have a few hundred holes.  It's hard to cover all the cases.  Look up 'Koenig Name Lookup'.)