Posts by Stevie 7427 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Both were in use during the BBC weather report when I left the UK in July of '84.
I've no idea why the units in use in the USA cause such pearl-clutching loss of stiff-upper-lip in UK techies.
Real people only need five temperatures for everyday use on either continental plate. Is the weather: cold enough to kill me, cold enough to require a coat, comfy shirtsleeve weather, too hot for a jacket or hot enough to kill me?
People who have to use temperatures for work use K if it has to travel or whatever comes to hand if it doesn't.
And when it comes down to it, switching between Fahrenheit and Celsius (which was called centigrade in those aforementioned BBC weather reports) is a trivial mental trick if you don't need to-a-fraction-of-a-degree accuracy.
Isn't modern "Celsius" scale actually upside-down as-invented Celsius? I seem to remember coming across that snippet back when I cared.
I'll be sure to watch the reconstruction of the event on the Smithsonian Channel (I believe the show goes out as 'Mayday' on other channels).
I'll be putting money on 'No Flaps'. About 80% of the on-takeoff crash episodes I've seen end up being 'no-flaps' determinations
Of course, being a Boeing airframe, who knows what bits were left off or what computer program glitched?
I tried reading the article (RTA) from top to bottom (TTB) but found the confusing multitudinous proliferation (CMP) of three-letter acronyms (TLA) - and yes I know that they aren't really acronyms (ARA) if they don't spell out words (SOW) - to be detrimental (TBD) to reading the article (RTA) for comprehension and retention (CAR) of information.
No doubt the technology is awesome (TIA) but I CBA to read the article.
I had a steel garage door break it's springs and come down on my right hand.
Thank Azathoth for that chunky silver American Eagle ring, now with an impressive flat formed into the thin bit on the palm-side.
Had to deep-six it for some surgery in '22, and it is a bit tight now, but I've got to do some more work on that garage door.
I wonder if I can get the Ring of Finger Un-amputation reshaped and re-sized?
Tsk.
Don't you know that if you don't use your budget it gets reduced in the next fiscal year because "you obviously don't need it"?
Imagine what that does to your reviews from the upper managers in your department.
It's almost as though your local council *doesn't* have a permanent moving road hole to show you how it all works.
A lithium battery develops internal structures that short the cells when overcharged or over-discharged.
Then, to quote a manufacturer's datasheet, "Venting with flame can occur". My absolute favourite dry wording of a hazard.
You have to charge them carefully too, using specialized chargers that can balance the charge across cells and know when to shut down.
You can't apply lead-acid thinking to these batteries.
Thanks for the link. I had no idea.
So, since diesel is more expensive than petrol (very much more so here in the US), diesel engines need turbochargers for performance and require these extra fittings and maintenance procedures, and given diesel cars seem more expensive than their petrol cousins, what is the advantage of the diesel engine in a car over a petrol power plant?
Not trolling. Genuine question. Genuine run-on question I guess. Sorry.
This hammer drill user was phoning it in.
For real vibration dealt to the workpiece one simply cannot beat a sawzall (or tiger saw if you go Porter Cable like me) fitted with a coarse "cut anything" blade.
Such is the earthmoving vibration produced that when I used one to cut out a burglar-proof door frame (metal inserts in frame, frame screwed into the house framing so securely no screwdriver would work; if it hadn't been an excuse to buy the tool I'd have been very disheartened by the prospect).
Halfway through the first cut one side of the frame disengaged from the house hung on the saw for a fraction of a second, ripping out the top and other side, then the entire frame was hurled into the back yard triggering manly howls of triumph and leatherface-like saw brandishing from yours truly.
Place I worked at in the 80s was losing Unix servers to thieving thievy thieverizing thieves who thought they were PCs.
So the higher-ups put some contractors to work securing the servers.
What this *should* have looked like was mounting each server in a hefty cage that was securely fastened to the scenery the whole built to withstand a damn good crowbarring.
What it *actually* looked like was some idiot drilling through the case with a long electrician's bit and running a security cable through the holes in the case and around some more-or-less sturdy thing in the office.
All the "secured" servers ended up dead and having to be replaced.
Some because the mucho-expensive Winchester hard drives had been drilled through (upside: no-one was going to steal them), some because the motherboards had been perforated (each 'security installation specialist' apparently had their own ideas and techniques for exactly how to drill the holes for maximum security), some just because when powered up the metal flakes scattered all over the naked electronics by all this drilling (which by some miracle had missed every vital component) turned out to be Notte An Goode Thynge.
I had a colleague who insisted that sitti9ng by an electrical bock made him ill for years.
Then he was moved and I was given his desk.
When they removed his PC so mine could be installed in its place on the desk, a dust bunny the size of a soccer ball was revealed.
Yeah, the problem was the EMF from the breaker box. That was what was making him sick.
Not the cloud of dust mites being bounced off the wall and into the air by the fans of his workstation.
Only in places where they haven't over-invested in middle management.
Our place is moaning and dripping about the "problems" involved with a hybrid schedule.
Said "problems" being the worthlessness of most of the Middle Management tier.
Bunch of useless phone sanitizers.
There was the design experience of everyone else doing the trick and succeeding, I think, even with slide rules, which were a pretty fast and accurate way to do the initial calculations, certainly as accurate as a pocket calculator if you knew what you were doing (the common Wikipedia-derived knowledge on the subject now withstanding).
And the proof of the pudding is that Boeing's effort never left the concept model stage.
I think what they were doing was trying to one-up the European and Russian efforts in the usual-for-the-time American way. It would have been a propaganda coup, but in the end it was cheaper to just ban Concorde from landing at NY or LA.
My memory is that Concorde was banned until the space shuttle started overflying the US at Mach 12, at which point 'doesn't matter any more'.
My guess would be that Elon da Genius (according to Bill Maher) is behind this measure for reasons having to do with Space X returning to earth quite quickly.
Tangentially, I remember the Revell kit of the Boeing SST. It has five sets of undercarriage, *two* hinges in its droop snoot, and was swing-winged. Even as a kid I thought it looked like a lot of unnecessary bits'n'bobs for something already achieved by Concorde's design teams.
In an alternate universe, this thing flew, and so did Mustard, a promising lifting body design of the kind sorta featured in the movie 'Marooned'.
We needed to convert a PC to a print controller for a mainframe (long story) and that required connecting the PC to an impact line printer with a block multiplexer cable.
Thick as a man's thumb, with a connector that looked like a decent sized chromatic harmonica crossed with a sandwich box. Not your average circa '99 back-o-the-pc socket compatible plug.
So we ordered a special board for the pc, to be plugged into one of the expansion slots.
Said board arrived and looked like something a talented high-schooler might have made in their parent's garage; thick fiberglass board with very few thick tracks on it and some chips, a humongous socket for the block multiplexer connection and a weird-looking edge connector that had a long bit, a small gap, and a shorter bit.
It would not go in the slot. The non-coppery bit of the edge connector was too long by a quarter inch or so.
Colleague was all gloom, doom and despondency, then went into full 'nothing to do with me' mode when I whipped out m'trusty Swiss Army knife and started to file the very expensive board. No, no respirator, no protection for the 'clean' room environment. I was tired and wanted to go drinking.
Saved the day. Literally, because that installation enabled the print pool, formerly the victims of a 27 hour day schedule, to get a Cool Hand Luke moment after my re-arrangement of the workload (despite their luddite resistance to anything new) got that down to 22 hours by removing unecessary stationery changes and buggered-up for years line-up routines.
And was I richly rewarded and promoted? No. Within four months I was fired off that project so the colleague could take over and get the credit.
Real beer maybe.
Trad sweet ales are vanishingly hard to find.
Best beer I ever had in the UK was Davenports Top Brew Deluxe. Marketed as an IPA.
Should have come in a ribbed bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label, but unlike most wildly hallucinogenic beers, this one was absolutely delicious.
I was told that Bass Charrington bought out Davenports and closed the line down a few years after I moved to the USA.
Gone to the dogs Two world wars Mafeking Rationing etc more etc.
Had one of those too. Was asked to take over Project Millstone from a consultant who had rigged the compile process to fail unless manually tweaked after 'gather underpants' but before 'profits'.
I tried to address that systemic problem but by doing so made an enemy of our manager who preferred to have everything break so he could rush in and fight the ensuing fire in front of *his* managers.
So he gave the project back to Mr Shirthead.
Who then did something so unspeakably unethical he was told to not come back from his vacation.
Wherein the now-panicked Mr Manager decided to ask me to take over Project Millstone again, and was astounded when I politely declined the 'honour'.
There followed a couple of months in which Mr Shirthead's projects (which were manyfold) were turned over to various people who actually knew what they were doing (rather than being miserable hackers who gaffer-taped stuff together), who then threw appalled hissy-fits and spent a shirtload of money 'making good'.
But Project Millstone went to someone else, I'm glad to say.
Many years ago I took my first contract at a small printing plant to write code in Applications Manager.
That language was a list of parameters that a central program would decipher into VT-> Mainframe applications. Not in any way man-sensible (to use a phrase current at that time).
The method of making these things was to construct a 'logic chart' of drop-thru conditions and then turn that into the code.
The department was very small, and the DPM was well-loved. He didn't use logic charts, so no-one did. And they really needed to.
I was asked to debug one of tghe programs and offered extra hours to do it, and for a week I took over a really long table (printer, remember?) and opened up the yards of greenbar carpet, crawling down it with a highlighter.
The programmer had obviously started an idea train, worked it all day, then come in the next day and completely forgotten what they were doing, so started anew. There were entire paragraphs of code that were never accessed, but it took ages to discover that with enough confidence that they could be cut out. In retrospect I should have just asked for the spec and rewritten it.
Part of the problem lay with that spec, which had several different functions bundled into what should have been a bunch of single function transactions. Well, analysts and programmers were all relatively new to the job.
Eventually I had it all sorted out on a Friday, and I left the resulting code in the library to be promoted to production, and left to take up a weekend of drinking.
Monday morning I was approached by the boss to ask if I had any backup copies.
"No" I said. "Why?"
Because my suffered-over and laboriously edited code had been overwritten - by the original mess. The mangler responsible had not made a backup of anything before they started Operation Maximum Destruct.
I shrugged and politely said there was no time now to do it over, because my contract was ending in a couple of days, which were to be filled with the finishing of my other scheduled work.
We had a consultant who wrote seriously obfuscated perl and used it to suggest to mgmt that everyone but he should be fired as the staff were incompetent.
He got fired instead, but his code stayed.
When I was given the 'difficult to understand' code to maintain I, the only non-exclusively-unix staffer in the shop, fed the code into Scite and the shenanigans were made manifest and easy to understand.
Styling editors, lads 'n' lassies. Beats the obfuscators every time.
"The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, "
Which tells you what you need to know about the work getting done
"and reduces employee monitoring."
Which tells you all you need to know about middle managers and why they push for return to office.
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