Posts by J.G.Harston 3849 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
Some of the sites I've been recently working on I've needed to regularly go to the front of the counter and back to the back of the counter. You enter the back office area via Star Trek "shwup!" doors that only open one way. Unless you toss something over the top of the door to activate the sensors. Saves a trek all the way through ther store to the exit and back around to the entrance.
I sorted through my Mum's late husband's paperwork, and every time I thought I'd found everything, something else would pop up. A carrier bag of utility bills with a share certificate stuffed at the bottom. A bank statement used as a bookmark. Phone bills from the gas company, gas bills from the Co-op, electricity bills from the phone company. He seemed to treat suppliers like socks.
At the end of the first week of my current job I spent 15 minutes re-arranging the stock in my van and practising loading and unloading, so all the bar codes were facing upward so my weekly stock take was just beep beep beep beep beep.... The other engggiiiii ennnnngggg (cough!) can't say it. The other technicians just chucked everything in their van, and so took half an hour to drag everything out and scan it each week.
Why am I picturing a trolley full of equipment being dragged across a door strip, sticking, the puller giving a good yank.... and the whole pile tumbling crashing to the floor?
Also, why do people somehow think the best way to push something is from the point the furthest away from its contact with the floor, which is another way of saying "force it to fall over"?
Doh. This reminds me of the annoyingly-still-too-prevelant habit of people using three-mile wide images as avatar photos *DISPLAYED* one inch across instead of *RESIZED* to one inch across. You see them when the download stutters and they are displayed filling the entire screen, until a few more bytes of the document arrives and they get redisplayed.
I'm not sure I understand the issue. It shoule be irrelevant how *you* hold *your* data, as long as you can accept somebody else's data in somebody else's format, and send your data to somebody else in their format. Ages ago I wrote a little database program for a specific task, its native data format is something I put together to make the program coding effecient. However, it will export and import in CSV, so it's irrelevant what my format is.
It's rare that an organisation says "job done, let's abolish all our jobs". Well done Tim and co. The usual process is to continously redefine their target to keep Tarquin and Jocaster in their jobs.
Absolute poverty's been conquored, ok let's target relative poverty.
Relative poverty's been solved, ok let's target inequality.
Inequality's been solved, ok let's target inequity.
Inequity's been solved, ok, let's redefine 'inequity' to ensure this gravy train keeps going.
I did something related in the mid-80s. I was developing a message sending program, and for initial testing the command line parsing was just thrown together a fixed-length hex parser. Not even real hex, (line[n]-48)*16+line[n+1]-48
So, there I was sending test messages to station 10.... when somebody at station 16 piped up "there's something wrong with my computer"... Ooops!
Standing meetings don't work for me. I have a blood pressure thing where if I stand for long periods I pass out. :( Discovered this when having my pressure taken with a (looks for spelling...) sphygmomanometer and woke up on the floor with bits of broken "plumbing" around me.
"up to now there's a treaty prohibition on mining everyday objects for everyday civilian use (which, according to the Guardian, Israel is a signatory to)"
....which Hamas have been doing for over eleven months, using civilian infrastructure for military purposes, hiding in civilian hospitals, using civilians as defense sheilds, billoting in civilian accommodation....
I remember when you wrote files to a CDROM, the writer would change the *file's* attributes to ReadOnly. Because, I dunno, it's a read-only *DISK* so, hey, let's make all the *files* read-only as well. So copying them back later to where you needed them resulted in a completely borked installation as programs couldn't open the files they were trying to update.
I think has *has* told us he doesn't know what he's doing - which is the whole point! He *DOESN'T* want to spend weeks tinkering just to be able to *USE* his computer, he just wants to *USE* the damn thing.
Just like I just want to get into a car, turn it on, and drive it. I'm not a car tinkerer, I do not have the skills or patience to have to "fiddle" with a car in order to get to work or some groceries. Same with printers. If my printer is dead, I replace it. Yes, I'll offer it to anybody who wants to tinker with it before I dump it, but when I ask "does anybody want this printer, it tears the paper and dumps toner everywhere" the *WRONG* response is "if you take the top off and undo these screws....."
*NO* I want a printer so I CAN PRINT STUFF. *****NOT****** to tinker with and get in the way of actually getting the printing work that I want to do done.
Similarly, the OP wants a computer so he can *USE* the computer, not to tinker with it and get in the way of actually doing the computer stuff he wants to do.
To add to the stories: in the early '90s I had a call out to one site where the computer was repeatedly reported as crashing. I visited the site to investigate, opened up the computer case, probed everything, sat there for 30 minutes with no problem, put everything back together, still works, left the site.
I got called back again... still keeps crashing.
So I asked the user to demonstrate, while I just sat in the corner and watched and the user did some intensive large-screen graphics editing stuff... after about 15 minutes, yes it started crashing.
I lifted the monitor off the case to open it up.... lifted the monitor.... the monitor..... yes, you know what's happening. The weight of the monitor was just enough to flex the top of the case, and after a dozen or so minute of operation the computer innards had warmed up enough to expand an internal vertical card juuuust enough to touch the inside of the case and cause it to mis-seat in the socket. I can't remember after all this time, but I think the fix was a telephone directory to spread the weight.
Yeah, I'm drafting a local government report, and in my mind it would be about four pages: three maps and a paragraph of descriptions. But it is going to have to be at least a magnitude longer. For this sort of stuff it's like being in primary school, you have to show your working at every step and describe how you got to the conclusion you are arguing for. And, of course, everybody wants to put their oar in and "contribute".
"There is a perception that you need a computer science degree and a deeply technical background to get a job in cyber," he wrote. "The truth is, cyber jobs are available to anyone who wants to pursue them."
That may be the case in Murcia, but I've applied for UK "cyber" entry level jobs and have been turned down due to not having any skills or experience in working in "cyber".
It's irrelevant if it's for profit or not, the important distinction is between *archiving* and *lending*. Copyright laws have plenty of allowances for archiving - a fundamental part of preserving the knowledge of civilisation. But what they are doing here is more than archiving, they are lending. In the UK they would be required to pay into the lending library royalties fund.
When doing electrical work my electric shock recovery plan is the same: make a cup of tea and take the time to drink it. It forces you to let your body relax and disperse the stress chemicals from the shock, and gives you time to see if any adverse effects surface. I've also used making a cuppa to time mixing mortar.
There's a thing called the Blue Helmet Rule. It doesn't matter what the colour is, it's a principle where one person wears something distinctively different and them and ONLY them give instructions in a multi-person task. "Bring it my way", "No, towards me a bit" BlueHat: "NO! EVERYBODY SHUT UP! Bob, prepare to move left, Jim, prepare to move right, ok, both of you move three steps..." etc. The blue hat can even be invisible and only "present" in the minds of the people present.
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