Posts by Shooter 245 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2009
In army marksmanship training, I was taught the difference between precision and accuracy.
Precision is five holes in the target, each an eighth of an inch apart but the group 6 inches from the bullseye.
Accuracy is five holes in the target, centered around the bullseye but 6 inches from each other.
We were to strive for both precision AND accuracy!
During that blackout I was several hundred miles north of you - backpacking the mountains of Michigan's western upper peninsula with my brand-new bride. No cell signal at that place and time of course.
Got back to some sort of civilization and all the locals could talk about was how badly the trolls (lower Michigan - "under the bridge") had messed up the power!
By the time I was able to contact my boss, all was well. At least for us.
I learned early on, working in, er, "challenging" industrial environments, that if one dropped a small part it was best to just watch it fall. If one attempted to catch said part, it would invariably go careening through space and immediately be lost to view. Likely winding up in a high-temp or high-RPM or high-voltage location (or all three).
By far the nastiest place I ever went to was a rendering plant. In high summer.
For the uninitiated, a rendering plant takes in all the leftovers from butcherings (sometimes roadkill as well, but not this place) that had no value on it's own. Think fat/tallow, guts, blood, beaks, feet/hooves, etc. That stuff then gets "rendered" (processed) into commercially viable by-products. The smell alone is enough to knock you off your feet, and there's a coating of rancid grease over pretty much everything on the plant floor. Including the electronics. Covers helped, but not much - you still need ventilation!
Puts my OCD into overdrive!
I compromise by leaving the switches that I see most frequently in the DOWN position when off. Then I try to avoid looking at the switch that's UP when off. Works well for the cellar lights, and acceptably for the outside lights (controlled from the front door and the garage entryway).
This is actually the origin of my handle on El Reg. I was widely known as the guy who would "shoot down" idiotic management ideas before they were implemented.
Nowadays, those same types of plans are thought up several management layers (and often several states) away from where us lowly plebs have to implement them.
I think I've told this story before...
About 25 years ago - back in the days when we still had such luxuries as in-office admin people - we had a PC with a CD drive for our office gal, who was a fairly heavy smoker (the smoking was heavy, not the gal herself). Eventually the CD drive stopped working, and the IT department was consulted (at that point I was industrial service, not IT).
In due course, a new drive arrived at our office. No IT tech, no instructions, just a drive in a cardboard box. The office gal was aware that in a previous life I had "done something with computers", so asked me for help. No problem! Until I opened up the PC's case.
I could barely make out any of the innards, as everything was coated in a nasty mixture of carpet fibers and sticky nicotine residue. The computer was unplugged, taken out the back door and cleaned with compressed air before being (carefully) vacuumed. That at least made it possible to replace the CD drive. Everything else was wiped as clean as could be while in place, the PC was buttoned up and returned to service.
A short time later the law was changed to forbid smoking indoors, and sometime after that the lady in question moved on to greener (or not, as the case may be) pastures.
Icon for required PPE -->
I remember reading about a young officer at his first posting who had written a report chock full of TLAs.
His superior promptly returned it to his desk with the letters "UNA" scrawled across every page.
Perplexed, the young officer asked what UNA stood for.
"Use No Abbreviations", came the reply!
Makes a certain amount of sense in this particular use case - a battery too drained to power the car's drive motor would still have plenty of juice to operate a few LEDs and a speaker.
On the other hand, it's not like Junior is driving a Tesla through Death Valley. No big deal if the toy car just grinds to a halt.
"a Cambridge physicist calculated a few years back that, given the typical density of UK housing estates (20+ dwellings per acre), geothermal heating would not work except for the few, as there wouldn't be enough to go round."
Holy crap!
My house sits on a one-acre lot, and I sometimes think my neighbors are *still* too close for comfort. I can't imagine living with 19 other homes on the same size plot.
(I know - I'm privileged.)
This reminds me of the only time I ever managed to put a blemish on my mortgage payment history.
Back in the day (about the turn of the century) I had the habit of spending my Saturday mornings paying the upcoming bills. Writing actual checks by hand, as I wasn't yet comfortable with internet banking and bill-pay. Then off to the post office to drop them in the mail, and continue with the rest of my Saturday chores.
Then one day I had a phone call from my mortgage company, letting me know that my payment was a bit light that month. Turns out that I had inadvertently put the check for the electric company in the mortgage envelope and vice versa. I immediately called my bank, to be informed that the electric company had already deposited my mortgage check. So I then called the electric company to ask why they had done that, and ask for a refund. The electric company said they thought I "was just making an advance payment", even though the check wasn't made out in the name of their business. And was roughly twenty times the amount of my normal bill (budget plan - same amount every month, adjusted annually. Makes it easier to plan the bill payments).
I immediately wrote a new check to the mortgage company, but I didn't have enough money in the bank to cover it until the electric company returned the over-payment, which took a LOT longer than it did for them to cash the check in the first place. By the time the mortgage company received my new check, it was past the grace period, so I was charged a penalty and got a black mark on my payment history.
I don't blame the mortgage company - after all, the initial screw-up was all my fault. Nowadays, I make sure I have enough funds in the bank to cover several months of bills in case of any problems, but at the time I was freshly divorced and things were a bit tight. And I've learned not to pay the bills until AFTER the first cup of coffee!
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there were more than two major cell phone operating systems, I was researching which system I wanted to invest my electronic future in.
Let's just say that when googling for Symbian, you *don't* want to leave out the "m".
Glad to have made that particular error at home, and not at work!
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