Posts by aui 18 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2012
Many years ago I worked in a clean room where we had to enter an airlock, suit up, walk onto sticky mats to remove any dirt, then wear overshoes.
Normally, we'd all have gone home at 5:30, but there was a war on so we were on overtime. At 6 the cleaners came in and the airlock doors were propped open at both ends and then went about their business in their pinnies with Mr Sheen, yellow dusters, mop and bucket!
I've had the following at my bank of nearly forty years, but only recently...
"Where has this money you're paying in come from?" & "What are you using this money you're drawing out for?"
The best by far from another bank to my 92 y.o. mum...
"Can we see ID before we issue you a cheque from your savings account." Apparently her photocard bus pass was not good enough and she was then told to apply for a driving licence!
A number of companies already offer laser protection eyewear ( http://goo.gl/NbGuRD ) not too dissimilar to sunglasses and not much dearer than R*y-B*ns. Yet there is an inertia in the airline industry to buy/wear them.
Other UK air services already protect their pilots with these or special helmet-mounted visors.
Hence, why does a physical, plastic CD cost me less than an intangible MP3 download of the same album from Amazon?
When asked why $17 CDs were £17 here in the UK, a Virgin Records rep once spouted on TV that "they're made in Japan on very expensive equipment and England is a long way away" from that country. So, when I was in New York, I popped into the Virgin store and noted that their own-label CDs were actually pressed by Nimbus in England... and with $2 = £1 were therefore half the price.
Why was that I wonder?
"It was not unusual in the early days of colour TV to find the colour controls turned up to produce glaring saturation and strange flesh tones"
So, for nostalgic viewers, Geordie Shore and The Only Way is Essex bringthe 70's colour TV experience back to your screen!
BetaHiFi did exist and I still have my (cost an absolute fortune at the time) SL-HF100 to prove it, along with the demo tape featuring the opening scene from the Roger Moore Bond film Octopussy.
It did go through a period of tape chewing afters years of non-use, but taking all the rollers and guide pins out for a good clean or polish enabled me to transfer over a lot of 80's video stuff and music to DVD and MP3.
I also have a number of new, sealed Betamax tapes,,, so hanging on to those as there'll be worth money at some point :-)
In 1981/2 we had a 6800-based Perkin Elmer 3500 datastation with hi-res monochorome graphics card at work. It came with several 'unofficial' games, one of which was Star Trek.
The disappointing thing about the game was the number of times the ship broke down, so I tinkered with the program to make the ship start with a realisitc health level of 1 (and no more) per system instead of a borderline flaky 0.
For some reason, whoever wrote our version decided that the ship's weapons, warp drive, etc, were continuously repaired, even beyond 100% functionality. However, their starting level of 0 meant that the random fault generator could render the game 'over' after your first warp into Klingon territory.
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