Posts by JohnG11 8 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2017
In general I've been watching, from the moon landings on, or reading about space exploration with great interest.
(I used to lecture about data communications via satellite on behalf of InMarSat way back in the past.)
Only, it just struck me, what is the carbon footprint of a rocket launch?
I'm guessing that it can't be trivial.
Takes me back to the nineties and ICL (god rot their non-existent soul).
Twenty years working for the company as a data comms specialist. (Modems, LANs, WANs, ISDN, digital exchanges, etc.)
Having been made redundant in one division, on the last day of the ninety day notice I was offered a job in another division.
A year later that division had a 'clear out' and the axe fell again.
The last day? You've guessed it, Christmas Eve. "No need to come in before the 31st!"
The upside?
For the next successive ten years I sold my services as a freelance 'specialist' back to them at a significant mark up.
Good ole manglement, it's the same everywhere.
You missed so many ...
"There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium."
Thank you Tom Lehrer (and Gilbert and Sullivan).
As high as 14KHz? Lucky you. At 72 going on 73 mine is now below 10KHz.
Ah! Castrol R, that takes me back to my first car, a 1957 two-tone MG Magnette, lovely beast.
Cost me sixty five quid. That was after my awful BSA C15 bike.
Nowadays I use EAC (Exact Audio Convertor) with LAME 320kbps v=0. (All freeware)
That transferred to the Cowon X7 (look it up) with its 160GB miniHDD and a pair of Sennheiser HD600s. Who, on this panet, could desire more?
I finally diposed of my Thorens TD125 mkII, Rega 300 arm, Ortofon moving coil cartridge and 600 plus LPs more than 5 years ago. I now have more than 1000 CDs and the collection is growing. Thank goodness for 2nd hand CDs.
Rock on Tommy.
I was fortunate to be allowed to do my electronics engineering apprenticeship at BAC Weybridge in the mid sixties, now known under it's original Brooklands name. The old track was largely still in place, except for the chunks they had to cut out to prevent the re-flooding of "the bowl" due to unprecedented river rise.The river Wey runs through the site. And the other chunk they removed to allow the VC10s to take off. Whilst there the main work was on VC10s and some on BAC1-11s.
I was quite unaware at the time that the TSR2 was being built until the project was cancelled. There was undue influence brought as the F1-11 (heap of rubbish) was being developed at the same time.
Later on I got to see the first Concorde fuselage mock-up in one of the smaller hangers there.
Incredible to think the skin was made of Duralumin.
The highlight was meeting, shaking hands and talking to Barnes Wallace during the induction process. The other thing was the attention to detail one learnt and the incredible standards of engineering that were instilled into us, young fools that we were.
I could tell many tales of nearly killing ourselves doing crazy things on the old race track. Like taking a trolley down the hill climb slope with five of us on board. Lucky to be alive frankly. The old Vincent Black Shadow made a few star appearances on parts of the old circuit that were still navigable.
It was there I got my first grounding in IT, operating an ICT 1500, a re-badged RCA301 20k character machine. Went on to assembler and later machine code on FEPs.
Happy memories.
Well, on-board you see a wi-fi router which you'll have to access in the normal way.
Mounted under the skin on the roof of the aircraft is an antenna pointing upwards. The associated electronics optimises the signal to one of the Inmarsat satellites, about 36,000 Km up, in geostationary orbit, and establishes a link to its broadband service. Just don't expect a high speed service, I think it's about 384kbps.
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