Posts by Sam not the Viking 631 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2018
It's worth noting that LHR has three separate power supplies but these are not linked to a common bus-main, so the failure of any one supply will cause some equipment to stop causing an inevitable (planned) shutdown of the airport. This risk was known and deemed high impact, low probability. Well, we all know about "low probability"; if it didn't happen last week, you're on borrowed time.
It's a 275 kV site with three power transformers. Credit to all the services involved: no-one was injured.
At last, I understand what our new boss thought he was eating when he declared to his supremos: "I will double our turnover within two years and reduce costs at the same time." He never disclosed his plan to us doubters, nor it seems to his controllers who wisely asked how things were going after twelve months had passed. Pointing to the accounts ledger, they intimated that things were not going well....
Inexplicably, there followed a spot-check for drugs in the Executives Wash Room (we only had one executive).
He was getting inspiration from the 'fast-food' delivery man but it wasn't bananas.
Just like that, he was gone! Magic ----->
Management assured the public and government that the chances of total loss were 1:100,000.
A certain Mr. Feynman disagreed, agreeing with the engineers.
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” It's a sombre statement.
I am under the impression that this machine-alteration to human direct-speech has already been introduced into the standard 'Press Briefing'. Whilst a human can understand (most of) the wording, the sentence has little connection to meaning.
It's no wonder that AI models, trained on this data, are sometimes, often, confused.
Using a slide rule makes you (me) consider the calculation and break it down into the most economical form and separate out the 'orders of magnitude'. There were some hydraulic calculations that were so simple on a slide rule but a real pain on a calculator until they became programmable (and affordable).
Amusing aside: When I started work on 'real' designs, our Chief Designer's slide rule had many of the graduations erased over time. He said he could "Remember where they used to be." He was a brilliant designer of rotating machines with an instinctive flair for optimising shapes in fluid dynamics. This skill did not transfer to all his trainees; I am a bit of a plodder but I do know when an answer is wrong.....
A 'simple' enquiry to update my sim-card pushed me towards a chatbot and an insane maze. Predictably, it failed. Badly. I then asked for my PAC to change supplier. Within seconds a 'retentions' operative called, and offered me a 'deal' which was not available via the on-line process, Half the price of my existing contract plus far more data than I need and Eu roaming which was what I really wanted. Warily, I accepted the deal and I was promised a new sim card through the post, despite my protestations that I wanted an e-sim. Anyway, despite an email telling me that it had, the sim-by-post didn't arrive so I chased it up via the chatbot. After an hour of circular argument, when I was asked to pay for the sim-card that had not been received, I again asked for 'retentions'. Transfer not possible, so I called them.....
Within twenty seconds of a curt explanation I was promised a sim card, by post, free of delivery charges.... Thankful, but exasperated I asked why it couldn't be done electronically? A brief silence followed, then the electronic process was started and within less than a minute the e-sim was operational.....
These companies could save users a lot of time by dumping AI and 'chatbots' and put the money towards employing more people. It'll never catch on.
Somewhere, in the attic, I have punched tapes from my early years at university. I had forgotten about them until this article. Now I don't know whether to seek them out; I won't be able to read them. Something else for my children to look skywards and roll their eyes.
Perhaps my grandchildren could make kite-tails from them: Cloud computing!
Gosh! If you feel that about your current employment you need to get out.
Personally, I enjoy working from home but the office has a great buzz, too. I work with friends as well as colleagues. That's not to say there aren't candidates for the 'open window'.....
CAD was very new..... Our designers were tasked with creating a CAD drawing of the entire factory and offices on the new system to 'demonstrate its capabilities'.
Somewhere, in the corner of an office on the second floor at a scale unimaginable, Albert's caricature sits with arms folded in the classic pose as he admonishes a lowly apprentice.
Allegedly.....
Look. It is because of articles like this, that the boss knows I read, that enables me to fulfil my objectives. Some of these objectives are even connected with our business. The 'ideas-graveyard' is generally foretold by the BOFH together with useful solutions.
Another solution ---->
In any technical environment, knowing when your bounds of knowledge have been reached is a skill. You might need to extend your knowledge and understand the implications.
The quickest answer is not always the right one, rarely the best. Food for thought ------>
Soon after I finished my post-grad training and working for real with proper customers on solving Technical problems with our machinery, we were 'given' an older guy who had worked away from the factory for years and needed somewhere to eke out his time before retiring. At first I resented having an extra person in the department where I was junior but had far more technical knowledge than the new/old guy.
He was just brilliant. Without a single complaint, he undertook all the mundane tasks, took calls and made understandable notes, and was very good with those 'irritable' customers. When he did retire after a few months, he was sorely missed.
Cheers Peter --->
I think it's worse than that.
If a criminal were to send me a message which is just garbage, gobbledegook, how would law-enforcement know that it wasn't encrypted by some dastardly process thus hiding a heinous plot? I couldn't supply the key, so I am then implicated in Mr. Big's enterprise.
Because I can't decrypt the 'message', I must be guilty.
I'm generally sympathetic to trainers; they know they might be up against some trainees with more knowledge/experience than them but what can they do? Even as a self-diagnosed expert myself, I've never failed to learn something from a trainer.
Real experts know that they don't know everything. There are, of course, some who know this is not true.
On the other hand, I've had experts who come in to tell us how we should be doing things, find out they know nothing, learn how it should be done, and then go away. Never fast enough.
Ha! Rather different era, I'm afraid. Pre M25 if you can believe it.
The recent Heathrow shenanigans did remind of another job which was so important, it had three independent power supplies and a standby generator. On our day of commissioning plant, all three power supplies were 'unavailable'. The generator had no fuel......
We rescheduled for the following Monday morning: It all made work for the working man to do.
I was a trainee so given the overnight shift to watch over a system which was on a two-week proving run. This installation was part of a linked system and I was given the middle section with a more experienced guy who had brought his caravan as his own 'welfare provision'. I had to sit in the control room whilst he sat in the caravan, probably thinking deeply. Nothing happened for several days until severe winds blew down the radio-link between stations, coinciding with a digger finding the new telephone lines. We hadn't been in touch with the other sites before so things carried on as normal........ Until the mains power-transformer failed catastrophically at 2:00 a.m. leaving us in near total darkness and isolated deep in the middle of nowhere. It was snowing.....
We needed to alert the other stations on the line. Raising my supervisor from his deep thoughts, I was sent off-site to find a telephone box.... This was long before mobile phones became popular.
The snow was getting deep and time was running out. I did find a working telephone box in a village a few miles away and called through to the 'command centre': "Just who are you?" they asked, not unreasonably. Eventually, I did convince them this was not a joke and they set in process appropriate action. It was a big interruption though; we reassembled a few weeks later to restart the two-week proving run. Fortunately, I had moved on in my training schedule.....
I was asked to go and investigate a control issue at a modern utility, installed in the middle of nowhere. Our mechanical-installation guys were still on site but the customer had insisted on 'Someone from the Office' to resolve the problem. It was clearly an issue of different sensor-inputs not being compatible with the control philosophy and I went with some trepidation as it was a complex arrangement to isolate and fix the fault whilst keeping the machinery operating.
On arrival at site, I had a cup of tea with our site guys and outlined the problem as I understood it. Two of us went over to the operating room to review the equipment and before I knew it, Keith had opened up the control screen, tapped in a few instructions and said "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients." I left site a few minutes later.
I made sure we employed Keith on a full-time basis. A few years later he left us and now runs his own business.
I remember trying to train Via Voice in vain. Before the millennium.......
It is strange how these horrors seem so vivid. Natural selection ensures we remember traumas to avoid repeating them.
On the other hand -----> (It would be the equivalent of Aristotle-think to believe the mouth developed to shout at Alexa, Siri, Clippy etc.)
As an engineering student we had to do a computing project. We used Fortran to write a Finite-Element program which was the up-and-coming analysis method at the time. A huge bunch of punched cards, the program took ages to process; we had to get special permission to avoid having the batch rejected for using too much run-time. To us, the results were spectacular. Fortran was the god. Happy memories ---->
I find it shameful that my latest batch of engineering graduates had nil training in writing code of any type.
We needed a new Project Engineer, skilled in handling high-value, long-term, technical projects from initial order, customer specifications, sub-contracting sub-orders, installation, commissioning and hand-over, including getting the invoices in on schedule. We were well prepared to pay a good price for this engineer.
The agency sent us a bouncer. They said he might need 'a bit of training' but he was cheap.....
Now I'm prepared to give those who find themselves in unfortunate positions the benefit of the doubt. This was not one of those.
These were great fun. The skill was in getting the tension just right: too many turns and it span out of control, too little and it had no endurance. The little grooves on the ridges enabled them to climb over small obstacles...... We sometimes put two on each side of a large matchbox to make a tank-like construction. This tank would 'attack' platoons of little plastic soldiers whose only defence was another rubber-band powered field-gun.
Football on the street; having to pause the game when a car/milk-float/coal-wagon approached. Any passer-by could join the game, if they dared....
Cheery times ---->
After we were taken over by a much bigger concern, I was tasked with forwarding the monthly 'Management Reports' because I knew how to use Kermit...... These reports were apparently highly confidential and obviously, I could not read them because they were password-protected..... Whilst this might have been a challenge, security was rather undermined when they used the same password as the Kermit transfer-protocol....
You will have guessed this was some time ago but the password is still in my memory: 'cabinet'. Their accountant had decided this was a word he could remember. Of course all companies in the group had to use this password.
Somehow, we learned that they were considering changing our working hours to match the rest of the group; we finished early on Friday afternoon.... they wondered why the other companies started to push for similar conditions to the newcomers. It might have been mentioned in the reports.....
I remember the old soldering iron which required heating up in the fire. More like a cattle-brand than a tool and my fingers still bear evidence of its multi-function.
However, my father was keen on electronics although it was thermionic valves in those days (he built our first TV in the 1950's): he had purchased an electric soldering iron. It was powered by a cotton-covered two-core cable and he connected it to work from a bayonet light-fitting via an adaptor you could buy for this very purpose. It meant that the power-cable dangled down from the lamp-fitting and was rather out of the way during soldering. Plenty of singed shirts and arm-air though..... My ability to fault-find by electrical-odour stems from those days.
A major project for a utility was to be discussed with the End-User, Consultant, machinery-supplier (us), Electricity board, Control-panel supplier, Telemetry and the cabling-contractor. For some reason, the control panel supplier was leading the meeting and they had determined all the major items of equipment to be supplied. The intention was to use state-of-the-art starters to drive the machinery and that supplier had been identified and was joint-leader of the meeting……
After detailing their proposal, I innocently asked for some technical particulars regarding the starting procedure which I thought was unnecessary. A sort of waffle-response from the starter-people raised eyebrows. Seeking further clarification, the electricity supplier scratched his head and said that they would have to lay on a new HV cable through the town at a preliminary cost in the millions of pounds.
Flabbergasted, the End-User looked at his Consultant, who looked at the control-panel supplier who looked at the starter-supplier whose face revealed panic.
Consequently, the starting method was revised to the relief of the end-user. The control-panel had his order-value reduced to tatters. The starter-people went away with nothing.
A good outcome for us.
We used this format in not-automotive manufacturing.This practice even had a name: "Team Briefing".
Grade A1 useless. Important/interesting news spread (much) faster by the jungle-drums; Doom-news was never reported but we knew, often before some of the bosses themselves.
When newly promoted I was invited/expected to attend the company monthly management meetings. Quite a large concern, highly departmentalised..... Lots of managers and each meeting took up the best part of a day.
The same managers attended but few did any preparation between meetings; each had a dog-eared, 'dedicated' folder which they carried in order to look important.
Business was tough (no surprise there!), and inevitably cost-savings were raised. "Overheads must be reduced" meaning: "Redundancies". A significant number of staff were to go. Of course, blind to the real problem, not a single participant at those meetings was personally affected.
Eventually, it was decided that a major product was to be run down and sold off. Which was when we started our own business with a clean sheet and no baggage. It won't surprise you that 30 years on, our company continues, the old company and it's thousands of workers has been scattered (frittered) to the winds. Those managers were the last to go.
We had an attic full of old wartime radios of different voltages, AC/DC and frequencies. My experience on 'trying to get these things going' lead to my acute skill in fault-finding by electrical-odour. And fear of electric shocks.
Even if you know something is 'dead', the first touch should be with the back of your fingers!
I came across one of the split-phase converters on some old electrical plant. We had to break down a door in order to get access to the mains supply. Two-to-three phase converter with open terminals. It had been installed during WWII to restore supply after bomb damage.
The customer, a utility, was upset because it had no metering so they'd had free electricity for nearly sixty years.
UK phase-colours were Red/Yellow/Blue: A pub nearby had its 3-phase supply 'updated'. Unfortunately, the electrician connected 'red' and 'blue' as 'live' and 'neutral' thus exposing every device to 415 V..... The resulting damage was extensive and expensive. Every electrical appliance was replaced.
Fortunately, business was able to continue by candlelight, hand-pumps and cash. ---->
These days, phase colours are Brown/Black/Grey which are sufficiently indistinguishable to encourage checks on completion......
Inspired by James Gleick's 'Chaos', I wrote a little programme to draw the classic Mandelbrot Set. It ran on my home, pre-Windows, Amstrad. I had to let it run overnight to get a grainy picture plotted on the screen which I was then reluctant to stop and lose the image. Wanting a better, more detailed picture, I knew our work computers had more memory......
Our server had a big (40 Mb!!) HDD which we used simply as file storage. In those days it was heavily under-utilised. I set the program to send its output to be stored there. Everything else on the system ground to a halt which although not uncommon, was unexpected and only I knew the probable culprit.....
It was good friend Peter Norton who brought his Toolbox to resolve the chaos I caused. How we laughed......
