Re: There is a joke here, somewhere
Ah, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters - that takes me back!
237 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jul 2018
Ah yes, pretty sure it was a Formula One in France that gave my partner and I an "interesting" experience many years ago, probably the 90s.
It was a completely automated affair, no staff on site at all, well certainly in the evening. You turned up at the front door and used a control panel to pay by credit card whereupon you received a paper printout with room number and key code.
Great. Payment made, code received and off we go to the room. Door opens fine with the code, only problem is that there's a bloke asleep in the bed!
No staff remember, so sorting that out via an entry phone intercom at night was an interesting exercise. Turns out the guy was working at the hotel as a decorator and someone had put him up in the room but obviously without putting the information into the booking system. Pretty crap system to allow that but I guess that it was cutting edge in the 90s.
Been using PCs since the early 80s, from BBC Micro via OS/2 to all versions of Windows up to Win10 (and I only moved there from Win7 a few weeks ago).
Never in my life have I used Outlook, a statement that will remain true until my dying breath. I think that my first remote access to email was via a 300baud modem from my BBC to the university *nix box, then when personal email became a thing Eudora did me just fine for years before I finally moved to Thunderbird.
That said, all my desktop email these days is done using the Roundcube web client and 3 quid a month to Mythic Beasts for hosting. Never, ever use the ISP provided email!
Which is why I'm sticking with my 1989 BMW E30 cabrio that I've owned for over 20 years.
When I first owned it I was living in central London so the automatic gearbox was a real benefit in that sort of traffic. And then I taught myself to left foot brake which is relatively straightforward with only two pedals, and that half-second quicker on the brakes definitely saved me from a massive coming together with a white van some years ago.
According to my go-to fount of all knowledge (QI on the BBC) this is a syndrome "suffered" by 1 in 500 people including the likes of Renée Descartes, who never got up before midday.
Now that I'm retired I typically go to bed between 2am and 3am and I'm never up before 10 in the morning. If I got up as soon as I woke, I would be up at 4 or 5 as sleep is more like a series of naps for me. That said, I reckon that I could nap for England!
Been like it all my life. I'm 71 now but as a teenager in the 60s I used to cycle to school about 2 miles away - had to be there by 9am but I would not be heading downstairs to grab breakfast any time before 8.30.
Very much this.
My last gigs before retirement involved converting Access databases to MySQL with a web front end. The sort of Access databases (I use the term loosely) that people put together after their Excel spreadsheet has run out of steam and which in turn finally fell flat on their faces. Anyone ever noticed how Access fails just as things get really complicated, or is it just me?
Best example was when I was asked to make a small mod to an Access database that a new partner had brought in from his previous post. Obviously he hadn't written it or he could have changed it himself. I reminded the client that I had made it very clear that I only touched Access in order to get data out of it, but said that I would make an exception in this case.
Turns out that the mod was to remove the previous company's logo and replace it with the company's own logo. Simple enough, but when I deleted the "old" logo there was another logo from an even earlier company underneath! IP rights anyone?
For context, my client was a firm of consultants charged with the oversight of multi-billion pound projects. Don't want to be more specific than that, to protect the guilty.
Ha, amateur effort!
As a schoolchild in the 60s a friend and I got interested in making gunpowder. We realised that a "fine grind" was the thing to achieve, resulting in the construction of a small mill from Meccano, an Andrews Liver Salts tin and some marbles. Worked a treat. Only exploded once!
The results were placed in a pill bottle with wires from a toy train transformer joined with a sliver of cooking foil to act as a fuse. Screwing on the top meant that things went off with a very satisfying bang!
That said, I did hear the sound of a shard of glass flying past my ear, so was probably inches from losing an eye.
That anyone could downvote your simple statement of fact makes me want to weep.
For the hard of thinking, here's an example from within my family. My stepdaughter and her husband set up a business selling clothing online and over the years built it up into a multi-million pound enterprise. They actually stock and ship the stuff world-wide themselves rather than act as a middle man and are UK based.
Then came Brexit. They have tried everything, including setting up a subsidiary in Holland, but have had to give up selling directly to customers in the EU. Luckily they also supply a few retailers as well, so now they just refer potential customers on the continent to them.
The utter killer is the cost of returns. The business has been built on exemplary customer service, and honouring returns has been a big part of that. I can't remember the precise details but essentially they can't reclaim something like VAT or customs charges. So if a customer returns a £70 shirt it will cost them around £40 to process the return. You do the maths, you can't run a business on that basis.
Back in the 60s I was lucky enough to be taught the "Nuffield physics" A level rather than the regular syllabus.
This was based on the wonderful books by Richard Feynman and the whole point was to make you "think like a scientist". I can still remember one of the exam questions - "Design an experiment to measure the drag on a ship's hull". We'd never covered anything about that in the syllabus, the idea was that we'd been provided with the skills to tackle the problem.
I did my PhD in expert systems in the late 80s at the University of Brighton (as opposed to Sussex where I did my degree), anyone remember POP11?
I added a capability to RBFS, the Rule Based Frame System, which I still think is the best named software I've ever developed - it was the Truth Maintenance System.
I started coding using BBC Basic, moved on to Turbo Pascal, then bought Delphi on the day that it shipped in the UK (Windows95 show in London?)
That showed up VB for the toy that it was - you dropped a component on a form and the code appeared, change some code and the component updated itself. Magic!
I make my "proper" coffee in an electric "Italian cafetiere" where the water is forced through the coffee grounds as it boils. Don't ask me why but I find it tastes much better than a "french cafetiere" where the water and grounds just mix, or a filter coffee which gives me a bad stomach while I can drink cappuccinos all day no problem.
Most Italian cafetieres are non-electric stove top devices and for some reason the electric ones are almost impossible to source in the UK. I got my previous Bialetti on Amazon via Bulgaria if I recall correctly.
Versions now seem available as "Moka pots" as well. Instead of watching a stove top boil, just put in the water and coffee, switch it on and walk away. Keeps the coffee warm for up to 30 mins after it's been made as well.
Reminds me of touring holidays in France in the 80s, if they did make tea it was with warm water, yuk!
Hot water was only possible by boiling a pan. I still remember seeing a kettle in a shop window in France back then - complete with large illustrated poster explaining what it was and how it worked.
Not only did Microshaft fail to offer Win10 users the option of a "classic shell" with a Win7 look, they actively sabotaged the efforts of those who tried to offer users that very thing. The hubris and sheer bloody-mindedness just beggars belief.
I've been using PCs since the BBC Micro and am still on Win7 - I've tried Win10 a couple of times and I simply cannot bear to look at it. I swear that those sharp corners actually hurt my eyes and the flat colours remind me of the bad old days of 256 colours being your limit. I may be retired but I still spend 6 - 12 hours a day looking at my PC's screens (6, count 'em) so I think that it's extremely important that what I'm looking at offends the eye as little as possible.
I must admit that I haven't checked whether the classic skin developers have managed to get back ahead of M$ in the last year or two, but even if they did I'm not sure that I could live with the update debacle in Win10 - at least with Win7 I can choose when and if to download updates. That's due to end in a couple of weeks of course :-(
I've been running Mint on other boxes for quite a few years now, so maybe I will finally make the jump.
It's a reflection of how crap Win10 is that, faced with a choice between Win7 without updates and Win10, I'm sticking with Win7.
Similar happened to me some decades ago, I was already doing WFH in the 80s so luckily was at home when it happened.
It being water ingress to the wiring in the street which I think put another live phase on to my neutral. All I know is that the whole house started to hum and every standby light lit up like a Christmas tree. Cue a sprint to the fuse box (no fuses blew) to throw the main switch, if the house had been unoccupied I shudder to think what would have happened to the wiring.
Personally I pay Mythic Beasts three quid a month for basic web hosting just to use for my email. Catch-all redirection means one mailbox but effectively infinite number of addresses, blacklisting specific addresses is easy, webmail is available and the performance just blows tsoHost out of the water. I spent a good part of last year moving people's accounts from tso to Mythic, and with the same mailbox running in different Firefox tabs for the different servers the difference in performance was "enlightening".