Re: eerrr...not quite "by the side"
In 1973, the Egyptians showed that they were very good at moving large amounts of sand by the Suez canal in a very short time. Maybe the pumps they used are a bit past it. (Hint, start of Yom Kippur war)
191 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Oct 2019
And Boots & Specsavers also dispense NHS-stocked hearing aids under the "Any Qualified Provider" (AQP) scheme..... for FREE (to the user, qualifying UK residents only) . The price they get for doing so also covers several years of support, and, even for a pair, it is less than the online price quoted above..... So why not try those out first before shelling out thousands ?
As a lowly student trainee, working in a north London research lab, we needed some variable capacitors urgently, and RS components did not stock them. Cue a 4-mile each way bicycle ride (on my own bike) to a local component shop (shows how long ago). There was no offer on paying mileage on my tyres......
We helped a friend move into a rented property, only about 10 years ago. Our job was to clean the residue from the previous smoker (carpets had been stripped out by the landlord). Since I am pretty tall, I was sugar-soaping the (artex) ceilings without using steps, which meant that it was easier to dodge the drips of liquid tar from an area just sprayed. Full PPE for that.
Well, we have survived as homo sapiens using the "plain old telephone service" for around a century with an audio bandwidth extending from 500 to 3000 or 3500 Hz, (varies with the side of the pond), presumed to be sufficient to carry the bulk of the articulation in speech. The assumption is true if the context is easy to understand ("Get out of my cave") but much less so if there is little context, ("Do you prefer Bach or Bartok?"). Your homework for tonight: "Was communication between homo sapiens and neanderthals likely to be high context or low context? Discuss."
I often wondered why UK sockets sometimes come without a switch. Seemed a bit cheapskate, until I lobbed a lightweight holdall under the counter into a space beside the freezer. Two days later I noticed a puddle on the floor in front of the freezer. Yup, complete de-frost. Had managed to hit the rocker with the holdall: so then I "cheapskated" and went for a switchless socket.
Again, slightly OT, but talking of "beached BMWs", I saw one actually perform the beaching on an oil drum as he started to pull onto a roundabout. It had fallen out of the back doors of a (slightly battered) crew bus that had been in front of him and rolled under his bumper (fender). Rear wheel drive ensured that the BMW managed to rise up and go beyond the point of balance.
Not always smoke stains. How about the ca 12V-rated electrolytic capacitor on a bench top power supply that can go up to 30 V ? Fortunately (a) it was only about 100 uF and (b) I was outside the room where that happened. Walked in to find a nice shower of confetti cascading down and a gibbering experimenter.
Salad cream : for something nominally regarded as bland by people outside of the UK, it runs a very close second to mayo on calorie count.
So let's get this straight:
bread: carbs
fish finger : a thin sliver of fish (protein) covered in (golden) breadcrumbs and oil (fat)
salad cream: fat
Does one have to put butter on the bread as well in case the above is seen as the low-cal version ?
Who needs the "crypto" aspect ?
It was called "scrip money". Beloved of 19th century industrialists: yup, only redeemable in the company store, which used marked-up prices anyway.
Of course any similarity between this and 21st century UK rail refund vouchers, not redeemable online, but only at a staffed ticket office (where a higher set of prices are shown) is purely illusory.........
Streamlined small claims procedures, yes. But results depends on the company involved. I used the process against a well known big (well it was big at the time) travel company. After 2 years of dragging their feet, they then tried to object to the interest charge (8%) that the court was allowed to add over the time taken to settle. After that they still would not pay up, so I paid the extra fee for the bailiffs to be sent in. Net result was they ended up paying out over twice as much as I was originally claiming. Adds a new dimension to any claim to be "customer focused".
"Valid ?", agreed, "fair ?": debatable. Flood the listings with your product, drive out the competition, and then rack up your prices. Seems to be the standard business model these days (and relies partly on consumer laziness for not shopping around or going beyond the first page of a search result).
Ah yes, the wonders of the 'free' market. Just like the fantastic range of broadcast news outlets we have in the UK: BBC1, BBC2, BBC Radio 1, ITN, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, Channel 4, BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 6 (where available), Sky, BBC World Service, RT. Oh, did you miss the non-BBC ones buried in there ?
.....and when the search engine almost invariably returns Amazon or Ebay as the top hit(s), is that just because of popularity or because they outbid the independent vendor ? Of course the search ranking algorithms would never be tilted in favour of big boys, that really would be creating a cosy cartel.
Try living on the ground floor of a rubbish bit of 1960's 3-storey UK-built maisonette/flat combinations (Planked floors between successive floors, with plasterboard on the underside. You could easily hear the microwave bell from the kitchen above). The route of the PVC foul pipe was boxed in behind wooden panels inside the corridor, and the bend was just below the floor. Acoustic, rather than physical, leakage was the problem.
Many moons ago, a certain broadcaster built an isolated studio suspended on springs within an outer building. Site was next to a canal, so high groundwater levels. "Never mind we will (a) tank it, and (2) put in an emergency float-activated pump in case the tank fails". During a wet period, the tanking fails, basement floods, float switches on pump, pump cannot initially keep up, float continues to rise and eventually flips over, switching OFF the pump.
Allegedly, a £100k (1980s prices) bit of large broadcast equipment was sent to a developing country, but went missing at the receiving airport. The equipment was reportedly found at a roadside, but minus its protective wooden packaging. A lesson there how "perceived value" depends on your perspective.
Went from a minor UK regional airport 30 years ago to Schipol. I pre-warned the airline that I was carrying prototype electronics with me to demo to a company. Carried in hand luggage, for obvious reasons, it was about the size of a spectacle case, but covered with mechanical switches and entirely hand-built. Going out was OK, but on return through Schiphol X-ray I suddenly found myself facing two gun-toting guards, but no polite verbal request to go for a manual search. Maybe the 4 NiCd batteries showed up a bit too well.
I started my working life fresh out of school in a north-west London research labs of a once-famous ELECTRIC company (similarly named but different companies on both sides of the pond). Old-fashioned industrial building. Labs could be sub-divided by benches stick out at right angles off the walls where the mains socket were. I say "benches" because there were two in my lab, daisy-chained. Occasionally we moved the benches around (installed in pre-history), so having a "male" and a "female" end on the power cords was too much like hard work if the benches went back the wrong way, and a hard-wired male end could get damaged in a move. So we had two female ends, ie sockets on each end of the bench, connected by a 13A plug to 13 A plug on a short, detachable "suicide cord". At least someone had made a little brass clip that wing-nutted down over the plug. In my enthusiasm to move an end bench, I suddenly realised I was holding a live (240V) 13 A plug...... And this was after the "Health & Safety at Work Act" of 1974.
Back in the 1980's security guard had to make his rounds and log his presence at various points around the site by inserting a physical key into a body-worn time-stamper. For the computer room, the key was chained to a wall behind a VAX11-750 and its accoutrements, leaving only a small alleyway to squeeze through to get to it. To aid his squeezing he steadied himself on the front of the VAX, only to press a reset button........ in the middle of an overnight run.
Many years ago I was debugging a very expensive bit of electronic kit with a few design issues on one particular board. eg under-specced ceramic wirewound resistor that gave an instant blister burn when lightly touched, and could melt its solder attachment to board. All hinting that a hefty power supply was lurking behind the scenes. Cue a more senior work colleague rushing through a revision and with a flourish hits the "on" button. My slow brain was registering that such haste was possibly not appropriate. The lights appeared to come up, but a few seconds later the magic smoke fairy emerges from a transistor can: actually probably more than one fairy. Although I was the first to observe it, the words of alarm froze in the brain. The only "f"-word was "aphasia".
That statement is a bit cheap on statistical accuracy given the otherwise reasonable summary of Thursday's instalment of the UK soap opera. Try comparing death rates per million across Europe and you will see that, although the UK rate is bad, it is not yet a "world beater". More like "primus inter pares". To adapt Baroness Harding's metaphor : using that statistic is no way to ice the cake.
Yes, FAT. As I said : naive. I thought M$ had provided a seemingly useful tool, and I was not officially in IT support.
Not so naive that I had not backed up all my data after previous uses. Not so true of the other users of that same computer (a data collection machine, off network to reduce response latency).
Ah but then you have to choose the correct wording in your warning-before-you-proceed message.
Consider a Win2k system that detects errors in your filing system, and it helpfully offers to "repair" it for you.
"Yes", this naive person clicked.
Cue a screenful of helpful lines reporting what it found wrong.
Cue a 30GB disc fragged into same-sized chunk with helpful names such as filexxxxx,frag where
1 < xxxxx < infinity
Yes, definitely naive in believing the "warning-before-you-proceed" message.
As a PFY, I worked in research for a company developing microwave oscillators for a combat aircraft.
One day I approached the test bench with a powered device attached and accidentally kicked the bench as I got seated. Result : level on power meter goes AWOL, frequency goes off analyser screen.
Approach boss to point out that this may not be a "marketable feature" for the particular aircraft: his solution was "Don't kick the desk".
It convinced me that a degree involving the study of structures was a very good choice.
Happened to me over a year ago. Could not find link on page to "Continue without signing up for Prime". Less than 30 days later, tried to cancel and eventually found the hard-to-find "Cancel subscription" link. Then went through pages of "Are you sure ?", "Are you really sure?", "Are you really, really sure ?".
Scrapped my account there and then and will not use them. Amazon, the Ryanair of retail sales.