Posts by Potty Professor 321 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2021
Some years ago I was "working away" in Finland. I usually have Classic FM on in the background, and was missing it whilst over there. I discovered that Classic was available over the Internet, but it detected that I was not in the UK, so refused to play. It gave me the option to tell it the Postcode of my location, and after entering my home postcode, over 1000km away, it played happily, although with a two hour timeslip, but I could live with that.
I was recently in the market for a potato rumbler. I found four listed on Amazon ranging in price from £40 to £160. Upon downloading the instruction manuals for all four, I was amazed to find that, apart from some very minor differences in colour and graphics, they were all identical. I therefor purchased the £40 one, which does the job perfectly and saved me a possible £120.
I was given my nickname by my primary school teacher, Mr. Isbester, when I was 11 years old. I was the only member of my class that knew about Pi, and could recite it to ten decimal places. He asked who had told me, and when I explained that my father worked at University College, London, he dubbed me "Professor Purvis", a nickname that I have carried through school, university, and most of my working life.
I worked in an office in Birmingham (UK) that was supposed to be on a strict 9 to 5 working day. I used to get in at 8 in order to make sure all the IT was up and running before the Technical Writers arrived at 9. I also ran all of the previous day's 3.5" output discs through the AV Sandbox before putting them in the Outgoing Post box.
On more than one occasion complaints were made that I was leaving at 4, until I pointed out that I had already done an hour's work before the rest of them arrived.
The major advantage was the lighter traffic for both my morning and afternoon commutes.
When my kids were at school, I was pressed into upgrading from my beloved Spectrum to a BBC Model B, because that was what was installed at school. I purchased one second hand, but it came with an inbuilt problem, it would crash after about ten minutes use, and refuse to reboot for about half an hour afterwards.
I took it out of the case and used a coolant spray on the memory chips, which would keep it up and running continuously, so long as the chips were kept frozen. I also noticed that all of the memory chips were plugged into chip carriers, although all of the other devices were soldered directly onto the board.
I was discussing this with a work colleague, and he suggested that perhaps there was a problem with the original memory chips that had not been solved by replacing them, and that the problem might lie elsewhere. He then looked very closely at all the other chips, and noticed that the Memory Interface chip was of the wrong sort, it was supposed to be a Fast chip, but was not.
I left him to unsolder it and replace it with yet another chip socket, while I drove over to RS in Corby to buy two of the correct chip (in case we damaged one), and when plugged in this solved the problem.
Apparently, the timing of the Read/Write and Refresh cycles would get out of synch as the chip warmed up, and would resynch after cooling down.
I once wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program to park the heads of my computer at work after a certain amount of time, and the Boss was so impressed that he had it installed on all the computers in the department, and I was promoted to Deputy IT Manager despite having no qualifications and being only self-taught.
Chap who used to work for me was at one time a wireman in a company that built telephone exchange equipment. One day, whilst wire checking a huge bank of Strowger gear, he fell asleep on the top of his stepladder, and only woke up when the Security man shone his torch on him during his nightly patrol around the building. As it was now after midnight, he was escorted off the site and told to come back later to explain his presence up a ladder in the dark.
Where I worked some while ago, they had a medical centre on site, so if anyone was injured at work, they could be treated quickly. They had an old LDV Sherpa ambulance parked near the building, so injured workers could be collected from almost anywhere on the site. One major problem - the bloody thing would never start, so it was a frequent sight to see four burly Security men pushing it down the main drive to bump start it.
I was once treated to a ride in it after I had been knocked off my bike (Doored, ithink it's called) and was sitting at my desk when my Boss said "You look terrible, what is wrong?" He called the ambulance and I was examined by the Company Doctor, who thought I might have some broken ribs. Cue another trip in the Sherpa to the Accident department of the local hospital, where I was X-rayed to confirm that I had three broken ribs.
There is much more to this story, but I won't bore you with it!
When I was about three or four, my mother, sister, and I were sitting in the car waiting for Dad to return from wherever he had gone (on business). Mum said to me "What does that sign say?" to which I replied "What sign?" The next day I was taken to the local opticians and given a sight test, which revealed that I was so short sighted that I would need corrective lenses for the rest of my life. I am now at minus eight diopters in my left eye and minus seven and a half in my right.
I have tried contact lenses, but my eyes are so sensitive (and I am so squeamish) that I just can't tolerate them, hence the bottle bottom specs I have to wear.
(Icon because goggles).
When I was a member of a defence organisation (unarmed), we were expecting delivery of our new RFID identity cards. One day a mysterious brown paper package arrived at Group Headquarters, with no address or other identifying marks, and was placed in the foyer. When the Security Department returned from whatever they had been securing, they immediately ordered an evacuation and called the Bomb Squad. These gentlemen carefully removed the parcel to the middle of the car park and set off a "Controlled Detonation". Suddenly there was snowstorm of burnt shards of plastic as the several hundred new ID cards were instantly destroyed and blasted into the air. There were still a few bits stuck to the wire fence when we were stood down many years later.
This happened to my father while we were on holiday in Italy. Old Chevrolet with 235cu in Blue Flame engine, one of the hydraulic valve lifters decided to give up the ghost and started clattering. Dad took off the rocker cover to adjust the valve clearance, and whilst so doing managed to short from battery live to the earthed battery clamp with the elastic metal watch strap.
Howling in pain, he pulled the strap away from his wrist, thus burning the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Letting go resulted in the strap springing back and burning a different part of his forearm. Rinse and repeat, and he had three parallel burns on his left arm and three burnt fingertips on his right. I had to take over the driving duties for the rest of the holiday as he was in too much pain and too drugged up with painkillers to drive safely.
Worst holiday ever.
When I was an apprentice, at the Apprentice Training School in Harold Hill, one of my fellow apprentices burnt a hole in his chest. We were gas welding, and a blob of molten weld metal burnt a neat hole through his tie and shirt, and lodged itself against his skin. He couldn't get undressed quickly enough to prevent a bad burn to his chest, and had to rush, topless, across the car park to Sister Amos in the Medical Centre for remedial action.
Place I once worked at in a suburb of Birmingham (UK) was on a busy dual carriageway. Parking was only allowed on the south bound side of the road in the morning and the north bound side in the afternoon to allow for tidal traffic flow. This meant that I would arrive at work and drive past the office building and around the north end of the central reservation in order to park on the opposite side to the building. I would then go out at lunchtime and drive around the south end to the same side as the building, before finally going around the north end of the central reservation again in order to go home. Each day in the office would mean having to drive an extra three quarters of a mile in order to park. Luckily, I was not in the office full time, most days were spent at site doing actual work.
The school I attended was built in the early 60s. The stage in the main auditorium had no wings, so putting on any kind of production involved maneuvering the scenery flats and props through a narrow doorway and out into the adjacent gymnasium. When we put on The Gondoliers, it was necessary for a full sized gondola to appear from one side of the stage, disembark several actors, and then disappear off to the other side of the stage. This was achieved by building the gondola in three sections, a main chassis on which the actors stood, and two trucks which ran on rails on the chassis and which carried removable flats representing the bow and stern of the gondola. This was repeated in the opposite direction when the actors had to exit stage right. Many hours were spent designing and building the gondola in the Woodwork department.
Unfortunately, the whole school was demolished shortly after I left in 1968 as it was discovered that all of the exterior cladding, the ceilings, and most of the insulation were asbestos. I can remember sitting in the Lower Sixth Common Room participating in competitions to see who could make a dart stick into the lagging of the overhead pipework. I am surprised that I and many others in my year did not succumb to asbestosis.
My family and I experienced the 99 eclipse from an Autoroute aire (similar to a rest area) near Nancy in France. We had timed our journey from Rugby to the Black Forest to coincide with the event.
About a quarter of an hour before First Contact, the french authorities shut down the Autoroute and all private cars had to be in an aire before totality, with the trucks lined up on the hard shoulder.
Unfortunately it was raining, so we thought that we were going to be disappointed, but just before Totality, a small hole appeared in the clouds, and we were treated to a stunning view of the corona.
Soon afterwards, we were allowed back onto the Autoroute to continue our journey, along with several hundred other vehicles.
I was once sent by my doctor to have a lung capacity test as I was having slight breathing difficulties due to Hayfever. The clinician who conducted the test remarked that I had almost doubled my lung capacity in the five years or so since the last test, and why was I worried about the results? I was surprised, because I had not had a test before, so I asked if I could see the previous test results. I pointed out that the details of the previous test were for a 70 year old man, and I was well under that age now, so it couldn't have been me. Turned out it was my father, whose name is very similar to mine, and had since died of Emphysema. Oops!
When I was working on the development of some new stuff for the Navy, part of my duties included keeping a record of the equipment as it progressed, and writing and updating the Instruction Manual. One day we had the complete equipment in the Test Area for a heat run, which was to be observed by the Customer. Lots of gold braid and stripes on sleeves, and the test was started.
As I didn't have any involvement in the actual heat run, I took the opportunity to take a few photographs of the complete, buttoned up, suit as it stood in the Test Area. Whilst trying to get the whole suite in frame, I backed off int a corner of the area, and suddenly the whole department went very quiet and dark - I had inadvertently backed into one of the Big Red Buttons and shut everything down,
Howls of fury and protest from the testers, and the Scrambled Egg Brigade were unceremoniously led away. The whole test had to be rescheduled for the next day as it had to start from cold. Needless to say, I was NOT allowed into the Test Area for that or any subsequent heat runs, officially observed or not.
Place where I worked made huge transformers (amongst other electrical equipment). One of our external contractors was working above one such whilst the lid was off (naughty), and unfortunately fell in. As you can't swim in transformer oil, he was walking about, up to his neck in the oil, until someone managed to find a ladder and lower it into the tank for him to climb out.
He wasn't badly injured, but our Security department insisted on putting him in our venerable LDV Sherpa ambulance and whisking him off to the local hospital. He was showered to within an inch of his life and then kept in overnight for observation, before being discharged next morning.
He was ferried home by taxi, still wearing nothing but his hospital gown, so that he could put on fresh clothes and return to work. His old work clothes were destroyed as they were sodden with transformer oil, and that don't come out easy!
Back in the mid eighties, when I was just learning how to program my shiny new ZX Spectrum, I managed to borrow a redundant dot matrix printer from my employer's lab foreman, all legal and signed for. After several months, a site inventory was called for, and grumblings were made about this ancient DMP being beyond its service life, so it was recalled. I took it back to the lab, and the foreman said that I could have it back on loan next day. Imagine my disappointment when I went to get it, only to find that it had been condemned and sent for scrap. There was nothing wrong with it, it was simply considered to be too old to remain on the inventory. :-(
My SWMBO was always late for anything. As far as she was concerned, leaving the house at the time we were supposed to be at the appointment counted as "being on time", I solved this by telling her a fictitious appointment time that was sufficiently advanced that we would have time to actually be on time. I used to say that she would be late for her own funeral - but unfortunately she wasn't. RIP Rosamund, still love you.
When I was working as a delivery driver, they gave me a mobile phone to keep in the van for business use. I also had my personal phone with me, so I connected that to the van's Hands Free system and set up automatic forwarding on the works' phone to shunt incoming calls to my phone, and thence to the hands free speaker. If I needed to call the shop or a customer, I would park up and use the works' phone to make (and pay for) the call.
I had a problem in a supermarket once. Each of the aisles had an informative sign hanging above it to allow one to see at a glance what the aisle contained, and one had only to push one's shopping cart along the headrow at the end of the aisles to find out where to turn in for the item required. Then came Christmas, and the aisles were festooned with adverts for "Special Offers", but those items were not necessarily in the same aisle. The placards also obscured the original aisle labels, so finding anything became a mad dash around the whole store, hoping to accidentally come across the required item. Add this to the fact that they had stirred the shelves with a big stick, so no item was where it had been the previous week. I complained to the Store Manager, but he just shrugged and said that he was obliged to follow Head Office's instructions.
Done that in my garage. Three sockets in a row, one for the tyre fitting machine, one for the wheel balancer, and one (with neon) for the compressor, with the machine name written on the backshell of each plug, after painting with white paint.
The neon is also wired through to another in the lounge, so that the compressor doesn't switch itself on at three AM and make enough noise to wake the dead (and waste electricity - who needs 100PSI at 3AM?). A quick check to see if the neon in the lounge is extinguished saves a late night trudge around to the garage to make sure it's off.
I also rigged up a circuit to show a green LED in the lounge to show that the garage and shed lights were off and both doors locked, for exactly the same reason.
Soon after we were married, we bought a cottage in a village near where we both worked. My wife complained that she was getting a tingle from the cold tap in the bathroom sink, so I checked it for potential, and found that it was securely earthed. She said to put some water in the sink, and then touch the tap, sure enough, a small tingly feeling was experienced. I checked the plughole surround, and found that it was at about 50V from the earthed tap. I traced the source to the overhead cable running across the yard to the shed, the flat twin and earth had deteriorated in the sun where it was bent at a 90° angle to go from the vertical run up the outside of the brickwork to the underside of the horizontal catenary across the yard. When it rained, the current flowed out from the live wire into the damp brick, across to the lead waste pipe, through the wall, and up to the brass plughole. I cut out the lead pipe and replaced it with a plastic one, which solved the immediate problem, but later on I had to run a new SWA cable across to the shed to stop the leakage into the brickwork. I avoided the sharp bend by introducing a "Pigtail" curve at the minimum radius of the cable.
Not IT, but very dangerous. We moved into a house that had a gas supply to a shelf above the kitchen door, where presumably the gas meter used to be. The current gas meter was in a cupboard under the stairs, with all of the gas plumbing correctly connected. I decided to remove the dead pipe from the kitchen, but when I loosened the blanking cap, gas issued out, so I hastily retightened it. I phoned the gas supplier and asked them to come and disconnect the pipe from the main, only to be told that their records indicated that it had already been disconnected, and any pressure inside was probably caused by corrosion inside the pipe.
I loosened the cap again to let the pressure out (after opening the kitchen door to allow the gas to escape), and waited for the hissing to stop. It didn't. I rang the gas company again, who were adamant that I was mistaken. I then said "So you wouldn't have any objection to my connecting my central heating boiler to that pipe, then?" There was a gas fitter round to my house within half an hour to cut off this unmetered supply. Should have kept my mouth shut :-(
When I was at Uni, one of our lecturers tried to teach us Statistics, and failed dismally. Oh! he knew his stuff OK, but couldn't explain what he was doing on the board. He would write a complicated equation at the top of the board, then a slightly different version, where he had solved part of the first equation. This was then repeated in several more lines down the board, each time simplifying the previous line, until he got to the bottom of the board and wrote the solution. We would all then be left wondering how he had made that enormous leap of logic to finish, but when asked for an explanation, he would say "but that's obvious". Not to us it wasn't. We renamed the class on our timetables as "Applied Guesswork".
One of my pet hates is the word "got". It is an ugly black weed that grows up through any cracks it can find in the English language, and should be avoided at all costs. Its only valid use is as the past tense of "to get", but it appears to have wormed its way into everyday usage. There are other examples of word misuse, but this is the worst.
I have encountered similar discrepancies in both of the houses I have owned. The solution to the first was to get all four interested parties, my neighbour, me, and our two solicitors, together on site and physically measure the position of the boundaries involved. This process held up the sale of my property and the purchase of the next from January to May.
Once having successfully purchased the second property, I went to repair a broken fence, only to find that the measured distance between the two houses was less that shown on my plans (and also those of the neighbouring property) by about a foot. The two plots overlapped on the ground but were adjacent on the plans. Again, the only solution was to get all four parties, including two different solicitors from the previous time, together and physically measure the distances. These revised figures then had to be reported back to the Land Registry before I was given permission to rebuild the fence in the right place.
When I was an apprentice in the late 60s and early 70s, one of the postings most feared was to Autolite, Belfast. Luckily, I was not asked to go there, I went to Autolite Enfield (among many other sites) instead. I don't know what I would have done had I been selected for that posting, but several of my fellow apprentices went there and had some hair-raising tales to tell when they returned. One chap, though, committed suicide just after he returned!
On the other hand, I spent three months in Dagenham Foundry, the noisiest place imaginable, and I still suffer from Tinnitis to this day.
Story told to me by my father, a long time ago.
One of his work colleagues, a Professor or similar, mentioned to him that the power kept tripping whenever he (the Prof.) tried to start a particular machine. Dad suggested that he connect a 100W light bulb in series to limit the starting inrush current, and switch it out (ie short it) when the machine was running to give the machine full power, thus "Soft Starting" the machine. The Prof. argued that that wouldn't work, saying that the bulb would blow because the machine would still want to draw its full current and thus overload the bulb. Dad had to patiently explain that it would work because the bulb would be in control, reducing the current, not the machine
I am disabled and suffering from Diabetes.
I was on a trip to collect something I had bought on eBay, when I had a puncture. Fitted spare wheel and continued. On the way back, only about ten miles from home, had another puncture, but of course, no spare now. Phoned the AA and gave them my location, right beside a phone mast on a bridge over an A road. "we'll be with you in ten minutes".
To cut a very long story short, three and a half hours later the van pulled up - on the hard shoulder of the A road fifty feet below where I was on the bridge. The driver then took a further quarter of an hour to navigate the back roads to reach me, where he put on his universal spare wheel and followed me the ten miles home. As I hadn't had any food for over six hours, I was feeling extremely wobbly by the time we got there.
Complained to the AA, but their excuse was that it was a Bank Holiday Saturday, and the changeover weekend between two different Half Term weeks, so the traffic was heavier than usual. If they knew that, why did they keep on telling me they would be with me in ten minutes?
My daughter was once returning home from her university some 100 miles away, and when she arrived in town in the wee small hours, the traffic lights refused to sense her 125cc motorbike, it didn''t contain enough iron to trigger the sensor. She waited and waited, and eventually had to dismount and push it across the pedestrian crossing after pressing the button to announce her presence.
Well, I was only 16 at the time, and as noted in NXM's post, I was shitting hot bricks as I fought not to hit anything on the way through the village. My father said afterwards that he felt a huge surge of relief when he saw me reach for the ignition switch.
I once nearly crashed my GF's father's brand new 1964 Pontiac Catalina. It had only done about 1000 miles, and he had never opened it up whilst running it in. He offered me a drive in it as I was well impressed, and suggested I open it up to see how well it would perform.
As I pressed the gas pedal, the linkage jammed wide open, and I went through Sutter, Illinois at speeds of up to 110 MPH with my foot firmly on the brake pedal and black smoke issuing from the drums. Eventually I switched off the ignition (no steering lock in those far off days) and started to slow down on compression.
Then I did a silly thing, I knocked it into Neutral, so no power brakes or power steering. I was then confronted with a left/right zigzag under a railroad bridge, but managed to bail out through a field gate and across the field. The cop who was chasing me was not impressed, a .38 looks HUGE when it's only inches from your nose, but GF's Dad, who was an ex-Mayor of Sutter, defused the situation by saying "It's OK Bubba, put your pop gun away, this young man has just saved my life".
Popped the hood and unlocked the throttle linkage, had to ask GF for a Bobby Pin to replace the missing split pin, and was rewarded with a Police escort back through the town to the Dad's farm.
I had a mysterious and sudden power steering failure on a 2006 (VW) SEAT Ibiza. Had to continue driving the 103 miles home, it was OK in a straight line or on gentle curves, but maneuvering was a bit heavy on the handlebars. Eventually traced the fault to a broken connector in the wiring loom, I can only assume that it had been struck by a stone or some debris thrown up under the front of the car. Once fixed, all was perfect again.
I once got a serious belt from the HT side of a 5kV - 240V step down transformer that I had been assured could not be back fed - it could and was. In my agony I managed to scream hoarsely "Switch the ***** thing off" and one of my co workers dived across the board and killed it before it killed me. This led to an in-depth investigation as to why, but I missed that because I was off sick for a week to get rid of a nasty case of the shakes. When I returned to work, I always shorted anything out before I touched it, sometimes with spectacular results.
When I was living in Kentucky back in the 60s, the house we rented did not have air conditioning. My father removed the front panel of the gas furnace in the basement, reversed the connections on the room thermostat to run the fan when the temperature was high, and turned off the gas supply. He then opened one of the ground level windows on the North side of the building and strung a net curtain over the opening. The air coming in from under the adjacent bushes was relatively cool, the net curtain condensed the moisture, and the resulting cool air was circulated through the AC ducts throughout the house. The condensate was collected in a plastic planter trough and disposed of daily down the laundry room drain. When the weather turned colder in the autumn, he reverted it to a central heating role, which was how he left it when we returned to the UK.
When I was on "Detached Duty" for my employers working in Finland, I wanted to listen to Classic FM over the Internet as I had when at home in Blighty. Unfortunately, the website detected that I was not in GB, so wouldn't let me in. It asked for my Post Code, and once I had entered my home address' code, it was quite happy to let me listen. Of course, there was a 2 hour time slip, but I could live with that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
