Posts by T-Bo

Macs

Macs were great for this sort of thing ... you could change pretty much any menu or dialog box in the System, given the proper editor. Anyone using my Mac would have found the Eject Disk and Erase Disk commands reversed ... the warning dialog for Erase was adjusted to reflect Eject also. Caught more than one unwary visitor with that one.

Once dropped a little startup program on my roomate's Mac Plus ... used Macintalk to call him very rude names, in a loop. Only way to exit was to hold the mouse button down through 2 full executions of the loop.

Ah, the 80's ... Fun times, those ... :)

As a young man, I worked temp in a store-room, pulling parts for electronic assemblies at a company that made digital printing equipment. All of the inventory control was centered in a U-shaped arrangement of desks, holding 8 PC workstations. Company decided to build a beautiful steel mezzanine over this, steel poles all around, to reclaim that part of the footprint for storage.

Every time the welders working on the decking above would strike an arc, the images on all of those monitors below would go absolutely crazy.

Entertaining, it was ... :)

Ranger 4

The US tried in 1962 with the Ranger 4 probe, though boffins lost control of the spacecraft and it slammed into the surface.

Pretty sure all the Rangers slammed into the moon... ISTR they were sent for rough photo recon, never intended to soft-land ...

In the run-up to Y2K, I was a consultant, converting/correcting clinical integration systems for that event. While working at a hospital system in Philadelphia with others like me from various vendors and consultancies, the Project Manager for the health system came round and requested that we all join her in a meeting room ASAP.

We assembled there to find a number of circular tables with dozens of neat piles of documents arranged around them, a number of 3-hole punches, and a stack of empty binders in one corner. Her idea was that we would each grab a binder and walk round the tables assembling the notebooks (which were apparently Y2K project updates for senior management/board meetings), repeating until the stack of empty binders was exhausted.

I gently reminded her in front of her boss that she was paying $400.00/hour to have me on-site ... I asked whether she felt those hours were more profitably spent building interfaces, or building notebooks for her meetings?

Her boss immediately returned us all to our duties ... never did hear how the notebooks turned out.

Original Star Trek

Obviously the planet-killer from TOS episode, the Doomsday Machine.

Just need a wrecked USS Constellation circling it for good measure.

Done traveling

In the run-up to Y2K, I was all over the US, upgrading/replacing data integration engines for larger healthcare and utility companies. After around a year of being on the road for weeks on end, supporting one site locally and 3-5 others remotely from my hotel room in the evenings, I finally got smart and caught on with a big hospital system to run their integration team.

Gave my current employer 4 weeks notice, as this would allow me to get my main client site in Arkansas through their go-live. Thought this would be a great way to end up for them. On Thursday of the final week, go-live week, I received a call from a colleague who was also in his final week with the company, saying "Check your credit cards ... mine have been cut off".

I checked, and so had mine. Amex, phone card, everything. 3 weeks of hotel, long distance bill, car rental, etc ... and I was on the hook for all of it. I went to my contact at the client site, explained the situation. He was livid. Insisted on paying all of my bills, and charging it back to the my soon to be ex-employer, with a significant markup for being idiots. Go-live was flawless, and I hopped the plane home on Friday, footloose and fancy-free.

Haven't considered a traveling job since.

Devil's in the details

Years back, I worked for 3D Systems, supporting their old resin/laser-based stereolithography systems. Customer had just taken delivery a of shiny new SLA machine, and the elevator stage had a mind of its own, with the stepper motor bucking and intermittently running the opposite direction as commanded. Two regional support techs and their senior supervisor visited the site, replaced nearly every component in the subsystem, but still the problem persisted.

After three weeks of this, the customer was ready to crate it up and send it back. So - I'm dispatched with a one-way ticket to Oregon to figure it out. First thing I did was unplug/check/reseat each connector on the harness involved. Sure enough, in manufacturing one of the pins in a molex block had been improperly soldered to its wire, connected by just a few strands. Sometimes the motor got correct current to all windings, and sometimes it didn't. 15 minutes with a crimp and portable soldering iron and all was well. Cabling is always a playground for failure.

Sundive

A spokesman for Disaster Area was later quoted as saying that it had been "a good gig"...

Not just a Clinic ...

The Cleveland Clinic is actually a Health System with 10+ large hospitals and dozens of outpatient/ambulatory clinics as members ... this move actually has huge implications for those of us in Healthcare IT...