Posts by Boris the Cockroach

You

should always take a good book to these sort of meetings.

Amongst my recommendations is

"The Necronomicon discussed, with experiments for beginners" (get the light leather bound version, you can claim its human skin)

Although nothing in there is as bad as when the new manglement fad is espoused by the bean counters and put forward as THE way forward at which point you propose the game favoured by your PFY "murder in the dark" and it is oh so very dark at the bottom of the lift shaft........

Sleep well all

More robotic mayhem

Or never assume your fellow programmers are as good as you are.

We had a machine with an add on robot.

The robot had its own control program with move commands, gripper open/shut and a wait command that paused the program waiting for the machine to send a signal to execute the next bit of robot code

The machine had 2 commands.... signal the robot to start and........ signal the robot to start and wait for the robot to send finished...

Needless to say I programmed the robot to pick up blanks from the tray and put them in the machine according to the master plan worked out previously as the machine had control of the splash guards and clamping.

My colleague<snarls and glares over the screen> did the machine program, so we both load up the code ready for the first test run.

and hit the big green button.

The sequence was supposed to go

Splash guard open

Robot arm in place to grab part

Clamp release

Arm up /wrist 180 to load blank/arm down

Clamp

Arm ungrab blank and retract

Splash guard close

The actual sequence was splash guard open, unclamp,clamp , splash guard close, arm straight through perspex splash screen, 1st tool comes down and crashes into arm before someone manages to hit the big red stop button.

Post mortum(attentive readers will have already worked out what happened)

My colleague<glares over the screen again> wrote his code and decided to use the 'robot start' command instead of the 'robot start and wait for the robot to finish' command

Needless to say the machine ran through its set of commands before my robot had even got as far as deciding to try putting the part in........... then it tried to put the part in.

Solution(H2SO4..... if only it was that easy....and I could get away with it........) I wrote ALL the robotic handling code from then on

This news

is rather like the story about bears shitting in the woods or the pope being a catholic.

A lifetime ago I was merrily earning an OU degree in computery stuff, and was applying for jobs with buzzwords such as concurrency, synchonised, Java, etc etc, because experience playing with robots/machine tools taught you all about programming concurrent applications (and the resulting bangs if you got it wrong)

Didn't get an answer....

However tweaked my CV to leave off DoB, skewls attended, and the first 10-15 yrs of work and magically I had people wanting to talk to me (not many).

The reason why companies want inexperienced younger staff is not about paying them less, or working them 100 hrs a day, its us older workers being able to see through the bullshit the PHBs come up with every day to try and justify their own employment/existence.

I used

to 'work' for the government... if we had any 'spare' time it was straight down the compressor house and into the little soundproof cabin built inside it... where the poker game took place.... we were government employees and hardly lightly to do anything as energetic as office chair racing ....

Although because we were young and owned 125 two stroke motorcycles... we did clear a racetrack among the machines one saturday.....

"And Boris is approaching the office bend now.. he got the racing line and on the brakes to snatch the lea and who opened the door..."

We only got caught because the smell of burned 2 stroke oil lingered until monday morning.......

After all these years

you'd think someone at m$ actually knew about the print service module and howto keep it upto date without borking it.

Then again, if the QC department hadn't of been fired to save money, m$ might have picked it up before the update got out............

Welcome to

my world.

Where major customers whine constantly about 'getting it made in China(or another outsourcing country)' because its cheaper. even after we've made the effort to reduce prices and increase productivity.

And then they do goto 'insert country here' and take ALL the work with them .. goodbye 3 shift system.. hello 1 shift with overtime (if you're lucky..P45 if not).

its right royal pita... especially where $multinational then calls you up and says "Can you make XXX part for us? 3000 per week as before oh and as a generous offer we'll knock 10% off the price we were paying before we dumped you"

Upon further enquiry , we found out that their new supplier could hit the production targets , but not the quality targets. so the counter offer went back offering 2 weeks development charge for us to rebuild the fixtures, grippers and recover the programming and then resume delivery at 25% more than we were charging before.

"WE CANT PAY THAT" came the answer...... "How much per hour does it cost to have your assembly line stopped?" we answered.

To be honest at that stage , we were gouging them, and we had enough work (just) to stay in business and didnt care if that deal came through or not.

And as the law of purchases says "Pick 2 of the following 3 options : Price, quality, delivery"

As exciting as the future

holds, please remember that if in 1982 you told people that you could have a handheld gadget that allowed you to talk to nearly every person on the planet, and contained the sum total of human knowledge that you only had to ask a question about and it would be presented to you, they would never of believed you .....especially the bit where 99.9% of users used it to watch cat videos and call each other rude names.

Having worked

for our MOD here on various projects

I can quite believe this tale.

Build your

own Z80 based computer AND have CPM free to use.... wwwwwwwwoooooooohhoooooooo

"Spriggins... get the jalopey out, we're off to visit that purvayor of all things electrical .. Maplins"

Wheres the proper ancient history icon?

The

more you tighten your grip, the more VPNs will slip through your fingers

Are

the indicators on subscription too? or are they still permanently on 'MOT test detection mode only' still?

Also I didn't know that the beam setting could be changed on a BMW, I though 'high beam' was it (along with 'rear fog lights all the time' too)

Translation needed

Quote:

"Meta also decided to leave some jobs unfilled, its hope being that those who actually belonged at the Silicon Valley goliath would rise to meet the challenge of taking on other people's responsibilities."

We have decided to make you work 2 jobs... your own and someone else's after they were fired for poor performance, please remember that if you perform poorly in either job , you'll be fired too........... oh and theres no pay increase for you covering for 2 people.

Another old

conversation

IT bod : the disk is failing, bad sectors everywhere, only a matter of time before it dies

manglement: It still runs

IT bod : look , just schedule an engineer to come out , do a backup and swap the failing drive over for a good one, it take 2 hrs

Manglement : costs too much, server/computer/industrial plant needed.. cant afford down time.

IT bod : look just let me.

Manglement : Nope nope nope nope not listening !

<Drive dies 4 days later

manglement : WHADDYA MEAN ITS GOING TO TAKE 3 DAYS TO GET AN ENGINEER IN ? FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT ....... etc etc etc

If you've not had the above played out in front of you, are you even a real IT bod ?

If there's

the money for a 30% raise for the boss, theres the money for a 30% raise for the rest of the staff

Otherwise we're going to be at the old gag of

Boss brings new super sports car to work, everyone gathers around it going 'coo'

And the boss says "If you lot work hard and get the deliveries done on time with no mistakes , I can have another new car next year"

Boris

"And when my boss did that with his new porche, I fetched the broom handle of doom and banged on the inside of the factory roof forcing all the seagulls to take off in fright and they always lighten their loads on take off...."

Wheres the birdshit icon ?

I hate my office

And want to work from home....... but it does have its rewards...like my crummy office chair with the blown gas cylinder inside that slowly drops you to the floor

However... a quick visit to the toolroom and some hot metal bashing later I have a collar that goes over the cylinder and holds the chair at the correct height.... only thing to remember is to sit down slowly because theres no 'give' in the chair anymore.

And then I have Tuesday off.. whoopee ... well a doctors visit anyway........ and my estwhile colleague opposite whos noticed my chair is no longer wonky, and his is, decides to swap the chairs over, and then finds out there are worse modications to an offfice chair than duct taping an airhorn to it......

Hes been off for 3 days now with a 'bad back'

The war goes on

I can see this working

Log into a website... lets call it "The register .com " supply your credit card number, name and address to prove you are an adult.

Now you're free to post whatever comment you like..

Right upto the point where the PFY misconfigures the database holding all our details and the hackers make off with a copy of all of it... new credit cards all round plus time+expense of canceling etc etc.

Now rinse and repeat for every site you goto.. and now its a great tracking device for anyone..... looked up abortion websites, registered with one... went to California on a pre booked appointment... now law enforcement in your 19th century state can go "Ohhhhhhh lets throw her in prison too" after they issue a warrent because after all planned parenthood works in their state too......

"Lets protect the children" should be banned as a phrase because it means nothing of the sort...

Anyway little 13 yr old Johnny borrowed his dad's credit card to make an account on pr0nhub.