Re: Well that's embarrassing
Sort of like Edmund Blackadder's piss-up invite list, when Percy says "Oh, and Lord and Lady Whiteadder, of course".
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Never mind. Reminisce about the bad old days.
Tee-hee. Here in New York they mount suburban speed signs on what looks like really naff Dexion. In high winds the signs rapidly twist and turn from side to side like a twisty-turny thing.
I wonder how *that* plays inside the mighty brain of the Tesla.
When I took *my* test you could fail for doing a handbrake start instead of a proper hill start.
Once you had your license you could start saving your clutch, not before. The instructor had to see the handbrake come off, then you do the mirrors, look signal thing, *then* pull out without the car moving backwards an inch or creeping forwards until the signal was out.
As a matter of safety one shouldn't have the car declutched, in gear and on the footbrake while at lights. One rear-ending and you are screeching into traffic (in every sense of the word), probably also demonstrating the Kangaroo Hop all instructors are familiar with.
Holding the clutch down for extended periods also leads to early failure of the thrust bearing of course, which leads to sudden onset cash starvation.
Which is why I, now in New York (land of the stop-go rush hour freeway parking lot) drive only automatics. Stick the bugger in gear and ride the footbrake until the road opens up, then it's cruise control city, baby.
Did the sub-prime mortgage fiasco not teach you guys anything?
If America's economy goes into the garbage disposal, it drags everyone else with it.
America is a great country at its best, but when it sucks it sucks hard.
And for all the thumbing down, the observant person will note no Youtube link or even a text link to a firsthand account of this happening has been posted.
The only reference I could find was in I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein and that is a secondhand hearsay account of something a technician said to clear a room in a science fiction story, *not* a report of actual trouser ripping in an actual lab.
More to the point, I've operated an NMR machine, and written of that here before.
The (ferrous) retort stand claws required no heroic measures to remove, just one waggish lab tech.
I stand by my disbelief in this magic Key-Ring Attractor of Trouser Destruction.
Keys not ferrous, as I said before.
Non-ferrous metals can be affected by the magnetic field, but usually the problem is the heating from induced currents and the radio emissions in MRI machines.
Wearing a key ring in the pocket while working an NMR machine (different beast, similar technology) would be, in my opinion, no risk to trouser material but likely ruinous to the spectrum being prepared.
Said by lab technicians no doubt.
Unless your keys are made of steel (quite rare I imagine) I'd have to slap a big "DISBELIEVE" on this bit of folklore.
They *might* cause mayhem in the spectrum as you swanned around the instrument tweeking veeblefetzers and adjusting the grunewallop. Depends on the instrument and how old it was.
I have only one hing to say about all your tales of woe: BORING!
Not one tale included the phrase "flames shot out".
What a sad day in I.T. In my day magic smoke was accompanied by gouts of mundane flame, or it didn't count. You'd be laughed out of the lounge bar of the Brewer's Elbow if you said "A bit of smoke came out and that was that" over a Friday lunchtime pint.
And as for these reports of otherwise completely ignorable "noises", well, I don't know where to start.
Don't know you're born. Fought two wars. Rationing. Mafeking. Etc.
*grumblegrumblegrumble*
Well you got your dead cat and you got your dead dog
In the middle of the night you got your dead toad-frog
You got your dead rabbit and your dead raccoon
The blood and the guts are gonna make you swoon
You gocha dead skunk in the middle of the road ... &c.
I like Access a lot. I developed a scad of single-user niftiness using Access 97 and prototyped a megascad more for porting to a network-capable database.
I think when all is said and done, MS Access is like any other complex piece of software; if it starts showing odd behaviour or odd results it is a pretty good indicator it isn't being used within its designer's specification.
My personal fave was a system I wrote to fill time and track a code-conversion project I was budgeted to take six months on but actually spent one afternoon writing some SSG (call is perl for Unisys mainframe) and automated the thing so it all ran in less than an hour. Because the worthless bag of smell in charge hadn't requested disc quota, the results all got deleted, so I was forced to run the automation again. And again. I tracked all this on an Access database I wrote, as I said, just to have something interesting to do.
WBOS mused that it was a pity we had no way of knowing how far along the project was in terms of converted code. I disappeared for about an hour and provided him with a report of exactly what he asked for (a byproduct of mi'Access database). He bemoaned the fact that to be useful it would have to be grouped by one of the subordinate data items. I took the report away for about 30 minutes and brought it back the way he had wished, sighing theatrically, for.
After that he didn't ask me for anything else. I think I genuinely frightened him with mi'powers.
Best blade on the swiss army knife? Getting a full command of the combo box events. You can make absolutely gobsmacking proof of concept stuff once you've mastered that little trick.
Of course any sensible tech support manager would have run the tape systems in parallel for at least 4 weeks gradually migrating processes to the new devices.
But this was a government site, wasn't it?
Government sites don't tend to have the kind of provisioning that allow for this extravagant style of migration. Either there isn't enough floor space or there aren't enough power outlets or the contracts aren't funded to overlap in that way.
Been there, done that.
According to NPR the Boeing simulator wasn't much better than the actual aircraft.
From comments inside Boeing during the build, experienced pilots reported crashing in the simulator "the first few times" a landing was attempted in the MAX.
And Boeing *still* recommended to airlines that no simulator time was needed.
Anyone who has chortled through an EE "Doc" Smith epic should look for these two Harry Harrison works:
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (novel)
Space Rats of the CCC (short story)
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers takes the framework of Skylark, sorta*, and tweaks the nose of just about every famous SF book available around '71. Space Rats of the CCC is just a delight from start to end. All written in the extreme hyperbole-riddled style of the Doc and side-splittingly funny. I'm laughing now just at the memory of some of the scenes from each.
* - The spacecraft is a jumbo jet, and the FTL is courtesy of a chunk of irradiated cheddar - the Cheddite Projector.
The Gods Themselves contains a rape scene that takes place between "married" non-human aliens that is entirely non-titilating, hinging as it does on a (probably over-explained for some) mechanism of reproduction that has no equivalent in human terms, and that entirely outraged me on the victim's behalf.
Asimov's work may not age well sometimes, but even in the 1980s he retained the power of imagination to come up with an astounding and disturbing idea, and the ability to write it up in an effective manner.
I found some of TGT to be tediously written, and it took some effort to get into the story because of that same effect others have noted - my tastes have changed over the years of reading SF since the heady days of finding "I Robot" and "Foundation" in the Panther edition circa 1970.
But the ideas in the story are astounding. Nip down your local library and try it out for yourself.
Why not share the joy of a science fair I once took part in?
Wire wrap? Wire wrap?
Y'soft southern jessie!
We 'ad t' use crocodile clips fabricated from spring clothes pegs wi' drawing pins stuck in t'ends, an' edge contacts were old straightened paper clips nailed t' circuit ends. Chassis voltage were 3kv DC on account o' t' valves. Every time one changed t' zero, paper clip 'ad t' be unclipped, an' the arcing an' screamin' and catchin' fire were summat awful.
But it were better than workin' up at mill.
Actually, John , the speed limits in most urban and suburban locations hereabouts are designed - from data captured by those suspicious-looking cables "they" sometimes stretch over the road - with the goal of ensuring a given amount of revenue from speeding tickets.
'Round here the "magic number" is 65%. That is: after measurement, the speed limit is set at the average which 65% of the local traffic moves at in that place. I'd bet time of day plays a part too, but cannot confirm that rush-hour is a favourite sampling point.
So in point of fact, at least in my locale, speed limits are *not* a limit, they are a threshold for end/beginning of month revenue generation.