Word of the day
At least I can say I've learned a new word today - Taiga.
El Reg never ceases to educate. Now if only they'd tell us how they're going to fit the sharks into the satellites?
2789 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
One of our customers had that - even had nice "safety first" logo/motto lanyards which they were very proud of. At least until I pointed out to them that they lacked the little plastic safety clip that would break before their neck did if the thing did get caught in something.
Suffice it to say a swift withdrawal and rework ensued. And what did I get for this? Yes, they insisted I had one too...
The secret is to in turn nick the pens from hotel rooms when you stay there, so that there is a large buffer stock to keep the cycle ongoing.
And as for loo roll, most of the stuff isn't worth the effort as its so cheap, waffy and thin that you have to use 3-4x the amount you normally would folded together before you get something that you won't put your fingers through. Indeed it's become one of my judgement criteria for any workplace, hotel or other location you might need to spend an extended period of time in.
So the question is whether it's getting nicked, or people are just using it up significantly more quickly than at home because it's so thin and useless?
Forget all the fancy promises and pledges you may get, go look in the bog cubicle and see how much they really care for their staff/clientelle by the quality of the paper they provide. It's a surprisingly good yardstick for whether the place is worth having anything to do with...
"To call yourself 'plus-size' is just a euphemism for being fat. Life is much easier when you're thinner. Big is not beautiful, of course a job comes down to how you look."
So would that be similar to calling yourself a "public safety hazard" as a euphemism for being a brainless racist egotistical talentless publicity whore?
And boy does she need a womble or few going around after her to clear up all the shit she spouts...
It's the zen optimisation of percussive maintenance (ie knowing quite where to hit something to make it work).
Taken to the fine art extreme it's radiating enough zen of upcoming physical violence that you put the fear of Dabbs into them and they start working to avoid it? Of course same may also be applicable to the user as well, as a pleasant by-product?
Brings back memories of a rather special day at Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire a few years back.
It's a short distance from RAF Coningsby where the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight are based, and whilst I was up on the roof of the castle the flight took off and were doing some practice basically around the castle.
Quite stirring to see the planes from such an unusual viewpoint a hundred and something feet up in the air. And as for the noise up that close, absolutely magical...
Also reminds me of the induction/site orientation training for one of our customers (global multinational semiconductor manufacturer) who is very big on safety that I had a few years back. Up comes the various slides, unless the training lady gets to the one about LOTO (lock-out / tag-out).
I looks at this, and looks around the room to see if anyone else has spotted the issue. Apparently not, so I ask the trainer "what's actually wrong with that image?". She looks and ponders for a moment, then says she can't see anything. At this point I point out that her slide seems to show someone has actually managed to lock-out a breaker in the ON position rather than the OFF one (which I didn't think possible, but they seemed to have managed it). Cue her going white, before commenting that she's been using these slides for years and no-one has spotted that until now.
Had a colleague have to do the training recently and asked him to check that slide out for me. Seems that the image is still in it, but it's now a question posed of "what's wrong with this image" asked to the trainees...
The problem is that two mini-HDMI to full-HDMI dongles won't fit side by side, at least the standard ones that get shipped in the Pi Zero kits (the "solid block" type dongle).
The new cables aren't exactly expensive though, and there's always the cable-type dongles as well which probably would fit side-by-side into the new Pi4.
And there's a new FLIRC case especially for the Pi4, which is excellent to deal with the heat issue (as was the previous version one for the 3B/B+).
But if you don't reach out, will they be there?
Best presentation I ever saw at a conference was a reasonably long one relating to some scientific investigation/endeavour, and had a comic strip running long the bottom of it.
So slide to slide it was telling a story, and at the end the presenter simply asked "and I guess you all want to know how things finally concluded" and put up a totally blank slide except for the cartoon conclusion at the bottom, whilst verbally summarising the end results of the experimental investigation.
Surely you don't need the fridge anymore? How long does chicken take to defrost from 85K?
Somewhat longer than it would take to freeze methinks.
I can vouch for LN2 being an excellent way to instantly freeze ice-pops on warm summer days in the lab, from all too long ago back in my PhD student times. Never tried it with LHe, that was reserved for our magnet (a puny 6T one).
Oh and kudos to Katyanna for correctly knowing Kelvin is an absolute unit and not calling them degrees Kelvin.
I always thought that was Croydon.
At least that's where all my Japanese ex-pat colleagues used to live (my employer is a Japanese company).
Still the Cannon place is a nice spot, on the lower end of Reigate Hill, so I'm sure they can sell it off for a tidy packet to some developer for yet more tiny identikit boxes they laughingly call apartments and homes around here.
Nah, in a vacuum everyone knows you can only use spherical cows.
Yup. I work for the European arm of a Japanese company, so am over there occasionally and one of the real joys is travelling on the Shinkansen.
It's also something of an experience when you're stood on the platform and one that isn't stopping passes through at speed. The noise and pressure wave are "interesting", although they do display warnings in both Japanese and English on the notice display boards that a non-stopper is coming through because of it. Suffice it to say they're neither quiet nor subtle...
You can literally set your watch by them, the tickets give you both carriage and seat number for reservations, and at the stations they even have little marks on the platform to show you where to stand and the train pulls up exactly to them every time. It's wonderful - even a dumb Gaijin like me can do it.
But it's other little things like the way the conductor (who they always have) will bow to the carriage both when he/she enters and leaves it. Plus the way that the things are cleaned at the end of every journey (not every day), and are generally spotless anyway.
The only downside is when I have to come back to the UK and use trains here afterwards...
Just what I was about to point out. Beancounters and HR have control over salaries/expenses and contracts/actual employment respectively, so giving them leverage over anyone and everyone.
You may hate them, but in the end you personally need them, or at least their (supposed) function...
I'm actually quite surprised that the marketing bods cared at all.
From personal experience it's normally sales/marketting that make all the promises, and then the field engineers get the "joy" of keeping those promises and getting the damn thing to work and to meet whatever lofty ideal the customer wants and the sales drone has blindly agreed to. By that point everyone else has moved on to the next pitch, and it's the engineers problem to deliver the impossible.
This is of course coupled with the promises for 24/7 support and for man-on-site start-up commitment, usually without actually asking or even informing us up-front. We only know about it once the deal is sealed and it drops into our laps. And as we're engineers we seem to be assumed to have inifinite manpower available, and teleportation devices to hand so we can support multiple sites in multiple countries all at once.
It's also coupled with a "lean and efficient" manpower structure which would be better described as a skeleton staff. And we hire 3rd party engineers as it's a "cyclical industry", despite the fact we've had record breaking years for the last few, and we don't have enough people to cover what we have to do, let alone all the new stuff we're supposed to be getting into. So we're basically merrily training recruitment companies staff...