Posts by Anonymous Custard 2797 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
Ah yes, dear old hire-purchase (aka "the tick" or "the never-never"), where you rented it long enough that you then owned it after the given period of time.
Said period of time of course being slightly less (by a matter of nanoseconds) than it took for it was either become redundant, broken or in such a general state of repair that the vendor wouldn't want it back anyway.
1 percent inspiration, 99 percent plagiarism – that's my motto.
You are the Great Lobachevsky and I claim my £5.
The inevitable TP quote here, from Thief of Time:
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
And of course, the thing should have been put in the cellar lavatory, without lights or stairs, in a locked filing cabinet and the signage reading "Beware of the Leopard.”
Best of British and a Friday pint to all...
With all this, I've now got a Yes Minister scene from "Doing the Honours" stuck in my brain.
Quote below, courtesy of IMDB.
[talking about honours and the abbreviations of the Order of St Michael and St George: CMG, KCMG and GCMG]
Bernard Woolley : Of course in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.
James Hacker : What does GCMG stand for?
Bernard Woolley : God Calls Me God.
I was going to point out that NASA is American, and they did their Brexit (ie declaring independence from Britain) about 250 years ago, give or take a few.
So all this new-fangled metric stuff doesn't feature so much, at least in distance measurements.
There have been attempts by them (NASA) to swap, but it didn't go so well...
This sounds like one of those broken arrow situations where you're not sure whether it would be more reassuring that they had something ready to fix up a major issue like this, or to be worried that they thought it likely enough to happen that they needed such a preparation in place...
Icon for where the original dilemma came from.
Always be polite to security guards and techs
I've said this here before, but my personal mantra is that, but also include secretaries as well.
Those three are the holy trinity, if you get on good terms with them then you can get anything done anywhere. Managers may think they run the place, but almost always it's the secretaries that run the managers...
Sadly the martian atmosphere is almost certainly much too thin for that to be effective. Even to remove dust from solar panels, let alone more deeply from around wheels. Especially given most of it is stuck electrostatically, at least on the panels.
Nice though it certainly would be to get some of the dust-covered rovers back up and running.
Maybe the next Mars 'copter should be equipped with a telescopic feather duster attachment below it...?
I followed the original flights of this beauty with great interest, but then everything went a bit quiet.
Was thinking that it had done it's thing and had been abandoned, so very happy to hear it's still up and flying and doing sterling science work.
Certainly several boffin beers to all involved!
One of my regional engineers was bought a rubber keyboard (one of the portable roll-up jobs) for that very reason.
She used to have very long nails, and that combined with her mechanical keyboard drove everyone else in the office nuts. Personally I couldn't comment as I worked in another timezone, but she took it in good grace and the squishboard is still in the office today (although the lady herself has long since departed to one of our customers).
I remember back in the uni days (decades ago now) when working on the uni student newspaper (using Mac's and QuarkXpress) when we discovered that all the sounds were customisable and that you could actually record your own.
Me and the then editor were playing around with it and he recorded "Don't do that!" in his most ominous and scary voice as the error "ping".
Then just left it for all the other writers etc to type their articles into the machines, and the looks on some of their faces when they triggered the warning sound was priceless.
All good fun, and said editor went on to be an MP and junior cabinet minister at one point, which may explain a lot (hi Jez!).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
