Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"

[GwenOnBass]

A cold beer and a plate of olives is the first draw after work in Milan. From there everyone goes home until about 10 pm when we all meet for dinner. La dolce vita. (Except for, you know, the work in the daytime!)

 

[SoulReflection]

People so eat the seeds. They can wreak havoc with the digestion. I eat them over the kitchen sink or outside. Never wear a white shirt.

On to olive pits, you can’t swallow them. You are allowed to remove them with your fingers and place them on a provided dish. But there is no way to do this without people staring at your pits.

Put them in your pocket.

 

[beans-on-toast]

Put them in your pocket.

Or someone’s purse. Maybe your cat would like them.

 

[beans-on-toast]

A cold beer and a plate of olives is the first draw after work in Milan. From there everyone goes home until about 10 pm when we all meet for dinner. La dolce vita. (Except for, you know, the work in the daytime!)

Italy saw a 57% drop in the olive harvest last year due to bad weather. Upsetting the folks there.

 

[Jeff Scott]

I'm feeling really "Lazy" right now, so:



The bassist, Nathan Peck, is a TB member.

 

[notJaco]

I'm feeling really "Lazy" right now, so:



The bassist, Nathan Peck, is a TB member.

OMG, did he stick his bass in the pool?

 

[beans-on-toast]

I'm feeling really "Lazy" right now, so:



The bassist, Nathan Peck, is a TB member.

Iridium is a hard brittle metal. I was expecting a trash metal band. One of it’s uses is a hardening alloy in platinum. They use it in fountain pen tips.

 

[Fat Freddy]

"I'm going to send you to a home for girls!"

and cross posting because it is too yummy not to share (and made it twice)
Crème fraîche, pomegranate, pear, and panettone

View attachment 4107443​

Parrot food.....

 

[Deleted member 268085]

A cold beer and a plate of olives is the first draw after work in Milan. From there everyone goes home until about 10 pm when we all meet for dinner. La dolce vita. (Except for, you know, the work in the daytime!)

Or tapas and a caña (0.1L beer) in Spain (pintxos and a caña in Bilbao).

Country roads, take me home
To the place...where I can get some decent food!

 

[G-Dog]

I'm feeling really "Lazy" right now, so:



The bassist, Nathan Peck, is a TB member.

Iridium is a hard brittle metal. I was expecting a trash metal band. One of it’s uses is a hardening alloy in platinum. They use it in fountain pen tips.

I think of the Iridium as the place that Les Paul held court around the turn of the century.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=les+paul+at+the+iridium​

Now that's the way to retire, if you can swing it!
.

 

[beans-on-toast]

I didn’t connect it with THAT club.

Iridium is also a satellite communications network for SATCOMM phones and data. It allows phones to work anywhere on earth.

 

[Deleted member 268085]

I didn’t connect it with THAT club.

Iridium is also a satellite communications network for SATCOM phones and data. It allows phones to work anywhere on earth.

I worked for the mothership (Motorola) when Iridium was being deployed. Got to tour the satellite assembly facility. There was some truly groundbreaking engineering going on. But there was no real marketing plan. Build it and they will come. Except. No, Iridium phones did NOT work anywhere on earth. Not inside. Not in a car. So, not a cell phone replacement for international worker bees, like I was. Too bad. I had to carry 3 phones (U.S., Korea, Europe/Asia).

But the tech! Wow. I thought pretty highly of my engineering skills, but I was IMPRESSED. The trick was making the satellite constellation look like a standard PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). That allowed them to use off-the-shelf PSTN gear. F'ing brilliant, that black box was (one at each earth station). Oh. And they were able to assemble a satellite in 30 days, in a horizontal position. NASA insisted that over 220 days were required, and that it had to be assembled in launch (vertical) position. Wrongo!

Unfortunately, Iridium was just another nail in the coffin for the original Motorola.

At least my pension is with the remaining piece of the original company (public safety and military/space comms). Those checks ain't never gonna bounce!

 

[GwenOnBass]

It's often said DEC couldn't market a cure for death, and I found this to be true.

 

[Deleted member 268085]

It's often said DEC couldn't market a cure for death, and I found this to be true.

Boy, howdy! Lots of examples, but the Rainbow PC takes the cake. I forgot that this was CP/M based, and not MS-DOS. Rainbows are for leprechauns.

 

[G-Dog]

Boy, howdy! Lots of examples, but the Rainbow PC takes the cake. I forgot that this was CP/M based, and not MS-DOS. Rainbows are for leprechauns.

When our Assistant Chief Design Engineer, The most technically astute guy at my first engineering job, bought himself one of these at home and started BASIC programming finite element analysis of designs the pressure was on for other ambitious engineers to do likewise.

Luckily for me, a few years later every Chief Discipline Engineer was issued one of these and encouraged to share with their subordinates. The Chiefs were all older, set in their ways, uninterested guys so a few interested subordinates had a feeding frenzy! I teamed with a guy who lived one block from me and we shared as many weekends as we could each sign up for. Yeah, that's just two 360K floppies.

The first one of these I got onto, with a whopping 10 megabyte hard drive, I ended up accidentally reformatting that HD with all the Machine Shop's productivity reports on it! I thought I was gonna be looking for a new job. The IT Department's attempt to "undelete" the data failed and they replaced the machine with a 20meg drive and color monitor and all upgraded software. Luckily for me the secretary, who had been running the reports, had diligently backed up to floppy disks, which I restored and eventually even streamlined for her to continue more easily than before!

​

By the time I surreptitiously replaced my office's 286 with a 386 motherboard and started running DesqView 386 for true multitasking (before Windows' task switching) most everyone thought I worked for IT and constantly asked me all those questions where the first reply is always "Have you tried rebooting the PC?"

.​

 

[GwenOnBass]

The little girl who inspired the Invalid Link Removed is likely our age today.

 

[beans-on-toast]

I worked for the mothership (Motorola) when Iridium was being deployed. Got to tour the satellite assembly facility. There was some truly groundbreaking engineering going on. But there was no real marketing plan. Build it and they will come. Except. No, Iridium phones did NOT work anywhere on earth. Not inside. Not in a car. So, not a cell phone replacement for international worker bees, like I was. Too bad. I had to carry 3 phones (U.S., Korea, Europe/Asia).

But the tech! Wow. I thought pretty highly of my engineering skills, but I was IMPRESSED. The trick was making the satellite constellation look like a standard PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). That allowed them to use off-the-shelf PSTN gear. F'ing brilliant, that black box was (one at each earth station). Oh. And they were able to assemble a satellite in 30 days, in a horizontal position. NASA insisted that over 220 days were required, and that it had to be assembled in launch (vertical) position. Wrongo!

Unfortunately, Iridium was just another nail in the coffin for the original Motorola.

At least my pension is with the remaining piece of the original company (public safety and military/space comms). Those checks ain't never gonna bounce!

Well, you do need a clear view of the sky. Iridium is still popular these days. Even mobile robots that people build use it. The connection to the network cost’s around $15USD per month. Only pay when you use it.

RockBLOCK Mk2 - Iridium SatComm Module - WRL-13745 - SparkFun Electronics

 

[beans-on-toast]

Have you tried rebooting the PC?" ​

IT people still want to reboot the servers at the first whiff of any problems.​

 

[SoulReflection]

IT people still want to reboot the servers at the first whiff of any problems.​

Alas, the birth of the expression "when in doubt, reboot". Something that has served me well over the years...

 

[GwenOnBass]

Once there was a kind of server ... and not seen in these worlds in a long time ... with eight toggles on the front face. Toggling all eight with both index fingers forced a soft reboot, as is sometimes necessary.

And witness to a senior engineer who, with both index fingers below the toggles as he looks left, then right, says quietly to nobody
anybody on the system?
click click

Faces at the computer room door
"The system's down"
It's fixed.

And in truth, it was.
Magic.