Bolderdash.....Hey Njoy, your not gonna get out of mowing the lawn that easilXD My husband and i were doing a little shopping on Saturday when we started joking abou the new lamp we were buying, if it's the end of the world why are we buying new stuff? Gimme a break already!
Did anyone see the goofs on TV running around with their banners and totally convinced they were all gonna croak on Saturday? I was hesitating whether or not to pay my bills Friday night....Just kidding!
Wait...there's another big one supposedly coming in 2012, December 21st. If that's the case i can really save some money at Christmas. So now i will wait until the 22nd to shop for the holidays, and then everything will be all picked over. Christmas will suck...... How do i tell the little grandkids that grama didn't get you a thing cuz the end of the world was supposed to come, so i decided not to shop? Remember the War of the Worlds when people were actually killing themselves because they thought they were all going to die a horrible death?
So Njoy.....keep mowing that lawn.
Hey Beeb, the weatherman says it's going to be sunny on Thursday, so if you want me to mow the lawn you're gonna have to come over here with your spurs and cowboy hat and make me, cause I'm going riding in my railcar.
I just realized I saved all of you Saturday night, just before 6 o'clock. The butter wasn't melting on my green beans and carrots so I popped the plate in the microwave and the microwave died. So MY microwave absorbed all the end of the world energy and it died for all of us. Now I'm going to have to build a shrine to put it on so you can all worship it's dead carcass.
Or ------ maybe I'll just fix it so I can heat up my lunch today. I have a whole shelf full of parts left over from the days when we actually used to repair such things.
About that Mayan calendar thing. The reason it only goes to 2012 is because that's where the calendar makers were when the Spaniards broke in and killed them.
The storm ruins your pots nikols? Where are you, Joplin?
nikols you reminded me about the rubber date stamps we used to use years ago. They never went more than 5 or 6 years from the date you bought them but I never heard anyone expecting it to be the end of the world on 12-31-59 just because it didn't go up to 1960.
Females in technical jobs? The only reason they don't is because they can make more money elsewhere. In the early 70s I was managing a TV repair shop with 9 technicians. At the local diner there was a new waitress who had come here from Scotland. I found out she was a TV tech and I tried to get her to come to work for us but she was making about twice what I could pay her, as a waitress.
By 2000 when my TV shop was not even making minimum wage for me any longer, there was a fiber optic undersea transmission company that set up a plant in town and I went to work for them. They were paying me 4 times what I was able to make fixing TVs. Five times, if I included the value of the health insurance they paid for me. There were 30 of us in the first orientation class, where they taught us all about how they put data onto a beam of light and send it through a glass wire to the other side of the world. Most of us technicians were trained in radio frequency transmission and there was one particular term they were using that didn't correlate correctly between the two types of modulation. The classes were an hour long, all being taught by their engineers and it was a 2 month training program. I kept asking how to compare the two but never got a satisfactory answer until a stunningly attractive female engineer came in to give one of the classes. She had designed the FEC module in their system and told me the way the fiber optic industry was using the term was actually incorrect and she explained what it really was. The engineer who taught us proper handling of the fiber cable and how to splice it was also a female. She became my "huggie bear" but that's another story.
We had a lot of female technicians, engineers and supervisors. During the orientation classes the girl who sat next to me most of the time was a supervisor who came from the navy. She had been on the crew of the floating dry dock that brought the USS Cole home after the bombing. One of the female techs I worked with had spent 12 years in the air force and was a great technician. I ended up assigned to the FEC work cell on the second shift where we had a terrific assembler. My partner and I held the record for the number of FEC units tested and passed on a single shift and we could never have done it without her. We could almost guarantee any unit she assembled would pass on the first testing unless it had a defective circuit board which certainly wasn't her fault. FEC stands for Forward Error Correction. It's a method of correecting data errors ---- before they happen, which is really interesting.
The stuff I'm typing right now is probably getting to you through some of the equipment I tested. We had undersea cables all over the world and our processing equipment was at the end of many of those cables where they came ashore. We installed it on our own cables and sold it to other companies who were in the same business.
When we finished up that part of the contract I went to "systems test" to set up and test the final product as configured for the customer's requirements. One time we had a problem that required the attention of the engineer in charge of the section. SHE came over and checked it out and gave her approval, then she looked at me and said: "I know you, you used to fix my mother's TV". I did remember her, as the young teenage girl who was watching me at one of my customer's homes. That wasn't as bad as the time I got an email from someone in human relations asking if I had a used TV she could use for her kids games. I asked her how she knew to ask me for that because I didn't know her. She said she used to watch me fix her grand father's TV. Now that just plain makes you feel ancient. I have plenty of "old" stories from when I worked there.
Njoy, you reminded me of mu mom's stories - she was a midwife for 20 years, so you could imagine how many people still remember her - even the kids (that are now older than me). But also, the thing about having a small business like you did with repair shop, those things are pretty much died off and you know, I like that type of service that you get when you have your regular grocery store, hair saloon - no matter how pathetic it may sound, but those places where people actually know you and care about you.But how do you correct errors before they happen?
nikols, it was very nice to have the personal interaction with everyone and that's the main reason I liked it. I began at the age 12 in the local TV shop and came back there 10 years later after getting my formal training. At that time I could have made twice the money if I'd gone to industry and I would have had health insurance and sick pay and vacation time but I gave those up because I really enjoyed fixing something for people who appreciated it. In the 60s a color TV needed to be repaired twice a year so I was in everybody's house quite often and they certainly got to know me. There's something about looking at a smiling face as you walk out the door that just can't be accounted for in dollars.
We used to have several family owned grocery stores in town. When the old lady who lived a mile away needed groceries she called in her order and the owner would put it in his car and deliver it on his way home at night. Otherwise she had no way to get her food. I had people who called about a problem with their TV that I could never find. It would be working fine while I was there but as I was leaving the old guy/lady would ask me if I would brush the snow off their car so they could go out. I was a quick learner so after about the third or fourth snowstorm I figured out that the TV only acted up when it snowed.
The error thing is really cool. Think of the words on a page as a string of data like a line of type. Then chop it up into millions of tiny pieces and scramble them all up in a way that allows you to unscramble them by reversing the procedure so you can see the line of words again.
Now, you send the data while it is scrambled, so think of that as a piece of string and cut a small section out of it and throw it away. What was on the piece you threw away was not any one single letter or word or series of words because it was all scrambled so it's just bits of any one letter out of the whole original string. When you unscramble it and put it back together what you find missing is a single ink dot here and there. So if you have a "t" with the tip of the cross bar missing, you still know it's a "t". When you put that into digital format it's either a "1" or a "0" that's missing. If the rest of the bar is all "1"s you know the missing thing has to be a "1" so you put a "1" in there before sending the data out.
And that's what they call Forward Error Correction.