That tree art hit the east coast of USA about four years ago. It does keep the kids engaged.
jn
Depends on if you sit on the porcelain chair during the meeting.
I have faced a large hairy bare belly on screen for a 9AM meeting once.
Check your cameras before connecting please.
How did we get onto The Adventures of TinTin?
Anyway, the Adventures of system7 yesterday was a trip to the splendid Portsmouth Central Library.
The delightful Librarian was unable to locate "TinTin in Tibet" for me, but said the Children's section had many other Adventures.
Alas, not a sausage, as we say. Turns out they are all out at the moment. All Ten!
Had to put my hand in my pocket at the local "Waterstones" bookshop who had a copy of "TinTin in Tibet". A mere £7.99 for this masterpiece.
Can you spot Snowy?
Yeti tracks were scary enough. But I had to stop reading when Captain Haddock fell off a precipice. "Great Snakes!", as TinTin is prone to exclaim. I was scared. But plucked up my courage and finished it this morning.
No real spoiler that Snowy saved the day again. It was very exciting.
I shall donate the book to the Library. Everyone should read this. 😎
Anyway, the Adventures of system7 yesterday was a trip to the splendid Portsmouth Central Library.
The delightful Librarian was unable to locate "TinTin in Tibet" for me, but said the Children's section had many other Adventures.
Alas, not a sausage, as we say. Turns out they are all out at the moment. All Ten!
Had to put my hand in my pocket at the local "Waterstones" bookshop who had a copy of "TinTin in Tibet". A mere £7.99 for this masterpiece.
Can you spot Snowy?
Yeti tracks were scary enough. But I had to stop reading when Captain Haddock fell off a precipice. "Great Snakes!", as TinTin is prone to exclaim. I was scared. But plucked up my courage and finished it this morning.
No real spoiler that Snowy saved the day again. It was very exciting.
I shall donate the book to the Library. Everyone should read this. 😎
Some people are well known in their place of employment and after 41 years of working in the same place many knew who I was. Most knew me for being willing to try almost anything once, blowing stuff up of course, and other similar antics (ever freeze an apple in liquid nitrogen then hit it with a hammer, "erase" a UV Eprom with a 200 watt laser or an X-ray machine). There was however one simple incident that remained associated with me for at least 10 years.
I worked in the product design team that was developing a state of the art two way radio for public safety (police, fire...) use back in the early 1990's. Since we made two way radios in house, and we were all essentially beta testers nearly every employee in engineering (several thousand at the time) carried a walkie talkie. Our radios had several modes, private call (a one to one conversation), group call ( a one to many, usually the entire department) and fleet call (all of engineering). Most calls were private, or group to address the required audience without disturbing everyone else. I had an idiot boss who did not know an ohm from a gigawatt, was quite impulsive, and had a general reputation for being an A$$. I was occupied one day when my radio squawked "Anderson I need you in my office NOW" to which I replied "I'm busy." This guy always did these kind of things using fleet call to demonstrate his dominance. A few seconds later he came back with some more demanding version of the same request including some profanity which I did not answer. The next transmission was his distorted voice (from yelling directly into the mic) screaming "Anderson, where are you." At this point I had finished my task, so I simply keyed the radio on a fleet call, held it in the bowl, and flushed. There were no further replies, but there was a good deal of cheer and laughter when I walked back into the department. The boss just had another of his stupid ideas to solve a technical issue which just demonstrated his lack of knowledge of basic electronics.
This would become the defining moment for which I was known around the Motorola plant for several years. It was also the catalyst that allowed me to escape that tyrant's rule and go work in an off campus think tank for a few years which was a neat learning experience. As soon as that way overdue project was completed, that boss was put in charge of a far lesser program, and eventually "encouraged" to leave the company.
I worked in the product design team that was developing a state of the art two way radio for public safety (police, fire...) use back in the early 1990's. Since we made two way radios in house, and we were all essentially beta testers nearly every employee in engineering (several thousand at the time) carried a walkie talkie. Our radios had several modes, private call (a one to one conversation), group call ( a one to many, usually the entire department) and fleet call (all of engineering). Most calls were private, or group to address the required audience without disturbing everyone else. I had an idiot boss who did not know an ohm from a gigawatt, was quite impulsive, and had a general reputation for being an A$$. I was occupied one day when my radio squawked "Anderson I need you in my office NOW" to which I replied "I'm busy." This guy always did these kind of things using fleet call to demonstrate his dominance. A few seconds later he came back with some more demanding version of the same request including some profanity which I did not answer. The next transmission was his distorted voice (from yelling directly into the mic) screaming "Anderson, where are you." At this point I had finished my task, so I simply keyed the radio on a fleet call, held it in the bowl, and flushed. There were no further replies, but there was a good deal of cheer and laughter when I walked back into the department. The boss just had another of his stupid ideas to solve a technical issue which just demonstrated his lack of knowledge of basic electronics.
This would become the defining moment for which I was known around the Motorola plant for several years. It was also the catalyst that allowed me to escape that tyrant's rule and go work in an off campus think tank for a few years which was a neat learning experience. As soon as that way overdue project was completed, that boss was put in charge of a far lesser program, and eventually "encouraged" to leave the company.
Someone had the bright idea of giving me a walkie talkie for work( in case I had and accident working alone and needed to communicate with someone that I was unconscious.... ) - little did they now how much of a fan of the Dukes of Hazzard I was; interestingly a nearby nursing home and nearby builders also used the same frequency, some very bemused builders received some calls from someone doing a very bad Daisy Duke impression.
During a recent morning zoom meeting a colleague’s wife walked into view in just a T shirt, it made the meeting much more interesting 😯
Zoom and others opened up a new world of communication that had not been widely used outside the corporate world until Covid came. We (Motorola) had been using video meetings for years, so it was not a new experience, but it was often amusing to spot someone's walkie talkie sitting on the table near the meeting controller in a conference room and subject them to world wide embarrassment by making rude noises or comments through their walkie talkie which were heard worldwide (we had IC chip design teams on 4 continents). All of our radios transmitted their unique ID on every transmission. The plant had its own trunking radio system in house and the system controller was local so anyone with access privileges could look at the logs to see who sent each transmission, so to protect the sender and invoke greater mystery one would use a cloned ID, usually one belonging to another person needing disrespect, say the boss mentioned above. I must mention that cloning ID's was not possible 😉
The Sparc workstation on my desk in the think tank had some great audio processing tools. It was fairly easy to grab someone's transmission from a walkie talkie, edit it a bit, then replay it through the radio network, or out of the speaker on any Sparc station on the Motorola network. this provided lots of fun until the UNIX / Solaris gurus figured out how to trace us.
Another excellent practical joke, grab a screen shot of someone's computer. Wait a day or two then turn that shot into a screen saver image and remotely install it to the unsuspecting user while he is out to lunch. When he returns it will appear that his last two days of work vanished. After the initial panic subsides and the user moves the mouse his work will be magically restored.
Another manager was often heard yelling Bull$#@t at the top of his volume range in the off campus think tank. Several people in the office were not amused, especially those who spent their day on the phone, so I captured a recording of this and created a DOS batch file to play this out of the speakers on his own PC every time he turned it on.
Yes, these were the days of 286 and 386 PCs, DOS and Windows 3.1 in a time when computer security wasn't an issue. Many people did not use lock screens or even log out when they left for the day so pranks were easy and common. One of my coworkers got on my PC and sent a "love letter" from my email to my bosses email (also male). Fortunately to myself and the boss it was an obvious prank, one that would be repaid over the years.....with interest.....compounded daily until a truce was called.
The Sparc workstation on my desk in the think tank had some great audio processing tools. It was fairly easy to grab someone's transmission from a walkie talkie, edit it a bit, then replay it through the radio network, or out of the speaker on any Sparc station on the Motorola network. this provided lots of fun until the UNIX / Solaris gurus figured out how to trace us.
Another excellent practical joke, grab a screen shot of someone's computer. Wait a day or two then turn that shot into a screen saver image and remotely install it to the unsuspecting user while he is out to lunch. When he returns it will appear that his last two days of work vanished. After the initial panic subsides and the user moves the mouse his work will be magically restored.
Another manager was often heard yelling Bull$#@t at the top of his volume range in the off campus think tank. Several people in the office were not amused, especially those who spent their day on the phone, so I captured a recording of this and created a DOS batch file to play this out of the speakers on his own PC every time he turned it on.
Yes, these were the days of 286 and 386 PCs, DOS and Windows 3.1 in a time when computer security wasn't an issue. Many people did not use lock screens or even log out when they left for the day so pranks were easy and common. One of my coworkers got on my PC and sent a "love letter" from my email to my bosses email (also male). Fortunately to myself and the boss it was an obvious prank, one that would be repaid over the years.....with interest.....compounded daily until a truce was called.
Back in grad school the sysadmins would occasionally play the “I am Locutus of Borg” Picard sound byte through every workstation in the entire Sparc station lab. Sometimes in the middle of the night when no one except the cleaning crew was there, sometimes when the lab was packed with students doing a last minute job on a major assignment due the next day. They put a stop to ME doing things like that when I loaded every single workstation up with Sonnet jobs that took all night to run - when the students piled in for one of those cramming sessions no one could get a thing done. Their jobs would run painfully slow or not at all. They actually had to extend the deadline on the project - which they NEVER did back in those days. You either did your damn assignment or you flunked.
You weren’t the one who wrote the “Your computer is now stoned” boot sector virus, WERE YOU??? It sounds like your kind of humor.
No, I did get Motorola to fund my two college degrees, one of which was in computer engineering, but I had already learned that I didn't want to write code for a living. Aside from a few scripts used in these practical jokes, all of my code writing was directed toward getting my hardware creations to do something useful.
The think tank operation was in Boca Raton Florida about 1/4 mile down the road from the huge (10K employees) IBM plant where the PC was born. Mot and IBM traded employees quite often, so I knew a few people at IBM too. IBM developed a neat operating system called OS2. Through some connections I became a beta tester for OS2 Warp3 and OS2 Warp4 Connect. It seems that I had a reputation among the beta test admins too. IBM, "You did what?" Me, "I put the printer (icon) into the shredder(icon) and it ate it. How do I get it back?" IBM. "Why would you do that?" Me, "To see what happens." There were other similar calls from me over 2 years. They took these seriously and fixed them. It turns out that this kind of stuff never happens in testing because engineers would not do that, but real customers do. I was a tester on nearly every phone we made for exactly this reason. Tes there was a clandestine test to find out what happens when a bullet passes through a cell phone containing a lithium battery. The results confirmed what was expected, and still today, a lithium battery is not recommended on a police radio.
OS2 was never really accepted into the corporate world, but it was never explicitly banned at Motorola, so In the days of Windows 95, I had my Motorola provided PC set up to boot W95, DOS with W3.2, OS2, and SUSE linux. OS2 Warp connect has an X windows manager option that let me get into the Motorola network and run stuff remotely on a Sparc 10, but display it on my PC. The HP guy really couldn't understand how I had MDS (their Microwave Design Software suite) "running" on a PC.
I remember the original walkie talkie...
Attachments
Yes, those early models had only one channel, no volume control, no "off" switch, no squelch control and rather irritating sound quality. They did however, have good battery life and would work continuously for many days without charging.