panomaniac said:
Ha! Yes! That gave me a laugh.I spent several decades as a theater tech, lighting mostly. My father did too, and I learned from him. It has always amazed us how little electricians know about electricity. I was always surprised and pleased to find one who did know his stuff. But I mostly spent my time rewiring bad electrical installations. They don't call those guys "sparky" for nothing.
It's good to know that Ireland is no exception.
And pity the poor fellows who are the "Electricians" in major hotels. Ask for a heavy electrical connection in a hotel ballroom- then stand back and be amazed. It will take hours when it should take minutes, and it's sure to be done wrong. To be fair, most of these guys are just general maintenance, but they are the only ones authorized to tie into the system. Sparks and cuss words a-plenty are guaranteed.
This rings a bell too.
I recall in my roadie days, occasionally one would have the misfortune of having to set up on some municipal premises. This meant that some twerp from the "Caansil" had to be in charge and would want to go around earthing everything - presumably to ensure that there were plenty of earth loops. Grrrrrr.
Loads of arguments in trying to explain to this "jobsworth" how sound systems work and also that no, we didn't want to electrocute the band either.
In fact this is almost the exact opposite of what some of us have been complaining about, but another indication of the disease!
7N7
panomaniac said:
Ha! Yes! That gave me a laugh.
It's good to know that Ireland is no exception.
And pity the poor fellows who are the "Electricians" in major hotels. Ask for a heavy electrical connection in a hotel ballroom- then stand back and be amazed. It will take hours when it should take minutes, and it's sure to be done wrong. To be fair, most of these guys are just general maintenance, but they are the only ones authorized to tie into the system. Sparks and cuss words a-plenty are guaranteed.
Then you would understand a theatre lighting patch system, a couple of years ago I got 240 across my hand because some genius of an electrician wired two cct's in parallel (at the stage end). Think about what happens when you plug one of them in... The guy who did it couldn't see the problem.
I've just finished programming lighting for all the main public areas of a large hotel here. I noticed that the 3ph outlet in the ballroom (63A) can't actually have anything plugged into it because of the way it sits behind it's little trapdoor. As it stands it is utterly useless, and it's the only one in the room. Having said that I've worked in hotels in London that had 800A of 3ph temporary power available
ray moth: I know, old house wiring in Australia is horrendous, and that old insulation is rubber. You can imagine what a good Australian summer or 60 does to it. The scene has got an enormous amount better in the last 20 years though, particularly in the non-domestic world. Portable appliance safety has skyrocketed in the last few years also, and that's starting to leak over into what people are doing in their garages.
I can guarantee that the safety practices I saw in pro theatre here would get you shut down in a week in Australia. Australians are for some reason very paranoid about electrical safety these days, it's probably got something to do with the experiences of 50 years ago.
The training I had to do here, to get onto construction sites, spent a long time dismissing myths that said how you would survive bad electrical shocks by doing this that and the other (mostly the equivalent of hopping on one foot whilst touching your nose). I'd never heard of most of them but apparently a lot of Irish believe in them.Having just had a go at the Irish, when the electricians here want to do good work, they do excellent work. I just wish they understood what was happening underneath the insulation, but that's not specific to Ireland.
The greengrocer's apostrophe...
Ah, but fortunately, most of the diatribes were correctly spelled. One exception, though (and I won't name names):
It's = it is
Its = possessive
Yes, I know possessives generally use apostrophes and have forms such as; "The council's waste." or "The husband's car," but we have "hers" and "its" and "theirs."
Oh, and could I rail against the apostrophe finding its way into plurals? Or, as some would say, "the apostrophe finding it's way into plural's?"
panomaniac said:
Ah, but fortunately, most of the diatribes were correctly spelled. One exception, though (and I won't name names):
It's = it is
Its = possessive
Yes, I know possessives generally use apostrophes and have forms such as; "The council's waste." or "The husband's car," but we have "hers" and "its" and "theirs."
Oh, and could I rail against the apostrophe finding its way into plurals? Or, as some would say, "the apostrophe finding it's way into plural's?"
This one may be universal. I guess that it's common enough to be a problem but obscure enough not to get the attention it needs.panomaniac said:
The default install is US English so unless you install it yourself....G.Kleinschmidt said:
you may find yourself thinking of sleep when you put tyres on your car
G.Kleinschmidt said:
Sounds good to me. Seriously, even when told about UK English, M$ Word keeps on offering apostrophes when faced with the plural of a word it hasn't seen before. I think the whole apostrophe fiasco can be laid firmly at their door.
And as for the, "This page intentionally left blank," that makes me want to scream.
anatech said:
I used to run a manual writing and publishing service for a big corp.
We had a rule that all new chapters should start on a facing (right-hand) page. Not so wild really.
On those ocasions where chapter n-1 ended on a facing page it was necessary to insert a blank left hand page ....
Then we got the calls .... " Page "y" is blank, can I have another copy..."
How to win?
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