Early Risers.

[polybear]

In other news.....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-58818291

Good to see it's probably going to a good - and very appropriate - home.

 

Bear is still waiting for Hermes to collect two parcels - and I'll be off to college before too much longer....

Turdycurses

 

The wall unit has now been sorted and china/glassware items sorted into "definitely keep" & "dispose piles" - some research will be required on the latter to check on values, if any, before sending off to the charity shop.  The "def. keep" pile is a little larger than I'd like - but I wouldn't like to part with those items.

[polybear]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-58826986

 

[NGT6 1315]

E'ning awl. Almost made it to the weekend!

 

I've been attending the first week of courses in Gotha, which meant getting up around 0330 am to catch the early ICE. Getting up that early I can do without, but at least I can doze a bit for the hour on the train. Everything went without a hitch so far!

It's a bit of a pity that we have courses only one week per quarter, so the next block will be in December. Many of the instructors are actually experienced on the railways (the head instructor is still a fully qualified train driver, for example), which I think can only be a good thing so as to not lose touch with what it's like in the trenches, so to say.

 

I think dinner'll be ready in a few, so, ta for now and be safe.

 

[45156]

Evening All

 

Just a quick visit and as usual, mucho skipping, as I've been SOOO busy with other matters.  Generic greetings are all I can offer.  Apologies.

 

Car needed some attention, according to my regular garage when it was MOT'd - they gave me an estimate of £299 inclusive of parts and labour, and in the meantime, I had to have a tyre replaced, and the tyre place almost refused to let me take the car back, as in their opinion, it was "unsafe to drive" - and quoted about £350 for the same work.  The upshot was that it wwnt today to my regular garage, where the work took just under 2 hours of Dave the mechanic's time, and after careful examination of the rear brakes ("need new shoes" - according to tyre place), all they needed was a good clean, grease, and pulling up.  Final bill was £220 inc parts and labour - big difference, and I know the work has been done, and done to a high standard.  Jubilee Garage is a very rare thing - a totally honest garage where they charge fairly (£50 ph + VAT) and where they will NOT do un-necessary work, and always tell it like it is.  I will miss them when we move - though we may just try to arrange our visits to Lancaster to co-incide with the date of our annual service and MOT = the only problem with that being if the car did fail, we would no longer be road legal.  I now also have a very resonable estimate for replacing th O2 sensor which is only giving intermittent service, and is causing the engine management light to come on from time to time - oh and they didn't charge for the diagnostic plugin either - can't say fairer than that.  Oh and the MD gave me a lift home and came to pick me up rather than have me sat in the office for two hours reading a book - excellent service indeed.

 

Now then, fans of my occasional musical offerings, the algorithm led me to this wonderful player and this is lovely

 

 

And here's the latest offering from my all time fave - Josh Turner, which popped into my inbox while I was typing this - though where it's been for six days is anybody's guess

 

 

Regards to All

Stewart

Edited October 7, 2021 by 45156

[Ian Abel]

Moaning all (well afternoon already!!) BIN day to boot!

 

Busy all morning with client issues - seems some layabout has been "messing with stuff" without telling anyone, and I've spent several hours figuring out and fixing access for various folks who suddenly were unable to get to all the stuff they're supposed to

No-one accepting responsibility, OF COURSE, just me having to figure out and correct SH!T left by morons 

 

Pre-rehearsal happy hour tonight, followed by schola rehearsal. Cheers

 

15 first thing and overcast though no sign of rain. 22 expected for the high.

 

Onward...

 

Whoops - Happy Anniversary to @Gwiwer and the Mrs/Dr.

Edited October 7, 2021 by Ian Abel

[simontaylor484]

Trying to get the Mrs to sitand relax is a nightmare she keeps trying to do stuff thats already done 

Anyway its good to have her back she doesn't seem better than before she went in but a couple of days rest at home may i hope do the trick

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. Congratulations Rick and Sharon and glad to see that Simons missus is back home, I hope they've identified the cause of the problem.

4 hours ago, polybear said:

The wall unit has now been sorted and china/glassware items sorted into "definitely keep" & "dispose piles" - some research will be required on the latter to check on values, if any, before sending off to the charity shop.  The "def. keep" pile is a little larger than I'd like - but I wouldn't like to part with those items.

I still have a lot of my mum and dads stuff, ornaments and such like. Sadly most of it will probably end up in the charity shop. I've been making a list of various items of furniture and family heirlooms and a few antiques and collectables. Amongst the items is a dressing table that was in the house when I bought it 33 years ago. The chap I bought the house off of offered it for free as otherwise he was going to take it down the tip. I accepted it as my previous property had a built in dressing table. It was a good quality item made by Austinsuite, very 1960's,  I decided to look them up to see if it was worth anything. They certainly are, I just checked £800 to £2,000!

[PupCam]

Greetings all and generic greetings of the appropriate variety for all situations.   Hopefully Simon and his wife can get settled now and I sincerely hope she has no more episodes.  Must be very worrying for all concerned.

 

In other news:

 

Busy day ordering carpets and flooring, scrounging underlay to insulate my garage  door (and try and keep the bikes toasty and the garage fridge freezer working during the colder months).   As there was a motorcycle dealer close to the flooring place it would have been rude not to drop in.   All those modern motorcycles look very fast and hence very scary to me!

 

I had to get a GP appointment to discuss changes to my medication this morning.  Unfortunately Puppers' Patented 'Pointment Procuring Procedure let me down - the landline phone's dial/pick-up button seems to have died due to excessive use over the last 18 months.   Had to resort to dial, engaged, cancel, re-dial on the mobile.   

I note from my phone that it took One Hundred and Twenty Six attempts to get through this morning!    Lucky I'm not ill ...

 

Some interesting discussions recently on old computers and computing experiences.   When I was at the Poly we used to submit BASIC programs by card batch processed over night.  Wow was that a slow code-debug cycle!    A couple of mates and I thought we were the Bee's Knees when we wrote code to display plots for assignments on an early Tektronix graphics terminal.    Introduced to my first computer game there as well; the previously mentioned "Lunar Lander" where you entered text values of thrust and burn time  with the objective of landing softly on the surface with at least an egg cup full of fuel left to avoid the "Plummet of Doom".     

 

Shortly afterwards my department got its first computer; a Commodore 8K PET with built in keyboard and cassette drive.   What a powerful machine that wasn't .    We programmed it (OK copied a load of BASIC from a magazine) with an early flight sim.   It was set at night and the "Graphics", I use the term extremely loosely and I maybe committing an offence under the Trades Description Act, were two lines of asterisks which wobbled from side to side and were meant to represent the runway lights.  The aim of the game was of course to get them symmetrical in the centre of the screen and the unseen glide slope   in such a position so as to arrive at the near end of the "runway" at a suitable air and vertical speed to make the arrival in the form of a landing rather than a crash!     Another favourite game (it took a while for anyone to come up with a sensible, real, work-related job for it to do) was "Adventure" exploring that underground cave system and happening upon Trolls by bridges and copies of "Spellunker Today!" casually left lying around to be discovered.   We had to wait until we upgraded to a 32K PET until we could play Space Invaders, such fun!

 

Anyway, enough of this nonsense, hopefully we see the return of some of the missing and/or lurking ERs soon.

 

Alan

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by PupCam

[Gwiwer]

1 hour ago, 45156 said:

occasional musical offerings

This might not be to everyone's taste but it made me sit up and take notice.  I had followed her fortunes through The Voice rounds and she delivered this in the later stages of the competition.

 

 

She went on to win having brought us another quite stunning cover in the final rounds.  Just watch Seal's face ..... 

 

 

[Ozexpatriate]

12 hours ago, polybear said:

It really, really p1sses me off that car manufacturers use colour as an excuse for whacking big premiums on the price of a car; I can understand a reasonable cost increase for metallics etc., but not "ordinary" colours.

Let's not forget this was Porsche. Anyone who knows German car pricing knows that pretty much "everything" is an optional extra.

 

This was for a 911 in the US. The metallics were only $800 extra. The "special colours" were a whopping $3,270 extra.

 

Colours offered vary by model. I don't know what made them special, but there really was something special about the finish of the car I saw on the road. More coats I expect. It was impossible to describe but you could really see something different in that paint job. They offer "custom" colours as well.

[JohnDMJ]

 

22 minutes ago, PupCam said:

Shortly afterwards my department got its first computer; a Commodore 8K PET with built in keyboard and cassette drive.   What a powerful machine that wasn't.

 

At the time, it was 'cutting edge' for the home computer!

[Ozexpatriate]

28 minutes ago, PupCam said:

Another favourite game (it took a while for anyone to come up with a sensible, real, work-related job for it to do) was "Adventure" exploring that underground cave system and happening upon Trolls by bridges and copies of "Spellunker Today!" casually left lying around to be discovered.

One of the labs at University had "Colossal Cave / Adventure" on 8" floppy discs for, if memory serves, some kind of DEC PDP machine. The disc drive housings were removed and you could see the head search (along with the "barp, barp", clunk and groan) to come up with the single line: "You a in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", the whole process taking several seconds.

 

A Winchester hard drive for the lab was purchased and the game loaded on the drive - with instant responsiveness! I believe I have a hand-drawn cave map somewhere, rolled up in a tube. "A hollow voice says 'PLUGH'."

[simontaylor484]

1 hour ago, PhilJ W said:

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. Congratulations Rick and Sharon and glad to see that Simons missus is back home, I hope they've identified the cause of the problem.

I still have a lot of my mum and dads stuff, ornaments and such like. Sadly most of it will probably end up in the charity shop. I've been making a list of various items of furniture and family heirlooms and a few antiques and collectables. Amongst the items is a dressing table that was in the house when I bought it 33 years ago. The chap I bought the house off of offered it for free as otherwise he was going to take it down the tip. I accepted it as my previous property had a built in dressing table. It was a good quality item made by Austinsuite, very 1960's,  I decided to look them up to see if it was worth anything. They certainly are, I just checked £800 to £2,000!

So called mid century furniture and other mid century design is highly saleable and very fashionable 

[simontaylor484]

42 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

One of the labs at University had "Colossal Cave / Adventure" on 8" floppy discs for, if memory serves, some kind of DEC PDP machine. The disc drive housings were removed and you could see the head search (along with the "barp, barp", clunk and groan) to come up with the single line: "You a in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", the whole process taking several seconds.

 

A Winchester hard drive for the lab was purchased and the game loaded on the drive - with instant responsiveness! I believe I have a hand-drawn cave map somewhere, rolled up in a tube. "A hollow voice says 'PLUGH'."

We had something similar at school on a BBC B computer you had to type commands in like pick up ladder use ladder etc.

 

I remember goingvwitg my Dad to look at  BMW around 1988 ish everything was extra cost including the radio/cassette 

[JohnDMJ]

 

52 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

One of the labs at University had 8" floppy discs

 

Remember them well! About 180kB of storage compared to the 360kB of a 5 1/4" floppy!

[Sir TophamHatt]

I hate taking annual leave.

 

I have some in a couple of weeks but the days and weeks leading up to it seem so slow.

 

Should be quite nice though.  Driving to the Isle of Wight for a few days and staying in a little chalet, which should be a good break but still think we didn't need to do it - already been away for a couple of weeks this year.  But next year, we'll be sticking to the one week in an effort to save some dosh.  Things should be paid off, which means more in savings, which means more in the "next baby" pot.  Don't know how much we need but I think it's about £10,000 as a start for the next round of IVF.  May have to take some equity out of the house, will see.

[PupCam]

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

 the single line: "You a in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", the whole process taking several seconds.

 

........

 

"A hollow voice says 'PLUGH'."

 

Ah there were so many memorable phrases (unfortunately I've forgotten most of them ) but that was the one.  There was also  the complimentary "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different".  

 

In the PET version of the game some key translations were incorrect by 1 alphabetic character / ASCII value.    To move in a NE direction you had to actually type OF.   How we found the solution I don't recall, perhaps a very early exploration of the code I should imagine?  At the time (none of us were programmers at that point) it would have looked quite intimidating.

 

UPDATE:

 

Oh no that's sent me on a nostalgic trawl of the interweb.    Seems like the key translation error I mentioned was actually a workaround for a limitation of the original user command interpreter.      Hmmm, maybe a need to find a version that runs on PC.  Just for old times sake you understand ...

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

 

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by PupCam
Added update

[PupCam]

13 minutes ago, PupCam said:

 Hmmm, maybe a need to find a version that runs on PC.  Just for old times sake you understand ...

 

Well that was easy!

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/colossal-cave-adventure/9wzdncrdlv4h?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

 

 

[Coombe Barton]

... it's October, dammit! ...

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2021/10/07/more-than-40000-new-cases/

[monkeysarefun]

We got a call at work a few weeks ago from an officer who'd just been posted into a position enquiring about a computer that was in the corner of his new office.

 

The previous guy didn't know what it was for, nor had the guy he took over from, and so on, so he called the local base IT guys who went and looked at it and suggested since it looked a bit special it must have been part of the system I support. 

 

One of our guys went over to check it out and came back with one of these

 

 

I guess it had been sitting in the corner of that office  since the '80's and part of the handover takeover routine for that job had obviously been "Ï don't have a clue what that is, it was here when I got here".

 

 

It still works and we plan to use it to replace the PC of the next  complaining user.

 

Edited October 8, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[tigerburnie]

G'night all

 

[monkeysarefun]

11 minutes ago, PupCam said:

 

Well that was easy!

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/colossal-cave-adventure/9wzdncrdlv4h?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

 

 

 

I have an old HPUX workstation beside me that still has that on it, along with a similar game called "Hunt The Wumpus".

[PupCam]

6 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

I have an old HPUX workstation beside me that still has that on it, along with a similar game called "Hunt The Wumpus".

 

I vaguely remember Hunt the Wumpus.      Once we'd thrashed the old PETs to death we upgraded to some "serious computers"  like HP9835s before moving onto HP workstations and HPUX.    

 

We also started to make use of the HP flatbed plotters (HP7225A), programming them in the native HPGL.    There were a number of plotter demo's built in I seem to recall.  One of them drew a very strange chart but it played Jingle Bells while doing it

 

Takes you back doesn't it!

[Ozexpatriate]

27 minutes ago, PupCam said:

Well that was easy!

"xyzzy" and off we go. Fun times.

 

Not to be confused with Zzyzx, CA.

 

I think I played all those text games mentioned - "Hunt the wumpus", "Lunar Lander" etc. Colossal Cave / Adventure was the best of them.

 

"Hunt the wumpus" long pre-dated HPUX. It was written in 1973.

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by Ozexpatriate

[polybear]

2 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

I still have a lot of my mum and dads stuff, ornaments and such like. Sadly most of it will probably end up in the charity shop.

 

Same here (only Momma Bear's) - I'm actively sorting and keeping what's special to me (including my own stuff) and the rest is either sold (where possible) or going to charity.  I'd much rather do that than keep it forever and then someone who doesn't give a sh1t bungs it in a skip.

 

In other news:

Hermes turned up to collect the parcels - only I'd (a) re-scheduled them to be collected tomorrow, and (b) already left for college....

Three new guys on the college course, and another recruited via RMWeb should be starting around the end of the month.  That should hopefully be enough to keep the  course safe from cancellation

 

Tomorrow's fun sees Bear doing some serious cleaning on Mickey the MG - as it hasn't been going anywhere it hasn't needed to be washed; however it's surprising just how dirty a car seems to get by standing on a drive doing now't - the bl00dy great tree outside doesn't help.  Step one sees the yearly removal of the rear light clusters which makes thorough cleaning of the hatchback shuts much, much easier - sounds like a weird thing to do but believe me it don't arf make things easier.  Then it'll be the door & bonnet shuts, followed by the alloy wheels.  That'll see off all the fiddly, time-consuming bits; the plan is to save the main bodywork for Sunday, hopefully followed by a polish & wax.  That plan will all go to rat sh1t...