When I was studying Computer Science at The University of Texas in Austin, I had one class where we were allowed to use a PDP computer that was normally reserved for graduate students. The professor who was in charge of it gave a group of us a 30 second instruction on how to boot the machine: flip this switch, flip that switch, and then push the go button. Great, that explains nothing. WTF are all these switches and why does this sequence work? It was rote memorization and my mind balked. I caught him later on and asked him to repeat these instructions and he gave me shit for not paying attention the first time. Effing jerk.
I don't recall what I did with the machine, it was probably just an exercise to familiarize us with working with actual hardware. Everything else we did was done at an arm lengths remove from the giant fricking CDC machine via punch cards and printouts. There was one graduate student there who was mucking about with something and he discovered an undocumented opcode. He played with it for a bit and finally concluded that it was 'jump random and destroy' which doesn't sound particularly useful.
My first job out of school was working with a Texas Instruments DX-10 mini computer (TI-900 was the computer, DX-10 was the operating system). It had a bank of front panel switches much like the ones in the video above. We actually used them a couple of times, but it was such a slow tedious process that almost any amount of software contortions were preferable.
We needed to hook it up to an IBM tape drive (I think it was an IBM, it used those frigging giant IBM channel cables). It wasn't too difficult, just a matter of figuring out which plugs to use and setting some jumpers, but I seemed to be the only one in the shop that could figure it out. I remember thinking the connector was pretty weird because the cable itself was this thick, armored thing about an inch in diameter, but at the end the sheathing had been stripped away and the connector was just hanging on a bunch of loose wires. Alien tech, but it worked.
Let's Fix What's Wrong with this Nissan Figaro (feat. Technology Connections)
Aging Wheels
This guy has a couple of interesting tricks up his sleeve, especially when he turns down a spark plug wrench using a wood lathe just after the 13 minute mark.
I often think cars should be modular so you could easily separate the engine from the rest of the car to make it easier to do some of these repairs. It could be done, but it would probably add some weight and cost and being as cars are designed to minimize those aspects it's not going to happen. Plus it gives enterprising guys complicated 3D puzzles to puzzle over.
First thing I do in the morning is fire up me computer and go poking around to see if anything catches my eye. I used to read the newspaper first thing in the morning, when it showed up, but then they raised their rates, and then they quit offering Sunday only, so I gave it up. But now the Sunday only subscription is available again so we've signed up. I only like it for the comics and the Jumble and the Numbrixpuzzles, all of which are available on-line. However, on-line comics are only one per page and I haven't found a curated selection anywhere, much less one that appeals to me. The Oregonian has a long list of available comics, and if you don't have anything else to do with the rest of your life, you could poke around in there. I've done a bit of that, but most of them don't do anything for me, especially since you not only have to wait milliseconds, milliseconds I tell you, for the page to load, you then have to scroll down and adjust the zoom level so you can read it comfortably. Screw that. Jumble is available on-line, except for the Sunday puzzle. On Sundays, the on-line version pulls up an ancient puzzle from out of their archives. Also, working the puzzles with a pen is quicker and easier than using the mouse and keyboard. Also also, working the Jumble with a pen allows to work from both ends. Normally you start by unscrambling the individual words and then trying to figure out what the phrase is. However, on occasion I am sometimes able to guess the solution phrase and use that to unscramble a particularly troublesome word. Can't do this with the on-line version, at least not without resorting to pen and paper, or upgrading my working memory.
Checking my YouTube history it seems I watched 14 videos this morning, or rather I started watching them. I only watched four, including this one, to completion. The others were:
Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band performs We Deserve a Happy Ending, a fun little tune, but the antics going on alongside is what makes the video. It takes a real showman to carry on performing while all that craziness is going on.
Ice Pilots NWT Bonus Features - Lockheed L 188 Electra
Glacier PilotBob Reeve eventually started his own airline using Lockheed Electras. Poking around must have triggered Google because YouTube served up this entertaining little clip.
"Kharkovchanka" - The Colossal Soviet Antarctic Cruisers
Some people like to make things, some people like to talk, some people like to play in the sand. Doesn't really seem to matter whether they live in a totalitarian dictatorship or the land of the free wage slaves. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am by what the Soviets managed to accomplish. For the USA, they were the only power on Earth that was even worth worrying about. They managed to maintain arms parity for 40 years, until their whole house of cards collapsed. Their engineers and mechanics were carried on the backs of the proletariat, something like we do here, just the Soviets didn't care whether they ground the peasants into the ground. We at least pretend to care.
My legs started hurting a couple of weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, but eventually it became clear. The new house I bought six months ago is built on pilings on a moderately steep hillside. I hate having to scramble on uneven footing, so the first thing I did was hire a contractor to install a set of stairs down the hill alongside the west side of the house. They are like two and a half stories tall and I've probably been up and down those stairs 500 times since then, so I am pretty well conditioned to climbing stairs.
Those stairs gave us access to the west side of the house, but now we need access to the east side where the gas meter and the air conditioner are, so more stairs. I figured we could just cut some notches in the dirt and put some stepping stones in there, but Osmany sold me on the idea of making something a little more substantial because they are probably going to be there forever. So I went to Lowe's and picked up a bunch of one foot square concrete stepping stones. To make the steps more durable you need to support the outward facing edge. If it is just sitting on dirt, the dirt can crumble, the step will tilt and eventually your stairs will start to collapse. Well, what are we going to support the edges with? Well, we have a bunch of one foot square stepping stones, so that's what we used and now we have a set of stairs where each step is one foot higher than the last. On normal stairs, each step is eight inches high, so our new stairs are a little taller. It's not bad, and it's only for access to the utilities, it's not like people are going to be traipsing up and down these things all the time.
Except when we are working here, I am going up and down these steps four or five times a day and surprise, surprise, my legs started hurting big time.
