Happy 7-8-9!

There's a story (possibly apocryphal) of an RAF pilot in WW2 who was on a squadron of aircraft testing the new RADAR equipment. He had been a maths teacher prior to the war and delighted in reading the "boffins" reports and correcting the errors in the maths therein.

Ah yes. Navy work. Although I was never told any details, of course (I don't have any clearances in this country), I cannot count the number of times he has come home tearing his hair out. They have a huge pack of detailed specs, the plans are half done, then someone (presumably some admiral) comes up with a bright idea of "we MUST add this." So, the plans all have to be rearranged. Nowadays, of course, it is marginally easier with computers, in that they don't have to redraw every plan by hand in order to accommodate things, but finding places to put the new equipment is always a major challenge as the ships are already too full of other stuff, all of which is essential.

Commercial ships are so much simpler to do.

You are right, they are a dying breed. So many of his colleagues are retired and many, many of them are, like us, from U.K. When we came over here, there were only three schools in the whole country which taught Naval Architecture. Can you guess why he was recruited? And why we didn't have any serious trouble with Immigration? Of course, it still took three months to get through the red tape, even though the company was screaming at the gov't that "We need this guy yesterday." When he did finally retire he had to promise his boss that he would be available to answer phone queries if they got really desperate.

He always did pride himself on turning out neat, elegant, economical, efficient ship plans.

He is now very happily retired, and no, he doesn't miss it. He has no idea how he ever found time to go to work in the old days.

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans.

Well, it's never fun to try to fix someone else's botched code, as the reason it doesn't work is often that they took entirely the wrong approach ;-) Easier to start from scratch sometimes! And I will say this about Perl--it's a language that gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself. It assumes you really know what you're doing and doesn't have controls to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. So, poorly written Perl code can be an absolute monster. I wouldn't want to inherit Perl code from anyone who wasn't really good at it ;-) My husband, who's the real Perl god, frequently just rewrites from scratch--and often ends up with half the code to do twice the work.

Best wishes, Ericka

Gotta have the camel book ;-) At least one baby had a camel onesie (courtesy of DH's workmates). We have lots of camels around the house/DH's office. The license plates on one of the cars reads "PERL HKR" (as in "just another..."). The funny thing is that it's a fairly regular occurrence that someone will leave a business card under the wipers or roll down a window at a stoplight and offer whoever's driving a job! ;-) I know, I know, sadly geeky. But amusing. We were sad to no longer have a VW Bug with a license plate that read "FEATURE." Not *that* one really brought out the geeks.

Best wishes, Ericka

Not only navy work. Just part of the human condition, I'm sure. DH used to complain, "The sales dept. sold them the moon, then tell the engineers to make it happen." The problem was that salespeople weren't engineers, and had little understanding of the complexities of the "little extras" they'd put on. Salespeople and engineers are two very different kinds of minds, and ne'er will their minds meet!

sue (but we need *both* kinds!)

It's not just ships. Lots of things have similar problems. There is a riotous movie called "the Pentagon Wars" which is a barely (well, a bit exaggerated - but not much) account of the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. In the movie they essentially combine the BFV, with some of the similar stuff that happened with development of the Sgt York. The film stars Kelsey Grammar as the typical military PM who just wants to get the stuff done for some milestone so he can rotate out with promotion after his 2 years, and Cary Elwes as the young Captain who is supposed to see that the thing really works - he's the T&E Eval guy, essentially. The film is well worth seeing, it's well acted, not far from true for the marvelous days of the 80s, and very funny. I bet your DH will love it.

About the 3rd year I was working at the lab, I was doing a good amount of tech expert consulting for various senior offices (read this going to meetings where everyone at the table has stars and some full colonel takes notes - or Navy Capt). Very interesting. I would come home a lot WRT one particular very large, multi-service program (that is equipmt in use now) and tell my friends I just wanted to make sure my name didn't end up in the Wash Post - or specifically Jack Anderson's column. Much better to fly under the radar. My then DH, who worked at a different Research Lab would complain that he didn't want to hear about work, because I couldn't tell him the "interesting stuff" - meaning the cool technical things. Although, I was able to use him for consulting on some stuff without attaching it to the object - so to speak. It would be fun when we went to social things with his older colleagues - he'd tell them - as they spoke condescendingly - oh, no ask her what she does - if she tells you, then we'll have to kill you.

In my area, there is a similar dearth. In the last few months, I've had some really interesting interviews to come back to "real" work. One head of a lab section - only about 5-10 years older than me, I'd guess - saying "wow

- you're about the youngest person around with this knowledge - we need you back for the corporate knowledge base." Our discussion -yup, most of the guys who worked in my specialty area - now dead, or very retired -and in their 70s. Just a handful around in their 60s. It's weird. I was the young one 20 years ago, and, well, due to circumstances - would still be the young one. Big gap of missing 30-40 year olds - with some experience, knowledge - in the area.

That's a fine thing.

LOL - it's good to be happily retired. At this point, DH and I have talked about this with our close friends - that he hasn't really experienced what I'm like when working in the career high octane job...as my interviews continue. We'll see how they go.

Ellice

Yup - you hit the nail on the head. I bought the SAMs book, worked through it, and after trying to fix the mess, essentially just wrote new code. Maybe not so elegant - but it worked. Didn't help that the grad student was in Spain and his professor didn't really get what the guy had done or not done.

Ellice

Loooong time ago with FORTRAN IV and possibly FORTRAN V computers needed a FORTRAN compiler in order to run the code. IIRC the second generation of the defunct Commodor 64? was supposed to have or support a FORTRAN compiler. Thinking back, the reason I didn't buy the Commodor 64? was that I was waiting for it to support FORTRAN. I don't think that it ever did.

I got involved in other things so I never followed up on what was happening in the FORTRAN world.

Does or would a PC or laptop support FORTRAN? btw I'm not shouting FORTRAN that is the way I was taught, never to type it in lower case letters. Quirky instructor I guess.

In my configuration control days I used to refer to the knobs writing ASSEMBLER as knobs that couldn't write the an identical five line "DO" subroutine in FORTRAN twice in the same hour without lousing it up. I remember briefly reviewing the documentation for the GGAS? ( gas get away special? ) experiment. In very short order I tossed it back on to the design engineer's desk and told him that I wanted nothing to do with the project. I suspect that he either had his staff clean up their act or suckered some other configuration guru to sign off on the paper work because the experiment either went up with a space shuttle or a Black Brant rocket supporting a space shuttle. To this day I would defy them to put together an identical experiment or half fill two identical glasses with water to "roughly" the same level. ASSEMBLER begins with ASS for a logical reason. LOL

I dabbled with some CAD (mac-auto) in those days but found it too stressful. With manual drafting while you were drawing a line from A to B you had a few moments to think about what you were going to do next. With CAD you drew a line from A to B with two clicks and the darn curser started blinking as if to say what's next bozo.

Drawing arcs and circles with CAD used to drive me to the coffee shop for a couple of cups of black coffee. IIRC with arcs and circles you started at the end point and went "backwards" to the start point, versus from the start point to the end point, throw in clockwise or counter-clockwise and I was ready to punch out the screen.

Now I will ask you! When you are editing a photo (read cropping) do you select the part that you "do not want" and click "cut or crop" or do you select the part that you "want to keep" and click cut or crop?? Grrrrrrrr.

Fred

nothing changes, nothing changes.Don't back stitch to email, just stitchit.

.

I little while ago a young girl in my office asked me what the large piece of light brown paper was doing on my desk. I replied that it was a blotter. She had no idea what a blotter was or did. Rather than explain the procedure for filling a fountain pen with ink (a what and what), writing something on a piece of paper and blotting it dry I pointed to a dictionary in a book case and said, "look up the word blotter" which she did. Sadly she did not ask any further questions or ask for a demo. I guess I have an above average dictionary. LOL IIRC a cheque written with a ball point pen was still not legal around 1960. I've haven't tried lately but cheques written with red ink or ball point pens with red ink were never accepted. First, red ink used to mean the number was negative, plus things written in red ink didn't photo-copy very well.

Formatting - Geeeeesh - You mean those three imaginary horizontal lines on the page where, "Master Fred", THOU SHALT place the proper part of a character or number below the center line and THOU SHALT place the proper part of a character or number above the center line and THOU SHALT NOT place any part of a character or number above the top imaginary line or below the bottom imaginary line???? hah, I remember some poor souls not only lost marks on their exam pages they were forced to spend a few days back in a grade one or a grade two class practising their writing skills on the blackboard. If a teacher did that today they would probably get fired or assaulted by the student's parents.

Apparently these days there are students who find it very difficult "hand writing" a 250 word report and don't get me started on the ones that have to drag out a calculator to figure out your change when you plunk down a dollar and three pennies for a 98 cent chocolate bar! plus if you don't ask for a 5 cent piece they give you 5 pennies! Grrrrrrrr.

Fred

nothing changes, nothing changes.Don't back stitch to email, just stitchit.

Is that similar to: " How Do You Carve A Statue Of An Elephant? In that one I just cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

Lucille

*Snip* *snip*

I totally get your issue with the Commodore. In the 80s a version of Fortran 77 came out that could be run on a MAC. ExDH was a beta tester for, IIRC, Microsoft. At his lab (he works at a lab named "center for computational physics and fluid dynamics" - he and a couple of others got high end Macs so they could locally run bits of code, and use the huge display, essentially as front-ends to the CRAY. Pretty common practice in the science world starting in the mid-late 80s (which is why us Mac types laugh at those who tell us they're only for graphics or to look cool). In my group, I got 2 big Mac workstations, and we had FORTRAN running. Then, it wasn't going to be easy on a DOS machine as the Mac processor did more. Part of the reason my boss had me get the huge memory, and awesome 24" monitor - that we wanted to be able to run some code without having to go back and forth to a mainframe. Worked great.

Now, I you can certainly get some version of Fortran - I don't know if it's

2003 or not - to compile locally. Back then -in the 90s - that's what we'd do. Some full code - fine running on the Mac. I had guys doing predictive calculations for real work on PCs (though that version was pretty darn course computational fluids). We did our more serious calculations (predictions, simulations -lots of physics & chemistry stuff - environment and target reaction) on some Silicon Graphics (SGI) work stations, and used a lot of UNIX.

You are so right. When exDH was doing his microgravity droplet thing for the space shuttle, he had a really good time given the outline of the code, and the detail equations to some intern (recent college grad) and making him write the code. I've always agreed with exDH - that's what the programmers are for - they can write the code - much more fun to do the science. His stuff went up, and was pretty successful. He's done a bunch of things now that have made experiment status on the shuttle or space station. Helps having colleagues (former classmates) at NASA, and being local to Goddard, and not far from Langley.

I feel that pain. Exactly why when these programs first came out people would end up taking courses to learn to use the tools, etc. Illustrator works this way, and hence, I don't recommend it for the only need basic graphics people. But, now you can also draw circles by just expanding out with a circle tool. Arcs, for precision, you can use numbers, degrees, or 3 points. All kinds of great things you can do with Bezier curves. But, again - not for the faint of heart. What I love now is once you do some little design, you can actually make that into a tool of it's own - like a rubber stamp - and just put that motif whereever - by having saved it into a symbol palette with a name. It's taken me a while to get used to this.

Ah, well, on some of these things, it's like an artist using masking. I just think of it as putting on masking fluid when I paint. But, you're right - in that things like AutoCad or Illustrator - for simple uses, not the best. But, for precision kind of things - amazing, IMHO.

Ellice

Um, WRT ballpoint pens - maybe in Canada or the UK - but here checks were legal. I don't remember my mother using a fountain pen and she always wrote checks. AFAIK, there is no restriction on ink, nor has there been for about

40 years (since my first checking account). Only restriction - must be done with ink, not pencil - or erasable material. I do remember, however, when you could write a legal check on any piece of paper - in case you forgot your checkbook, you could just write one as long as you put all the correct numbers for routing, account, etc. I do remember that in the 70s - getting some done like that at work.

I think there's been at least a little movement to go back to teaching arithmetic and basics again. Not letting calculators be used until the rudimentary parts are learned. Not sure about the hand-writing thing. I wonder if they do that at the early learning to write stages. Certainly it seems like children are expected to do their reports neatly typed and printed from the computer. Now the emphasis is on format, learning to do proper citations, etc - and not on the physical neat penmanship.

ellice

Before there were ball point pens - and that is not overly long ago - Americans couldn't write cheques ?

The concern in the UK/Canada with ball points was that they were far from permanent back then, and very messy and smeary. Until they improved, banks did not like them.

At that time I don't believe my cheques had any numbers on them, other than an index number for my cheque book. That came later. One could only cash a cheque at the bank, no ATMs, and if they were given as payment then the recipient knew which bank at which to tender them for payment.

SNIP

I think things that banks will do are a lot different since then. At least they were in my area of this country.

I worked for a major fund raising organizastion and back in the late 80's I will never, ever forget having someone hand me a personal check, ripped out of a grungy checkbook, with one corner torn off and a couple of smudgtes right down the middle (I had no desire to find out what the smudges were.) The check was in the amount of $1,500,000 and was the first payment on a very large pledge for a new computer department in the college we funded.

I held that check in my hand until our security guards came to take it to the bank for me. Why it scared me like that I'll never know, but I guess those numbers made me numb.

The bank accepted it without a blink or a nod.

Lucille

SNIP

LOL - clearly my response was that it wasn't illegal to write a check with other than a fountain pen. Given your attention to detail, I would expect that you know this in now way implies that writing checks with a fountain pen, or other instrument, would not be legal. Of course, keeping the context would have shown you again just trying to jerk my chain.

Moreover, should I question if Canadians could only write checks with fountain pens - and that prior to that invention - the old quill or pen without reservoir wasn't legal??

I understand the concern. I think that ballpoints were invented in the

30's, but became common here in the late 50s.

I can't really speak for the 60s. But, I do know that my first checking account when I went off to university in the early/mid 70s had checks with numbers, routing, and account info encoded on them. I do remember before that people filling in the check number on the check, but the account info being on the bottom.

Ellice

?????????????????

They were first invented in the late 1800s but it was the 50s before Biro's edition came into fairly common use.

I remember when any legal document had to be signed with black ink only, and I believe that is still the preferred method.

I remember when there was a lot talk about whether or not electronic signatures would be legal. I'm not sure if it is or not and probably will look up that fact just for the heck of it. When we computerized my office accounting department it was a very big thing and lots of legal wrangling was going on over the situation.

I may be mistaken, but I don't remember ever having a ball point pen, at least at home, until sometime in the 50's and I'm quite sure check came before that. I also remember when they leaked all over your pocket and pocket protectors became a joke for nerds. My DDH was always teased for that in the 60's but I was the one who had to scrub the ink out of his shirts.

Sounds like Vere Foster handwriting, brings back memories of being taught "joined up" writing when I was about 6 or 7.

Not just in Great Britain. I spent many an hour on those boring lessons back in Brooklyn too, but I never really had a good handwriting. I know way too many people my age whose cursive writing never got good enough to read so I suppose it wasn't particularly helpful, but the teachers loved it for a break from real teaching.

Now with computers do they still make such a fuss over handwriting?

Lucille