h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In case we find things to chat about on occassion, I thought I'd open this direct line.

Helen/Tsarina speaks nicely of you and says you are also known as Greg. I got tired of some of the silly names I met as the "Reverend", so now I go by MY given name, ... Nick. And rarely attach the Rev, though I am ordained by an obscure church in the US. Just as I rarely attach the CET (Certified Engineering Technician) after my name.

As Vonnegut would say, "and so it goes".

Apologies, Nick, I forgot to introduce myself. Yes, I am Greg.

I thought the bigger hammer solution was an Australian thing, we pride ourselves for our "fencing wire" solutions...but I can see I am a little chauvinistic...

The only time I have actually seen a bigger hammer in use in my working life is when a very expensive, only-a-few-in-the-country mainframe was dropped and we became a panel shop for a few days to be able to deliver it...luckily it was only the chassis not the cages or drives...however I have also seen some strong hand fixes

It's a rare day, but indeed, the BFH does get invoked. (I'll let you determine exactly what a BigFHammer is )

I know very little history, so I'd be hard-pressed to know if your country is older or younger than mine. But with only 137'ish years under our belts, we might still tend to be a bit round around the edges. Keeps things 'colourful' though.

I think Canada and Australia have a lot in common...our federation was in 1901 (colony started 1778), large land mass largely uninhabited, bit torn whether to align with the U.S.A. or stay with the Commonwealth and Europe...Australia has the added problem that we really should consider ourselves part of S.E. Asia

I have Canadian relatives...my sister-in-law is originally from Calgary, Alberta and she has dragged some of her family over with her. She was an exchange teacher and met and married my brother.

It can be an advantage being young, no wisdom but then no preconceptions. Things are judged on their usefulness first not whether they follow convention or look pretty.

I guess I have been using the BFH all my life but never put it into words however RTFM is something I still live by and remind others of Also I am always surprised when I come across colleagues who are aware of the basic rules of repair like...ask questions and replace as few components at one time as possible...especially programmers massive rewrite for a single command fix

I'm not sure when the first folks started mucking about in Canada, but I'm sure that late 1700's sounds about right. Our "confederation" was 1867. So far as we've found, my lineage came over around 1849 or so from "Prussia" which at that time was a massively large chunk of Europe. In any case, similar to you, a look at any map will show the lion's share of the acreage is unpopulated, and in fact largely unexplored. We've a long time to go yet before the density or congestion of many older countries becomes a problem.

Sorry I've not been back sooner. The military, who contracts a company to have me work for them, lined me up for a 3-week course. So in November, I started looking for a cheap, used portable PC. I finished the training last week, so naturally a real steal of a Dell Lattitude C600 fell into my lap yesterday. Murphy's Law, eh? The missus will use it as her device for typing, gaming and generally what-ever. I've spent portions of the day loading the Win2000, drivers, apps and games. Fun-toy.

I only recently found out the history of Murphy's Law. Apparently he was an engineer delivering the "g"-sensing vest for the rocket sled experiments during WW2. He found that all the sensors had been wired backwards and commented "If the techs can get it wrong, they will!" this evolved and become a watchcry in the lab and was reported to the media...


My family is mainly of Welsh heritage with some German on my Mum's side but at least six generations Australian either side. The family has been either sugarcane growers or workers (cutting or in the sugar mill) in Queensland (the north-eastern state of Australia) my grandparents moved to the city and so here I am.

It is one of life's simple pleasure isn't it, loading and tweaking a computer from scratch and having it run it's best...unfortunately in my house it doesn't last long...my children love to download applets but have no idea how to keep the space tidy (removing programs etc) but then they don't keep their room tidy so what can I expect...

Ah, tahnk you for that bit of trivia. I'm sure that I'd heard a part of that anecdote somewhere before, but never in-full. Can never have too much knowledge, of ANY kind, eh?

This portable came with a license for Win98 SE, but for maintaining purposes, I prefer any of the NT family. I tried the "upgrade" path, but marriage of drivers wasn't very successful. SO a clean sweep and a fresh load from a disc I've slip-streamed to the latest service pack level. I'll guess that is all tweaked and tuned nicely, ... the missus took off with it for several hours.

Sorry Nick, a failing of mine...the history of science and technology is a bit of a hobby...but unfortunately I tend to inflict it on others

Agree with you regarding the NT family...I have had very little problems with XP Home...I like to think that although Linux will never truly compete as a workstation "client", it did put Microsoft on warning that their monopoly is awfully fragile.

I've always been horribly weak in histories, geography and languages. But It a subject even wandered past a math or science, it was of appeal to me. A nearly before it was even a common term. So any bits of trivia or history like that is ALWAYS we,come, friend.

I stayed happily with DOS until OS/2 Warp. And it was so damned solid, easy to trim, stream-line, just simply make the way I wanted it. But IBM let it fall by the way-side about as I was getting comfortable with NT 3.51. So the natural flow onwards has left me still fully comfortable with Win2K. I've heard and read lots about Linux, but so far, it's still quite a bit the geeks-platform. To really, properly set things (as I understand it) takes more time and understanding than most home-PC users have. But indeed, it did raise the mighty MS-eyebrow, didn't it? Especially with fully MS-Office compatible suites that are open-platform.

Linux is a lot of fun...there are lots of applications available, all written by volunteers in a peer review system with varying levels of success...but then part of the fun is creating a system out of this mess...

From what I have gathered from our conversations I think you would enjoy creating a Linux system...our newsagents sell cheap how-to handbooks for a variety of software (Oracle, Flash etc) and the Linux handbook is quite good - lots of info and software, to get you where you can access the excellent help files that are always provided with Linux and any applications...consider it a pasttime to start with but I think you would slowly come to the dark side

I learned programming with about the 2nd generation of BASIC and Fortran IV. On a huge machine with all of 8K of (core) memory. The ferrite rings were large enough that even I could still see them today without glasses. So I know how addictive some pass-times can be. The biggest reason I've not yet delved into Linux is a spouse who has no appreciation for hours of tinkering, tweaking and fine tuning. It helps to keep one aspect of life less complicated. But I DO know, ... one day ....

Complete and utter understanding maybe when we retire
my introduction to computers was after 1/2" tape replaced papertape and disks were 14"...my telecomms training in exchange maintenance was very useful for the regular services, aligning disk and tape drives but it was repairing logic boards that I enjoyed when the ALU was one PCB and the CPU another...circuit diagrams and CROs

That same computer was commonly fed stacks and stacks of either punched or pencil-coded Holarith cards. But with patience, we did had the Teletype with the 5-level baudot paper-tape punch. And thus the HP2100A could digest from it. In a pinch, I might still remember the 42-step boot-strap procedure of the beast. Ummm, have you guessed that it WAS some time ago? Installed in the summer of '69, as proudly proclaimed on the line-printer everytime it conceded to being brought to life.

The bane of my existent was line-printers...dirty heavy brutes to work on always failing usually because the customer wound the things to breaking point before calling and we were expected to work (copying IBM) in long sleeves and tie in sub-tropical summers meanwhile the computers were in chilled rooms where you could work confortably even on diskdrives the size of washing machines

Heh heh heh, I even maintained 5-MB hard-drives in massive helium-pressurized enclosures. And that Dell toy I brought home "only" has a 10 GB packet in it, and how small is it? Technologies, constantly amazing me.

That was a short-lived notion in our military again in the early 80s. The neck-tie with working clothes. A couple of "clip-on" ties intentionally went into the works of a few lesser machines and then that notion passed.

PS: It was worth the $3 to me.

I deliberately bought BAD ties and allowed them to be marked with printer ink...and was completely ignored

were the "helium" drives high revolution? I looked after some 14" 1/2 MB drives that had hinged covers so you could clean the heads, sector sensor and disks with high flow air to keep thing cool and "clean" but they were slow...they were part of a data entry system so you had to deal with a group of women who weren't sure whether to be happy to see a new face or complain because downtime cost them bonuses

I no longer recall the rpm rate of those drives. The helium was kept at about 5 psi, just enough to keep out contaminants like cigarette smoke. The heads "descended" to the platters using inflating mylar cushions. Si in case of a power failure, the heads would lift away, should the platters wobble during run-down. Pretty high-tech stuff, eh? Off-the-shelf devices, vintage '78 or '79.

That was a great time to to be in the of the computer industry...before it became the IT industry...part of the reason I got my degree was we won an Apple repairer contract for the state of Queensland and we were swapping cct boards rather than fixing to chip level and the company wanted to hire its LAN technicians instead of training their existing staff

That is when things become a bit demeaning, even insulting, eh? Much of our "military" is also strictly board or module level. I have the advantage though, ... I am now the tech at the third-line, component-level repair. So I get to keep my fingers in it.

And not that I'm counting, but only under 15 years to retirement. Scarey as it is, last month was 28 years since I leapt into the big bad world.

20 years to retirement...27 years in the workforce...23 years married...15 years a parent...

Australia seems to have embraced subcontracting all non-"core" work...it keeps me in work...a good 2/3 of my present employer's business is maintenance of various assets and system for our defence forces including data and radio communications and aircraft