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

The way I'm seeing it, another 12 years or so and we own the house. So with the smallish pension from L-3/Spar Aerospace (my employer) and the one I already collect from 21 years in "Her Majesty's Canadian Armed Forces" just may make the ends meet. A faint hope anyway.

Spar has focused on aircraft maintenance and over-haul as well, relinquishing the Canadarm of the shuttles and the years of satelite comms they had. The fact that they have the 9 of us electronics guys here is a fluke of their supervisor-of-the-day knowing a the top local military chap of the time. But we do have the contract for a lot of comms and NavAids R & O for another 8 years.

I'm with Mrs-#2 for somewhat better than 17 years now. My 23-yr-old daughter, and subsequent grandkids, are the one happiness of a marriage in '81 that didn't really last long. They are all in Newfoundland at the moment, but hoping to move here in a year or so. Much better job prospects.

Looking at the raw numbers, we aren't far apart in age either. I just hit 45 in October. (Or 29 for the 17th time )

45 in May

I'm with Boeing Australia, which is a catchall for number of Australian aerospace and defence system businesses bought be Boeing in the 90's...it is still a little fragmented with the technical staff straining at the bit to share resources with each other but the financial and management forces seeing it as a blurring of focus...still it is a hell of lot better than the short stint I did as a consultant in the construction industry...they have the blame game refined to a fine art...not a conducive working environment

From the little I know, mostly my eldest brother who's played it for many years, consulting is not the most stable of positions. So with a family to look out for... The stability of a large outfit has it's shiny-bits. But as you just said, the ivory-tower folks can make things miserable enough. All they can see is their little empires crumbling. Life, eh?

Anyway, I wish you a productive afternoon and quiet night. (Two girls? Quiet? Yeah, right) I'm away to some time with the missus and then try to sleep away the tail-end of a miserable head-cold. It's been a weird winter here, -25 C one day, 8 C the next.

Night Nick, I will struggle on in the +35C humidity...must be our nature to pick extreme climates

And it was a good night. I feel very nearly human. Is that really something to aspire to though?

We're in a somewhat milder part of the country, so our winters normally don't dip much below -12 or -14. And the summers top out around 30. Mind you, with the humidity, that easily crowds the 40+ on occassion.

Anyway, because of geography protecting this bit from the harsher extremes, and very minimal aviary (?) traffic, it was chosen many, many moons ago for our military's main air-transport base. I was lucky enough to post in as I neared the pension point, and so settled quite happily.

I like to think humans have enormous potential but collectively lack the will to realise it. It's my contribution to stamping out depressive illnesses.

My wife, Annie and I have acreage south of the city of Brisbane, its horse country with some dairy, a lot of the racing and equestrian fraternity, we are less than an hour from the city, also some of the best surf beaches in the world and a great bay area for fishing, cruising and sailing (I'll get my yacht on day). We are both involved in Clydesdale horses (we own a big gelding) so we may go a little further south, closer to retirement, to get a bigger property and more horses, but for now we are very happy especially with our children's school and their friends and the community.

I was raised in beef and dairy country. With a goodly measure of pork tossed in, cash grain crops and such. Most of my work before leaving my parent's home was on farms. And despite some distinct personalities, I never met a cow I couldn't milk.

It's quite unlikely that we'll shoot for anything larger than the 1/5th acre we have in town here. Enough elbow-room for us, and the grand-kids to mess about when they do move up this way.

Our place is a favourite with the nieces and nephews, small stands of trees to hide in and climb, horses to play with and a small dam to mess about around.

Do you get a chance to read? I'm reading Orson Scott Card at the moment, the Ender series...he has that knack to make his books difficult to put down.

The place does sound idyllic, for yourselves as well as visitors. I always enjoyed get-away's to an Uncle's farm when I was smaller. Fields, hills, stands of undisturbed bush-lot ....

I kind of go in spurts with reading, nothing for months and then several novels in a few weeks. I'll read anything, except romances. The last few years, I seem to mostly find Robin Cook and Tom Clancy style books falling into my hands. But I love a good sci-fi, a thriller/horror, mystery or simple adventure. I've never developed a taste for fantasy though. What genre is this "Card"s books?

Been shovelling

The series is very much in the sci-fi genre although Card has written fantasy...the first "Ender's Game" is a classic but the whole series is strong...I lost my taste for "espionage" with Ludlum although funnily enough I thoroughly enjoyed the "Bourne" movies but then I have a failing for Bond movies...more discerning in my reading than my viewing

Yeah, Ma Nature thought we'd had enough of the easy stuff and rather unexpectedly gave us about 6" of heavy wet stuff. Life, eh?

I've heard the title of Ender's Game, but don't think I've laid hands on it. Maybe the next time I hit the 2nd-hand book shop. I prefer those places, ... if I choose a real stinker, I've only shelled out 1/3 of the price. Less self-inflicted butt-kicking involved.

As for discerning, well, anything is fair game for me. But if it hasn't caught my interest in the first 100 pages or so, it never seems to see the light of day again.

How goes your work-week? Anything novel or intriguing happening? We've a model of car-mount transceivers running out of factory warranty in a few weeks, so it was dropped on me yesterday. Tool up, rig a bench, write a useful repair and test scheme. Then deal with what-ever back-log arrives. Not thrilling, but it IS new to me.

Best part of the job new piece of kit to discover...lucky sod

...at the moment I'm documenting all the interfaces between our system and the customer's systems...radar, data and telephony...the interfaces are interesting, working out the parameters and checking them to our design assumptions; cataloging all the references and standards is pretty dry and getting hold of documents for some of the older gear is...interesting, let us say

Let me guess, ... one or seven sources have their own proprietary versions of an RS-449, or a slightly unusual baud-rate and stop-bit count. Just enough to be a real pain to mate up with.

That system I dealt with in the underground complex was all off-the-shelf Hughes Aircraft stuff of the late 70s. Their 16 and 36 (yes 36) bit processors, every flavour of 232, 422 and 449, and a few drunken engineers Saturday-afternoon designs thrown in for good measure. THAT was a challenge to trouble-shoot.

RS232 signalling but proprietry signal set...telephony standards from at least three incarnation of the telecommunication authority ago...being told a balanced to unbalanced signalling does not require active conversion...thank goodness at the moment I only have to document the stuff...a good work friend has the installation responsibility so he is making sure I do a good job

I've dealt with a few variations of passive BalUn's. Never much good with signal quality or frequency response, to my recollection. But then, I don't think this military has yet purchased a consistently viable VOX system either. When you can drop $15 bucks at the hobby shop for a pair of portable thingies that work just fine.

I've just GOTTA open a business of something or other, that can peddle to the government.

in this case it conflicts with the standard...one of the difficulties as a private concern working for the forces is we have to comply with standards when we know practicality and utility rules once we hand it over

I've actually perused a few of the formal "Mil-Specs". What a long-winded bunch of in a lot of cases. And as you say, in the end, that often gets tossed aside for real-world practicality.

There've been a few people suggest that I take some courses, upgrade to atleast Engineering Technologist if not the actual Engineer. Nawwwww. I draw less pay, but I still get to keep the fingers in it daily. I wouldn't enjoy days and weeks of theory, documentation and all of that, and then not get to work the end results. I'm a grease and dirty-nails kind of guy, I guess.

I enjoyed getting my degree for much the same reason I enjoy H2G2...wordgames and such...talking, solving puzzles and writing...but then being an engineer is something different...must admit it can be frustrating when the techs won't let me touch screwdrivers because they don't trust any engineer...but it does have some compensations

There has to be good aspects to both sides of the coin. Or simply there wouldn't be both categories, eh? I've always been pretty lucky that this military buys peculiar stuff. It's always meant that I have to find a way to mesh the old with the new. And not being in a commercial or industrial setting, some of the finer details or procedures of a "professional" can be side-stepped. The object is getting things working, correctly and NOW!

as my customer contact put it...it's the airlines job to fly safe, it's our job to fly to the edge if need be

the military have always been the best test bed for technology...willing to try, make mistakes and move on...given that is partly a bureaucracy