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

That was actually my biggest bugaboo about our "military" the last number of years. It started turning into a corporation, with business plans, careerism and any number of other ideas. These kinds of things are great in the business world perhaps, where it's the almighty bottom-line, every-body scrambling for themselves and their private empires. But a military needs that team concept, cohesion, a change of command. Or it's worthless in a real-world situation. I held out that last few years until I was pensionable. Now, when it all crumbles under a real crisis, it is somebody else's problem.

I would argue that they don't work in the business world either...company loyalty and leadership have been sacrificed for self-promotion at all levels...the military encourage loyalty and dependence on your fellow for good reason; they work and not because it's the trendy buzzword for the week...a lot of people are worried the slightest mistake will result in dismissal and most realise that with stockholders at the top of the stockholder, customer, staff ladder that poor profit is most likely means redundancy and you don't get loyalty in that atmosphere and without loyalty there's no team


Morning, Nick

Very slowly, I am seeing a trend back towards the team effort and ethic. So maybe this outfit will still survive. Again, it's not my game any more. I perform my duties and tasks for them, to the best level I can manage. And then go home at the end of the day, not wondering if I'll get called out at night for a crisis or natural emergency somewhere.

How's your week ahead looking? Now that you have atleast half a day put in.

It would be good if that was a global trend...back to what is important...it sometimes concerns me how driven we all are by consumerism and have lost some of the simpler joys of life...and some of the simpler values like community and integrity

Very pleasant weekend...the heat and humidity has ended so had a chance to enjoy working in the yard and with the horses.

And you?

The week-end is just ending for me. We had an unseasonably mild week last week, ... above 0 C nearly every day. But cooling down again to -5 and -8 for this week. We still have until atleast late March or early April to consider winter "real".

The work week will be some frantic spending of the end of the fiscal year. You probably know the story, ... if you don't spend the whole budget, SOMEHOW, you get that much less next year. It's astounding the amount of furniture and computer gear they buy every year. Not needed, but the money IS there. I'm trying to chase down some current test equipment that we can make good use of, and have in our hands by March 31st. Price being almost no object.

Fluke and Texas Instruments - you may not get another chance

Thankfully projects don't operate that way but there are some other accounting foibles that are just as shortsighted like...you over-ran your estimate on this task...well it WAS an estimate and we under-run on others so...

Doesn't Cheops' Law apply to anything dealing with governments? Nothing is ever done on time or within budget.

Oh yeah, Fluke for certain. A couple more Marconi communications system analyzers, perhaps a few items from General Dynamics as well. They pretty well blew a load on smaller bench-type equipment last year, so I'll aim for the bigger-ticket items.

Thank goodness we aren't building a pyramid, or dealing with a pharoah there are worse things than dismissal...just ask Moses!

Most of the test kit we buy is Rohde and Schwarz, good stuff but the lead times from Europe have to be taken account of. They supply and cover a lot of our radio gear and look after us so we tend to go to them first.

Oh yeah, I remember the hardships Moses dealt with. And the ugly robes too. I've seen Charleton Heston

When you find a good and reliable support system, you sometimes don't mind a bit of inconvenience, eh? What's a couple of extra weeks wait-time when it helps ensure good relations. Canada has authorized distribution centres for most of the big-name equipment folks. So mostly it's a matter of deciding what model will fill our needs best.

Unfortunately Australia is a bit of a backwater...small population and geographically isolated, we just don't have the specialist outlets...we can only drool over what's available in Europe and North America...I suppose it's part of why we have a "make do" philosphy

I agree to the distance and isolation, though I don't know about the "back-water" aspect. But if you want to know of the 'make-do' philosophy, I should intro you to my Dad. The master of improvisation. That ability had gotten me through a lot of frantic circumstances with limited resources.

I was given a book on "bush skills" for Christmas...how to make buildings, tools and farm implements using low-tech fencing wire, bush timber and corrugated roofing iron...some ingenious solutions especially for a lack of fasteners...like a farm house equivalent of a log cabin

Somewhat more useful than a book my brother-in-law received years ago .... "101 Road Kill Recipes"

Have you any idea how many potatoes you need to peel for a full-carcass moose stew?

Staying with family in Rimbey, Alberta several years ago...we couldn't work out why the dogs weren't hungry...a few days later we found someone had taken a moose, removed the head and rump and left the carcass...dogs informed us it was a little gamy but acceptable

I was going to visit your "song in my head" page but I saw you had your hands full

Two of the ladies have gone to the Land of Nod, so there's just Tsarina and I left. And you know how infrequent her posts can be when that rude thing called work intervenes.

So then, you have seen "most" of a moose, up close and personal. Some of those bulls are down-right terrifying, the sheer mass of them. Small wonder very few vehicles win a contest on the highways, eh?

I was impressed especially having to try and dispose of it in the middle of winter ...in the end we had to burn it...but you are right about the size, the biggest worry here is if cattle wander onto the road...no comparison

You said Alberta? In winter? Talk about nearly perma-frost when trying to dig. Even with the calibre of farm equipment the prairie farmers have .... That's be a tough job to bury. Nearly as tough as being in-wind of it burning. Kind of a no-win situation.

It's a bit crude, but the funniest circumstances of road-kill I ever encountered was in the summer of '95, when I was in Florida for 4 months. There, armadillos are as common on the roads as skunks or porcupines here. But the comical bit was that so many folks were driving ancient VW beetles. They'd hit the shell and go a quarter mile on two wheels !!!!

My brother was agisting horses in the winter for a couple of trail riding companies and had minimal mechanised implements...and as you say permafrost made digging a moot point anyway...his dogs were the problem though, started to dig out of their kennel when they smelt the fire and they weren't diggers otherwise.

similar story...Australia imported cane toads to control cane beetle...they didn't and now they're a pest...overproduce, eat the native frogs, have poison glands and skin like chainmail...in some places they are in plague proportions and their road crossings become several kilometers of toad skin with no tarmac visible...one local council reported that one such stretch has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars in road maintenance

See? The tree huggers are correct, .... nature IS our friend.

I don't dare mention roads covered with things to the missus. We met in central Manitoba, and there every September, every snake would come out of the bush. The main trunk highway, for about a 15 mile stretch, was nothing but reptiles absorbing the last heat of the year. And sidewalks, parking lots, ... Made driving dangerous and walking very unpleasant, to say the least.

Amazing, ya get a few years and locales under the belt, and there's a real-life anecdote for nearly every idea, eh? Gawd, I hope this doesn't mean I'm getting old !!!!

NOT old!!!...steeped in experience I like to think we are interested enough in life to still pay attention...the fact that we have ancedotes is proof the more things change the more they stay the same