The white tops shine nicely in car lights or any kind of light for that matter.?ÿ Safety feature.
In the engineering/geotech world there's a testing gizzmo called a Scala Penetrometer, and it's very easy to get one's digit, extremity, or hand webbing, or all, caught between the hammer and the anvil. We generally advise of this risk/hazard, noting that "you'll only do it once".
Setting t-posts with my father sixty years ago was my first insight into just how OCD the man could be.?ÿ ?ÿWe had about 300' of property line on the north side of the old homestead that had been an old wooden post and barbed wire affair since WWI.?ÿ Pops wanted a new fence when they built a house next door.?ÿ He decided on a t-post and field fence design.?ÿ One of those cute little drivers would have been nice.?ÿ We drove every one of them with a 10# sledge.
He set line posts aligned with his K&E that roughly fit vertical tangents and PIs.?ÿ Next he pulled a string line along the tops and we set the intermediate posts in the tangents.?ÿ He then used a hand level to look at everything (with me running a level rod) and made scratch in a field book.?ÿ He then pulled a string across the open spaces between the 'straight' grades.?ÿ Each damned post had a measurement from the string down to the top of the post.?ÿ My brothers and I had several posts that we drove too far down and had to pull up to adjust.?ÿ My oldest brother finally grabbed a bumper jack out of the garage to help pull the 'offending' posts.?ÿ It was an aggravating and painfully slow process that took all summer.?ÿ When we would see Pops heading out the fence with his fold-up carpenter's rule us kids would get scarce really quick.
I don't like to talk ill of a person after their demise, but the man was a grumpy perfectionist when it came to something he "was going to have to look at the rest of his life".?ÿ His being OCD rolled in with the fact he never saw a sober day after he landed on the beach at Iwo Jima made the man difficult to tolerate.?ÿ I will testify the fence was so perfect we should have taken it to the County Fair.
Years later I realized Pops had figured vertical curves on the rolling lumps between the 'straight grade' sections.?ÿ The straight string from VPC to VPT was an offset he used to figure how far down from the string to the top of the fence post.?ÿ This was all done with a pencil.?ÿ I still can't believe the man thought all that through just to put up a damned fence.
******
A large cottonwood had grown near that fence over the years.?ÿ Pops had been gone probably twenty years when the folks to the north had a crew come and cut it down.?ÿ After they left the fence had three or four posts that were worse for wear and the fencing between them was a little stretched.
I caught my 80+ year old mother staring out her kitchen window at where the tree had been.?ÿ I just assumed she would want the fence straightened up.?ÿ I told her I'd 'get to it' when I had time.?ÿ She told me 'not to bother' and that she thought it looked 'nice' that way.?ÿ When she turned to look at me she winked with a twinkle in her eye.
I knew we were both thinking about Pops and his damned fence.?ÿ
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That's one of the newer safety ones with handles on the sides.?ÿ We use older ones where you hold the underside of the drop weight (10kg).?ÿ We drag the kit up and down hills, sometimes with a spare bag of rods.?ÿ Some places down to 6 metres depth. Never seen anyone sitting on a stool before, or the fancy tray for the auger samples.?ÿ
I have 2 shoeboxes full of 3.5? floppies,
The new machine I bought (laptop), does not have a CD/DVD player; what's up with that?
I've had it for a couple months and just noticed today ;~>
@flga-2
I got a SMOKIN" deal on a huge haul of 3.5" floppies years ago. I think I paid $9.99 for 1,000 of them. I was so excited - best deal I ever made! I think there are about 997 of them in box gathering dust in the shed. But man, was that a GREAT deal!
I have an old HP ENVY (2016) that didn??t have one either, just 4 USB ports and a couple of video outs. You can get a usb cd/dvd player recorder cheap. Mine runs on usb power so no outside electrical is needed. Also I use stick drives for extra storage. Cheap!?ÿ?????ÿ
CD/DVD storage is obsolete.
I knew a fellow that in the 1980's was archiving data from interplanetary spacecraft missions conducted in the 1960's. The data had never been reviewed, was stored on 24-track reel tapes, and there were only two functioning tape drives on the planet. The last living tape drive repairman had retired, but they had him on retainer. When he started musing about relocating to Tahiti they started the CD backup program. This fellow told me that CD data storage was only good for about 15 years. I didn't believe him at the time, but I have been noticing an increasing error rate in recovering my own data backed up on CD's about 20 years ago.
Sometimes a good deal is hard to ignore. I have enough ??OxyClean? laundry detergent for 2 or 6 decades. And 10 gallons of sliced pickles from Costco. ?????ÿ
The first digital camera that I can ever remember using was back in year 2002. For its memory, it used 3.5" FD's, so that set the physical size of it. The lens must have been something like 0.1MP and it was limited to something like 20 photos, and very short battery life, or both. Probably cost the company $1000 each for that state of the art stuff.
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I've noticed that error rate too.
I was telling the staff a couple of days ago that when CD's first came out, they were touted as the b all and end all of music and data storage - indestructible, and nothing would ever be invented to surpass it. And I recall a news clip with some scientist rubbing treacle onto a CD, cleaning it with water and an cloth, then demonstrating that it still worked.
A CD has to be in bad shape to have errors, unless they are scratched in a circular manner. I saw a demonstration once where someone took a CD and drew magic marker lines radially on it, and it still played.
I was in a meeting once with Dr. Irving Reed at USC, who with another guy invented the Reed-Solomon digital error correcting code which is part of the CD format. He struck me as having the air of a British gentleman about him, even though he was American.
That rings a bell - don't clean them in the "wax on wax off, Grasshopper" circular motion.
@richard-imrie I used one just like that to take photos of cellular tower sites.?ÿ Time was always critical and waiting for film to develop or finding out that the pics didn't come out good wasn't an option with the distances involved.
I remember a James Herriot story, about sending a feces sample (in a treacle tin) to the lab, to test it for johnnies disease, or worms, and sending some salve to a customer names soames. It was for a horse, and had instructions to rub it in well.
Tristan went to mail the packages, and got the addresses mixed up.
Soames got a treacle tin of manure. With instructions to "rub it in well".
And, the lab got salve, to test for johnnies disease.?ÿ
They got a letter from Soames, that was "the most vitriolic letter I have ever seen", according to James Herriot's boss.
Tis the only time I've ever heard of a "treacle tin". I did not know what it was either.
Nate
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I had to google "treacle"
I only recognized the word from reading Alice in Wonderland decades ago.
olled in with the fact he never saw a sober day after he landed on the beach at Iwo Jima made the man difficult to tolerate.
??olled in with the fact he never saw a sober day after he was 17?ÿmade the man?ÿimpossibly difficult to be within 100?? of 24/7.
Paden, I know more about that than many people. My Father finally drank himself to death at age 52. I was 13 at the time and at his funeral, to make matters worse, every single Nun from my school prison had to show up. As soon as the final Amen was enunciated I was out of there without the courtesy of greeting anyone. I was so relieved all this crap for 13 years was finally over. Embarrassed to say but I didn??t shed one tear and have lived happily ever after. ?????ÿ
??DUKE NUKEM?, ??JILL OF THE JUNGLE?, ??CASTLE WOLFENSTIEN?, and ??MONKEY ISLAND??ÿ
No Oregon Trail? Lame! ???? ?????ÿ
@flga-2
I believe life is what you make out of it.?ÿ Some people spend their whole life span being a victim of something that happened to them over a relatively short period of time long ago.?ÿ I chose to shed all that years ago and it sounds like you did also.
I could write two very different stories of my upbringing.?ÿ The one I tell is really how I choose to remember it.?ÿ All of us kids (and our mother) endured my father's alcoholism up until the day he died.?ÿ Back in the day we all spent time not going to school until the marks or bruises healed.?ÿ There's a good reason we all called him "pops"...
And even though I actually learned the trade from my father, our relationship was always strained at its best.?ÿ I spent the last 30 days of my father's life by his hospital bed.?ÿ I told him I figured this was the last chance we would have to sort things out.?ÿ I didn't want to spend the rest of my life talking to a headstone in a cemetery.?ÿ We really didn't get anything ironed out, but he did apologized for being what he guessed was "a little rough" on us kids.?ÿ I wish my brothers and sisters had been their with me.?ÿ None of them would visit him.?ÿ I got mixed results from my siblings when I related to them what he had said.
We all overcame our upbringing in different ways.?ÿ My actual father-figure was my oldest brother "Cole" who found his solace as a man of the cloth after a wild childhood.?ÿ He did right by me and probably so many others.?ÿ In a rare admission of the realities of life and the Cash Clan I'm sad to tell you Cole passed away in Colorado Springs last month.?ÿ I was sad to see him go, but he was ready.?ÿ I'm glad I was able to thank him many times for the corrections he blessed me with in those tender years.?ÿ
His reply was always, "That's what family's for".?ÿ
