Posts by George of the Jungle

The only game in town

Where I live, Comcast is the only high-speed internet connection; the local phone company's DSL offering pales in comparison. For standard internet and basic digital cable (which is the lowest tier now available), I pay about $115/month with all taxes included. Removing the TV portion raises the cost of the internet connection, so I would not pay very much less for internet-only.

We don't watch much on the telly, preferring to do "on demand" services through Netflix or Amazon's video services. If another high-speed alternative shows up in our area, I'll drop Comcast like a rock!

Connery

I had to vote for Connery; the first movie I saw in the theatre was "You Only Live Twice".

I did like Brosnan's portrayal though; he had the suave veneer, with the underlying darkness, although those movies were, as someone else said, pants.

Moore was the best in "Live and Let Die" and "Man with the Golden Gun" (though I really preferred him as Simon Templar). Moore also was hobbled with the 70s, and the fru-fru of the time. He played a much better character later as the tetchy "ffolkes".

I've though Lazenby did as well as could be expected with 1) following Connery and 2) having an awful script.

Dalton's movies were forgettable for me. I'm not sure if it was the time or what, but I don't think I've seen them more than once.

I'm trying to like Craig, with Casino Royale being good, but Quantum of Solace was bollocks. I'm hoping Skyfall will be better.

Food of the Gods

Pure maple syrup is the food of the gods. We make our own syrup from our trees, but since we only have two trees, we get a quart or two a year at the most. But, we made it ourselves!

AT&T are such cunts, though all the US cellular companies are in some way. AT&T just seems to have perfected it into an artform.

Luckily for me, I don't have to worry about dealing with them as GSM doesn't work at my home. I do own a Nexus One, but it's only used when we are in Europe.

Another former DEC employee

DEC was my first job out of school in the '70's. I had interviewed with IBM (amongst others) but was turned down for my grades being too low. DEC hired me because I had a bunch of real-world design experience while I was in college. I'd also been responsible for the maintenance of the Chem dept's PDP-8/i and was an operator for the engineering department's PDP-8/e.

My first job was working on the memory and memory management for the 11/44. One day I was cussing out the board, looking at timing issues, when I hear this guy behind me say, "What's wrong?" Without looking up, I said, "Oh this damn memory timing is off," while turning around, and there's Ken Olsen and Gordon Bell, doing their walk-around the Mill labs. They were then doing the "oh have you checked XXX?" and "let's hook another scope up to the row lines and see the timing there." I've never worked in another large company where the CEO was grabbing test leads and looking at debugging information!

As I said, I worked primarily on the 44. I also worked a little on the still-born 11/68 (11/60 upgrade) and the 11/74 (multiprocessor 11/70 system, basically 4 cooperative 11/70s). We used to love the 11/60 because you could rewrite the microcode and mess with people's heads! :) We also used to sit down the hall from the RSX guys, and would cadge source code so we could put hacks on our 11/70 development system to annoy our fellow engineers. Good times.

One last story. While on the 11/44 project, the lead came to me and said, "You're the young kid, you know hardware and software. We have these oddballs coming in to test their operating system on the platform. If that goes well, they'll buy these." The "oddballs" were people from Bell Labs, running Unix on the 44. I learned a lot about Unix working with them; I've been parlaying that knowledge into work for the past 30-something years!

I was supposed to go work on what became the VAX 11-730, but I was young and left the company to do other things. I ended up back there 20 or so years later as a consultant but that's a story for another day. I still have all my PDP-11 manuals and some of the software/OS "helper cards".

This space for rent

Llewellyn would have been completely apoplectic if Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear had done that kind of trip in the MINI-E, especially with a Jezza comment like, "This whole thing is rubbish!"

It would bracket nicely with their coverage of the Tesla a few seasons ago. Ah well, one can dream.

Oh sure

"The US Department of Homeland Security has joined forces with the most relentless and observant patrol force available in the US - Walmart shoppers."

Right... just check out the "people of walmart" picture site. That will show you the crack Walmart shopper forces (or in many pictures, forces you to see Walmart shopper crack...)

Ah, I see you have the machine that goes "ping".

This is my favorite. You see we lease it back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.

Apple's Ping sounds about as bloody useful too.

More old computers

I had a Digital Equipment Celebris 590 (Pentium 90MHz system), manufactured in 1995, running ipCop as my firewall. I got the box for free in 1999, and it's been working (with the occasional time-out for power failures) ever since. Even though I talk about it in the past tense, it is still running - my ex-wife got it as part of the house.

My current ipCop firewall uses an old Dell Pentium II running at 233MHz - speedy! I may replace it with a mini-ITX system I have laying around, just to cut the amount of electricity it uses.

Tower climbing

I have climbed two different radio towers, both times to change the warning lamps at the top of the tower. These were just baby towers though - 100 feet and 200 feet. Since both were on the tops of major hills in the area, the view was spectacular. Not as good as the one in the video, but still impressive.