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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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KIKI
FWIW whenever a service tech came in to set up/ maintain/ repair an instrument I always asked them if their engineering departments ever asked the service people for suggestions ... and the answer was always no.
Why not have NO feedback for your what I'm sure you think is your perfectly perfect product!


SIX: Because this is all cheap stuff made in China that sells well enough even though it's cheap stuff from China with instructions that can hardly be called English.

The entire plant is set up, and mostly automated, to make the products specifically as you get them in the box. Altering just one little thing would cause the need to alter the production process which requires shutting down a portion of the plant, re-configuring everything, then testing it before putting it back into production mode.

Given the fact that this stuff is manufactured, packaged and shipped halfway around the world and is still as cheap as it is, they are working on razor thin margins to turn profits.

The only time they're going to look into altering anything is if something is broken so bad that all of the units are getting returned, or (much worse) it ends up causing injuries or death.

I think about computers and computer parts and their history when I think of this. In the early days of building computers with a friend of mine, everything was made in the States and was SUPER expensive. But despite the fact that the processing power, storage and memory were just mere fractions of what we have at our disposal today, those old PCs were almost perfect when it came to stability compared to what we have today if you set them up right.

You'd be hard pressed to find any electronic parts now that are made in America. They're a boatload cheaper, for sure, and everything is so much more powerful after 20+ years of R&D. From the quality of anything from motherboards, CPUs and GPUs to the software you're running whether it be an office suite or video games, the coding is also quite lazy these days, relying on the processing power of today's technology rather than expert coding and intelligent decision making to really push the limits of today's hardware.

By all rights, the machines we use in our everyday lives should be capable of quite a bit more than they currently are. But everything from the Operating System to the software package for your Graphics Card/Chip is written so sloppily that countless cycles are lost every second executing redundant code.

But nobody is ever going to fix any of that. Nobody's life is at risk. Most of the time, even though it is thought of as an inconvenience, a simple power down of the system and reboot is all that is required to "right the ship".

That's arguably a small price to pay compared to the $4000.00 it would cost to build a new computer if all of the parts were made here in the states and the fact that the days of $600 Office Suites are long gone. Hell... you can just use Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets which are almost as good as Microsoft Office and offer more to most people then they're ever going to need to use and you don't have to pay a cent for it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Well! You know quite a bit more than you let on, SIX! Hubby (who programs in C and many other languages and is also a computer hardware expert) says the same thing.

But even I can see the sloppy (SLOPPY! SLOPPY!) programming. Our tablet, for example, has all the horsepower under the hood to be able to run several applications at once, and yet it can't manage to run more than one tab at a time. (eg play a video while you look at something else online.) Even my phone does better than that. Our DVR? Can't manage something as simple as "file management". What about "memory management"? Why do products need to be rebooted every once in a while? Doesn't the system do cleanup on powering down?

And that's just the stuff that I see. If someone (not me) were to look at how many clock cycles were wasted just waiting for something, or how many hundred of thousands of lines of code that could be eliminated, they would probably be aghast.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Ya know what's awesome? When your buddy finally decides today is the day he wants help with something and today is also a blizzard after a week without any snow.

It took me a half hour to get there. Took me 90 minutes to get back home in the car we all know eventually isn't going to make it to Point B.




I think my problem is that I spend my life going from ZERO stress to 200% stress and back far too often. I knew today wasn't going to be a good driving day, but I did it anyways. Even more than helping a friend out (which will be reciprocated in the spring), but I just needed to get out of the fucking house and do something with my life since I let one thing after another destroy my momentum I had going once the dentures came.

He needs more help tomorrow, but I don't know if I'm going to sign up for that. Driving in the morning is supposed to be terrible. 30 to 32 degrees with snow/sleet.

I'm already wondering if the area I was working around has those auto-ticket street lights or not, since I blew one because the speed limit around there is high and I was afraid of skidding out when the yellow came at just the wrong time. That would be extra fun to get a $150 ticket when I'm already out gas and tolls and worked all day for free.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Cool. My mom used to knit. She tried to teach me, but I knit so tight I bent the needles! I thought it was a lost art.

As for myself, I was working on lots of paperwork. But the dental insurance company REALLY screwed up my policy. I spent hours on the phone over 3 days trying to figure out why I couldn't log into my account. It turned out they entered a completely bogus birth date ... nothing matched up at all, not day nor month nor year. Supposedly they fixed it after having supposedly fixed it a few times already and supposedly after updating their computer overnight it's supposed to be OK now. But they said that a few times already. I got a bit gun shy about trying to get into their website after getting bonked off and redirected probably 50 times. So I bailed off of paperwork to get on with house work, which is what I've been doing yesterday and today. Just regular stuff, shopping, cooking, dishes, laundry, and a bit of (re)organizing. I have 2 laundry loads left, it should all be done tomorrow. And then I'll return refreshed for my paperwork effort. (Which I hope goes better than it's been going!)

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Originally posted by Brenda:
This Saturday could be the last time BC changes its clocks. We here are getting tired of waiting on Washington, Oregon and California to get their collective sh&t together and deal with congress.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Starting Tuesday we have the possibility of a change of weather... the chance of rain for the foreseeable future.

BRENDA, how fares BC with the coronavirus? You might have ANOTHER reason not to go to malls!

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
This Saturday could be the last time BC changes its clocks. We here are getting tired of waiting on Washington, Oregon and California to get their collective sh&t together and deal with congress.

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Good for you guys.

I'm envious of those in Indianapolis who don't change the clock. So stupid that half our state does and the other half doesn't.





Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Sad to say that BC has had its first death from COVID-19. An elderly man in a care home in Vancouver.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Sad to say that BC has had its first death from COVID-19. An elderly man in a care home in Vancouver.

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I don't think the guy was on a cruise ship or returned from a trip to Wuhan or Italy recently! Did they have a presumptive source for his infection that you know? Or did they assign it to 'community transmission'?

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I can't figure it. There's nothing in here that it would want as far as food. How would it even know to burrow into a roof? There wasn't any shingle problems, as the roof was only a few years old when I bought the house and nothing has ever leaked.

Everybody I've talked to, including people who do trade work, have said they never heard of a squirrel burrowing down into a roof before. But unless my roof was hit by a meteor that burnt up between hitting the roof and the drywall inside the attic, that's exactly what happened here.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Oh that's too bad, Brenda. I agree with Signy, it's another good reason to not go to malls at this point.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

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I can't figure it. There's nothing in here that it would want as far as food. How would it even know to burrow into a roof? There wasn't any shingle problems, as the roof was only a few years old when I bought the house and nothing has ever leaked.

Everybody I've talked to, including people who do trade work, have said they never heard of a squirrel burrowing down into a roof before. But unless my roof was hit by a meteor that burnt up between hitting the roof and the drywall inside the attic, that's exactly what happened here.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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The one story that I read about squirrels returning to the scene to repeat the damage had to do with an exterior attic windowsill. Why a windowsill? And why go back to it after it was repaired?

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
In the garden, and RAIN!!!!

YAY rain!

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'd like a drought over here please. Could you send some of that West Coast weather my way when you get a chance?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by Brenda:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'd like a drought over here please. Could you send some of that West Coast weather my way when you get a chance?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Dry weather just got here and I want it to stay for a while.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Glad to hear that Kiki. It's dry in my neck of the woods for a spell.

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