Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

Oh No, thats the last place to be right now, keeping my fingers crossed for you that its nothing that can't be fixed really quickly and easily, so you go back home quickly. Good job you've got your phone and charger with you so you can keep in touch 

[bd139]

Yeah got the phone and the Anker so good for a couple of days of TEA and eBay . They’re cleaning me out both ends. Doesn’t look like anything serious fortunately based on imaging results just a transient body malfunction. I really don’t recommend this. 

[Specmaster]

Have you got any half decent nurses or eye candy that you can watch to take your mind of it at all? Just keep clear of the red heads 

[bd139]

Just an angry french dude so far. Not my type 

[Specmaster]

Maybe better luck in the morning then, good to see that you're keeping your spirit up. I always fancied nurses and other such professional types who wore uniforms, not so much for their uniforms but what according to what was the topic back then, what they wore under those uniforms 

[mnementh]

In all honesty... this is just another aspect of the "I am a person, not a number!" debate.

mnem
 

You still only read half the post, and avoid the part where your proposed "solution" isn't one. And, I am a number. 19XXXXXX-XXXX <- a Swedish Personal Identity Number, like US SSN, but not "secret".

I did read it. I understand. Those of you who code can deal with that shit, and you can order the damned numbers any way you see fit: as long as you document in the code, nunna my fukkin' bidness. Actually, even iff'n you don't document, nunna my bidness.

On a user level, there is no good reason for insisting on numbers instead of names for months. We functioned as a civilized society for hundreds, in some cases thousands of years doing it that way.

And no, you aren't a number. You are a person who, for the purposes of making it easier for a machine to grasp your existence, has their name translated on a lower machine level to a number. Big fucking difference; at least to me.

mnem
Oh, and Fives.

[mnementh]

Both of these things are why we have an OS. That kind of sh...tuff is literally its job, and the job of those people tasked with making a specific language version thereof. As I've mentioned; the places where the OS deals with dates are already being translated from binary to hex to decimal numbers; no reason that cannot instead return a TEXT NAME whenever the month field of a date is encountered, and translate it back exactly the same way. I literally could not care less how the computer organizes this stuff for its own use.

mnem
 

I know how these arguments with you go, so I'm not gonna get into the details. I'm just gonna point out that the bit I've quoted in bold above screams to any actual programmer reading it that you're in "doesn't have clue territory". You might want to consider that before you press on arguing with the others.

You're right. I've had to try several times... was never good at it, and whenever I try, it turns into a lost weekend or three worse than any booze bender. I can barely wrap my brain around the concepts of tables, arrays and hashes when I'm actively taking courses, and the further I get away from it, the less I can remember.

But in principle, you know what I'm saying is true. There is no reason for any person to have to deal with this crap. The only reason it ever started being the way we did it was so that people who think like machines could sort crap easier... and then so that machines could do it. The crappiest smartphone has plenty of horsepower to handle this on the fly.

People still think of months by their names. And there's no good reason the user interface on the machine can't or shouldn't think that way too, even if the underlying machine is thinking all in numbers.

mnem
*punt*

[mnementh]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

Urrrggh. Have had a few close calls myself with the low-carb diet. Wish you speedy relief, my friend.

mnem
*sending wishes of raisin bran and corn and everything else wholesome, whole-grain and fiber-ily*

[Kosmic]

Both of these things are why we have an OS. That kind of sh...tuff is literally its job, and the job of those people tasked with making a specific language version thereof. As I've mentioned; the places where the OS deals with dates are already being translated from binary to hex to decimal numbers; no reason that cannot instead return a TEXT NAME whenever the month field of a date is encountered, and translate it back exactly the same way. I literally could not care less how the computer organizes this stuff for its own use.

mnem
 

I know how these arguments with you go, so I'm not gonna get into the details. I'm just gonna point out that the bit I've quoted in bold above screams to any actual programmer reading it that you're in "doesn't have clue territory". You might want to consider that before you press on arguing with the others.

You're right. I've had to try several times... was never good at it, and whenever I try, it turns into a lost weekend or three worse than any booze bender. I can barely wrap my brain around the concepts of tables, arrays and hashes when I'm actively taking courses, and the further I get away from it, the less I can remember.

But in principle, you know what I'm saying is true. There is no reason for any person to have to deal with this crap. The only reason it ever started being the way we did it was so that people who think like machines could sort crap easier... and then so that machines could do it. The crappiest smartphone has plenty of horsepower to handle this on the fly.

People still think of  months by their names. And there's no good reason the user interface on the machine can't or shouldn't think that way too, even if the underlying machine is thinking all in numbers.

mnem
*punt*

mnem is almost right. It's not the job of the OS but the programming language / framework. With any modern one, it should be pretty easy to convert any time format to any other with couple lines of code.

First, the time is normally kept by the OS, by counting the number of tick since a specific date (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(computing)).

Then, in your programming environment, you should have access to some functionalities to convert that number to something more useful.

Ex in C#:

Code: [Select]

string time = DateTime.Now.ToString("MMMM, dddd dd, yyyy");
"DateTime.Now" get you the current time.

"ToString("MMMM, dddd dd, yyyy")" Do the convertion to a string with the format specified in argument.

the output string would be something like that "January, Sunday 24, 2021". By default in English, but you can change the language as needed.

The reverse operation (From string to time) is as easy.

[Saskia]

@bd get well soon

[mansaxel]

People still think of months by their names. And there's no good reason the user interface on the machine can't or shouldn't think that way too, even if the underlying machine is thinking all in numbers.

mnem
*punt*

I actually, quite often, think of months both as their name and their

Code: [Select]

printf("%02d",month); sequence number. I guess being brought up with the SSN/Personal Number as very important info you should know by heart (also for your parents and children) has damaged me permanently and made me a cog in the machine. I quite like it in here. Hot and greasy!

[mansaxel]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

"Oh, shit."

In all seriousness, get well.

[cyclin_al]

Again... it is already doing that translation on a lower level... from hex to usable decimal numbers. There is no reason in the world that simple text representing a month's name in whatever language cannot be part of how the OS parses that part of any date, except stubborn need to reduce it all to numbers and make people think like a machine so the machine doesn't have to.

What you're saying is that the whole world should have to propagate this same argument til the end of time so that a statistically insignificant portion of the population can have a supposedly easier time parsing regexes. 

mnem
 

Well, yes. You have a point. But: Have you ever tried locale-dependent programming? Like, for real?

And, this side-discussion on "how to talk to your computer" sort of took over my simple empirical observation that what you propose as completely unambiguous is not. Not even in the constrained case when we agree which language we're dealing with.

Your move.

With all the money spent developing OSes with blinkenlights and every imaginable gewgaw, maybe something this basic and human-thought-oriented should get some time. The OS is the natural place for this to occur, as they already have teams of devs working on every language version anyways. And for those locales where nobody can be arsed, then use the Latin-derived names that most of the world uses as an alt anyways. 

Again; once the translation standard is developed, it becomes pretty much a code jellybean that can be dropped in anywhere, just like the code MS uses during setup to define these things and all other programs refer back to it thereafter.

In all honesty... this is just another aspect of the "I am a person, not a number!" debate.

mnem
 

The whole  "I am a person, not a number!" debate is part of the problem.  The computer programmer can do all sorts of things to give the computer as much intelligence as they can.  However, the human condition can always outwit the computer and artificially/intentionally/unknowingly create a "garbage in, garbage out" condition.

SWMBO's mother makes a perfect example for this sort of thing.  Someone here already mentioned sorting photo files with dates as part of the filename.  She does exactly this (badly) with files and folders.  Since the computer sees the data as a filename, it is not even aware that the data is in the form of a date.  Right there, the computer has already been outwitted.  Now comes the human condition.  In conversation, she will recall that she was thinking in Polish on that particular day when the photo was taken, for some reason completely independent of that for taking the photo.  Now, take another instance and it may be Polish, French (France), French (Quebec), English (US) or English (Canadian) that she was thinking in, each with a different locale she may be using.  She has her reasons for thinking in the various languages, but without her explanation, there is no possible way to know (or remember after the fact) what she was using/thinking at the time.  In fact, there are times when even she does not remember.  Good luck on guessing which of the 5 locales she has used at any particular moment.  Another human or computer has no chance to recover usable information from her data.

I know, since I have been trying to recover some of that information.  This is the same person with the failed SSD that I have been attempting to recover data from.  What @mnementh says does work out when the photo has valid EXIF data.  EXIF data is in a machine format and can be displayed in a format by the OS as selected by the user.  Otherwise, it becomes challenging.  Take a date of 01/02/03 as an example.  In her photos, the best guess as to the year is which dog appears in the photo.  That can only be done by someone who knows her dogs and what the dog's appearance was at a certain age.  The month of January, February or March is best estimated by looking at the size of the snow banks in the image; other months are even more challenging.  Whichever field is left over after guessing year and month must be the day .... but may be the day the photo was taken or may be the day the photo was transferred to the computer.  Good luck 

So there we have it.  Confusion will reign supreme.  Any attempts to reduce the confusion are futile 

[Robert763]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

No taking the monitors apart, they are not TE
Get well soon.

[Zucca]

Well fuck. In hospital. Bowel obstruction. Not sure if it’s serious or not. Rate this day 0/10 do not recommend

Did you eat an ananas ham hawaii pizza?
get well soon, we need you here.

[Specmaster]

@bd139
How are you feeling today buddy, more comfortable I'm hoping? Have they given you any news at all yet as to what the problem is, and when they think you will be going home again?

Whatever the reason for the armed police last night in my street, it was serious as there has been a police presence at the house all night, and they are still in attendance now.

[BU508A]

To increase your mood @bd139 there is a Marconi signal generator online (NAWTS):



https://www.ebay.com/itm/402658690958

[bd139]

@bd139
How are you feeling today buddy, more comfortable I'm hoping? Have they given you any news at all yet as to what the problem is, and when they think you will be going home again?

Whatever the reason for the armed police last night in my street, it was serious as there has been a police presence at the house all night, and they are still in attendance now.

I’ll spare you the icky details but they cleaned me out end to end and feeling a lot better  . Just waiting for normal service to return and will kick me out of the door so home tomorrow morning if all goes well. They don’t know actually cause and can’t find anything visibly broken apparently. Said diet was fine so it was likely coincidental. Apparently it just happens sometimes 

As for armed police, we have them this weekend on the local estate as well. Probably high loon factor at the moment.

[Specmaster]

Wow, nice bit of gear that, shame about the photos though, with camera shake like that you can hide a lot of marks etc.

[bd139]

To increase your mood @bd139 there is a Marconi signal generator online (NAWTS):



https://www.ebay.com/itm/402658690958

Won’t ship to UK .  Big problem now.

[Specmaster]

@bd139
How are you feeling today buddy, more comfortable I'm hoping? Have they given you any news at all yet as to what the problem is, and when they think you will be going home again?

Whatever the reason for the armed police last night in my street, it was serious as there has been a police presence at the house all night, and they are still in attendance now.

I’ll spare you the icky details but they cleaned me out end to end and feeling a lot better  . Just waiting for normal service to return and will kick me out of the door so home tomorrow morning if all goes well. They don’t know actually cause and can’t find anything visibly broken apparently. Said diet was fine so it was likely coincidental. Apparently it just happens sometimes 

As for armed police, we have them this weekend on the local estate as well. Probably high loon factor at the moment.

Oh thats great news for you, so could be home soon then  As to police, yep you could well be right, could well be to do with lockdown causing people to lose their minds. As I'm one of the original grumpy old bastards, it suits me, don't have to see anyone and pretend to be nice 

[beanflying]

@bd139
How are you feeling today buddy, more comfortable I'm hoping? Have they given you any news at all yet as to what the problem is, and when they think you will be going home again?

Whatever the reason for the armed police last night in my street, it was serious as there has been a police presence at the house all night, and they are still in attendance now.

I’ll spare you the icky details but they cleaned me out end to end and feeling a lot better  . Just waiting for normal service to return and will kick me out of the door so home tomorrow morning if all goes well. They don’t know actually cause and can’t find anything visibly broken apparently. Said diet was fine so it was likely coincidental. Apparently it just happens sometimes 

As for armed police, we have them this weekend on the local estate as well. Probably high loon factor at the moment.

Put on some tunes @bd Blink-182 springs to mind

[BU508A]

Wow, nice bit of gear that, shame about the photos though, with camera shake like that you can hide a lot of marks etc.

This seller is known for the blurred pictiures. I have no idea, what this guy is doing with the camera, but taking good pictures isn't that rocket science. Even me can do somewhat goot picture.

 

[Robert763]

The Marconi 2017 is a lovely bit of kit. Cavity tuned and VERY low phase noise. A lot of bang for the buck. Only downside is it's big and heavy.

[McBryce]

To increase your mood @bd139 there is a Marconi signal generator online (NAWTS):



https://www.ebay.com/itm/402658690958

Won’t ship to UK .  Big problem now.

Here's one in the UK to make you feel better: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MARCONI-INSTRUMENT-2017-SIGNAL-GENERATOR-10kHz-1024MHz/254398839563

McBryce.