Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

Hmm, that does not ring quite true to me, to be able to learn the skill set required to get involved in IT, must require a person to at least have an interest in that subject in the first place, much the same as someone who becomes a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, vet, pilot etc. You don't just leave school and think about which jobs pay the most, and then learn the skills in order to gain employment in that sector. Yes, I accept that there are many thousands with the attitude that they only work as a means to an end and those people normally can't be arsed to learn anything special as it normally requires years of very low pay while learning and also involves either going to university or college and loads of evening course work while their friends are out on the town.

The thing that frustrates me really is your last point. I knew a guy who worked for EON in a call centre. He was proud of his job, which is fine. But at the same time whined about how everyone else had stuff he doesn't and about how much money he didn't have. The guy has some serious organisational aptitude. I suggested he does some skills building and goes on some courses and he immediately complains that he's not being paid to do it so why the fuck should he? Quite happily throw £500 a month down the shitter in the pub and on smokes.

Self-imposed cognitive dissonance keeps us all as slaves.

Totally agree, when I left school and joined the local bus company as an apprentice, I went to college, day and evening one day a week, loads of course work on other evenings and was earning just £2.50 a week, others who did not want to learn skill were doing general manual work in shops, etc earned around £20 a week. Later in life, many of them were either in lower paid jobs or unemployed as companies closed down due to recessions and the internet taking its toll.

[Specmaster]

Hmm, that does not ring quite true to me, to be able to learn the skill set required to get involved in IT, must require a person to at least have an interest in that subject in the first place, much the same as someone who becomes a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, vet, pilot etc. You don't just leave school and think about which jobs pay the most, and then learn the skills in order to gain employment in that sector. Yes, I accept that there are many thousands with the attitude that they only work as a means to an end and those people normally can't be arsed to learn anything special as it normally requires years of very low pay while learning and also involves either going to university or college and loads of evening course work while their friends are out on the town.

What, you've no Indian lads and lasses in Essex who trained to be Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants because that's what mom and dad pushed them to do because "It's a nice solid respectable career"? Newham's chock-a-block with them, and those careers are chock-a-block with people (of all ethnic backgrounds) who had no particular interest or aptitude but wanted a nice respectable, lucrative, thoroughly middle-class career. It's the middle-class equivalent of the upper class politics/military/church destiny for No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 sons. It's also the reason why there are so many crap Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants out there.

The answer really to that question, is very few, don't forget that as the legend and song goes, the streets of London are paved with Gold and as a result London was the holy grail and Mecca for many of these families, Essex was considered to be the boon docks, full of carrot crunchers etc   

[AVGresponding]

Hmm, that does not ring quite true to me, to be able to learn the skill set required to get involved in IT, must require a person to at least have an interest in that subject in the first place, much the same as someone who becomes a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, vet, pilot etc. You don't just leave school and think about which jobs pay the most, and then learn the skills in order to gain employment in that sector. Yes, I accept that there are many thousands with the attitude that they only work as a means to an end and those people normally can't be arsed to learn anything special as it normally requires years of very low pay while learning and also involves either going to university or college and loads of evening course work while their friends are out on the town.

What, you've no Indian lads and lasses in Essex who trained to be Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants because that's what mom and dad pushed them to do because "It's a nice solid respectable career"? Newham's chock-a-block with them, and those careers are chock-a-block with people (of all ethnic backgrounds) who had no particular interest or aptitude but wanted a nice respectable, lucrative, thoroughly middle-class career. It's the middle-class equivalent of the upper class politics/military/church destiny for No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 sons. It's also the reason why there are so many crap Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants out there.

The answer really to that question, is very few, don't forget that as the legend and song goes, the streets of London are paved with Gold and as a result London was the holy grail and Mecca for many of these families, Essex was considered to be the boon docks, full of carrot crunchers etc   

Having never watched TOWIE, I feel unable to comment...   

[DH7DN]

This Tek-Demon appeared on my desk today... 

"He who fights with Test Equipment should look to it that he himself does not become a Test Equipment Anonymous. And if you gaze long into a Rabbit Hole, the Rabbit Hole also gazes into you."

~~ DOOMed TEA in 2021

[bd139]

Ooh very nice. The low tech solution strapped to the front seems out of place on a 2465 until you consider the state of digital cameras back then. The 2465 has aged well compared to other tech!

[beanflying]

This Tek-Demon appeared on my desk today... 

"He who fights with Test Equipment should look to it that he himself does not become a Test Equipment Anonymous. And if you gaze long into a Rabbit Hole, the Rabbit Hole also gazes into you."

~~ DOOMed TEA in 2021

Need to find some time to play Doom Eternal which I installed a month ago and have opened then closed Also added the Halo collection last week that hasn't even got to that stage.

[bd139]

My daughter was downloading that for the weekend last night. She is QoS'ed out of the network though 

[Kosmic]

We are only in it for the money ...

This job is not what I would consider fun

Exactly that.

Edit: must add that I know three people who retired at the state retirement age here and died within 5 years in poor health. They fell for the carrot on a stick life. I'm not doing that. I'm screwing the IT sector, doing the bucket list NOW, retiring early and starting on a new bucket list then. It might cost me my sanity but I was never sure of that anyway 

Same plan over here. Get all the money I can from them, put it away and retire as soon as I can. Then I will probably try to start a fun but useless business.

Talking about "Getting all the money I can", I got an interview with amazon next week.

[Saskia]

well, I am honestly only it it for the money ...

wanted to switch careers when doing "service for my country" and the application to change to a medical career was denied "because I had already spent too much time in the service". Well, they put the application into a stockpile and let it rest until too much of that time had accumulated. And then denied it. Bastards. Which is when I told myself: fuck them. and started to study math, computer science, psychology and some other stuff.
when I finished my term I did indeed try to finish my university, however I had a divorce 1 month prior to the exams, plus my "foster father" who had taken me in and protected me from abusive parents died just 3 days prior to the exams. I barely past those intermediate exams and was not really able to continue studies. Which is when I got an offer to do IT consulting for a large bank for 75Pesos/h.
I took that offer and never found the time to go back to university.

I do not have the job I wanted. But still I am good at it. I think I would have made a fine endocrinologist or toxicologist.
Never got the chance. Now I am an old hag, so no chance to a new life awaiting me in the offworld colonies. No chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure ...

In other news, I just got a Sony digital dictation gizmo with a USB port for 29 Pesos.

[DH7DN]

Ooh very nice. The low tech solution strapped to the front seems out of place on a 2465 until you consider the state of digital cameras back then. The 2465 has aged well compared to other tech!

Yeah, I bought the C30 camera out of curiosity. I'll try to adapt a Raspi camera (or maybe a CMOS/CCD camera) someday in the future.

This Tek-Demon appeared on my desk today... 

"He who fights with Test Equipment should look to it that he himself does not become a Test Equipment Anonymous. And if you gaze long into a Rabbit Hole, the Rabbit Hole also gazes into you."

~~ DOOMed TEA in 2021

Need to find some time to play Doom Eternal which I installed a month ago and have opened then closed Also added the Halo collection last week that hasn't even got to that stage.

Don't worry, same problem here... This game is just another title on my pile of shame   
It was unplayable ~3 years ago when I bought it (my PC hardware just couldn't handle it). It's nice to have few days off and "relax" by killing some demons 

My daughter was downloading that for the weekend last night. She is QoS'ed out of the network though 

Haha! Nice

[Saskia]

I'm worried. People are starting to talk about their failed marriages and describe their illnesses in unnecessary detail, while bemoaning the shitshow the world has turned into these days. Are we all becoming - hams? 

In order for us to become hams we must be hobos first like this guy. I can't imagine any of this civilized group resembling him. 



And I promise. After this parting shot no more talk of piss bags. 

Let's hope this does not turn into a talk of shit bags ... 

[beanflying]

I'm worried. People are starting to talk about their failed marriages and describe their illnesses in unnecessary detail, while bemoaning the shitshow the world has turned into these days. Are we all becoming - hams? 

In order for us to become hams we must be hobos first like this guy. I can't imagine any of this civilized group resembling him. 



And I promise. After this parting shot no more talk of piss bags. 

Let's hope this does not turn into a talk of shit bags ... 

Best we don't talk about politicians 

[bd139]

Talking about "Getting all the money I can", I got an interview with amazon next week.

Ah so I can shout at you all day on Chime? 

More seriously, watch out for their compensation offers. They like to offset on stock, keep salary fixed and assume the stock growth will pay off in your favour. It doesn't always do that so when they toss you on the street after your third year there or you burn out, you'll wonder what hit you.

But good luck. If you play it you can win good there.

[Cerebus]

My daughter was downloading that for the weekend last night. She is QoS'ed out of the network though 

Give her a history lesson. Put her on her own VLAN, whack that out via a router that loops through a couple of back-to-back 14k4 modems and every 30-45 minutes randomly drop carrier on the modems. "You kids think you have it tough, why when I were a lad..." Mind you, that would equate to a 330 baud modem on an acoustic coupler and an ASR33 in my case.

[bd139]

Give her a history lesson. Put her on her own VLAN, whack that out via a router that loops through a couple of back-to-back 14k4 modems and every 30-45 minutes randomly drop carrier on the modems. "You kids think you have it tough, why when I were a lad..." Mind you, that would equate to a 330 baud modem on an acoustic coupler and an ASR33 in my case.

Yeah. I remember playing Homeworld over a dialup back in the day with a good friend of mine because he couldn't get a 512k ADSL. That was expensive as fuck so I ended up lugging my entire desktop PC round his house and patching up a 10baseT network. Then being us, we got hammered and I couldn't drive home so had to sleep in his mum's wicker basket chair which was uncomfortable as hell but had less bugs in it than the carpet.

On the subject of her. She has made me proud. So on school open day my eldest spent her time dissecting rats, neatly arranging piles of organs and making kids and parents retch.

Back to ebay lurking. Friday afternoon so far uneventful! 

[tggzzz]

On the subject of her. She has made me proud. So on school open day my eldest spent her time dissecting rats, neatly arranging piles of organs and making kids and parents retch.

Excellent Glad to see you can still have fun at school.

[Kosmic]

Talking about "Getting all the money I can", I got an interview with amazon next week.

Ah so I can shout at you all day on Chime? 

More seriously, watch out for their compensation offers. They like to offset on stock, keep salary fixed and assume the stock growth will pay off in your favour. It doesn't always do that so when they toss you on the street after your third year there or you burn out, you'll wonder what hit you.

But good luck. If you play it you can win good there.

Yeah I'm used to those schemes. Also normally they don't give you the auctions right away. They spread it over 5 years. So it's also a retention technique.

[AVGresponding]

The FLIR works, though the fact it has its own battery is quite annoying to me. I think I will move it on, if the Cat 61 is as good as I hope.

Here's a pic of the heat distribution on my tv/monitor, the gradient isn't huge, the cold bits are about 2.5°C lower than the hotspots.

Let me know as I might have a mild interest

Chances of this happening are a bit remote I'm afraid; I'm currently in an email back-and-forth with Teledyne FLIR customer services trying to figure out how badly knackered the thing is. Possibly just a battery but possibly much more. That first time I used it has been the only time it's worked properly... I have the feeling this is going to be returned to the seller, unfortunately.

[Saskia]

oh bummer. Good luck with the return.

[Specmaster]

Hmm, that does not ring quite true to me, to be able to learn the skill set required to get involved in IT, must require a person to at least have an interest in that subject in the first place, much the same as someone who becomes a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, vet, pilot etc. You don't just leave school and think about which jobs pay the most, and then learn the skills in order to gain employment in that sector. Yes, I accept that there are many thousands with the attitude that they only work as a means to an end and those people normally can't be arsed to learn anything special as it normally requires years of very low pay while learning and also involves either going to university or college and loads of evening course work while their friends are out on the town.

What, you've no Indian lads and lasses in Essex who trained to be Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants because that's what mom and dad pushed them to do because "It's a nice solid respectable career"? Newham's chock-a-block with them, and those careers are chock-a-block with people (of all ethnic backgrounds) who had no particular interest or aptitude but wanted a nice respectable, lucrative, thoroughly middle-class career. It's the middle-class equivalent of the upper class politics/military/church destiny for No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 sons. It's also the reason why there are so many crap Doctors/Lawyers/Accountants out there.

The answer really to that question, is very few, don't forget that as the legend and song goes, the streets of London are paved with Gold and as a result London was the holy grail and Mecca for many of these families, Essex was considered to be the boon docks, full of carrot crunchers etc   

Having never watched TOWIE, I feel unable to comment...   

Not talking about now, I'm referring to when the great influx first happened years, London was the prime target, Chelmsford was not even a city back then, and I doubt that not many Indians had even heard of it, London...oh hell yes, thats why you have ghettos all over the place where fellow countrymen would flock together, like Southall for example. TOWIE had not even been thought of back then 

[AVGresponding]

Found this quite interesting:

[Specmaster]

That was interesting, I have soldering suction fan with a charcoal filter but have never used it owing to the small bench I have 

[mnementh]

Hmm, that does not ring quite true to me, to be able to learn the skill set required to get involved in IT, must require a person to at least have an interest in that subject in the first place, much the same as someone who becomes a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, vet, pilot etc. You don't just leave school and think about which jobs pay the most, and then learn the skills in order to gain employment in that sector. Yes, I accept that there are many thousands with the attitude that they only work as a means to an end and those people normally can't be arsed to learn anything special as it normally requires years of very low pay while learning and also involves either going to university or college and loads of evening course work while their friends are out on the town.

We are only in it for the money ...

This job is not what I would consider fun

Get out of it then and do something that is more fun, thats been my motto because you spend a huge amount of your life working and it is a hell of a lot easier if you actually enjoy your work.

Most people can't earn a living wage doing something that is fun or enjoyable to them and sometimes when you do something because you have to it ruins it for you. I have always found that it's best to keep the two parts of your life separate.

A fine example is electrical engineering. I found the corporate side of it to be absolutely horrible and at the time I didn't know enough to start a business and go solo. Now I know enough about business, having run one, that I don't want to mix something I enjoy with the business. I also understand that I probably don't know enough about electrical engineering on a professional level now to risk it either. But I can now enjoy it with no consequences either way other than burning some cash occasionally.

Ergo the only option is efficient use of energy versus return of investment which means looking for something where there is a high demand for skills, a low supply of skills, a low entry cost and a low risk from failure. Some parts of the IT sector are absolutely perfect for that 

Ehhh... a lot of truth in that. Working at what you're good at is not necessarily what you enjoy.

Like me; I'm a fixer. 

A mechanic in the classical definition of the word: someone who fixes machines. The part of the job I enjoy is the part where I'm learning aboot a new kind of machine to be able to fix it; alas, the conditions under which I'm allowed to pursue that bliss by their nature only want you to fix the same old shit 1000x a day until you're ready to take a walk off the edge of a volcano.

I thought when I was young that I could resolve that by going into a line of work where I helped design and manufacture those machines; surely in that role I'd have ample opportunity for new experiences, but no... ultimately every such job I had turned into some variant of manually debugging reject boards/devices/bins of stock with some form of multimeter and either fixing or decommissioning the thing. While I was doing that mind-numbing drudge work,  I had to deal with insane scheduling bunk like swing-shift, 40 hours in 3 days and the PHB up my butt 6-12 hours a day like all his production shortfalls were my fault, not because his little cabal of douche-puppets refused to pay for even basic maintenance on the machinery on the floor until it blew up and production halted.

Which of course was also our fault. 

If I wanted to do more, I had to deal with all that and go back to school at my own cost for even more specialized training than what I'd been doing all the while working for years that it was very obvious would literally become useless knowledge the moment they cast me off for some noob undergrad with zero experience that they could pay a dollar less an hour.

And this went on for over decade, until what was a repetitive circle-jerk of layoff and rehiring every other production campaign abandoned all pretense of being an actual career and turned into the zero-safety-net clusterfuck we now call the gig economy; lather, rinse, repeat...

But hey! I was living the dream!

I'm not looking for sympathy here; at this late stage of the game, and having burned up my youth making pretty much the worst possible choice at every juncture because it seemed I didn't have any choice at the time, it's obvious I am not meant for life in the corporate setting. 

I'm just laying it out so when I say that I held out until I knew I was going to wind up a news story aboot some guy on a rooftop with a rifle, you understand my full meaning. I was that close when I bailed on the corporate clusterfuck... I could literally count the days before I went completely off the rails.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

This must be a hint to shift the latest arrival from the kitchen table, that's a loaf defrosting. 

Good idea, this. The 203 should have enough thermal mass to help defrosting the loaf

Or you could Plug it in, leave it turned on and tell her it's the new bread warmer.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Yarp. Bossman just ordered a Xilinx VCK 5000 for me for farting around ...

Oh hey look... they're on sale! You should get three!!! 

mnem