Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

@mnemeth Whats going on in Montreal? I'm hearing reports of hostages being held on the roof of Obisoft offices by at least 1 armed man, have you heard anything at all?

I have no idea... I've been on the road all day running down the lumber I need for this project. Maybe cyclin_al would have a bit of a clue; he's from that neck of the moose.


                                                  "You might be in Canada, ehhh...?!?"

Speaking of which... one of the lumberyards has an interesting mascot; my son named him Mustard Moose.

mnem
"Oh, just trample off, ya hoserrr..."

Wow.  That's one of very few moose left from Moose In The City back in 2000.  That thing's over 20 years old now.

Wait.... whattt?!? You mean the moose was a thing up here?

When I lived in San Damntonio, they were one of the first host cities for CowParade:    http://www.cowparade.com/our-story/

...and it was at the time when the whole thing exploded. We had like 100 cows produced through... IIRC, City Arts Foundation... and donated to various local artists and fine arts schools for the event. It was huge back then, before SA turned into one of the world's scariest strongholds of "Lets Make The Rapture Actually Happen" rabid religious right-wingnuttery and we had to run away. 

mnem
"Keep Austin WEIRD!!!"
"Keep san Antonio LAME!"

EDIT: Added linky to CowParade

[mnementh]

In Sweden, if you want a DIN 49491 Heizgerätestecker for your Germany-built VTVM and not desire paying 30€ plus shipping for a new one, you shall search for "Toaster", because that's where they were mostly used.

Possible side effect: Vintage Toaster Acquisition Desire.

mnem

[Cerebus]

[mnementh]

No. just... no. 

mnem
*currently feeling very thankful for his blooberry muffin*

[bd139]

I couldn't resist it. The Cherry MX silent reds were calling me again 

[mnementh]

mnem
If you water it will it grow into a real keyboard...?

[AVGresponding]

Can't beat a freshly toasted crumpet drowned in butter

[mnementh]

I prefer a everything bagel toasted extra dark with too much butter & cream cheese.

mnem
Dragons don't need a toaster. 

[Cerebus]

I've just started defrosting the fridge/freezer, otherwise I'd hit the kitchen and brew up a batch of fresh buttery crusty croissants to tantalise all of you with.

[Saskia]

Saskia, I don't really see where this is going.

Neither do I. I have seen a lot of bad stuff from folks of any color, any religion, any whathaveyou.
I could not care less about all that stuff as long as this person treats me with respect. And may very well expect the same respect from me. I just don't buy into "you are white, so you are racist".

I do have a problem with radical fanatics of any color, religion, etc. Be it left, be it right, be it christian, muslim, whathaveyou.

Why not leave it at that ...


And by the way, I just did have fresh croissants ...

[tggzzz]

We had like 100 cows produced through... IIRC, City Arts Foundation... and donated to various local artists and fine arts schools for the event.

We had 61 gorillas and I don't know how many Gromits, e.g.

[Cerebus]

You can never have too many Gromits. I think every tinkerer ought to have their own Gromit, just like every mad scientist should have an Igor.

Edited to add: "Frau Blücher"

Edited to add 2: I may have just broken the cardinal rule of polite English upper crust society: "I don't care what other people do as long as it doesn't frighten the horses.".

[AVGresponding]

*heads off to toast crumpets, some with cheese on top*

[bd139]

*heads off to toast crumpets, some with cheese on top*

What blasphemy is this??!?!?!?! Cheese on crumpets?!?!?!? 

[Cerebus]

Cut the fella some slack, he is Northern. 

[Cerebus]

And in that vein: Cheese and bacon on a fresh Staffordshire oatcake. Hmmmm....

[Saskia]

anyway. the builtin graphics and the freebsd X server did not want to play.

I decided Debian will be good enough for Hubby. Works out of the box.

Will spend no more time on the NUC.

Will spend some muulah at the local Charly on some red thai curry.

What are crumpets ? Pets in crums ?

[mansaxel]

I've just started defrosting the fridge/freezer, otherwise I'd hit the kitchen and brew up a batch of fresh buttery crusty croissants to tantalise all of you with.

2 hours ago I set a baguette dough from Orvar the IInd, my current rye sourdough. He's something like 10 days now. Started as 25g commercial yeast, water and coarse rye flour.

[Specmaster]

Saskia, I don't really see where this is going. There seem to be a lot of logical disconnects - Your friend with cancer seems to have encountered an arsehole civil servant (we have them too BTW), I don't see what that has to do with racism. Ditto, the local police being worthless and not doing their jobs (that happens here too, it seems the police everywhere seem to find it difficult to find the wit to deal appropriately with sexual crimes).

I'm with Martin Luther King Jr. we ought to judge folks by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin, or the god they worship, or what school or university they went to, etc. etc. The current UK Prime Minister is white, went to a 'good' school (Eton), a 'good' university (Oxford), and look what a worthless idiot he is. A prejudgement on his easily perceived superficial characteristics would be proved wrong.

The only trouble the large Pakistani-origined Muslim family across the street ever causes is their kids playing football in the road. Just an ordinary family in other words even though all the males go out dressed in pyjamas of a Friday lunchtime. The two  2 ¹/₂ Odinists who live in the road are quiet and keep themselves to themselves, and I suspect nobody but me and SWMBO knows what they are. The Black families next door and opposite (British natives and Francophone immigrants respectively) are no trouble, they're just ordinary families. The Ukranian lesbians downstairs and the English lesbians next door are fine too. The mad cat lady who lives at the other end of the street is what she seems, but she's normal otherwise. I can find no major faults in the actual content of the characters of my neighbours, but someone somewhere is ready to pre-judge those people because of one of the perceived characteristics I've mentioned and they would be wrong, both in judgement and morally, to do so.

The only truly suspect character in my entire street is this old beardie-weirdie with long grey hair who lives at one end and drives around in a red convertible sports car (At his age? Really?) with some blond floozie who's even older than him. Well sketchy if you ask me. You see him carting weird electrical equipment into the house, and bottles of chemicals. Trust me, we're gonna see police tape around his house one day, one of those tents over the door and lots of CSIs walking in and out in bunny suits.

Wow, you do live a multiracial and a multi persuasion street that damn sure and you also seem to know far more people in your street than I do in mine and there are only 20 houses in my street!

My Neighbour is a Polish family and is the only one that we get on with, he is local bus driver, and they like us, keep themselves to themselves. We take each other's parcels in for them etc and always speak when we see each other. Their children are well-behaved and play in the street during the good weather (we live in a no through road). The other neighbours are not so nice but are native British, we have a Pakistani or maybe Indian couple across the street, who also keep their own counsel. There is a family 4 doors away have the opinion that they own the street and will readily take my parking spot because they have / had 5 cars at their house, and they are a real rough and ready lot. In fact, it would never surprise me if they weren't related to the Kray twins.  But that said, in general our street is a very quiet and peaceful one, the only friction is always over parking spaces, so in general I find myself on the whole agreeing with you but there is one thing I wish you would come clean about the odd couple down the road with all the electrical gear being taken into their house, which is in reality of course is you talking about yourself but last time I looked, I don't think I recall anywhere where it says that being a TEA addict will eventually require having Police tape and tents erected around your house 

[ch_scr]

anyway. the builtin graphics and the freebsd X server did not want to play.

I decided Debian will be good enough for Hubby. Works out of the box.

Will spend no more time on the NUC.

Will spend some muulah at the local Charly on some red thai curry.

What are crumpets ? Pets in crums ?

Which NUC is it?

[McBryce]

You see him carting weird electrical equipment into the house, and bottles of chemicals. Trust me, we're gonna see police tape around his house one day, one of those tents over the door and lots of CSIs walking in and out in bunny suits.

Are you sure that "The strange guy carting weird electrical equipment into the house, and bottles of chemicals." isn't how the neighbours describe you?

McBryce.

[URI]

your view on racism might be a bit different if you were a white woman somewhere in Northern Germany trying to fill up your car and being threatened because you were not wearing a head scarf and you were driving a car in the first place.

(This happened at Cloppenburger Straße in Oldenburg, similar thing happened in Ingelheim, City Center). Ingelheim is the town where the police throws you out of their police station if you want to report a rape. They would not file a police report and investigate.

Your experience may differ ...

There is always 2 sides to the story. And we all made different experiences in our lifes. Even though it seems that I have a subscription on shit happening to me.

I'm struggling here a bit, are you saying then that Northern Germany is a coloured area and that they discriminate against white people, white women in particular who aren't wearing head scarfs and are a car driver? I was under the impression that is us whites who were supposed to be guilty of being racists.

I'm with AVGresponding here:
"Racism is not a disease that exclusively affects white people."

But I don't see the point in declaring rape crime as racist just because a black coloured man rapes a white coloured woman. That's just crime.

The son of good friends (16yo) has a brown coloured skin and black, curly hair.
His mother is German, his father is black coloured.
He's born in Germany, raised up in Germany, speaks German without any accent (like his mother) but he doesn't feel German.   
In fact, he speaks of himself as "wir Ausländer..." (we aliens...) because of his permanent experience of what we call here in Germany "Alltagsrassismus" oder "Alltagsdiskriminierung" (roughly: every day racism/disrimination).
If there's some trouble at school -he is under the first suspects without cause.
If something went wrong in the neighbourhood, his mother is called up frequently even if he wasn't even there at the time in question.
If he travels by bus he's treated differently in occasional ticket checks.
If he goes to a shop he often is treated differently compared to his white coloured school friends.
...

It's often not direct and open racism, often it's just a slightly different behaviour of other people he notices.
It's not always and everywhere, but too often to be just random.
And when I'm with him I also have noticed those slight differences in behaviour, sometimes it was me that was treated as one would expect and he was just behind me and experienced that he was treated slightly differently -what I could see, too.
Perhaps you may ask why I'm sensitive to this "Alltagsdiskriminierung"?
Because it happened to me, too.
When I was a young adult I had long hair, colourful clothing and was just not the type of guy a mother-in-law would have liked for her daughter in most places.
People treat you differently if you differ from the norm in a way that is not seen positively by the majority.

McBryce, you wrote that you experienced an open, friendly German society. Well, it is, mostly.
I think you experienced it this way because (caution: assumptions) you are male, white, Christian and not a complete asshole a friendly person yourself.

I remember that I did experience more "normal" behaviour to me after I cut my hair and changed my style of clothing when I was at university.   

I have a mostly positive view on the German society, it is more open, more friendly than it was e.g. in the 50's and 60's -according to what my grandfather and my uncle have told me.

Ok, that's it from me, now on to TEA again.   

[URI]

I'm very happy to announce that I could buy a component level service manual for my HP 8110A pulse generator.

I'm so happy because it's really rare. On the net you only find the users and module-level service guide for download.
Keysight doesn't offer the component level service manual for the 8110A any more.

I haven't checked it yet but I hope I now have a chance to repair the offset circuitry fault of some generator boards I still have in spare.   

[Specmaster]

I couldn't resist it. The Cherry MX silent reds were calling me again 

Haha, you also seem to have a thing about keyboards, like I do  , at one stage I had about 6 different keyboards but the best ones are the Cherry red nes.

[Cerebus]

Wow, you do live a multiracial and a multi persuasion street that damn sure and you also seem to know far more people in your street than I do in mine and there are only 20 houses in my street!

To butcher Dr. Johnson: "When a man is tired of Newham, he is tired of life".

We also have Hindus, every variety of Eastern/Central European, some students, and I don't really know what's down the other end of the street (other than the mad cat woman Annie).  Our street runs up to around No. 50, with quite a lot of flats, so perhaps 70-80 households. I'll talk to anyone so it's quite easy to get on at least nodding terms with the neighbours and, with such a mixed crowd, you get a bit less of of the Southern English reserve where people don't automatically strike up a conversation just because there's someone next to them on the street they way they do in some other countries and more northern counties. It's Diwali today, so I expect quite a few twinkly lights in people's windows at my end of the street later.

From back in the days before the French Revolution, many immigrants to London ended up in the Spitalfields area - that's why there's an association with the Rag Trade around there because French Protestants ended up there and started weaving silk. The French gradually got richer and moved further out or moved west, then there were jews en masse to replace them, then Bengalis. Over time the initial landing point for immigrant populations has moved further out and the settled immigrants have moved out further still.

So now Newham is the landing point for new immigrants and has been for some good time, which is why we have so many Eastern/Middle Europeans here at the moment, and not all previous waves of immigration have moved on. We've precious few French and Jewish immigrants left and any there are have been so assimilated into the local culture over generations that they don't stand out. Each wave of immigration has left more people from different groups behind and so Newham ends up as probably the most diverse borough in the country. The nominally Pakistani family opposite are on their 3rd generation here and close to the 4th -  granddad was part of the 60s immigration from the subcontinent. A similar story for the Hindus. The new wave of largely white Europeans are the freshest and are only just starting to raise children here.