Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[BU508A]

There are issues with more active pixels on the same size sensor. One that a lot of people miss is dynamic range. A small active area (pixel) is both less sensitive and saturates at a lower level. The ratio of active area to dead space (interconnects readout circuitry etc) goes down too. These can be fudged with processing but the raw data is still poorer. You really notive these effects when using imaging sensors for measurement purposes.
More is not automatically better

Indeed ! That's why I always understood that large sensors were better, more light hitting them, less noise, better sensitivity, and cost a fortune, and were used in professional cameras.

Just like the saying goes for car engines " There is no replacement for displacement "... same goes for camera I guess : " there is no replacement sensor area ". That doesn't rhyme though.... need to word it better than that...

If you are interested in more details about how small a pixel size should be, the SNR related to pixel size etc. I've attached a paper from the Stanford University about this topic.

Source:
https://isl.stanford.edu/~abbas/group/papers_and_pub/pixelsize.pdf

[Vince]

Wow they went to town about it...

I like how they are upfront about it on the cover page : " It's very hard to figure this out due to the great number of factors and the HUMAN PERCEPTION of picture " quality " " !

Indeed, it's not all science, there is an irrational part to it as well.

Basically that paper confirms the " larger the better " gut feeling, with the exception that this means less spatial resolution. However just how much of a practical impact that might have in reality I don't know.

I guess it would be most evident when taking a macro shot, with the objective literally touching the object... but then again, that's what I did when I took the pic of the TO3 package yesterday, and even though I limited the resolution to 2MP, it's still good enough for me. The camera can do 12MP IIRC, which means even in macro shots there is plenty of head room for a lower pixel density / larger die for the same pixel count.

Every body has their own requirement of course, but really, 12MP is more than I have ever used for a pic. I default to 2MP. When I need to go higher to capture more detail like text on a document that spans multiple pages that I would want to have all in one shot, I would increase to 3MP or 5MP as necessary, but not more, it's just not needed to get the required resolution. So really a 12MP as far as my own use is concerned, I could make the die as large as the manufacturer is willing to do !   
Trouble is, it looks like the larger the sensor, the higher the cost. 

Of course as BD said, more pixels let's you crop the picture later to get rid of the unwanted parts. However I doubt you would crop more than 50% of the picture area or else you would need to get some training on how to frame the subject I would think !     so let's ay you need a 6MP sensor tops, so make it 12MP to give your the cropping ability. But 50 or 100MP not sure how useful that would be...
OK, maybe found a another excuse for large MP counts : if you are shooting a subject that's really, really far away. You have a 600mm objective but it's not enough to make it fill the sensor.... with a silly high pixel count you could digitally zoom on it. but that would require an extra super mega stable tripod or else the distant subject it would be super blurry / useless  I guess ! 

Yeah photography is all very interesting indeed. My crappy camera forces me to try to understand how this all works, because it can never make a decent picture, so I am trying to understand how to configure it to try to lessen the pain. Lots of trial and error...
What kills me is that 99% of the time the "live" picture in the LCD / view finder, is GREAT, matches what my own eyes can see.... but somehow the picture that gets recorded on the SD card when I press the shutter button... IS NOT what was on the LCD screen !    FFS, if it was nice on the screen, why don't you just write that to the freaking SD card and call it a day ! 

Ahhh.... photography..... 

[tggzzz]

I will investigate the technical possibility of filtering his posts automatically, so that they don't even appear on my screen. Maybe there is some Firefox plug-in that can do that, I don't know. I will have a look for that at the very least.

When I was young the important skill was being able to take time to glean all information from whatever source you could get your hands on. Now the important skill is the opposite: being able to quickly decide what to ignore.

That doesn't require plugins etc, merely the ability to speed-reed and/or glance at the style. Long handwritten letters in green ink used to be a big visual hint!

[bd139]

Wow they went to town about it...

I like how they are upfront about it on the cover page : " It's very hard to figure this out due to the great number of factors and the HUMAN PERCEPTION of picture " quality " " !

Indeed, it's not all science, there is an irrational part to it as well.

Basically that paper confirms the " larger the better " gut feeling, with the exception that this means less spatial resolution. However just how much of a practical that might have in reality I don't know.

I guess it would be most evident when taking a macro shot, with the objective literally touching the object... but then again, that's what I did when I took the pic of the TO3 package yesterday, and even though I limited the resolution to 2MP, it's still good enough for me. The camera can do 12MP IIRC, which means even in macro shots there is plenty of head room for a lower pixel density / larger die for the same pixel count.

Every body has their own requirement of course, but really, 12MP is more than I have ever used for a pic. I default to 2MP. When I need to go higher to capture more detail like text on a document that spans multiple pages that I would want to have all in one shot, I would increase to 3MP or 5MP as necessary, but not more, it's just not needed to get the required resolution. So really a 12MP as far as my own use is concerned, I could make the die as large as the manufacturer is willing to do !   
Trouble is, it looks like the larger the sensor, the higher the cost. 

Of course as BD said, more pixels let's you crop the picture later to get rid of the unwanted parts. However I doubt you would crop more than 50% of the picture area or else you would need to get some training on how to frame the subject I would think !     so let's ay you need a 6MP sensor tops, so make it 12MP to give your the cropping ability. But 50 or 100MP not sure how useful that would be...
OK, maybe found a another excuse for large MP counts : if you are shooting a subject that's really, really far away. You have a 600mm objective but it's not enough to make it fill the sensor.... with a silly high pixel count you could digitally zoom on it. but that would require an extra super mega stable tripod or else the distant subject it would be super blurry / useless  I guess ! 

Yeah photography is all very interesting indeed. My crappy camera forces me to try to understand how this all works, because it can never make a decent picture, so I am trying to understand how to configure it to try to lessen the pain. Lots of trial and error...
What kills me is that 99% of the time the "live" picture in the LCD / view finder, is GREAT, matches what my own eyes can see.... but somehow the picture that gets recorded on the SD card when I press the shutter button... IS NOT what was on the LCD screen !    FFS, if it was nice on the screen, why don't you just write that to the freaking SD card and call it a day ! 

Ahhh.... photography..... 

Robert's point about sensor size and dynamic range and BU508A's article are spot on. There are diminishing returns on increasing pixel count and decreasing pixel size. I am mostly afraid that the outcome will be more processing of the image which will realistically just end up with crap images with digital artifacts.

I tend to shoot RAW which is 14-bit dynamic range on my camera body. There's a lot more information to recover if you fudge the shot  . Here's an example of a before and after if you shoot RAW after a couple of minutes in Lightroom as an example:





99% of what appears on the screen is not what comes out of post processing. It's about capturing as much data up front as possible really. The smartphone cameras try and do a half arsed job of this which is getting better but it can't beat some actual thinking.

The real killer on smartphones is the fact you usually have 1-3 prime lenses with zoom emulated via digital processing. That just ruins everything.

[Vince]

Wow BD I am not sure I understand... Googled this "Lightroom"' thing... image post processing S/W OK... so you mean that the camera captured a blinding sky that's 100% white, and the S/W managed to find 50% blue skies and little clouds in that ?! 

So I assume your eyes were seeing these blues skies and clouds, and it's just the camera that decided to turn it all white.... but it wasn't really white, the S/W managed to find nuances in that white sky to reconstruct the original blue skies parts ?!  Well, I am rather baffled !
But that's incredibly cool !
... but would be much better if the camera captured the skies properly to being with ! 
and I still don't understand when one is supposed to write sky or skies, and brains instead of brain ! 

The grass looks much better as well. Vibrant bright green rather than dull darker green. Obviously that's only morally acceptable if the grass was indeed vibrant light green to begin with, otherwise it's just digital makeup and cheating ! 

Nice ruins. Plenty of space to install your lab there, just needs some kind of a roof...

[bd139]

It's not really post processing past the normal stuff the camera does. The camera captured the blue sky. But it was well overexposed because I was shooting in full manual and didn't have enough coffee in me. The dynamic range from the capture (14-bit RAW) allowed me to pull the exposure down from the raw sensor data the camera. The sky was blue just overexposed.

I did shift the grass saturation up a little bit afterwards because that sells the image better to who is interested in it. That was cheating 

[Vince]

OK OK... still, that means the camera gave you white skies but it was possible to recover the blue in it after the fact, so that's good to know !!

I mean I run into this problem regularly, when the sun light coming towards me/camera is not blinding me, bu tis blinding the camera, which automatically lowers exposure which then makes the subject I am interested in, all dark, making the picture useless. Like for example once, I was trying to take a picture of my living room curtain. Looked really nice in the flesh, but the camera somehow was blinded by the sun light coming through the curtain. I tried all ISO settings to no avail, impossible to make a decent pic.
So next time I will try to shoot in RAW format see if I can improve the picture to something decent...

Thanks for the tip 

As for saturation, I have just recently discovered a nice use for it. The schematic for my Rochar Nixie DVM looks nice on screen, but is impossible to print because it's scanned old "brown"/ yellowed paper that once printed on my B&W laser printer is all black and useless. So I tried to convert it to black and white before printing, but no good result would come out of it. There were areas that just would never come out right once converted. But then I played with saturation and that made the brown background much lighter, so THEN I could convert that to B&W using the "threshold" feature IIRC or whatever, and NOW it would give me a decent, usable B&W schematic that I could print ! 

[tggzzz]

Wow BD I am not sure I understand... Googled this "Lightroom"' thing... image post processing S/W OK... so you mean that the camera captured a blinding sky that's 100% white, and the S/W managed to find 50% blue skies and little clouds in that ?! 

So I assume your eyes were seeing these blues skies and clouds, and it's just the camera that decided to turn it all white.... but it wasn't really white, the S/W managed to find nuances in that white sky to reconstruct the original blue skies parts ?! 
...
Nice ruins. Plenty of space to install your lab there, just needs some kind of a roof...

He is just moonlighting for estate agents, who manage that all the time.

This was my parents' house, which also needed significant renovation including a new roof. My eyes saw continuous gray altostratus clouds

[Vince]

Yeah real estate agencies are used to tricking people !

In this pic they went too far though, making the pic "suspicious" 

I mean the sky is SO blue that you would expect all that light to also affect the trees and make them much more bright and vibrant, not a dark dull greeN.
same for the stone walls.
Pic is not consistent "enough" light-wise to be credible, run away people, don't buy it ! 

Were it me I would have made the sky a bit less luminous, touched the trees to make them more vibrant, and "cleaned up" the RHS wall 

[bd139]

Being on the market for a flat if I run this through my lightroom preset for "un-estate-agenting" it, it looks about right now 



Anyway back to TE ... reverse engineering the HP 427A charger now...

[Vince]

Thanks BD, I actually find it much better looking this way ! More realistic colours, more natural, the stones covering the exterior of the ground floor look much more natural and pleasing.

Looks much better this way to me... but I guess I am not normal 


I don't even understand why British estate agents bother putting blue skies on pictures, like... come on, we LIVE here dude, we know what British weather is like, who do you think you are going to fool ! 

However that might work when trying to sell luxurious properties on-line to some rich people that live abroad, in Arabic countries or Russia or I don't know ! 

[Cerebus]

Guess I'm gonna have to make more popcorn.       

you through that whoppa bag already ? 

Dawn duels will be next. 

Well you know what popcorn's like, you just keep dipping your hand in the bag without looking and all of a sudden it's empty and you want some more. 

I get Mike's point though. Whether he intends it to be so or not is another question, but Mnem's tone when he thinks he knows what he's talking about can get a bit

[med6753]

I've said my peace concerning that subject matter. It can be taken as he needs to tone it down or throw a childish hissy fit and toss stones in my direction. Don't care either way and like Vince I'll ignore it.

When I make popcorn it's for the entire group to enjoy. 

Some good news here. My daily insulin routine is having some positive effects. Since upping the daily shot from 10 units to 15 units my fasting blood sugar has come down dramatically. Tuesday was 120mg/dL. Yesterday 113mg/dL. This morning 109mg/dL. For a non-diabetic should ideally be 100mg/dL or less. But anything under 120mg/dL is considered "acceptable". So I'm getting there.   

[Cerebus]

There are issues with more active pixels on the same size sensor. One that a lot of people miss is dynamic range. A small active area (pixel) is both less sensitive and saturates at a lower level. The ratio of active area to dead space (interconnects readout circuitry etc) goes down too. These can be fudged with processing but the raw data is still poorer. You really notive these effects when using imaging sensors for measurement purposes.
More is not automatically better

All that is true but for photographic purposes it's not really the limiting factor. Almost any reasonably modern sensor intended for photographic use can beat film in terms of dynamic range. However the ability to shift gain (aka alter the equivalent ISO number) on digital sensors tends, I suspect, to mean that this isn't always taken advantage of by being operated at the optimum exposure whereas with film you were forced to.

With the sensor disposed of the limiting factor becomes the lens in front of it and there's no doubt that this is what makes the most difference. People are quite often surprised to find that a digital photo of mine that they like, that beats their jigapixel digital picture, was made with a humble 17 year old, 6 megapixel Nikon D70. Of course the secret is that it was made with a decent lump of glass in front of the sensor with perhaps twice the resolving power of the lens on their latest Apple/Samsung/Whatever with a much more modern, better, and higher resolution sensor.

[Robert763]

There are issues with more active pixels on the same size sensor. One that a lot of people miss is dynamic range. A small active area (pixel) is both less sensitive and saturates at a lower level. The ratio of active area to dead space (interconnects readout circuitry etc) goes down too. These can be fudged with processing but the raw data is still poorer. You really notive these effects when using imaging sensors for measurement purposes.
More is not automatically better

All that is true but for photographic purposes it's not really the limiting factor. Almost any reasonably modern sensor intended for photographic use can beat film in terms of dynamic range. However the ability to shift gain (aka alter the equivalent ISO number) on digital sensors tends, I suspect, to mean that this isn't always taken advantage of by being operated at the optimum exposure whereas with film you were forced to.

With the sensor disposed of the limiting factor becomes the lens in front of it and there's no doubt that this is what makes the most difference. People are quite often surprised to find that a digital photo of mine that they like, that beats their jigapixel digital picture, was made with a humble 17 year old, 6 megapixel Nikon D70. Of course the secret is that it was made with a decent lump of glass in front of the sensor with perhaps twice the resolving power of the lens on their latest Apple/Samsung/Whatever with a much more modern, better, and higher resolution sensor.

Yep, when I was more into DSLRs I spent more on the lenses (Canon "L") than the camera (20D) but that was many years ago.

[tggzzz]

Yeah real estate agencies are used to tricking people !

In this pic they went too far though, making the pic "suspicious" 

I mean the sky is SO blue that you would expect all that light to also affect the trees and make them much more bright and vibrant, not a dark dull greeN.
same for the stone walls.

Pic is not consistent "enough" light-wise to be credible, run away people, don't buy it ! 

Were it me I would have made the sky a bit less luminous, touched the trees to make them more vibrant, and "cleaned up" the RHS wall 

Yes and no! The trees are darker under any lighting conditions, but the ashlar stonework is a "honey" colour that is typical of this area.

Here's a more representative picture, although not taken on the same day. (bd is too pessimistic!)



As for "run away, run away", there was a house nearby that fell (no pun) into that category....

It was sold in Jan 2020, and the new owners decided to update it. The problem was that it was a "listed" house (like my parents' house), which means you have to get formal official permission before making changes.

When it came on the market, the slideshow indicated that the floorboards were up, there were significant gaps in the wall, and an RSJ was visible. WTF?!

Our estate agent sold the house in 2020, and he said the new owners had been sufficiently incompetent about the updating that it had caused large cracks in the neighbouring property, and hence large lawsuits. Apparently the bank repossessed the property after it initially failed to sell. My daughter said people would have to pay her to take it off their hands!

[bd139]

There are issues with more active pixels on the same size sensor. One that a lot of people miss is dynamic range. A small active area (pixel) is both less sensitive and saturates at a lower level. The ratio of active area to dead space (interconnects readout circuitry etc) goes down too. These can be fudged with processing but the raw data is still poorer. You really notive these effects when using imaging sensors for measurement purposes.
More is not automatically better

All that is true but for photographic purposes it's not really the limiting factor. Almost any reasonably modern sensor intended for photographic use can beat film in terms of dynamic range. However the ability to shift gain (aka alter the equivalent ISO number) on digital sensors tends, I suspect, to mean that this isn't always taken advantage of by being operated at the optimum exposure whereas with film you were forced to.

With the sensor disposed of the limiting factor becomes the lens in front of it and there's no doubt that this is what makes the most difference. People are quite often surprised to find that a digital photo of mine that they like, that beats their jigapixel digital picture, was made with a humble 17 year old, 6 megapixel Nikon D70. Of course the secret is that it was made with a decent lump of glass in front of the sensor with perhaps twice the resolving power of the lens on their latest Apple/Samsung/Whatever with a much more modern, better, and higher resolution sensor.

I actually had a D70. Nice camera

Completely agree. I'm going to be honest and say I rather like the modern smartphone cameras. You can get some shockingly good results out of them but the lack of glass is mostly what kills them for me. I missed a lot of opportunities. So I traded someone else's kidney for some mirrorless kit 

[Cerebus]

Some good news here. My daily insulin routine is having some positive effects. Since upping the daily shot from 10 units to 15 units my fasting blood sugar has come down dramatically. Tuesday was 120mg/dL. Yesterday 113mg/dL. This morning 109mg/dL. For a non-diabetic should ideally be 100mg/dL or less. But anything under 120mg/dL is considered "acceptable". So I'm getting there. 

Good news.

A word of caution if I may, and I'll add that you've said nothing to make me suspect you're doing this, so treat this as a public service announcement and not directed at you. A doctor I was talking to once said that it was "Important to remember to treat the patient or disease, not treat the numbers". With any physiological process that can spit out numbers ostensibly characterising how 'good' or 'bad' things are there's a tendency for both doctors and patients (also public health authorities and policy makers) to fixate on the numbers, sometimes to the detriment of the person/people being treated.

In a perfectly healthy individual you can expect the numbers to bounce around from day to day and it's important to remember that you're measuring a noisy process, with the analytical equivalent of 2 or 3 digit DVM, and also that the 'normal' figures are derived from population norms that are themselves noisy and sometimes from such small sample sizes that it'd be embarrassing to be caught relying on them. Thus the practical difference between 109mg/dL and 'normal' is a bit like the practical difference between 5.25V on a rail and the nominal 5V figure. Sure, if you've got a handy adjustment and an accurate enough meter you'd probably adjust that rail to 5.00V but you don't actually have to. As long as the device is working well 5.25V is fine, and similarly with disease processes that have 'numbers', as long as the patient is healthy that's the important thing, not that the 'numbers' are spot on. On the particular subject of diabetes I wonder what effect happens  in the US where 3 digit mg/dL figures are used, versus places that use mmol/L figures that are usually expressed as two digits - that 109 mg/dL would come out as 6.1 mmol/L. Does it predispose people to inappropriate over-precision because there are 3 rather than 2 digits in the number?

With diabetes we're quite lucky that HbA1c figures give a much better picture than regular blood sugar readings, so those are the numbers to pay attention to. Of course with HbA1c being a long term measurement they are much harder to tune in (long phase delay in the control loop). Beware doctors who inappropriately obsess on short term measures of physiology (like instantaneous blood sugar measurements) versus long term ones (like HbA1c) and/or the actual health of their patients. For the avoidance of doubt there are, of course, values of short term measurements that need treating as medical emergencies, it's quite right to react to 'numbers' that are so statistically significantly off the norm that they indicate an immediate or immanent problem.

[Specmaster]

Guess I'm gonna have to make more popcorn.       

you through that whoppa bag already ? 

Dawn duels will be next. 

Well you know what popcorn's like, you just keep dipping your hand in the bag without looking and all of a sudden it's empty and you want some more. 

I get Mike's point though. Whether he intends it to be so or not is another question, but Mnem's tone when he thinks he knows what he's talking about can get a bit

The important points to remember are though that as always, the advice on offer is always given with the very best of intentions and the other is that the reader accept that is the case, but whether they read or accept the advice, is their decision. We are all big boys here and if we all act like we believe we are, there will no arguments, no need to bring moderators in to sort things out, we will do that naturally by our own ethos. We all have different ideas and beliefs and adds to the spice of life. Long live this thread. 

[Cerebus]

I actually had a D70. Nice camera

Completely agree. I'm going to be honest and say I rather like the modern smartphone cameras. You can get some shockingly good results out of them but the lack of glass is mostly what kills them for me. I missed a lot of opportunities. So I traded someone else's kidney for some mirrorless kit 

I have and still use the D70, but I have to agree that a decent phone camera is often as much as you need. I use my iPhone SE (original SE, 2016-2018) for an awful lot. I'll dig the D70 when appropriate, but for everyday when the iPhone won't cut it I've got a Fuji X100F which has the great advantage of looking like a 35mm film rangefinder, handling like the same, has a real optical viewfinder (which can be switched to digital), has a decent [fixed] prime lens and can be fully automatic, or using controls that are exactly where they would be on a rangefinder can be fully manual.

[bd139]

HP 427A reverse engineering complete. Power supply was roughly as expected 

Will do some simulations and check nothing will melt if I replace the NiCd with a Zener string 

Edit: zener string won't work. So regulator it is! (shunt regulator -> TL431 + PNP transistor)

[mnementh]

Guess I'm gonna have to make more popcorn.       

you through that whoppa bag already ? 

Dawn duels will be next. 

Well you know what popcorn's like, you just keep dipping your hand in the bag without looking and all of a sudden it's empty and you want some more. 

I get Mike's point though. Whether he intends it to be so or not is another question, but Mnem's tone when he thinks he knows what he's talking about can get a bit

BWAHAHAHAHA! Projecting much, C...?   

Seriously... If there's one thing you've successfully bludgeoned me with over the years... it's that in here, I have no authority. In this case, the motivation is more along the lines of "There's nothing worse than a reformed smoker..." or perhaps, a reformed rantaholic.

I'm working on a more measured response... since my attempt at simple honesty was, as usual, taken the most negative way possible. Please be patient... I'm still not that good at it. 

mnem
*clickety-clickety...clicky-clackity... clickety-clickety-clack...*

[mnementh]

(SNIP lots of IMO tech-talk that's irrelevant to the interpersonal stuff at hand)

Other than that... honestly, some of your comments make you sound like you're still stuck in the "Windows XP is still plenty!" mentality, and quite frankly... today's computers actually do so much more than that; even a confirmed "old is still okay" nerd like myself won't run it willingly, or any computer of similar capacity. The difference between those old boxes and even my old gaming rig on Win10... just light years ahead.

You need a certain minimum amount of machine nowadays if you're going to be on the intardNet at all. You need sufficient processor and at least 8GB RAM, preferably more, just to run Windows Firewall/Defender (it's still in there, and it's still pretty decent) and your browser (or the equivalent of those two in other OSes) so you are even marginally safe.

The fact you run *NIX tells me you can't possibly be that ignorant of modern OSes... there is so much wrench-twirling under the hood required to even get it running that you pretty much have to have some knowledge of what makes a modern OS tick, and what they can do if you feed them adequate computer power. So I really don't know what to make of those ignorant-sounding remarks. 

mnem
 

Gee....could you make that response any more arrogant and condescending? Who died and left you the "expert"? I swear I think you like tweaking our resident Frenchman's nose and when he reacts negatively you tell him to chill. No, it's you that needs to chill and tone it down several octaves. You know as soon as Vince wakes up in the morning and sees your response the shit is gonna hit the fan. And I don't blame him. Talk to me in the tone of your response and I'll tell you to go fuck yourself. There's a right way and a wrong way to educate and spread knowledge. Your bully pulpit doesn't cut it.

Guess I'm gonna have to make more popcorn.

Papa Smurf, you have already had too much pop-corn, that's not good for you health... too much of anything is not good for health in general so... no, I won't even reply to him, it's not worth it.
Just about everything he said is non sense, stuff I never said, nor even meant in the slightest. Doing so is his usual tactic to force me to correct him so I get into the fight he wants, needs, lives for. He is not a dragon for nothing. He did choose his avatar appropriately, I will give him that.  This is 5 year old level social media BS and I run away from that. He can have it with someone else. I am done with him. 12+ months of that shit, I am just bored with it.

I shall now ignore his posts and provocations advitam eternam. I like TEA and want to stay here, it's my ray of sunshine and I got to like it over the months, I must admit. But this dragon shit is killing me. I didn't come here for that shit. It does not add to the TEA experience, it just puts me off of it rather. It's truly toxic, on a psychological level. I don't need my mind to be messed up more than it already is ! 
Some might find it fun and like it, good on them. To each their own.
I shall ignore all of his posts from now on and certainly never ever reply to any of them. It's just asking for trouble and I can do without it.
I will investigate the technical possibility of filtering his posts automatically, so that they don't even appear on my screen. Maybe there is some Firefox plug-in that can do that, I don't know. I will have a look for that at the very least.

Then he will say I am a drama queen I am suuuure... he is the one causing the drama, not me. I am only reacting to it to preserve my mental health. He can go fuck someone else's mind now, won't be me any more. I would love to tell him to fuck off but I just can't resort to insults.

Whatever he replies if anything, I won't even know about it, won't read it.

All I care for today is how to organize all the parts I have sorted the past few days. I still can't decide on the best way to organize them in my drawer cabinet and/or small plastic bags  and/or plastic bins in a large drawer. That, I care about 
Oh, and also plant the baby strawberries, raspberrries and tomatoes in my garden, that I bought yesterday. At the super market these are horribly expensive yet taste like shit.. but growing your own is easy, costs bugger all, and they taste orders of magnitude better, and you are sure they aren't soaked in a million different chemical products. It's a no brainer.

So I will do that today. That's all I REALLY care about ! 

I hope you have not yet eaten the entirety of the pop-corn bag, it was way too much for a Smurf or even a human being ! 

It has nothing to do with any of that primate posturing med is so fond of, and there is no intent of rubbing your nose in it, and there is, for the umpteenth time, no intent of offense. It has to do with one simple thing: Seeing you doing exactly the same thing I used to do all the time in here, and having learned better, trying to steer you away from it.

Vince, you routinely post mini-rants in here about all sorts of stuff, and you very often "play to the cheap seats" to pump up the drama in a way that really makes you sound dumb. I know you're aren't; I've read through a number of your repair posts outside of this space.

Just like I used to do... and sometimes still do.  But my friends here in the TEA, over the course of several years, have mostly taught me to try and be better... and that is what I'm trying to pass on to you.

When others in here tell you you're being over-dramatic, you'll usually listen. But if I tell you you're doing it, you have a conniption-fit like it's a personal attack, when it is not. I'm trying to be a good neighbor/good friend and telling you when you sound foolish or ill-informed or to put it bluntly: ignorant. Just like when my fellow TEAers have done time and again with me.

Not everything is a competition, and just because you take offense, it doesn't mean an attack was made. Grow a little skin, and learn to tell when someone is trying to help and when someone is actually trying to cut you down. I specifically stated that was how you sound when you make one of those ill-informed posts, and whether you like it or not, it is true. I deliberately phrased it that way because I don't think you are ignorant... and I did think you might care not to sound that way.

So now I'm just being honest. Please just take a moment and think before you post one of your mini-rants... I know how hard it is sometimes. (Gawd, do I ever... *ashamed facepalm; twice for good measure* )

If you go back through my history on this thread, you'll se I've been guilty of more ignorant rants than I can count... But at least in the last year or two... I have tried very hard to step back and look at any such missive rationally and critically, and try to do a little research before I click the [Post] button.

Just as I've done this time. This is like the 6th... 7th... 8th edit...

So if all you take away from this is "mnem's a fucking hypocrite" because I'm telling you about something when I usedta do it all the time (and sometimes still do ), I can't stop you from going straight for the lowest common denominator.

But I swear, on the lives of all my little horde, that this is not the intent. The intent is to ask you to at least try to stop and think before you post. Try and do a little research on the subject before you explode about it. Maybe dial back the "drama for its own sake" just a little.

Just as my friends in this space have done over and over with me and continue to do.

Cheers,

mnem
*sad sigh*

[med6753]

Some good news here. My daily insulin routine is having some positive effects. Since upping the daily shot from 10 units to 15 units my fasting blood sugar has come down dramatically. Tuesday was 120mg/dL. Yesterday 113mg/dL. This morning 109mg/dL. For a non-diabetic should ideally be 100mg/dL or less. But anything under 120mg/dL is considered "acceptable". So I'm getting there. 

Good news.

A word of caution if I may, and I'll add that you've said nothing to make me suspect you're doing this, so treat this as a public service announcement and not directed at you. A doctor I was talking to once said that it was "Important to remember to treat the patient or disease, not treat the numbers". With any physiological process that can spit out numbers ostensibly characterising how 'good' or 'bad' things are there's a tendency for both doctors and patients (also public health authorities and policy makers) to fixate on the numbers, sometimes to the detriment of the person/people being treated.

In a perfectly healthy individual you can expect the numbers to bounce around from day to day and it's important to remember that you're measuring a noisy process, with the analytical equivalent of 2 or 3 digit DVM, and also that the 'normal' figures are derived from population norms that are themselves noisy and sometimes from such small sample sizes that it'd be embarrassing to be caught relying on them. Thus the practical difference between 109mg/dL and 'normal' is a bit like the practical difference between 5.25V on a rail and the nominal 5V figure. Sure, if you've got a handy adjustment and an accurate enough meter you'd probably adjust that rail to 5.00V but you don't actually have to. As long as the device is working well 5.25V is fine, and similarly with disease processes that have 'numbers', as long as the patient is healthy that's the important thing, not that the 'numbers' are spot on. On the particular subject of diabetes I wonder what effect happens  in the US where 3 digit mg/dL figures are used, versus places that use mmol/L figures that are usually expressed as two digits - that 109 mg/dL would come out as 6.1 mmol/L. Does it predispose people to inappropriate over-precision because there are 3 rather than 2 digits in the number?

With diabetes we're quite lucky that HbA1c figures give a much better picture than regular blood sugar readings, so those are the numbers to pay attention to. Of course with HbA1c being a long term measurement they are much harder to tune in (long phase delay in the control loop). Beware doctors who inappropriately obsess on short term measures of physiology (like instantaneous blood sugar measurements) versus long term ones (like HbA1c) and/or the actual health of their patients. For the avoidance of doubt there are, of course, values of short term measurements that need treating as medical emergencies, it's quite right to react to 'numbers' that are so statistically significantly off the norm that they indicate an immediate or immanent problem.

Everything you stated is absolutely true. I fully realize and understand blood sugar numbers are a moving target and constantly change. My whole point in buckling down and checking it on a daily basis is because over the past 6 months my A1C has been climbing. That's the number that's most important when treating and monitoring diabetes. And now that I am on insulin I need to find that point where over an average period of time my instantaneous blood sugar numbers show a steady decline to what is considered "normal". And that will result in an A1C number to shows that I am successfully treating and managing the condition. I have seen what uncontrolled diabetes does to a person and it ain't pretty. 

[Brumby]

I have seen what uncontrolled diabetes does to a person and it ain't pretty.

So have I.  It killed my mother.

Even though she was on insulin, she did not have the discipline necessary for it to have any real chance of control - it merely delayed the inevitable.  After years of food abuse, the effects hit hard ... and quickly.  Over the last couple of weeks, the speed of decline was frightening.