Fifty Years of the Internet And Mobile Phones

This is a relatively quick and easy article to write. The first mobile phone call was made just over fifty years ago on April 3, 1973. The Internet is almost fifty-five years old. This is August 2023 in the 21st Century. 

Bear in mind, the first transcontinental phone call, amplified by thermionic valves that made a coast to coast call in the USA possible, was made only 58 years ealier in 1915. Not even sixty years passed between phone calls that could barely be heard up to 1200km distance, to transcontinental distances,  to intercontinental calls over Telstar satellites, to mobile phones. -- sidenote. Look up the provided links... 

I'm sitting at a large older monitor plugged into a venerable and ancient laptop typing this on a wireless keyboard, with a bluetooth earpiece in my ear listening to music and podcasts via a Samsung mobile phone. We have subscriptions to several streaming services that we access on a smart TV running Android. 

All these devices are the progeny of ENIAC which became one of the first general-purpose computers in 1945, but Herman Hollerith developed the first machine that tabulated by punched cards in the 1870s, and Vannemar Bush developed electric/electronic calculating machines in the 1930s. 

The DEC PDP11 was a good machine for its day, and in 1994 I was lucky enough to get hold of one that was in a 4ft (old school measurements, yes) fully enclosed rack cabinet with a smoked glass door,and consisted of a CPU (in the Wikipedia image, the thing with the row of keyswitches near the bottom of the rack) in the middle, a few power control switches and an output panel at the top, and a high speed paper tape punch/reader for storing and loading programs into it just under the CPU. It was very impressive in my flat, taking up the space of two bar fridges on top of each other as it did. It was also plugged in and fully working, and I'd painstakingly cut a paper tape that sequentially lit the panel lights and clicked the power control relays occasionally. It also dimmed the lights momentarily when I turned it on, and an observant friend noticed that it made lights flicker ever so slightly in sync with the running program. Today, my mobile phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful and runs for several days on a li-ion battery. Needless to say, the PDP11 only got switched on when I had visitors I wanted to impress.. -- my braggy sidenote

The first 3D printing equipment - 1980s. Reprap ("I am your father, modern 3D Printers!") was a fairly recent 2005. Compare and contrast with a Bambulabs P1S which is pretty much the acme of home 3D printing and came along just under two years after its progenitor the X1 Carbon. (By the way, if anyone wanted to shout me a P1-P or P1S I wouldn't say no. Just sayin'...)

It just made me want to produce a graphic. All my graphics can be bought at full size and without text or URL tag, just contact me

I'm also looking at a series of 3D-printed items - a caddy for holding several external disk drives, a few other tools and assistive things I printed for us. If I need a tool or have a problem - I can make what I need. We have lids to save partially used tins and tubs of tomato paste, the cats have dishes with raised ridges on the bottom to allow them to get their cat kibbles easily, and there are some "stuff organisers" in the bathroom mirror cabinet to keep about fifty small items - organised - and easy to find.

The future really IS all around us.

It'd be a pity if some kind of climate crisis spoiled all that future... 

EDIT: I found a few more things that say "the-future-is-here" to me, loud and clear. First up is a "pin" (I guess a brooch style pin from context, because the picture included could be anything, really) made by ex-Apple employees that acts as a voice-activated AI assistant and, while it purports to sort of get out the way of life and be unobtrusive it seemingly needs you to hold up a hand to see a projected display, which I'd find weird if someone was facing me and suddenly held up a hand and started at their palm. Not sure if it can do audio too but then does it just blurt your answer out or do you need to still wear an earpiece?

Don't get me wrong - it's the sort of tech I'd kill for but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. I already have a mobile phone that does all of that, and people have become used to them in the fifty years that we've had them and the thirty-five years that they've become a mainstream device. If they could really make the tech get right out of the way I'd be on it like white on rice though... 

Too soon to tell if this is the next killer device but fingers crossed.

Second thing is more geeky even than that first one - if that's possible, and I think you'll agree with me when you read this that it is. It's an optical network on a chip and it promises (to me, anyway, as I read the article) that pretty soon the capacity to run a massive AI program in a slot of your desktop PC. I just know that this Optical NoC will be shrunk and shrunk down and finally it'll reside on your probably quite large mobile phone - and when it is, it'll eat Humane's lunch. 

And maybe *this* time I can hit enter on the article and let it stay scheduled... 

EDIT: Nope - I had to edit again, this time to add the paragraph below the lede about telphone communications to give an idea of how fast the technology developed; and to add the sidenote about my PDP11 in my pokey little flat in the 1990s. (Sidenote to that sidenote: I also had four conventional tower case servers of some sort (that were tall enough to lay a large panel door across to form a big and handy workbench/workdesk) that had power supplies so hefty that I once used one of them to arc weld outside just to prove the point to a doubting friend when he asked why I didn't power all my old 'puters up together to have a really great display. Kenny, as I said back then there ain't no household fuse panel can supply that much juice without catching fire... Also, the tower servers were some weird brand I was only really keeping for the power supplies for other projects. - And the fact that they made for a very interesting workbench/desk unit... )

(Oh more - I also had a huge-ass ASR-33 style teletype, a carton of blank paper tape, and - for a while - the entire stage sound setup of a band with a head rack and effects rack I built for them out of their gear, a 24 channel front of house mixer desk, and the speaker stacks. And yes the tiny living/dining room also held a couch, TV, a decent stereo, and several computers like a VIC-20, C64, and am Amstrad CPC464 with disk drives, much of it interconnected so the stereo provided a bit more oomph for games and demos. To say my neighbours probably hated me at times might be an understatement... 😸 - - - I might throw together some memoirs sometime.)

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From Ye Olde Blogge #4 Sunday, January 18, 2004

Rome My Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

There are a LOT of mini posts on this Sunday! I must have rolled them up from a list. (And I did - the process of text->HTML->text into the text dumps stripped a lot of stuff out as I recall.)

Why are brains in the head?

Another biological mystery. Among hundreds...

Many animals, and all known plants, get along without a brain at all. That's a known fact, we have animals like earthworms which don't have centralised hearts and certainly no brains, yet they live. Their hearts are a bunch of nodes along their bodies which just massage their internal juices around, and their nervous systems connect in such a way that there's no 'control centre' anywhere, it's just distributed among the nerve junctions.

Similarly, all the plants we know of have no intelligence that we're aware of, and don't have anything we could call a nervous system as we understand that term. Yet they too live, and we're now not quite so sure anymore that they aren't as aware as, say, an earthworm - they certainly react to their environment, and it's been shown that they react to threats and somehow communicate this to others of their species nearby. Hence, my unwillingness to state categorically that plants don't have brains or at least primitive distributed complexes...

Insects, invertebrates, and plants - they form the vast majority of the biomass on this planet, and most of them seem to do that without needing a brain. In many ways, life gets along far better if it just has no brains, just little biological machines chugging away. Brains just seem to disturb the balance...

So okay, let's get that framed a bit better. Have you ever wondered why we find nature so beautiful? We're born into a whole world full of nature, and then we wonder why we find the only thing we know, the thing that sustains us and nurtures us and provides our only impressions of beauty, beautiful? There's a name for this phenomenon but it just escapes me for the moment. Sort of "QED, now let's test for it and - surprise! - QED!" What it means for the purposes of my discussion is that we rate the success of lifeforms on a profoundly different scale than, say, that earthworm.

To us, intelligence and adaptability are indicators of success. Our brains are what makes us the successful, world-dominating, all niche exploiting, most successful lifeform we've ever known. A large part of what we perceive to be our evolutionary success, is due to those largish lumps of gray matter in our heads, our brains. Without that brain, we'd actually be wiped out by any suitably hungry colony of cave bats or field mice. Minus that pound of not-quite-flesh, we would not survive even if the mice and bats and every damn thing kept their distance as a mark of respect for the late kings. We would starve to death in our idiot bodies.

Hang on - we keep our single most mission-critical organ on an external, sticky-outy fragile bone box? Isn't that a bit silly? Shouldn't we be keeping it right next to our hearts, in a bony box deep in the middle of our bodies? Where the most layers separate it from damage by the big wide external world we supposedly rule? So what went wrong here? Why did this retrograde step happen?

Yep, if you're a four-legged prone animal with a Large Brain, then that's the part which is furthest away from whatever is chasing you. And if you're a four-limbed bipedal animal then it places the Large Brain way above (one would hope) harm's way from attack by ground provided the crittur attacking us is A) on the ground and B) not another four-limbed bipedal animal with a Large Brain intent on bashiing our Large Brain out with the Tool which it's Large Brain just invented...

And similarly, when our prone friend attacks a foe, their large Brain is now at the forefront and most prone to Retaliatory Attack By Other. So I don't get it... Why did Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks become the flavour of the aeon? I imagine that the distance from the Bulging Eyes and Large Flappy Ears to the Large Wobbly Brain had to be kept as short as possible to allow us to process input more quickly, because that's an admirable survival trait, to be able to size up a situation quicker than the opposition and then act on it.

But - here's the kicker - now that we've assessed the situation, we realise the Other is much bigger and fiercer than we are - and we now have a problem. Yes, we saw the outcome much quicker than the hypothetical Other With A Large Brain further from their sense organs, but - ... dammit, now we have to wait for the signal to travel from our brain to our legs, and start Evasive Running-Away Manoeuvres 101... Almost as far as if the brain had been in that superbly protected position in the middle of our bodies. We might have lost a few nanaseconds of time for the brain to react, but we gained those nanoseconds in the reduced time it would take for our RUN!!! reaction to reach our legs...

Just like I'm not convinced by men's nipples and other things, the Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks doesn't quite convince me either. We're a whole evolutionary system gone wrong, we are, not just one branch of the tree...

So - given that we seem to be built entirely wrong, that we destroy more ecosystem than we contribute, and that 95% of the world's biomass would consider us (if they had Large Brains) a Bad Aberration in the evolutionary course, what precisely are we?

I assume we're a lucky guess, a system that came about by accident and which worked, albeit always to the detriment of the overall system, but it did work. We're now fulfilling our mission, which is to rid the world of all troublesome 'others' and we're succeeding quite well at that, what with the species extinction rate. 'Bang on target, old man, good work!" and all that. We will probably eventually succumb to an Amoebic Entity With No Reasoning Power Whatsoever, and then Life will resume it's pleasant plodding course.

I'd still like to see a lifeform designed by Something With A Smart Brain though...

---

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Olde Blogge #3 Sunday January 18, 2004

MyRome Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

THIS WEEK: Eerie echoes of the future and COVID-19. Wow.

The conspiracy theory that dares not speak... - something... umm...

I'm saying SARS. I'm saying AIDS. Can you say "tailored," dear reader?

Why was I looking at a news item the other day which stated that a possible reason SARS was so successful in Asia is because Asian people have a particular genetic trait which SARS can latch onto? It just seemed so - convenient - that this virus would cause us less collateral damage than another, competing-for-the-world's-resources, racial genotype...

How did I bring AIDS into this? Well, it's another virus that targets specific groups, although this one does it via another mechanism. But the group it targets are people who won't be mixing it up in the gene pool, or else it gets to people who can't easily avoid or treat it, i.e. African people. And I'm almost willing to bet that someday very soon, some scientist somewhere will spot another "genetic hook" in this virus.

I don't claim to be politically correct. Life (no matter how many nanny-staters say otherwise) will never be politically correct, it'll always pursue its own course, which is to weed out political correctness and the nice guys and the not-quite-guys and... well, you get the idea...
It's just that... well... dammit, I am NOT a conspiracy nut but these things seems so... so... convenient... Bugger, now I've said it...

The world is shrinking, resource-wise. No-one can argue with it anymore, we are cleaning it up as fast as we humanly can, and therein lies the rub: Who will end up inheriting what's left? Yes yes, the "nice" folk would have you all sit arm in arm around the campfire but be honest, do you think it's gonna happen? Uh-uh...

And I can hear someone asking how the heck we could have developed AIDS before we cracked the genetic code. In fact, how SARS could be targeted at a genetic loophole so quickly after the genetic code was opened. So I'm going to digress for a moment.

When I was a much younger pup, I read about lasers and how they were going to develop lasers and I was amazed. They developed lasers, and I was amazed some more. Then I read in an electronics magazine that someone had theorised that a magnetic field could be amplified and used to fuse wiring and electronic devices, and I mentioned this to a retired technician friend of mine. "That sounds like project Green Ray" he said. When I asked him more about this, he said that he'd worked on a magnetic pulse weapon in the Air Force some 20 - 30 years earlier

In other words, it took around 25 years for mainstream Defense technology to make it into mainstream civilian technology. So when exactly did genetic work first come to the point where it could become useful for targeting virii at specific groups? Ah-hah, ah-ha...

Then too, look at how scattershot AIDS is compared to SARS. AIDS did it's selection by using circumstances against particular groups, who have become the target group by virtue of economic disability. SARS is more refined, but hmmm... Targets, say, North Koreans, does it? Or Iraqis? Not too far away is it?

Pass the gene-splicer lads, I need to get rid of this tribe in the middle of Australia here!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm also shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Olde Blogge #2, Sunday, January 18, 2004

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

ALSO: On this day in 2020 after I'd spent money on a new Lenovo Ideapad laptop/tablet combo, she finally arrived and I unpacked: Leni the Lenovo. She rarely gets used in tablet mode but when she does, I'm very glad to have a Win10 tablet I can carry around and use via touchscreen swipes and an on-screen keyboard. Also - it's great to be able to type, 'mouse' around using the touchpad, and then just tap a thing on the screen to select / activate. ALL laptops and PC screens should have this by now! It's just a way better way of working.  

TechnoFRZ - why weenies will never work out...

(I received this from a friend who works in IT as the sole IT guy in an office of - look, I'll let them take it from here:)

I'm about to work twice as hard at work, because we have a techno-weenie, an OS FRZ... (Fanatical Religious Zealot to those of you who missed the heyday of acronyms.)

And why? Because we both look after the same network, from different offices. We're connecting a company that's striving for that elusive first WAN, and we have different approaches. I tend to use what the company wants, for the sake of the company's network, while he tends to want to make the company use what he prefers, on *his* network... It's not going to work for him, on a lot of levels, and I think you can see why.

Being an Admin in a company means that you have a slightly different customer focus than the rest of the company. The company are there for the clients - you're there for the company... While my opposite number is in head office trying to change us to his idea of a perfect networking solution, I'm happy to provide whatever our customers are using so that our sales and tech support people are talking the same language as our customers. He has the company's Big Boss's ear, I have the interests of the whole company at heart - can you see who's going to win?

Our company made software which was revolutionary for it's heyday, which pushed the envelope and needed Silicon Graphics' finest just to run. As computing power ramped up, our software got a complete facelift into the 20th century by being fully ported to Windows. The reason? Our clients' networks have gone to Windows, and keeping a few SGI boxen around was becoming too cumbersome.
So now all our customers are all switched, and my oppo has switched as much of the network as he can to Linux and OS software... Why are our programmers and developers, who've just gotten used to Visual Basic and the Evil Way being asked to use gcc again? Well, at his office site, anyway...

Meanwhile, we have a decent MS based network, and a VPN based (as it should be) on *nix firewalls. I like to use what's appropriate, not something I'm devoted to. If you have favourites, you won't be touting them long unless they happen to agree with the needs of the company, if you stick to those favourites then you'll be outgrown when your company outgrows the technology.

I don't want to weigh in right now on the value or otherwise of sticking with one company for extended periods of employment. I'll just say that I think if you can stick with one company for a decent period, I'll respect you more because I consider that you've grown with that company and thus have shown dedication, ability to learn, and must have some measure of something which enabled you to keep your job. I'd hope that one of those "somethings" would have been the ability to adjust to the needs of your organisation...

(Note: The IT guy who sent me this is as far as I know still working there as I'm posting this story. He sent it to me early 2003.)

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Laser vs Anko Economy Earbud Sets Quick Comparison.

I recently had the sad experience of my favourite "necklace" type earbuds, a no-name brand from the Reject Shop. 

If you enjoy podcasts and music while you work without disturbing co-workers (or one's wife, which is the more important motivation for me - we both have a right to our own soundscapes) then earbuds are the way to go. 

Background

I don't need hi-fi for podcasts, just endurance and comfort. And all we have in town are Big W and K-Mart. Oh yes - we also have a Harvey Norman electronics shop and a Jaycar agent but HN are invariably the same things rebadged but overpriced, while Jaycar is an agency and doesn't have a great range of budget earbuds. I'd bought a set of earbuds connected with a necklace style cable that had a small control pad inline, made with skinny flat cables that - after a few years, mind you - had finally broken the wires inside and stopped working.

The Reject Shop no longer had those necklace-connected sets of earbuds, which is a drawback of shopping at such budget outlets - their product lines appear and then disappear, and this brand ("Sound Republic" I think) had been replaced by something other range - that had no necklace earbuds. Big W has a house brand "Laser" and K-Mart has their "Anko" brand, which is a small step up from Reject Store, so I bought the cheapest necklace set at Big W, and then had to buy the equivalent at K-Mart. 

History

We both have normal individual earbud sets, hers is Anko; mine, whatever brand Reject Shop has been flogging recently. I hate the earbuds because due to carpal tunnel syndrome I have low sensation in my finger and I keep dropping them and having to go hunting for them. The worse issue is that my set lasts only between 120 and 180 minutes before needing to go back in the case for quite a while to recharge. Pah! For dilettantes! I listen for hours a day and want the audio to last for phone calls too. 

The Anko separate buds last significantly longer and sound better, according to both of our evaluations.

But I wanted to go back to the more familiar (and to me, more useable) necklace buds, and pretty much any would do. (Except not, as I found out...) Here's a picture I grafted together out of commercial images online. They're not the exact models I got but illustrative of the type.

These are for illustrative purposes only and not
the actual earbuds I purchased.

Help me with the cost of them, use the image below to make a donation. I rely on donations to keep things paid up. 

Laser

The Laser set took hours to charge, being supplied with 0% charge. That alone made me a bit wary of them because discharged - and supposedly new - lithium batteries means they've already been discharged beyond their lower limit and that makes the chemistry suspect to me. 

But I charged it and then tried to connect the set. For the first five attempts I tried their connection method, then tried a desperation measure I'd used once before, pressing the power/connect/select button four times in quick succession after the earbuds announced "Connecting..."

That worked. Sort of. The phone connected to the earbud set. And then a few seconds later, disconnected. After trying that two more times, I gave up on the set. The +/- buttons would seem to have worked as volume buttons first, and skip forward/back second, I'm used to the skip function being similar to older BT speakers because once the volume's set you hardly need to alter it.

The earbuds have magnets to click them together when not in use. The cost was ten dollars. 

Manifest: Included the necklace earbuds with the familiar little control pad inline in the necklace, a charging cable, and a (truly execrable) User Manual.

Pros: It cost ten dollars. That was five dollars cheaper than the Sound Republic set had cost me two years earlier. 

Cons: It had a suspect battery and didn't connect properly nor hold a connection. Therefore nothing else could be evaluated. 

Anko

The Anko earbud set had 90% charge right from the outset, it paired first time, and was fiddly to get into my ears because of the weird earhooks. The necklace cord was a trifle short for my liking. The sound isn't particularly crisp but adequate. 

All in all a trouble-free and reasonable experience. The only other odd experience was that it didn't have an inline control pad, the controls are on the right-hand earpiece. There is no power LED.

The buttons I'd have liked to use as skip + / - buttons work as volume buttons first and have to be held for a few seconds to work as skip buttons. Comes down to personal preference I guess.  They cost fifteen dollars.

Manifest: Included the necklace earbuds with the controls in the Rh earpiecece, the earpieces have an over-ear hook, and there's a charging cable, several more earbud earpiece inserts to suit your ears, and a reasonable User Manual.

Pros: Supplied with useable charge in the battery, the earhooks make wearing them a bit more secure for an old fart like myself and they connected flawlessly on the first attempt.

Cons: Earhooks aren't of the best design, necklace cord is a trifle shorter than I'd have liked, the skip function. And a power LED would definitely have been worth having.

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That's it. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have bought another set of Sound Republic earbuds because they lasted so well and had decent battery life. But life isn't always perfect.

Sound Republic

Not a review. Sort of.

These cost about fifteen bucks a few years ago and have a flat thin ribbon cable connecting them and the control pad, sounded passably good for the price, and the battery lasted all day for me, right up until the thin cable finally flexed through. But that took two years of regular use. 

As I recall they came with the inevitable badly written manual, a charging cord, and not much else. They may have had a set of silicone ear inserts.

Proving that sometimes a cheap no-name item can be pretty good. I'm going to try some microsurgery to get them going again. 

From Ye Olde Blogge Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Memory Lame

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.  

Pride in incompetence

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I was just too young when I was young, or maybe too gullible, or something...

Have you ever noticed though, that less and less people take pride in their work anymore? In fact, some people I deal with seem to revel in their incompetence at their job, a kind of "look, I'm so fuggen useless and I'm still making that asshole PAY me for my services!" kind of pride at yet another job fucked up...

Why I reckon it *could* be me, is that when I was growing up, it seemed to me that people actually gave a shit about their jobs. Maybe I just perceived them as 'grown-ups' and knew that grown-ups were practically perfect in every way, maybe it just seemed to my young mind that these grown-ups were doing things that I considered unimportant and thus it made me think that in order to perform such unimportant tasks, they had to take some strange pride in their work. But the fact remains that I still feel that work ethics have changed tremendously in the last thirty years.

When I was 11, I met my first incompetent. She was my friend's mum, and she worked checkout at our local grocery store. I used to amuse myself by racing the cash register, and one day I noticed a miscount of around a dollar in the store's favour. Being a polite little lad, I was very polite in pointing it out, and also noting that since the amount corresponded to a particular item's price, that it was most likely that this item had been rung up twice. No scanners back then, it was all manual punch in the price...

Thing is, she knew my mum. and she complained to mum about me, said I was a 'little smart-ass'... I ask you - what sort of internal reasoning led her to believe that her fuck-up was due to me being a smart-ass? How convinced of her own competence did she have to be?

I read somewhere that more incompetent people are most convinced of their own competence than more competent ones. Because they are so bad at what they do, they don't realise that there's a lot of improvement to be made in their performance, while a more competent person is more aware of what their duties entail and more critical of themselves because they *know* they could improve a lot.

I believe that, implicitiy and completely...

When I was 20, I went into a stereo store to buy myself a reasonable stereo system. I discussed what I wanted with the salesdroid, and then pointed out two turntables which I thought were to my specs. Salsedroid immediately ignored both of those and pointed to several other, more expensive, and actually *lower* spec, units. He was selling to me based on price and had no idea of specs whatsoever! 

After asking him once more to stick to my specs and not to the catalogue prices and getting nowhere, I'd had enough of him. Back then, you expected the salesperson to know at least *something* about the product they were selling...

I asked to see the store manager, explained that I had the then not inconsiderable sum of $5,000 in my pocket in cash to buy my stereo equipment, and that his store had just lost that sale because of the incompetence of that salesperson. I bid goodbye and only walked back in once more a few days later (after buying my gear at a store where the staff knew something about their products) to see what had happened. I was gratified that the salesperson had apparently been sent packing. Managers took $5,000 seriously in those days...

Thing is, for those days, that was still considered inexcusable, offensive, and unprofessional. 

Nowadays, it's the fashion...

On a similar vein, more recently I was shopping for a secondhand laptop and walked into one of those computer trader shops, and finally found a laptop in my price range, but... so little RAM, such a low-powered CPU... It wouldn't run Windows 98, which is what I wanted it for, so I asked the salesdroid if they would upgrade the RAM for me so it wouldn't swap out all the time, and mentioned that I needed it to run W98.

'Oh it'll run W98 fine' was his breezy reply, 'it just depends on how much of Windows you install."
Pardon? You mean I can install a cut-down version of the W98 kernel? Can you tell me how? You mean save hard drive space not RAM, don't you?

'Ah, you just uncheck some stuff when you install it..."

By that stage I'd had enough, and said, in a voice loud enough to carry all over the store, that I was going somewhere else to spend a few grand, somewhere where the staff knew anything at all about what they were selling. The manager came over not to apologise, but to try and convince me that his salesperson was right, that any dickhead knew that if you installed less of the 'fruit' as he called it, it would use less 'memory.' At that point I just shook my head, called the manager a name I'd rather not repeat here, and walked out.

More? My next door neighbout works as a delivery truck driver for a whitegoods outlet. He has a diesel 1.5 ton truck, and every morning I hear him crank and crank and crank that truck, because he doesn't know enough about that truck to know that you should hold the key on preheat for a minute before starting, so that it won't have to supply current to both the glowplug and the starter... If it was just a few weeks I'd believe that his preheat had burnt out and he was waiting on spare parts, but it's every workday morning for a year now, so it's obvious he's either just clueless, or else he doesn't give a shit.
I believe the latter actually, because a few times he's come home with deliveries still in the back of the truck, canvas-covered rear wide open to thieves and often to the rain, and I wonder why the store keeps him on...

Went to a restaurant with three friends, checked in at the counter, and then sat there for about 15 minutes without anyone bringing us a menu or asking us if we wanted drinks to begin with. Quite a ritzy restaurant, it charged a premium price and was supposedly one of the best new venues in the locality. After 15 minutes I used the mobile phone to ring the manager and ask if there was a chance of being served, the reply? 'We're not busy, you would be served as soon as you arrived. When were you thinking of coming?'

I informed him that we'd been sitting at table 16 for almost 20 minutes now without any contact, and there was a profuse rush of apologies, but still no waiter.

About five more minutes elapsed before one did arrive, so we placed our orders and waited some more. By this stage some 30 - 35 minutes had elapsed since we first came in and were asked to take a seat. None of us were badly dressed, nor were we rowdy or otherwise objectionable, after all, we wanted our dinner. About seven of around thirty tables were filled by that stage, absolutely not a busy evening.

No excuse for it, really. But that's not the end of it...

About halfway through dinner, my friend's coffee ran out and they flagged a passing waiter and asked for another cup. We finished the meal and were still waiting for that coffee. Two more of us felt the need for a post-prandial coffee so we flagged down another waiter, asked again for the first coffee, and asked that another two also be brought out. Waiters were walking by at the rate of one every few minutes, and we waited for about ten minutes before flagging down another waiter. Yes, he'd check into it, yes, he'd make sure our coffees arrived as soon as possible.

Another ten minutes and we got up to leave. At the register we noticed that we'd been charged for those three extra coffees, and asked to see the manager. Explained to him why we had decided to go to a coffee shop instead of waiting for almost 30 minutes for a coffee after the poor evening's service we'd already had. And he went and asked his waiters who said they'd never received any orders for extra coffee! (Yeap those same extra coffees which were on the tab, that's the ones...)

When we pointed this out, he said he had to back his staff and the extra coffees must have been entered 'in error...' At that point we'd all had enough, and I'm glad to say that this particular restaurant, which was a new venture, went broke and was taken over by new management in its first year. Reviews were shocking and mostly singled out the lackadaisical service. (ted, added in 2023 from memory. Sorry, still not divulging the name of the place or the manager, the place had an African country as the theme is all I'll say.) 

That points out something to me. The manager had the chance to smooth things over and keep four regular customers, because the food was indeed excellent. Instead, he chose to support his staff, staff which cost him more and more clientele, more and more bad word of mouth, and less and less income.

And yes, we did tell everyone we knew about how the place had been, and probably cost him another 100 clients among our circles of friends, and I daresay that every other dinner party that his incompetent staff drove away from the restaurant also badmouthed the restaurant to *their* friends...

Here's someone who not only was incompetent, he also seemingly looked for and fully supported incompetence in his staff because he himself knew so little about how a competent restaurant was run...

So is it me, or is ignorance winning the race?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.