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The further and continuing adventures of the girl who sat in the back of your homeroom, reading and daydreaming.
About Me
- Roberta X
- Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
- I'm *mindlessly* fascinating. My internal monologue is like a frog in a blender, swimming like mad to keep ahead of the blades.
What's On My Other Blogs?
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HERMES "ROCKET"5 years ago
My Blogfriends List
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Sci-Fi Hot Take...47 minutes ago
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Ethnic food, Westphalian style1 day ago
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Cults and Music5 years ago
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Defenders Of The Bill Of Rights
(c) 2007 through 2024, inclusive. All rights reserved.
Ego vadum perussi vestri prandium
Ego vadum perussi vestri prandium
"I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions."
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Blogs: A link here does not constitute an endorsement! Many people have gone nuts in recent years.
- View From The Porch
- Cop Car's Beat
- insert witty title here
- Walls Of The City
- True Blue Sam
- Trailer Park Paradise
- Tom Cochrun/Light Breezes
- Thunder Tales
- The Wandering Thoughts Of J. R. Shirley
- The View From North Central Idaho
- The Unwanted Blog
- The Travis McGee Reader
- The Shekel
- The Miller
- Marko Kloos (.com)
- The Clue Meter
- Staghounds
- SnarkyBytes
- Sharp As A Marble
- Shall Not Be Questioned
- Self Sufficient Slacker
- Say Uncle
- Rustmeister's Alehouse
- Rich's Garage
- Retrotechnologist
- Pergelator
- PA State Cop
- Not Clauswitz
- New Jovian Thunderbolt! (RIP)
- Mycroft HOLMES 4
- Mike Kole: Hoosier LP guy
- Mike Flynn: The TOF Spot
- MArooned: JayG
- Listen To Uncle Jay
- Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel
- Jigsaw's Thoughts
- Insert Title Here
- In Jennifer's Head
- I Work On A Starship
- Home On The Range
- Gun Blog Black List
- Fatale Abstraction
- Fat In Indiana
- Every Blade Of Grass
- EB5AGV RadioRepair
- Cowboy Blob (link fixed!)
- Carteach0
- Caleb at GunNuts
- Brick O'Lore
- Better and Better: Matt G
- Ambulance Driver
Blog Archive
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2012
(824)
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June
(65)
- If You Like Carl Bussjaeger's Science Fiction
- There Aren't Enough Baseball Bats In The World
- Update: Day
- Drought Broke, Sinuses Broken
- The Tragedery Of The Semi-Commons
- See, They Wouldn't Take "No."
- IMPD: I Wish This Came As A Surprise
- Sense -- Who Needs It?
- DIACF, F!nd-The-B3s+
- The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec
- When Laws Collide!
- $1000 Later...
- ...I'm Off...
- In Threes
- Gabe Suarez Embraces The IngSoc Esthetic
- A Milestone, Plus Misc.
- Chicago Pyschic Rift Update
- A Return To The Range
- Galileo: Still Dead
- Gak! Brain Bleach, Must Find...?
- Observation
- A Physicist Looks At Prometheus
- Chicago's What War?
- An Undeniable Truth
- Not Doin' Too Well
- Another IMPD DUI
- The Most Something Woman In The World
- PS: .32-20 Cowboy Loads
- Pull The Pin!
- Good Morning!
- John Carter: Underpromoted By The Mouse
- What Have I Been Reading?
- Yats! Goooood Food
- How Urban Legends Are Born
- What Profiteth It A Man...?
- Summertime Quencher
- Diary Entry From A Parallel World
- Here And Gone In An Eyeblink
- Esperanto? Interlingua? No! Esce Tu Parla Lingu...
- Speaking Of Holidays (And Their Names)
- The Horror Of User Fees!
- Yet More Starshipping
- Just In Time For Stonewall Day*
- Free To...
- Webbed
- Road Trips I Should Take
- Stupid Party: Also Tone-Deaf
- Something New At I Work On A Starship
- Another "Aargh" Morning
- The Day After D-Day
- Fireflies
- Overheard At The Bilderberg Group?
- On Gov. Walker, Elections, Monarchs And Common Sense
- Full-Motion Tilt-Shift
- Functional Art Is Functional
- BlogMeet Images
- Tam: Cartoon Graphic Narrative Heroine
- BlogMeet/Gun Show In Brief, And I'm Off
- And The Best Part Is, He Put Scorn Quotes Around "...
- Good Morning To You
- American Taliban
- Bisard Latest: IMPD Idiots, Not Crooks
- Mixed (Up) Media
- Friday Blank
- BlogMeet Sunday!
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June
(65)
Webcomix
On The Front Lines
What They Say:
"...Savagely cynical Roberta...."
--Sepulveda's Revenge
"Your lack of compassion and humanity is stunning."
--Some Canadian dude
"I think my brain just core dumped. What were we just talking about?"
--A travelling Texan
"Die quietly you ignorant hoosier."
--A Sad-Sack Moonbat
"Memetic whiplash has rarely been so much fun."
--A Really Kewl Guy
"I liked the variety of content you have shred with the readers..."
--A Spastic Spammer
--Sepulveda's Revenge
"Your lack of compassion and humanity is stunning."
--Some Canadian dude
"I think my brain just core dumped. What were we just talking about?"
--A travelling Texan
"Die quietly you ignorant hoosier."
--A Sad-Sack Moonbat
"Memetic whiplash has rarely been so much fun."
--A Really Kewl Guy
"I liked the variety of content you have shred with the readers..."
--A Spastic Spammer
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No e-mail.
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I Do Not Allow Guest Posts. Ever.
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You adware-loading weasels, Sitemeter: you're gone.
8 comments:
Or because they DO flip the light switches. Worked in the NOC of a now-defunct midwestern telecom back in the '90s. Every Friday night a certain well-known shipping company would lose their ATM T3 at company headquarters. No LMI. I'd wait for the trouble call, and explain that they'd have to go into the server room and turn the lights back on. Because every Friday night, the last guy out killed the lights. And the freaking morons had the rack plugged into a switched outlet. Couldn't convince 'em to put it on a dedicated (or at least unswitched) circuit.
Every effin' Friday night...
I'll go you one better. A USNS vessel, some 600 feet long. The panel supplying power for the TACAN beacon also supplied power to the bridge consoles (in a different compartment, and of course it wasn't marked). One of my techs goes to perform some planned maintenance on the beacon, and inadvertently shuts down power to the bridge.
They got After Steering (kind of an emergency backup bridge) up and running - not a trivial exercise - long before my tech, unaware of the hub-bub, brought the beacon back up and unknowingly restored power to the bridge as well. A month later, same circus. Figured it out the second time, the fix had to wait for our next yard period.
Nothin' like unexpected Free Ice Cream of a Saturday morning.
Woo, great little story.
Oh and this part made me laugh almost out of my seat:
"Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right."
So, so true.
Corrective factors are everywhere. Hell more goes into finding the right method to rescale "good enough" data than getting "pristine data".
Mostly because the latter is as rare as unicorn beaks and about as expensive.
"There are technicians working aloft. Do not rotate or radiate any electronic equipment."
Nice story.
"IF KEY/TAG IS ABSENT, TECHS ARE WORKING ALOFT" is the actual legend. Visible if you take the key out, usually there's a big tag marked "SAFETY KEY" hiding it.
Also, despite a fan and duct, the mast/radome is thermally stagnant; it was over 100 F at the radome end. Fun! (So glad I had the optional hydration kit installed in my helmet.)
At the risk of picking nits on an otherwise neat story...
"Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read albles off the scribed marks..."
"Albles"?
Otherwise...
A few weeks ago some article, on Wired.com I think, made an offhand reference to how SF "is supposed to be about great engineering or scientific projects." (Bill Quick quoted it on Daily Pundit.) I object, based partially on Heinlein's tenet that SF is about people. What makes this a story worth reading is you and (incidentally) Dr. Schmid.
Otherwise, sidebar in Popular Mechanics.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Typo, "angles." I thought I'd got all the obvious misspellings.
These yarns are supposed to be about people -- but also the actual nuts-and-bolts of a big starship, the nuts-and-bolts of a real society. A lot of SF just glosses it over; it's all Big Picture stuff about the Movers and Shakers. I dunno about that kind of thing; I don't know any of those type people. I'm not gong to try to write about them. Dr. Schmid, I know, to the extent that anyone does.
FWIW, we do not mention that "Bill" person's name here.
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