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Keeping Busy — Why Now?
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Keeping Busy

To distract myself I finally partitioned my second disk and loaded Ubuntu on it.

Things went fairly well, with Precise Pangolin [AKA ubuntu 12.04 LTS], and the desktop looks familiar to a Windows user, but all is not sweetness and light. For some reason the Help system is displaying the manual as white text on a white background. I can see the graphics and the links, but the text itself is invisible. There must be a setting somewhere that will address that problem, but it seems to be unique to my installation.

Another annoyance is that I can’t simply do a reboot from Windows and bring up the boot manager, as there apparently isn’t enough time for the system to recognize that I’m pressing a key, so I have to shut down then access the manager during the longer power up sequence.

I’m certain I can fix that problem with a Linux boot utility, and just set the Linux drive as the primary boot.

I really need a book. I’m happier with a paper copy and good index. I realize that the electronic versions are more convenient, but I really like actual books.

73 comments

1 Kryten42 { 07.25.12 at 2:29 pm }

Bingo! 😀 (wow! This thread is still alive?!) 😉

As I have said before, I *ALWAYS* engaged the clients or end users befer we even began thinking about designing anything. In the 80’s, this seemed a novel concept for several companies. The first reaction was usually something like “What does it matter what we think?” or, “I don’t have time for this” (that was quite common). When I explained that it was in their interest to get involved if they wanted to have a quick RoI and long life investment, they usually came around. 🙂

This is why I generally hired people who were smart, keen etc and who would listed. I generally had to read 30-50 Resume’s to find 4 or 5 worth interviewing. I could tell a lot about their personalities by how they represented themselves. I became quite good at it. 🙂 When I had to find 14 hardware/software engineers, I must have read a couple hundred Resume’s and had over 30 interviews. Most of the ones I eventually hired were Asians (mostly from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and a Malasian), and 1 UK guy. 🙂

I also kept my people shielded from all the Corporate crap that goes on. I must admit to being quite proud of the fact that when I left a company, pretty much all my people left soon after. Heck, I even heped many get good jobs elsewhere. Almost all those companies I left went down the sewer within 5 years of my leaving. Generally because they went back to the old ways of ignoring the customers, cutting corners, etc. Program’s I’d instituted were cut as *a waste* (in spite of the fact they cost the company nothing and improved productivity and the quality of work). For example, I decided to hold project meetings Monday after lunch, and Thur’s morning. Monday was an hour (sometimes more if required) and was a mostly *where are we at, and what’s the plan for this week* meeting. Thur’s was a half hour and was a *how have we done so far? And who needs help to complete their goal/milestone?*. If they had met all goals and milestones by Fri lunchtime, I gave them the rest of the afternoon off and we had a big BBQ lunch. If they exceeded their milestones, they also got a dinner with a partner at a very good pub/bistro nearby (it was all paid for out of the project budget/grant). And even though we ended up 2 month’s ahead of schedule after 6 months, the retarded bean counters whinged about the espense! (I decided they were just jealous because they never got a free lunch/dinner! Can’t imagine why!) 😈 BTW, my team almost always exceeded their target’s, and I was not a softie and made them easy target’s either! The R&D Director (a man I greatly respected) had originally estimated the new control system would take 20-24 mth’s to develop. We did it in 14 mths. We lost him a year later when he was approached by MiT to do his Master’s there. He actually came to discuss it with me, since he had been our strongest ally on the Board, and knew what would happen if he left. I told him not to worry and to grab the opportunity! But, as he predicted, within a year it all wen’t to hell and I (and my people) left. *shrug* Still, it was the right dicision I think to this day. 🙂

The guy who replaced me at this company where we designed very expensive industrial machinery was a Sth African who’s most complex design was a Z80 based alarm controller! LMAO The control system we designed for our biggest, most complex machine (designed to do the work of four other machines) had a NatSemi NS32532-25, 2 T800 Transputers (amazing processors from Inmos UK), 3 Z-80 CPU’s (for controlling the motors on each of 3 axis), and 2 TI 32-bit DSP’s! Oh… and a Weitek (sp?) fast/accurate FPU (hooked up to the NS32532). Most people have no idea how many complex calculations have to be made to make a high-energy plasma cut a square corner on 2in RHA plate at 12cm/min! Plasma has mass, therefore inertia.) 😉 When *my* people realised that the new *boss* had not a clue, and was a self-opinionated fool, they all left. BTW, originally we were going to use the Motorolla 68020, but we had so many bad ones delivered as well as bad RAM and other CMOS components (as I said above), I changed to NatSemi after they assured me that wouldn’t happen (and put it in writing with a performance guarantee too!) NatSemi were great to work with I discovered. And the NS 32532 was a great CPU (we had 4 of the first samples they made). TI were also great to deal with, and Toshiba. I actually wanted to use the NS32xxx series CPU in the first place becaused I was quite familiar with it’s smaller sibling the NS 32016 that I had on my BBC computer some years earlier. But I was argued into the Motorolla series because of suposedly *better tools*, *better support*, etc. None of which ended up being true in fact!

It took quite some time to decide on the design/dev tools we’d need. But I am pretty sure I’ve mentioned all this stuff in a nother thread last year some time. 😉

OK, I’m about ready to collapse… so g’night all! 😀

2 Bryan { 07.26.12 at 12:55 am }

The thing is, Kryten, when you are making high price/low volume equipment knowing what your customers want and need seems so obvious to me that I can’t imagine not doing it. The equipment has to fit into the work flow of a factory, so you have to understand what the machine must do, in what order, to make it worth the large investment in buying it. If someone has to redesign their entire factory to use your product, or train people from scratch to use it, they aren’t very likely to buy it.

If you target your customer with the product, it is a lot easier for Sales and Marketing to present the product in terms that the customer will understand and appreciate. The fact that the product is new and painted a nice color is not going to hack it in the real world.

Motorola has always been inconsistent. They do something great and then they fail to follow through with it. It’s almost like they can’t finish a product, make the transition to actual production. I spent more time dealing with their communications products, especially their radio systems, and some of their stuff is outstanding, but the next product in the series is total garbage.

National Semiconductor and TI are old line tech companies who have maintained their engineering culture, and that makes a big difference.

Yes, I remember the post where you laid it all out.

Get some sleep, so you can prepare for the next election, which seems to be getting closer every day.

3 Kryten42 { 07.26.12 at 10:38 am }

Elections… Pfffft! I don’t think I’ll even bother voting! I have principles! They can fine me the $100, I couldn’t care less! What a choice… Reelect a puppet idiot who just can’t do a thing right, or a corrupt neo-con Religeo-Fundi who’s even more stupid! Hell… I may even let them take me to Court! Then I can argue that it is immoral and unethical to force me (or anyone) to vote for a candidate when I have a moral/ethical/rational objection to all the candidates!

And you, my friend, are in the same boat. 😉 😈 At lest Americans never let your Gov railroad you into forced voting! And people say Yank’s aint smart! 😉 LOL

You know I agree with you about engaging customers. Yeah… I can’t really understand it either. *shrug* *People are wierd* I think pretty much covers it! 😀

One of my rules was: If we have more support people than sales people, we are screwed! LOL

I went to the Motorolla distribution center in Sydney… I’d visited a Motorolla plant when I was in the USA with GD earlier. Talk about chalk and cheese! The plant was a marvel of strict protocols and rules… it was amazing. Their distribution/wharehousing on the other hand, was dark ages!! If they had any handling procedures, the Manager I was with couldn’t find them, though he was adamant they had some! I saw people either putting chips into anti-static tubes, or removing excess from an order, without even a anti-static strap! And I am sure most were waring nylon. That’s when I approached 3M for an audit. All my people had done the full 3M static courses, and we had the whole R&D area covered and audited by 3M. One of the problems with bad static procedures that 3M showed us, was that often damage can occur that won’t cause problems until some time in the future. They showed us microscope images of various components, such as CMOS IC’s where some of the internal tracks had been partially cratered. Eventually, and usually sooner than later, the track will burn out and you have a faulty or dead (if you are lucky, that’s easier to diagnose) component. So, whilst we tested everything that came in, and discovered a few faulty of dead, I had no idea how many others would die while in the field within a year. I was impressed with NatSemi. Thier facilities were very good, but the GM was so impressed by our precautions and when I showed him that 3M video, he called 3M to improve their distribution center. I must say, 3M were pretty good also. We sent a few clients their way, so they in turn gave us good discounts, free training updates, and a consultant/tech visited us montly and checked everything out. 🙂 But, that was the 80’s. I have no idea if any of them is as good now. Things were different then. 🙂

4 Bryan { 07.26.12 at 3:18 pm }

I’m voting for Dr Jill Stein of the Green Party, and the major parties can pound salt for all I care. They don’t want to represent me, so I won’t vote for them. This will be the second Presidential election in which I voted for the Green candidate.

When the Santa Ana winds were blowing in San Diego you didn’t want to work on anything. The winds are hot and bone dry, so the static was nearly impossible to avoid. The same for New York in the winter when you walked around with a key in your hand to discharge the static when you approached a door. Running a high-speed printer was another good static generator, which is why you needed a humidifier in the printer area. People don’t get it.

There’s nothing like opening a box of components and seeing Styrofoam beads sticking to everything, like that isn’t a signal of a problem. You really have to question the reliability of a company that does things like that. You know it was done to cut costs and the people that did it were unaware of the effects on the products. There were days when I seriously wondered why anything worked given how it was made.

5 hipparchia { 07.26.12 at 8:55 pm }

Elections… Pfffft! I don’t think I’ll even bother voting! I have principles!

lol! although i’ve always been jealous that y’all have compulsory voting. i think non-voting is a perfectly legitimate action, but it ought to be a willful action like yours, not an apathetic inaction like we have here.

6 Badtux { 07.26.12 at 11:01 pm }

I remember the National Semiconductor 16032. The problem with the 16032 is that the first few production runs were buggy, even multiplication was buggy, I don’t remember the edge cases but there were some that you’d never get the same answer twice. What they were attempting was simply beyond the capabilities of the technology at the time, you simply couldn’t make a processor that complex out of hardwired logic gates on a MOS substrate and expect it to work bug-free, and they didn’t yet have the automated tools to do quick simulations and revisions. Motorola had much the same problem with the 68000, back in those days when logic chips were laid out by hand on large lightboards then photographed and shrunk down for lithographic purposes, but solved it by using microcode rather than logic gates for most of the processor. It resulted in a slower processor but one that worked, there were a few bugs in the initial samples but fixing them was a microcode revision rather than requiring a re-layout of the chip.

Of course, long-term, National Semiconductor’s approach was superior and is how most of today’s processors are done. But in the long term, we’re all dead.

Regarding voting, I’m voting for the lesser evil. I’m still annoyed that Obama was the only candidate on the Democratic ballot here in California, the primaries are the place for protest votes, but as mediocre and, well, Republican, as Obama has been, Rmoney disgusts me on so many levels that it’s clear he would be possibly even worse than George W. Bush as President. I mean, GWB was a callow cad, but he never did the outright racist whistle-calling that Rmoney is doing, indeed one of the few things he did post-9/11 that were the right thing to do was when he appeared on national TV and insisted that blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few terrorists would be wrong. Heck, even crazy old John McCain had the dignity to look very disquieted when his supporters started making racist comments. Rmoney, on the other hand… well, as the top post on my blog yesterday pointed out, he’s doing everything but using the N word to remind folks that he’s white and Obama isn’t. (The hilarious part is that Obama’s family on his mother’s side has been on American soil for almost 200 years longer than Rmoney’s family!).

Sometimes the lesser of two evils really IS the lesser of two evils. Just sayin’.

7 Kryten42 { 07.27.12 at 1:54 pm }

LOL @ hipparchia! 😀

I do have to bashfully admit that I always thought it was a good idea also. Until now anyway! LOL But the fact is that it isn’t 100% effective anyway. Sure, it forces most voters to go vote, but many have no idea about the candidates, platforms, etc., and just tick boxes as fast as possible to get back home ASAP. There are usually a high level of so-called *Donkey Votes* (usually when someone just crosses out the card and writes “Skippy”, “Mickey Mouse” etc as their prefered candidate), or just messes up the card either accidentally, or on purpose. 🙂 The number of actual *informed* voters who take time to do it properly are not that high in reality. So, in the end, it’s not all that different. 🙂 You can force people to vote, but you can’t force them to think or to care! *shrug*

I’ve voted for our Greens in the past, but the current leader “Bob Brown” is too radical, and couldn’t care less about anything other than the *environment* for anyone (who isn’t a total tree-hugging lunitic) to take him seriously and vote for him. Our Democrat Party self destructed years ago and exists as little more than a name. So, *real* choices are very limited. 🙂

Badtux, you almost made me cringe when you put 16032 there!! LOL I thought my memory was playing tricks on me yet again. But Google came to my aid, and the Co-processor for the BBS micro was the 32016! Phew! 😛 😉 But it’s predecessor was the 16032, and I remember it also. And as you say, theye had a fair share of problems, as most did back then. 🙂 One of the reasons the 32×32 series apealed to me was that at that time we had some Labtam systems that used the 32032 (hmmm… I think it was the model 32032 computer in fact) 😉 and a Tektronix 6130 Workstation that the company was using for engineering design work when I started there. In the end, there turned out to be 3 excellent reasons for choosing the NS 32×32 series over Motorola (or Zilog Z8000, which thankfully we didn’t choose), was that it proved to be far more reliable, it had a swag of flexible adressing modes (which became critical in a mixed processor design. Especially when we used the Inmos C004 Programmable 32-way Crossbar Switch and IMC C012 Link Adapters), and the third reason was that Tek had a CPU adapter module for it that made hooking up the pattern generator & acquisition probes for our DAS 9200 a breeze, especially because we didn’t have to design out prototype boards with 100+ probe points! 🙂 We had shortlisted computer vendors to HP, Sun and Apollo. Apollo win because they had a much better OS (two actually, Aegis & Domain/OS), used a standard ISA bus architecture (could plug in a PC card and use PC cards in the Workstations which was a plus for at the time), and Apollo had a Transputer development system (called simply the TDS) and supported the Occam language and had Occam to/from C & Fortran cross-compilers, and all the s/w we wanted to use ran on the Apollo’s. But the big point for me was their version/revision control s/w called DSEE (which of course we called “dizzy”). LOL I also really liked their brilliant Token-ring network. It allowed DMA page faulting from any HD across the network, among other things. They also supported Ethernet.

Aegis was *WAY* ahead of it’s time! The network was self discovering (so nodes could be added or removed easily and at any time), and all workstations running Aegis acted like one big system. They had a couple great demo’s to illustrate this (which I loved to use when I was bored, to the chagrin of my co-workers!) 😈 One was Net-bounce (a ball would bounce across the screen from one W/S to the next), net-Push (a guy with a broom would *sweep* the screen from one W/S to the next, and net-melt (which would cause all the displays to melt down as if acid had been poured onto the top of the screen)! Ahhhh… I so happily remember the resultant cries of anguish and horror the first time I used these! 👿 LMAO Fun times… fun times… *sigh* (yeah, I know, I was a right SOB! But that’s way better than being a hard-nose tight-arse!) LOL My teem (eventually) forgave me, and even apreciated a boss with a sense of humor. We had a lot of fun there, and I tolerated practical jokes (so long as nobody was hurt in any way, and no work was disrupted. Everyone agreed with and accepted that.)

You are right about problems with early CPU’s (etc.). The early DNS workstations had dual 68000 CPU’s (which Apollo slyly marketed as a sales point). But not because it was a true *dual processor* system! One would act as a watchdog to the other because the 68k often page faulted! The watchdog would halt the main CPU, load the page into RAM, and allow the main CPU to continue on it’s merry way. Motorola apparently fixed this in the 68010 (and the main reason for that CPU). 🙂

I was soooooo pissed a couple years later when Apollo sold out to HP due to the fault of one corporate moron at Apollo who decided it would be a great idea to make lot’s of money by using the company cash in currency speculation trades in ’87. Unfortunately for Apollo (and all of us), he was dead wrong! *SIGH*

Ohh! A bit of *trivia*… Did you know that the HETE-2 spacecraft and the Picard satellite use T800 Transputers? Not bad for a CPU first produced in the late 80’s! 😀

8 hipparchia { 07.27.12 at 6:30 pm }

One was Net-bounce (a ball would bounce across the screen from one W/S to the next), net-Push (a guy with a broom would *sweep* the screen from one W/S to the next, and net-melt (which would cause all the displays to melt down as if acid had been poured onto the top of the screen)! Ahhhh… I so happily remember the resultant cries of anguish and horror the first time I used these!

like this? i loved that site. sadly, yahoo and ebay do not seem to have any sense of humor.

as for the voters, yeah, we have all those too. one of the problems in recent decades though is that the far right has been really good at motivating their fan base to get out and vote. if all the disaffected moderates and liberals and lefties had a little more incentive to get up off their apathies and at least mindlessly vote for the slightly evil lesser of two evils, maybe we’d have fewer far right radicals and idiots in office. and maybe if they had to vote, they’d think about it two seconds longer too. or maybe not.

9 Bryan { 07.27.12 at 7:14 pm }

Actually, those sorts of things are quite useful if you are a network administrator and you need to shut down the system … a good deal more effective than messaging.

Hipparchia is right, in the US too many of those who do vote are less informed than the people who don’t. There is a long history of electing dead people in the US. Some times because the surviving candidate(s) are real morons, but often because a significant number of voters were unaware of the change in status of the winning candidate. Of course in some areas we have dead people voting, so it sort of makes sense. It’s hard to be more uninformed than dead, well, unless you watch Fox News.

10 Badtux { 07.27.12 at 11:38 pm }

Kryten, ah yes, Apollo. Along with Stratus and Sun, one of the major players in the early workstation market. What was interesting about that era was the sheer number of innovative companies that were doing interesting and different things that we can’t really do today. I was recently involved in designing and implementing a clustered storage system. What was depressing was that I remembered every wheel we were re-inventing from various systems I encountered in the 1980’s or even earlier. But modern operating systems don’t have any of that functionality, it all got lost in the wash of DOS, Windows, and Unix/Linux (a simplified version of 1967 Multics ideas, not even innovative when new, much less now almost 40 years later) that swept all the innovative players away.

Reminds me of when my boss started talking about “the cloud” as the future blah de blah. I pointed out to him that “the cloud” was basically 1970’s timesharing service “utility computing” and suffered the same problem with security camera data that eventually resulted in the demise of those timesharing services, i.e., limited bandwidth between the customer site and the “cloud” and the question of how to secure things in the cloud and what happens to your data if your cloud provider goes bankrupt. He was somewhat annoyed that I was pointing out that his Brave New Thing was actually a Back To The Past thing.

The reason for lockstepping the 68000, BTW, was not because of any bug or flaw in the chip. It simply had not been designed to have a memory management unit and there were no provisions within the processor for having a page fault stack to handle spilling microcode state to, and restoring microcode state from, upon being signalled by the MMU that there was a page fault. I was frankly amazed when Bill Joy and his team at U.C. Berkeley managed to prototype a graphics workstation using two lock-stepped 68000 processors, because the CPU simply had never been designed for that application (Bill and friends of course then took their prototype, went out and found some cash, and founded Sun Microsystems… I still remember playing with the Sun 1, it was slow but basically if you wanted to do R&D at a university, you had to have one, because it came with a number of computer language compilers for free while computer language compilers for other workstations cost big money). Apollo charged big money for development software, and besides all the interesting stuff research-wise at the university level was being done on BSD Unix which of course is what Sun used as their OS, so the academic market pretty much standardized on Sun and that ended up driving the industry. Just another case where vendors made short-sighted decisions to increase short-term cash flow (e.g. by charging big money for development tools) that ended up destroying the company in the long term (by ceding the academic market to Sun… BTW, this is also what eventually destroyed Sun when they did the same thing in 1993 with Solaris).

The 68010 was basically what Motorola released at the request of Sun, Apollo, etc. once it became clear that the basic 68000 architecture was suited for the application, but that was a couple of years later. Being designed for a MMU was one of the big advantages of the 16032 compared to the (even more buggy) Z8000 and the (somewhat less buggy) 68000 — the 16032 was designed from day one to have a MMU. It annoyed me greatly that National Semiconductor could not make it work right until everybody had already adopted the 68000 or, worse yet, the atrocity that was the 8086. “Nobody will ever need more than 640k” indeed… even in 1982 where 64K of memory was a lot of memory, I could see that such thinking was ridiculously short-sighted, I did not consider the 8086 a serious chip and was flabbergasted when IBM adopted the 8088 as the basis of their PC. The only thing Intel had that was worth anything was the 8087 floating point math coprocessor. Perhaps IBM was thinking that their “microcomputer” would be used for low-end scientific processor and thus needed a good FPU (National Semiconductor’s was *much* faster than Intel’s but also late just as the processor was, and Motorola didn’t even have one at the time). It’s the only thing I can think of that can justify foisting that atrocity onto the industry. Though calling the 8087 a “good FPU” is an atrocity in and of itself — the thing took longer to load and store registers to memory than it took to multiply two 80-bit floating point numbers together!

if all the disaffected moderates and liberals and lefties had a little more incentive to get up off their apathies and at least mindlessly vote for the slightly evil lesser of two evils, maybe we’d have fewer far right radicals and idiots in office.

Perhaps. But 50% of the American public is below average, and in this day of 24-hour Faux News average ain’t so bright nowadays. It’s like when GWB got re-elected in 2004. My friend from Lebanon ranted, “How could Americans re-elect that IDIOT?!” When I pointed out that 50% of all Americans were below average and it took just 50%+1 votes to win… he got real quiet. Probably started reconsidering his citizenship too (he’d gotten his U.S. citizenship just in time to vote for Kerry).

11 hipparchia { 07.28.12 at 7:44 am }

He was somewhat annoyed that I was pointing out that his Brave New Thing was actually a Back To The Past thing.

ha. a lot of people where i work are enamored of The Cloud and when i point out some of the disadvantages, i’m accused of being stuck in the bad old days. 😀

I can remember when the lab i was working in at the time transitioned from terminals and The Mainframe to Personal Computers. there was a lot of grumbling, like with any big change, but some of us were sure looking forward to not having to depend on [be chained to] the mainframe and its keepers.

12 Bryan { 07.29.12 at 12:06 am }

Ah, yes, the ‘golden age’ of connecting to a DEC PDP-10 via a Teletype ASR-33 connected by cramming a telephone handset into the rubber cups of a Bell 103 to roar along at 10 characters per second on Tymshare. Oh, yes, we certainly need to bring back that concept.

And how long was Twitter down when its ‘neato, super-reliable, dual parallel systems’ managed to both crash within seconds of each other?

Of course, we should ignore what happened to all of the people who used the T-Mobile Sidekick when the Microsoft data center had a glitch, because the ‘cloud’ will keep your data as safe as all that data stored on the Megaupload site when the Feds shut it down for ‘piracy’.

My host has had problems over the years, including an episode when a contractor killed all power while the systems were up and functioning. During those years, to the best of my knowledge, they have never lost any data that belonged to me. That said, I still back-up this site on a regular basis to my own machine, as a prudent guarantee that it won’t disappear.

I won’t bore you with the gruesome details, but ‘it turns out that our back-up system hasn’t been working for some time, and no one checked to see if there was anything on the media’ is not exactly an uncommon thing to hear after a major disaster.

The reason to have your own computers is so you don’t have to depend on other people for access to and protection of your data. The only reason ‘cloud computing’ sounds good, it that is resonates with outsourcing in the minds of MBAs.

13 Kryten42 { 07.29.12 at 5:14 pm }

LMAO Thanks for the laugh Bryan!! 😀 I needed that, only because you know I agree, and I’be been through all that too (though the terminal I used way back then was a KSR-33). Ahhh… The ‘goodoldays’ of the 20mA loop serial comm’s!

Agree (and thanks for the links hipparchia. I see what you mean!) 😀

Well, I am sorry to say that I will be AWOL for awhile. Not sure how long exactly. More than a few days, less than a month (I hope)! 😀

Thanks all. 🙂 It’s been a blast. 😀

Stay safe, be well, and be happy! Cya soon(ish) 😉 😀

14 Bryan { 07.29.12 at 7:46 pm }

Take it easy, Kryten, we should still be here when you get back. We still have a few years before global climate change washes over us.

15 hipparchia { 07.29.12 at 10:09 pm }

thanks for stopping by, kryten, you always brighten my day!

16 Kryten42 { 07.30.12 at 11:32 am }

Thanks my friends. 🙂

I had to get up (it’s about 2:15 AM) to take a couple oxycodone. Pain being something of a sleep inhibitor! 😉 Thought I’d have a quick peek while I wait for them to do their thing.

You all brighten my day also (even Badtux 😛 😉 Kidding of course, you are a very decent example of Humanity IMHO). And you are very switched on. It would have been a pleasure to work with you when I was at my best. You have my sincere respect. As do you all. 🙂 This is the only place on the ‘net I visit now, let alone bother posting. Because, well, you guys make it worth the effort. Whatever happens, you are all good people. Truth. Thank you.

Reason I’ll be away is that these oxycodone pain killers aren’t really doing it for me. So I am going into a palliative care facility for a few days to a few weeks (depends how long it takes to manage the pain etc.) where I can get a morphene drip and finally get some decent sleep! LOL Once I am through the surgery late Sep. (and after recovery, however long that takes), all these med’s should be a thing of the past (in theory!) 😉 😀

And just maybe… after I am off all these *dopey* pills… maybe my mind might get back to somewhere approaching my old self, It’s the only reason I am putting up with all this actually. 🙂 *shrug* I guess I will see soon enough. 🙂

Sorry I’ve been rambling and repetitious of late (and my spelling has become atrocious). Hopefully all that will be a thing of the past come end of year. (I spell checked most of this. It was pretty bad).

OK. Time to pull the plug, and see you all when I see you!

Stay safe, be well, and be happy! Oh… and *PLEASE* whatever you do… DON’T be good!! Give the bastards hell!! 😈

Thank you.

17 hipparchia { 07.30.12 at 12:44 pm }

Give the bastards hell!!

will do!!

18 Bryan { 07.30.12 at 1:44 pm }

We don’t discriminate – we give everyone hell without regard to the marital status of their parents or their investment portfolio worth. We are Equal Opportunity Kvetchers.