Bush's Name Could Grace Sewage Plant
San Francisco GOP Raises Stink, Plans To Fight Move

SAN FRANCISCO -- A San Francisco-based group is offering a plan to name a sewage treatment plant after President George W. Bush. The commission calls it a tribute to the outgoing chief executive and the "mess" he'll leave behind.........

(Full text--http://www.kptv.com/politics/16818742/detail.html)
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Seems appropriate I think--after all, the last eight years of this nation's political administration merely amounts to $4!t in the cesspool. ;o)

(Oh yeah--before anyone tries to speculate my political leanings, I will say I am largely independent--if anything specific, maybe leaning slightly to either side of centre at times depending on the issue, my mood, my blood pressure and the current planetary alignment.

There.)

WELL DONE!

It's already been done.

BUT GOOD JOB!

But you are terrible at this. ( wink )

Check out:

http://feedback.pdxradio.com/show.cgi?tpc=2186&post=241467#POST241467

Better luck next time

Ah Crap....I guess i must have missed it. ;o)

(Hey--I had to start somehow..........)

Nice!!

You are in the club man. No worries.

Newbie's........Sheeeeeesh!

DT...we were all once very green on this blog and in radio! It's fun to watch my one year old grandson being very silly but kinda scary too as he creeps up to the terrible two's now throwing himself on the floor when he can't get his way...where did he learn that???
Pdxradio newbies won't get away with that!

Actually I have been here for just barely over a year now as Motozak2 (and off & on under various other handles.) If you want a "newbie" then track down J.D. Dorian sometime! ;o)

Broadway--thank the Gods you didn't see me when I was first "learning" how to use a computer, period, at age three. You want a temper tanthrum????

(Of course, the old DOS-machines of 1986-87 were considerably more difficult to use than they are now. Even Dad was known to drop a few really strong expletives at the thing occasionally, much to the anger of Mum..............)

DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, and Wing Commander were very tedious to get working properly!

I meant DOS <4......but yes, 6.22 and WFW3.11 were (still are! ;o) tedious to get running properly.

F.Y.I., a few months ago I did an install of Win for Workgroups 3.11 on an old 486DX2 system a friend gave me........should also be worth noting that the original installation disks were the very ones that came with my vintage 1994 Packard Bell. But once I got it running, my Gods it was just like the old times........

Now I just got to get a Usenet client installed and it would be like I had died and gone to heaven, I am sure.

On the other hand, I agree with Andy Brown in another thread when he said the last great OS Micro$oft made was MS-DOS. In my view tho, WFW311 only makes it better. ;o)
(--> http://feedback.pdxradio.com/show.cgi?tpc=2186&post=235701#POST235701)

What is it about old technology that seems to eerily make it more fun than the newer stuff I wonder?? *laughs*

> What is it about old technology that seems to eerily make it more fun than the newer stuff I
> wonder?? *laughs*

Ask "62kgw."

For me, old tech is fun because it's often distinctive in it's performance. Over time, tech trade off choices are made such that it's whittled down to the functional, "good enough" performance attributes, or some attributes are just traded for others. What we are used to seeing tends to carry weight that impacts our value perception associated with those trade offs.

Also, how we make things just changes over time as advances in materials science deliver new options.

Old wood radios, for example, are just great! They are great because the properties of wood are great. They just don't make sound economic sense.

(though the peak oil thing might just change that!)

Older tech tends to be simpler tech, and often more robust tech as well. The robustness of new tech often drops over time due to the trade offs made for economies of scale. Sometimes this isn't true, but a lot of the time it is

It's cheaper, but it kind of sucks too. There is something wrong with artificially disposable tech. Better to just spend more and maintain it, than to always replace it, but that's just me.

Simpler is debatable though. Maybe just familiar to those of us who experienced it directly is a far better way of expressing this. Vacuum tubes are a good example, along with analog computers.

Either we've experienced tubes or we haven't. I would imagine a tube is something very strange to the EE's today, used to working on mostly silicon. Probably just as strange as the pong game I once had, where the circuit *was* the game. No program, no CPU, just electronics that literally formed pong.

Another attribute that's often attractive is simple accessibility. We've made great advances in miniaturization, meaning we often have to have an enabling technology to work with things, where older, human scale things, we often can manipulate more directly. This takes some of the human craftsmanship out of things, making the construction of it more difficult to appreciate directly.

Greater dependence on mechanical elements, such as cam's, pulleys, and such is a good example of this. Think of the punch buttons on older radios, -vs- the little bits of silicon.

The punch buttons never forget, but maybe are not as repeatable as we would like. It's possible to pull an old radio out of the dump, punch the buttons and still see what stations were programmed in. How well the station was actually selected was related to how much effort those that built it, put into building it.

The silicon is very repeatable, but depends on a battery and will forget, if not powered. To me, this seems cheap somehow, even though it's highly likely to perform better in most ways that matter.

I'm quite sure part of this happens to be due to a lot of tech I experienced over time having states that endured in many ways that current tech does not.

I like computer paper tape for these reasons. It's human readable, human manipulable, very robust (I know that sounds silly, but it's just dead simple and it works nicely, even dirty or damp), and within it's storage limits, effective and cheap.

I once wrote a program in C, compiled it, printed out the source code, then "printed" out the object code to paper tape. The punched out bits literally ended up in a bit bucket, I found humorous.

(still do)

Today, I could go and find that roll of tape and literally read it, and make use of it with no enabling technology. At least just the data of it. Just look at the tape, do some math, and record it with pencil and paper, if desired. Maybe just type it in to another machine.

Still takes a CPU to execute it, of course, but it's pretty damn portable, if you think about it.

Vinyl records are similar in that, if I really wanted to, I could mechanically get the sound off of them, with things I fabricated by pure hand and eye and simple tools.

That's cool stuff to me, because it's at my scale, where skill and craftsmanship directly equates to quality and robustness. How well I crafted the reproduction works would equate to sound quality, and how well I powered it mechanically, perhaps with a crank even, would equate to consistency, for examples.

"Old wood radios, for example, are just great! They are great because the properties of wood are great. They just don't make sound economic sense."

Absolutely. Even the cabinets of my Cerwin-Vega speaks are wood. I tried going the "cheap@$$ plastic speaker cabinet" thing a few years ago. Never before had I heard such hollow lifeless sound. Then I got my Criterion speakers at Goodwill (R.I.P.) in 200 and never again did I have to suffer. ;o)

Unfortunately the foam suspension on the woofer units in the old Criterions was over twenty years old by 2005 and was pretty much rotten away. A neighbour down the hall in the apartment building I was living in downtown PDX at the time had a pair of CV's or Peavy's he was selling.........I ended up snagging an almost $1000 pair of professional speakers for $200. ;o)

Turned up loud in a small apartment like mine, they don't sound that good......I think it may be the particular environment I am using them in. Played quietly tho, or at a moderate level, they sound amazing.









Sooner or later I intend to make a wood cabinet for my GE Super-Radio............ ;o)