Galt's Gulch

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    Posted by $ allosaur 3 years, 8 months ago
    Me dino thinks my ability to issue wise cracks is why I lived to turn 75 today.
    I was in the class of 82-2 (2nd 4-week class of 1982) at the Alabama Department Of Corrections Academy in Selma when told that the average life expectancy of a corrections officer is 59.
    Stress made Allosaurus (Latin for "different lizard") want to crack jokes.
    Been living off a full pension plus SS since 2007.
    "Ever see an elephant hide in a tree?"
    "No."
    "They hide pretty good, don't they?"
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    • Posted by $ pixelate 3 years, 8 months ago
      Happy 75th Birthday!
      I recently moved to Southern Arizona from Washington State. My best friend down here is a guy that also moved down here from Washington, around four years ago -- this, after serving for 26 years in the Washington State DOC (Department Of Corrections). He is now a real-estate agent and is loving it. He told me that Life in the DOC was hard on people -- you were literally In Prison -- and that the average life-span for officers was somewhere in the 50's. He also indicated that there was an online Memorial page -- lots of his fellow officers had died in their early 50's and a few in their 40's. He has a new lease on life -- and is effectively, an entirely new person -- gone are the DOC habits of smoking, drinking, etc ... he now runs 100 miler ultra marathons and is looking forward to the additional income via the WA State pension check.

      Glad you've been out of the DOC for 14 years and counting Dino. Cheers to many more birthdays and the opportunity to share your observations on Life with the rest of us here in The Gulch.
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      • Posted by $ allosaur 3 years, 8 months ago
        Semi-retired, I worked as a security guard for 4 contract security companies, including Wackenhut.
        Recall telling an employee of a client (a Wachovia data center) that so many corrections coworkers had died of this and that~~that I felt like a infantry rifleman of the 1700s, who marched in a skirmish line toward an enemy that had opened fire, causing hit coworkers to drop dead here and there all about me, leaving me to wonder when a lead ball would find me next,
        Anyway, Type 2 diabetes began to mess with my feet. I became fully retired during 2013.
        There's a cane within reach where I sit right now.
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  • Posted by $ pixelate 3 years, 8 months ago
    That Gardening one was delightful -- I can think of a few State and Federal level bureaucrats that I would like to plant somewhere.
    Then the Virtue Signaler with the mask -- of course there will always be the residue of humanity that cannot part with their "look how much I care" mask.
    Cables - tell me about it - I went through two large bins full, lots of duplicates, but some are One-Of-A-Kind ... 4-pin Din for my Radio Shack CGP-115 color printer... my fondness for the 80's ... one day I will power-up the Radio Shack Color Computer ECB along with the array of peripherals . . . Retro Computing during my retirement years.
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 3 years, 8 months ago
    I have several SCSI cables and terminators. Can’t bring myself to throw away a 25 pin straight through, twisted shielded pair, even though a four pin USB smokes it now!
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    • Posted by $ blarman 3 years, 8 months ago
      Hehe. I used to build SCSI drives. It's still a far better architecture for data transfer using multiple devices than USB...
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      • Posted by $ Thoritsu 3 years, 8 months ago
        I am a huge Mac advocate (of course been beat into submission by the wannabie Windows), and Apple adopted SCSI quite early. Are you saying it remains throughput-competitive with USB, or just the communication architecture is?
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        • Posted by $ blarman 3 years, 8 months ago
          Unfortunately, development hasn't continued on SCSI to advance the speeds like with USB. One of the things that set SCSI apart was that SCSI is a parallel bus architecture with addressing for hundreds of devices where ISA and its progeny were built on a dedicated bus architecture. For a personal computer with only one or two drives, SCSI wasn't cost-competitive. But for servers, SCSI ruled in terms of throughput, etc. In fact, many of the other ISA-based technologies (including SATA) just played software games in order to string multiple devices on the same bus.

          Just one more example of cheap winning out over superior.
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          • Posted by $ Thoritsu 3 years, 8 months ago
            What about SATA3?
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            • Posted by $ blarman 3 years, 8 months ago
              It's faster, but still a serial architecture rather than a parallel one. And despite the speed of the transfer, you still get a bottleneck at the processor when you have to weave in the various information streams. What you end up with is another piece of hardware (or some bloated, flaky software) which tries to sort all this out and present it to the memory registers in a decipherable fashion. All they're really doing is shifting the bottleneck from the I/O to the processing system and then throwing a bunch of dedicated cores at management.
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  • Posted by AmericanWoman 3 years, 8 months ago
    Ha..the phone one reminds me of the day was giving away "stuff" rather then pay to tractor it to another state had one of those Princess on the wall phones, now wish I kept it but am not a keeper of "stuff"....kid maybe 30 years younger then me laughed because on the phone was the original sticker sent Dial 911 in case of emergency....he laughed you had to be reminded of that silly kid never would understand the letters and numbers no doubt on a rotary : )))
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  • Posted by mccannon01 3 years, 8 months ago
    Yes! Yes! Yes! Wonderful this week, OUC!!! LMAO!!!

    Oh, BTW, I do have several boxes of cables and one of them thar old timey phones!!

    P.S. Thanks for the interment tip, LOL!
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  • Posted by shaifferg 3 years, 8 months ago
    S terial DB 25 cables make excellent connections from a model rocket launch controller to the launch racks. Allows control in groups of six pads, put 6 25' cables together and achieve 150' safety distance for high power rockets. Retired from teaching after 30 years, made the double hockey sticks (77) last year. 30 rod launch system now 20 years old and I'm even older and still flying rockets. This has no relevance to any previous comments. Maybe a little to some age related.
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  • Posted by katrinam41 3 years, 8 months ago
    LMAO and Happy Birthday allosaur! I have a box of cables, everything except the one I need. Anyone in the Gulch have a spare HDMI cable for sale? My Radio Shack keyboard wants to handshake my computer with the mixer app.
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