Have you done anything big: start a business, climb a mountain, build your own house?

Pacer x

spec said:

I'm no programmer but I have learned a bit about programming and have worked with many 'softies' as we called them.

When they first started using C++ there was all this talk about OOD and 'instantiation' and I thought that was way beyond a mere hardware engineer. But when I looked into it and realized that a lot of the OOD techniques had been used for years in hardware, and when I found out that instanciation only meant 'an instance of', some of the fog cleared.

Software is a fascinating area and the boundary between software and hardware is dissolving, to an extent, with the availability of low cost single-board computers and free IDEs that run OK on PCs.

spec

Click to expand...

Software indeed is a wonderful thing to learn but be ready to let it whizz your brains a bit as C++ can drudgy sometimes while debugging and you may get as angry as hell.
BTW being a scripting student it also came to my mind that ETO 's java scripts are running real slow and is responding with a lot of lag recently.I remember how ETO was one of the fastest growing communities and also gave good browsing experience.
In my opinion it seems like the server machine is under great stress or we may be the victim of some XSS attack.Think admins should check it out .

tech master 117 said:

Software indeed is a wonderful thing to learn but be ready to let it whizz your brains a bit as C++ can drudgy sometimes while debugging and you may get as angry as hell.
BTW being a scripting student it also came to my mind that ETO 's java scripts are running real slow and is responding with a lot of lag recently.I remember how ETO was one of the fastest growing communities and also gave good browsing experience.
In my opinion it seems like the server machine is under great stress or we may be the victim of some XSS attack.Think admins should check it out .

Click to expand...

It's been working just fine for me, never had an issue. Probably something on your end.

Most of the time I visit ETO from many different machines with different ISP's but everytime I see the same performance.Then has it something to do with the ISP's in our country although I can visit other sites with good speed.

tech master 117 said:

I remember how ETO was one of the fastest growing communities...

Click to expand...

When was this? After the troll war a few years ago this site has diminished to a fraction of the activity it once had.

throbscottle said:

Mines a trans-am please! Any year

Click to expand...

I have a 95 Trans Am 5.7 Litre. Mine has been parked for last two years as gas got too expensive. I'll see if I can dig up a photo.

Mikebits said:

I have a 95 Trans Am 5.7 Litre. Mine has been parked for last two years as gas got too expensive. I'll see if I can dig up a photo.

Click to expand...

Arrragh... I'm green with jealousy.

The first yank automobile I ever rode in was around 1958. We were hitch hiking around Suffolk England and this beautiful white Thunderbird convertible pulled up; we were bragging about it for weeks.

tech master 117 said:

Most of the time I visit ETO from many different machines with different ISP's but everytime I see the same performance.Then has it something to do with the ISP's in our country although I can visit other sites with good speed.

Click to expand...

I can visit ETO as though I'm from many different places/countries (something like 40 or so) in the world and I don't see any real issues.

Spent the summer turning a wilderness into a holiday park, only one caravan at the moment, but i shifted nearly 30 tons of soil by hand. Cleared 4 acres of brush with a strimmer and pulled a 40' mobile home 1/4 mile with a 12 HP tractor on soft ground! A couple of other things as well but not as tiring.

Little Ghostman said:

turning a wilderness into a holiday park

Click to expand...

Dang Little Ghostman, you win the brute force medal! I don't think I've worked that hard my whole life.

Brute force sums it up lol. no finesse involved lol

Little Ghostman said:

Spent the summer turning a wilderness into a holiday park, only one caravan at the moment, but i shifted nearly 30 tons of soil by hand. Cleared 4 acres of brush with a strimmer and pulled a 40' mobile home 1/4 mile with a 12 HP tractor on soft ground! A couple of other things as well but not as tiring.

Click to expand...

Holey Moley! That is one heck of a lot of work! I used to do that kind of thing as a conservation volunteer with the BTCV, so I know what you must have been up against. Now just digging the garden is about as much as I'm prepared to do.

I remember when I cleared the area my place is in now. Same thing you did. One very long summer of raw hard labor.

I cut and burned enough trees and bush that if I had saved it I probably could have heated my house for free for at least the first 5 years I was here from it. Man, those were the biggest fires our property has ever seen. a few had ash piles so big they had red hot embers still burning in them 4 - 5 days after the main burn was done.

The major tasks of the early American farming pioneers was clearing the trees, and in some areas, removing stones/rocks from the soil. It was the same in the UK before that time.

I have done a bit of tree felling and have found that the hardest part is digging up the roots. We had a large ornamental cherry tree in the front garden, but it became diseased and had to come down- regrettably. The main roots were a foot in diameter and extended for fifteen feet.

spec

I did the cut, clear and burn thing then rented a dozer and pay loader for a week. Roots weren't a problem with those.

Looking back I should have just dozed everything right from the start and been done with it. One day with the dozer would have saved me a month's worth of evenings and weekend clearing work I did by hand.

tcmtech said:

I did the cut, clear and burn thing then rented a dozer and pay loader for a week. Roots weren't a problem with those.

Looking back I should have just dozed everything right from the start and been done with it. One day with the dozer would have saved me a month's worth of evenings and weekend clearing work I did by hand.

Click to expand...

Yes, I learned that lesson. Once I had a mountain of rubble to loose. I spent weeks loading it into the boot of the car and driving the rubble to the municipal tip, but then I got to know a chap who did heavy demolition and digging work. He cleared an even bigger mountain of rubble in half an hour. He also leveled some ground, that I had been struggling with for weeks, in another half hour- and it didn't cost that much either.

Since then, I have found a chap who has a roll-on roll-ff lorry with a grab on the back. He just rolls up and removes whatever you have got and drives off: again, not too expensive either- much cheaper than hiring skips (dumpsters). The other day, on one of his visits, he also positioned a capping stone that the stone mason and three other guys could not manage- they almost killed themselves trying to lift it.

I find tractors, Bulldozers, Hi-Macs, scrapers, and heavy machinery in general, fascinating. As a kid, I used to to watch the operations at a gravel/sand quarry about five miles away. After a few years the quarry closed and most of the fixed gear- towers, crushers, sorters, conveyor-belts, motors- were just left to rust. If was a treasure-trove of materials and parts, but most of the materials were far to big for me and the motors, even the relatively small ones, were three-phase.

spec

spec said:

I find tractors, Bulldozers, Hi-Macs, scrapers, and heavy machinery in general, fascinating. As a kid, I used to to watch the operations at a gravel/sand quarry about five miles away.

Click to expand...

We had to stuff a container with a Komatsu backhoe (I know could be a different name). The driver who brought it on the platform offered a little show with all the pirouettes he was able to do. That kind of ability is good to have when you need to displace those machines inside the hold prior lifting for discharge.

When I was a kid there was a derelict woollen mill near where I lived. Used to find loads of old bobbins in there, the sort which now sell for a pretty penny when nicely polished. Just junk back then of course. If only I'd had a crystal ball...

Wimps, i did it by hand , still got a huge amount of scrub and soil to move, and some 120 trees to take down by hand. Much easier in winter though

Here is my current big project: Engine, exhaust, motor mount are out now for refurbishment. Getting the bits back next week, so will be reassembling.



Can you spot my helper, Madi, sleeping on the job?