Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

I commend you for stepping up to the home schooling for your kids. I frankly wouldn't have the patience for it but I suppose in times such as now I would have to suck it up and just do it.

[med6753]

Has it really been that long? Our discussions about electronics shops we knew in past has made me think of the first time I saw a Tektronix scope in the flesh. 49 years ago! Electronics Lab at college. About a dozen 547's with 1A2 plug-in's set up on benches. And I actually got to play with it. It was an immediate want and then a realization that a poor college student can't afford it.

I was aware that Tektronix existed before actually seeing one. My Father had this book describing the operation of 535 and 545 scopes. It has no copyright date but since it describes non-suffix 535/545 that places it to mid to late 1950's. And those full size pictures. It was readily apparent that I wasn't looking at an ordinary Heathkit.




So, 49 years later I finally have one. No, it isn't a 547 but the 535A will do. Same enormous form factor, basically same look, same 1A2 plug-in, absolutely same feel and of course that unbeatable fine blue-green trace.

[bd139]

Yeah Nottingham reality: Actual fact I got to choke hold a whore for free.

She was trying to mug me at the time on a tram

And how exactly did you *know* for a fact she was a whore  ?

By 'mugged' he means the price negotiations weren't going his way... 

Good retort 

I commend you for stepping up to the home schooling for your kids. I frankly wouldn't have the patience for it but I suppose in times such as now I would have to suck it up and just do it.

It's a piece of piss:

1. Argue with Google Classroom sign up and sign in for 2 days while someone at the school end has not even bothered to RTFM about it and is talking all patronising like you're the fucking idiot.
2. Receiving an apology when you call them out for not knowing their arse from their elbow and explaining why and how and why you actually have some credentials on this stuff and they don't
3. Receive some half baked piece of shit in powerpoint, because it's the only tool they know, which is uploaded to Google Classroom corrupted. This is while telling the kids "you have to fill in the gaps" whilst leaving no gaps and no placeholders to put any text.
4. Working out which strategy for handing the work in is correct on this moon cycle.
5. Watching the kids get bollocked for not handing it in using the correct method, which is immediately protested by at least 30 angry as fuck parents.
6. Finding that wonderful teacher who wants you to print shit out and scan it because she doesnt understand how it all works.
7. Watching 30 kids attempt to join a zoom call in a coordinated fashion on their 3rd hand argos no brand android tablet while dad drives a top end Tesla with an iphone 11 (sell your penis extension and buy your kids some decent kit ffs)

I don't care about the whole teacher propaganda here; they're mostly shitty babysitters without a damn clue. There are a few exceptions but they aren't teachers any more I note.

[Kosmic]

I commend you for stepping up to the home schooling for your kids. I frankly wouldn't have the patience for it but I suppose in times such as now I would have to suck it up and just do it.

Same comment, good job Mnem 

[med6753]

It's a piece of piss:

1. Argue with Google Classroom sign up and sign in for 2 days while someone at the school end has not even bothered to RTFM about it and is talking all patronising like you're the fucking idiot.
2. Receiving an apology when you call them out for not knowing their arse from their elbow and explaining why and how and why you actually have some credentials on this stuff and they don't
3. Receive some half baked piece of shit in powerpoint, because it's the only tool they know, which is uploaded to Google Classroom corrupted. This is while telling the kids "you have to fill in the gaps" whilst leaving no gaps and no placeholders to put any text.
4. Working out which strategy for handing the work in is correct on this moon cycle.
5. Watching the kids get bollocked for not handing it in using the correct method, which is immediately protested by at least 30 angry as fuck parents.
6. Finding that wonderful teacher who wants you to print shit out and scan it because she doesnt understand how it all works.
7. Watching 30 kids attempt to join a zoom call in a coordinated fashion on their 3rd hand argos no brand android tablet while dad drives a top end Tesla with an iphone 11 (sell your penis extension and buy your kids some decent kit ffs)

I don't care about the whole teacher propaganda here; they're mostly shitty babysitters without a damn clue. There are a few exceptions but they aren't teachers any more I note.

I would be a fucking raving lunatic. I give you props too! 

[Cerebus]

I do like LEO, very helpful.

I think this LEO is a more natural fit here:

[med6753]

I do like LEO, very helpful.

I think this LEO is a more natural fit here:

I guess "LEO" stands for a bunch of things. When I hear it I think "Law Enforcement Officer"

[Specmaster]

Thats a good endorsement for Nottingham then, the chicks there are fair game 

If STD's are your thing then go for it. 

Nah, this old grey beard has managed to dodge all of those by keeping the old trouser snake under control, but don't let me stop you from having a go if like 

[mnementh]

It's a piece of piss:

1. Argue with Google Classroom sign up and sign in for 2 days while someone at the school end has not even bothered to RTFM about it and is talking all patronising like you're the fucking idiot.
2. Receiving an apology when you call them out for not knowing their arse from their elbow and explaining why and how and why you actually have some credentials on this stuff and they don't
3. Receive some half baked piece of shit in powerpoint, because it's the only tool they know, which is uploaded to Google Classroom corrupted. This is while telling the kids "you have to fill in the gaps" whilst leaving no gaps and no placeholders to put any text.
4. Working out which strategy for handing the work in is correct on this moon cycle.
5. Watching the kids get bollocked for not handing it in using the correct method, which is immediately protested by at least 30 angry as fuck parents.
6. Finding that wonderful teacher who wants you to print shit out and scan it because she doesnt understand how it all works.
7. Watching 30 kids attempt to join a zoom call in a coordinated fashion on their 3rd hand argos no brand android tablet while dad drives a top end Tesla with an iphone 11 (sell your penis extension and buy your kids some decent kit ffs)

I don't care about the whole teacher propaganda here; they're mostly shitty babysitters without a damn clue. There are a few exceptions but they aren't teachers any more I note.

I would be a fucking raving lunatic. I give you props too! 

The people who produced that curriculum are not teachers; they are graphic artists with teachers as consultants. As you may imagine, those who graduated in the top 30-50% of their class are actually TEACHING, so these "consultants" are hardly a fair representation of the breed.

The teachers in front of the camera are also not representative of the breed... they are the ones who didn't have sense enough to realize what an utterly FUBAR assignment this was or are the few with enough experience to adapt and actually try to realize this ill-conceived plan of the worst administration in history, which Dept of Education is headed by a fucking dilettante psycho-bitch horse-breeder whose appointment was deliberately chosen to DESTROY the public education system so our your their corrupt Congress could finally argue that we need to turn THAT over to the private sector too... because that has worked out so well for every OTHER US government agency so far. 

We do not use the Google product; we subscribe to time4learning.com. Curriculum there wasn't just slapped together in the face of a crisis; it has been developed over nearly 2 decades and has to earn its keep, because people are actually paying for the service.

Is it the BEST curriculum...? No. It is not always right either. But it is the best mix of resources that a cynical, untrusting old bastard like myself and his true-believer educator wife could find.

As to your argument that teachers are little more than babysitters:

That is because greedy bastards have deliberately broken the system... gutted it from the inside out and tied the teachers hands behind their backs, NOT because the teachers don't know how or want to actually educate. A public education system that once was a shining beacon of hope, the envy of the world, is now just another cog in the shit-machine that is corporatocracy.

When teachers are forced to buy construction paper and pencils for their classroom out of their own pockets, and music  education, when it does get any time, is at most one class a week per student, you know they've cut the fucking budget too far.

Teachers are primarily babysitters in our greed-based economy BECAUSE the broken education system overloads them to the point they simply don't have enough hours in a day to do much more. Period.

We've probably all seen this meme before... it goes a little OTT in the math, but it DOES point out the sad truth... today's classroom is constructed not for learning, but like a factory farm, and the students are little more than piglets being fatted up for the slaughter of ejection into the modern lowest common denominator workforce:

Teachable Moments: Are You Sick of Highly-Paid Teachers?

“Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do — babysit!"

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 p.m. with 45 minutes off for lunch and planning— that equals 6-1/2 hours).

So each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585 a day.

However, remember they only work 180 days a year! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

Let’s see….that’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year...

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2011/02/22/948224/-Are-you-sick-of-highly-paid-teachers

Oh, and whoops... Minimum Wage is no longer $3/hour. 

mnem
 

[Fungus]

When the tram conductor body slammed her, the contents of her bag spilled everywhere and it was fairly obvious.

I only have second-hand information to guide me, but... she might be just an ordinary girl in Nottingham.

[Mr. Scram]

Looks like the inevitable happened. Autodesk has decided it has bought enough market share with their "free" services and is now cutting out a lot of fat. Be stuck or pay up. But hey, their paid services now come at a discount!

https://hackaday.com/2020/09/16/autodesk-announces-major-changes-to-fusion-360-personal-use-license-terms/

[tggzzz]

I do like LEO, very helpful.

I think this LEO is a more natural fit here:

I guess "LEO" stands for a bunch of things. When I hear it I think "Law Enforcement Officer"

Lyons Electronic Office, the first computer used for commercial business applications. Running a chain of tea shops, in fact. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

Or Low Earth Orbit.

[mnementh]

Every time you hobos start talking about LEO, I have to catch myself... growing up in a hippie household, that  means something totally different, and the ol' dwagon hackles start to rise. 

mnem

I do like LEO, very helpful.

I think this LEO is a more natural fit here:

I guess "LEO" stands for a bunch of things. When I hear it I think "Law Enforcement Officer"

Yeah, this was where I was going with my original comment; LEO as in "Heads-up, Five-Oh is one block over doing a sweep!" not something more constructive. 

mnem
Mmmm... Tramadol good, fire bad...

[med6753]

Yeah, this was where I was going with my original comment; LEO as in "Heads-up, Five-Oh is one block over doing a sweep!" not something more constructive. 

mnem
Mmmm... Tramadol good, fire bad...

"Stop and frisk" can actually be fun if done properly. 

[mnementh]

So... are the fuzzy handcuffs yours or hers...? 

mnem
 

[med6753]

So... are the fuzzy handcuffs yours or hers...? 

mnem
 

That's for me to know and you to not know. 

[bd139]

... school things ...

Mostly agree. Here things are slightly different (or are they?).

The government sets the curriculum here based on a combination of some crystal ball somewhere, some common sense and corporate demand. "we need more computer people so lets spawn an initiative". One of them was very successful (BBC computing initiative) but the 10-15 year lag on idea to effect is somewhat terrible. Thus lots of people fall straight out of the education system straight into a shit show of no employment because either the things they were shaped to do are obsolete or saturated with staff.

But in that 10-15 year gap, there is another shit show of deep hierarchy. The government divides the country up into local education authorities (LEAs) who oversee the schools. The LEAs are responsible for pooling resources across schools and schools are responsible for curriculum. Now schools get a fairly nice budget and are NOT underfunded here despite the crap the teachers are mostly spouting. What happens is the schools are marketed various fads. The fads range from new teaching methodologies, training courses, magical unicorn software and all sorts of shit. So what happens is the entire budget gets burned on changing large things rather than incremental improvement and on dead end fat methodologies where are children are experimented on really.

At the end of the day, much like our health service, changing ideas and playing find the ideology eats more resources than the functional role of teaching children (or fixing people if it's health care).

The Google Classroom incursion was a really really good example of where this goes to hell because it shows that when the teachers are sold an incompatible ideology, any ability to adapt to the situation is thrown out of the window almost immediately. In this case the LEA were rolling it out incrementally to all schools but the last two that were holding on were the ones my kids went to.

The schools my kids went to were guilty of:

1. Spending £100k they on a VMware cluster they don't need because google classroom was coming in the LEA told them about it.
2. Spending £50k on ipads via a 3rd party non apple distributor that leads to £1500 a seat cost for a single fucking mid-range ipad with NO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE. Not only that, none of their existing estate worked with it so the teachers got a free ipad each out of it basically.

Now I was a parent governor at one of the above schools which I found was a role which had "conduct rules" which were tantamount to "you can't speak about these problems". I quit so I could speak freely.

So the problems here are:

1. Idiot fads sold by companies who are trying to turn education into a cow to milk rather than a public service.
2. Idiot short sighted school management.
3. Self interest and disinterest in self-improvement by teachers (unless there's a free training course)
4. Complete lies about funding.

When I got asked recently to donate to our local school I raised an FOI for their accounts which they declined as it'd cost too much to prepare. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Headmistress has a nice 20 plate Audi TT...

[mnementh]

Yes, but headmistress is not a teacher; she's a fucking administrator. Whether she worked her way up the ranks as a teacher or not, her primary drive is administration, NOT educating children.

As long as the people who administrate keep trying to make classroom sizes bigger than 10-12 students per learning group, teachers simply aren't going to be able to manage anything more than babysitting. Teaching (as opposed to lecturing) is the original "multitasking" job: You have to deliver concepts in an interactive format because that is how the human brain works; we have to be taught how to learn from a book or ANY standardized pool of information, we don't naturally learn that way.

This means full-duplex communication between the teacher and every student; you cannot teach if you aren't listening as well as speaking. One human being simply cannot maintain any more than a handful of open connections at the same time; when one tries, everything devolves into a matter of just trying to manage discipline.

What this means in the modern cookie-cutter assembly-line teaching system we have now is that the teacher has to summarily execute all cross-channel interference to keep the SNR as high as possible; even that noise which is legitimate, needed feedback from a student.

The US education system is the most extreme example of what happens when you let bean-counters redesign your schools: Whole generations of students who don't know beans. About anything. 

Now a cynic like myself will tell you that dismantling of the US public education system was never an accident; that the educated populace we once had was the enemy of the corporate authoritarian paradigm, and that public education in America was deliberately destroyed to produce a populace ignorant enough that some of them would actually vote for the obvious liars and thieves we have running the show and selling us all off to the highest bidder.

[EDIT: I recommend you take that statement with a grain of salt big enough to pickle a dragon, but DO give it honest consideration; there's enough truth in there that one simply cannot ignore the evidence all around us.

But at some point we have to stop blaming the teachers, roll up our sleeves and fix the broken system that makes teachers into babysitters, because I guarantee you, most of them are NOT in it just to collect a paycheck; there's just too much stress and BS involved for that.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

So... are the fuzzy handcuffs yours or hers...? 

mnem
 

That's for me to know and you to not know. 

That's okay... if you forget yours you can borrow one of mine. 

mnem
You prefer red, pink or blue...? The prrple ones are special; they do not leave the house. 

[nixiefreqq]

someone explain how this on line education is supposed to work?

how exactly is this gonna' train the next generation of typesetters?

(yes....a counselor once tried to push me into that class.  i suspect that some rural schools in pa never got the word and still have drawers full of toxic fonts)

[xrunner]

In case you didn't know, this is how the ingredients in WD-40 settle in the can (or in a bottle LOL). You do have to shake the can before use (so it sayeth on the can).

The question is: Can I filter out the "white" stuff, or does the "white stuff" make it more betterer that it would be without it?

Thank you in advance. 

[med6753]

We're going to have a generation of dummies. The education system sucked before the pandemic. Now it's 10x worse.

As George Carlin once said "it will progress so bad that they only thing you'll need to get into college is a pencil"

And I'll add. A million dollars tuition and in debt for life.   

[mnementh]

It's just lip service to the idea of fixing public education, and to make it look like we're doing something instead of admitting that the current system is so broken it cannot deal with any interruption in the flow of money and bullshit. Either one fails and the whole teetering edifice comes crumbling down, like every pyramid scheme. The whole "Business as usual" paradigm is little more than the biggest pyramid scheme in human history.

COVID has been a firewall of real that no amount of BS can overcome, so now the cracks in the big lie are widening to the point that even those who don't want to see are being slapped in the face with the reality underneath.

No idea how much longer the BS peddlers can keep it up; but hey, I've been saying this since the 90s. 

mnem
Every crisis is a business opportunity.

[bd139]

Give it a few months and everyone will have forgotten about it all and the dead. Humans are quite happy being miserable as long as it looks like nothing is changing.

Just ordered a tinySA from a drop shipper here. Place your bets: genuine article or clone already?

[mnementh]

In case you didn't know, this is how the ingredients in WD-40 settle in the can (or in a bottle LOL). You do have to shake the can before use (so it sayeth on the can).

The question is: Can I filter out the "white" stuff, or does the "white stuff" make it more betterer that it would be without it?

Thank you in advance. 

Not sure; it's probably paraffin. What do you use the stuff for?

WD-40 is penetrating oil, not lubricating oil. Its purpose is to infiltrate rusty bits to help break them free. It is worthless as a lubricant; it evaporates too readily and the residue can actually cause galling in load-bearing surfaces.

I've had the same can of WD-40 since I quit working as a auto mechanic; really, it has no purpose on a technician's bench. 

mnem