The Vent and Rant Thread

[Cinisajoy]

Do you get many visitors?
I personally don't get visitors since the kids left town.

Just running ideas by you.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Hitch

...
I've played with rats. Quite smart, really. And fun.


Hitch

Rats make good pets if you raise them from pups, but they need to be white or harlequin. The grey/black ones that live in the wild have just too much negative image.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by wodin

Rats make good pets if you raise them from pups, but they need to be white or harlequin. The grey/black ones that live in the wild have just too much negative image.

My co-worker says you are conflating two ideas here. Yes, wild rats will never make good pets. But if they were not ever wild, the color can be any color. He's had brown, grey, and even naked rats (which makes them pink). Big ears; little ears... his wife had a LOT of rats in their menagery.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

For that matter, I still have my ancient PC clone running MSDOS 5 on a shelf. It has a 10 mhz NEC V20 CPU, 640 KB of RAM, a megabyte of expansion RAM on a card, a Hercules graphics card driving a mono monitor, and two 20[b]MB[/i] Seagate ST-225 hard drives. My Palm TX PDA has 128MB NVRAM, 4GB of storage in an SD card, and a 312mhx Intel PXA CPU.

Everything gets smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper. Alas, users don't get smarter...
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Dennis

My first real computer experience was on a ZX81, a simple processor (a Z80) and a default of 1 KB of memory, no internal disks of course. I did have the whooping extension pack to 16KB memory. On that machine I learned programming.

My first PC was a Commodore Colt, a 8088 CPU with 640 KB memory. We upgraded it later with a 20 MB (or 10, I can't recall) hard disk. That was a huge investment then. The disk was just a slow as a floppy...
Ah, the early days of home computing.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes. Maybe they are indeed pets, outside for some fresh air and sunshine. I wish I had an easy-ish method like that for the furballs, who simply CANNOT go outside. Too many predators. Cats have an extremely short expected lifespan in our neck of the woods if they live outside. As in, days. Between coyotes (primary predators), Great Horned Owls that are truly shockingly large (I'm pretty sure that they would not mess with our male, but the female...), and, of course, rattlesnakes. Yes, really, and 2 years ago, we had one living beneath our front porch, so...not imaginary.

A fellow participant and moderator on another website where I was active made a series of posts about "Accidental Yellow Cat", a feral cat that gradually moved in with her. She lives in NM, where coyotes are the main predators, and worried a lot about the cat. She was pleased when it moved in because it would be safer, but it still wanted to go out and prowl. The last time it didn't come back.

I've considered making the patio into a catio, but, a) it's large (72' x 12) and thankfully covered, and b) it wouldn't keep the snakes out at all, nor scorpions or other things. {sigh}

A friend of our friend Naomi had a plethora of cats in her place in upstate NY. Most were feral, and made their home in her barn or in a covered patio area. I'd sit there when we were up for a visit and watch kittens cavorting. A couple of the braver ones would come close, but not enough to actually touch.

The last time we were there, I saw none. The apparent reason was hawks that moved into the area and saw dinner.

Another old friend lived in a house in the boonies with an assortment of outdoor cats. He described walking out his front door to find a racoon with a kitten in it's mouth. He decided that raccoons were no longer "cute", grabbed his 22 rifle, and shot it. Why no. Raccoons aren't cute. They are wild animals, smart, adept at getting into everything, and highly destructive. There are some classic horror stories about people trying to keep them as pets. It works up till they mature, then all bets are off. Want to keep one as a pet? Get it as a baby, and get it neutered as soon as possible.

I've played with rats. Quite smart, really. And fun.

Tasty, too, if you're from a culture that eats them. I saw a lovely tale years back from someone whose parents had been Peace Corps volunteers in Africa. When it was time to leave, the village where they had stayed threw a feast to say goodbye. Mom was quite taken by one of the dishes served, and asked what was in it. "Cane Rat." <gag!> <spew!>
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Dennis

[wodin]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Tasty, too, if you're from a culture that eats them. I saw a lovely tale years back from someone whose parents had been Peace Corps volunteers in Africa. When it was time to leave, the village where they had stayed threw a feast to say goodbye. Mom was quite taken by one of the dishes served, and asked what was in it. "Cane Rat." <gag!> <spew!>
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Dennis

According to Sir Terry, dwarves will eat little else.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

My first real computer experience was on a ZX81, a simple processor (a Z80) and a default of 1 KB of memory, no internal disks of course. I did have the whooping extension pack to 16KB memory. On that machine I learned programming.

The first computer I used was an IBM mainframe at a bank. The first one I had at home was an AT&T 3B1, a single user Unix workstation. (I still have it.) A PC didn't join the family till rather later.

My first PC was a Commodore Colt, a 8088 CPU with 640 KB memory. We upgraded it later with a 20 MB (or 10, I can't recall) hard disk. That was a huge investment then. The disk was just a slow as a floppy...
Ah, the early days of home computing.

I was aware of Commodore's PC line, but never used them. I did log time on Commodore 64s, which were neat conceptually but hobbled by design-to-cost decisions. As the name implied, they had 64K RAM, but they had 16KB of ROM, as well, with an 8K OS kernel in one ROM chip and an 8K Microsoft Basic v2 interpreter in the second. The 6510 CPU it used could address 64K, max, and the ROMs were normally mapped into the space. It was possible to select whether RAM or ROM was mapped into the corresponding address, and one app I used would stash BASIC code and data "under" the ROMs, then flip the ROMs out of the map to access the code. You had to be careful you weren't trying to call a kernel routine or execute BASIC code while the corresponding ROMs were mapped out, but it worked fine and was one of the cleverer bits of programming I saw.

The 20MB Seagate ST-225 drives I had cast about $200 each. These days, I can get 6TB SATA drives for less than that. The ST-225s were a good bit faster than the 360KB 5.25" floppies, however.
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Dennis

[WT Sharpe]

I know this isn't the Joke thread, but since Hitch, Dennis, and others have been talking about programming and computers, I couldn't resist sharing this photo I saw today on Facebook.

[badgoodDeb]

Oh, ouch .......

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Oh, ouch .......

And so handy! Stuck there right on the refrigerator where it can be easily located if needed!

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Oh, ouch .......

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

And so handy! Stuck there right on the refrigerator where it can be easily located if needed!

Well, of course!! Somebody told me that it was Important, and that I shouldn't lose it!

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

And so handy! Stuck there right on the refrigerator where it can be easily located if needed!

A colleague of mine once pinned his backup disk onto the side of the file cabinet ... with a magnet ... so he'd always know where it was -- in plain sight ...

One of the old 5-1/4" discs -- which the magnet put a dent into ...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I know this isn't the Joke thread, but since Hitch, Dennis, and others have been talking about programming and computers, I couldn't resist sharing this photo I saw today on Facebook.

In actual fact, I suspect the disk would still work. It tends to take a more powerful magnetic field to scramble one than the sort produced by a refrigerator magnet, especially since the magnet is over the center of the diskette where there won't be any data stored to scramble.

Still a bad idea, but not necessarily deadly...
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

You ought to see the magnets we have here at Fermilab. And I'm not even talking about the 20+ foot long ones which are electrically powered. Our vacuum pumps have a magnet that's about 6 inches by 8 inches by 1/2 inch thick (very rough guess). Broken off pieces of those used to be found on all sorts of bulletin boards around here. It requires real effort to pull them away.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

In actual fact, I suspect the disk would still work. It tends to take a more powerful magnetic field to scramble one than the sort produced by a refrigerator magnet, especially since the magnet is over the center of the diskette where there won't be any data stored to scramble.

Still a bad idea, but not necessarily deadly...
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Dennis

Unless of course he used the magnet out of a dead hard drive.