Larkin, Here's mine...

Well, you're lucky to be so brilliant. I hear the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's is delayed for brilliant people since they have more brain cells to lose before problems occur. Us average types have to worry about losing our minds at an earlier age.

-Bill

His memory is excellent. He remembers Cambridge Instruments, Cambridge Instruments, Cambridge Instruments, and even Cambridge Instruments.

Insubordination is practically a requirement for a design engineer.

I *did* once get fired for insubordination. I was the 5th employee of the company, chief engineer for 12 years. They had 400 employees, and I had designed $200e6 worth of stuff for them, when they fired me.

They are gone now, silly people.

I can't understand why any bosses begrudge equipment purchases. They can depreciate it or often just expense it, so most companies get about half off.

Cute, and very real.

I recently gave up on Adobe Acrobat and switched to Foxit Reader. No more hangs. However, I had difficulties until I totally purged Acrobat from my various machines using their removal tool:

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There's nothing brilliant about being better than some of your colleagues.

Perhaps. It would be nice to know what was actually going wrong. Alzheimer's - like cancer - shows up more frequently in elderly people, but people have survived to 110 without showing any sign of it. The incidence is sporadic.

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Yours seems to be failing. I also make references to EMI Central Research, Haffmans BV, Nijmegen University and - on occasion - Kent Instruments in Luton.

Even Kent Instruments in Luton trumps steam turbines at Tulane.

I could see their point. Having me waste about 30 minutes dragging the generators around, and only being able to do IM tests after hours, was their idea of a reasonable compromise to avoid spending money. Small company mentality, etc...

I just happened to find a 1977 HP test equipment catalog. An HP8640B starts at $6400. Adding options 001, 002, and 003 (variable audio gen, internal doubler, reverse idiot protection) adds $275, $850, and $300 respectively. Total: $7,825 in 1977. Inflation since 1975 is about 4 times making the price $31,300 each in 2013 dollars. I needed two generators. Can you see now why management was a bit hesitant to spend the money?

In the end, they screwed it up anyway. It's traditional for the test equipment to follow the product from engineering to production. Lots of advantages, such as easy of building test fixtures and ATE systems. However, in this case, they bought the new generators for production, and gave engineering their older generators. I had to edit a rather large number of test procedures to accomodate productions new generators.

Incidentally, I sometimes fix HP8640B generators:

For once John "White Trash" Larkin is right... Slowman is losing it

...Jim Thompson

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Jim Thompson is the expert here - he lost it years ago. Quite what he figures that John Larkin is "right" about may eventually be revealed, but I'm not holding my breath.

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I thought you quit this group because you were too good for this trash talking off topic stuff.

Robotic scabs, not to be confused with robot's scabs. ;-)

Tools/options/applications/Adobe then select 'Use Adobe Reader' (default) or 'Use Other' for each function.

Good move....now everyone here knows your middle name is "Elbert".

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He fell off the wagon, again.

I haven't used Adobe's readers in a decade, or more. I use PDF-XChange. Tried Foxit but didn't like it so went back to PDFX; better rendering, as well.

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Great post!

What makes me chuckle is management cheaping out on IT equipment. Really, how much does a large screen display cost these days? Sure, I understand a little scrutiny on the network analyzer, but a $500 display? A frappin' mouse (I brought mine from home, the one's offered are so lousy)?! I've spent more than that arguing the case, at a few employers.

Too bad it wasn't under the bus.