OT: I've just become Joerg-asmed ;-)

There are 2 kinds of people: Those who move out of the city and those who move into the country. The former are always bitching about the country. The latter love it. I guess we know which kind you are. Art

Happened with UPS here.

You can probably still shoot a can down the road and nobody fusses about it.

Better yet: Far, far, far from too many lefties. I do not miss the malls, you can get almost everything online or locally. Heck, we even bought our espresso from Amazon. We've got a good Japanese restaurant, plus a good Mexican and an Italian. And a place where they sell saddles and boots and stuff. The next town has a micro-brewery. What more does man want?

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Yep. And they use highway signs for target practice.

I'm just 0.6 mile from Schnepf Farms and the Olive Mill and a couple of miles from the "Pork Shop".

Population density, in increasing order...

people, cows, pick-em-up trucks, guns >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142   Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Yep. And it's 10°F cooler out here than in Phoenix... and we're only about 45 miles away. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142   Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Den lørdag den 5. oktober 2013 21.21.42 UTC+2 skrev Jim Thompson:

;)

-Lasse

:-)

You know that you are in the country when you walk into a Walmart and in the center aisle there is a special on horse feed supplement. Like here ...

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Hey if you guys keep this up I'm gonna have to try for a green card !!

I suggest to wait until the next election ... no kidding.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

In my case, a specialist science-fiction book-shop. At town of 150,000 is t oo small to support one. Edinburgh - 480,000 - is the smallest that I've kn own, and it has a decent university (which helps). Sydney and Melbourne hav e got one each.

Good hardware stores (where you can buy electronics side-cutters) also seem to need a decent population density. I had to drive 40km in the the Nether lands to get my transformers wound. I probably won't have to drive as far i n Sydney (though it may take me longer).

Jobs for electronic engineers within a short commute. I haven't found one i n Sydney yet - they exist but at the moment there are more engineers than j obs, and 70-year-olds don't make the short-list.

Sadly, my current electorate is a safe Liberal seat - Liberal is in Austral ia what Republican is in the US, if slightly less rabid - and my MP got 58,

306 of the 92,084 valid votes cast. Australia has a single transferable vo te voting system, and after the preferences were distributed he beat the La bor candidate (read Democrat) 62,359 to 29,725. Houses and appartments arou nd here are expensive, and my MP is less rabid than most Liberals, which is why they rejected him as party leader a few years ago.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Well, there's Amazon.

We have the oldest hardware store west of the Mississippi right here. And it is an excellent one.

That's so last century. Today the Internet and services such as Go-To-Meeting are the name of the game. My standard commute is 15 seconds, on foot. I've had clients for a decade where I never saw anyone in person because I do this kind of virtual work since 1989.

We had talked about that a while ago here in the NG. You need to broaden your horizon. I don't know about the rest of Australia but this horizon may have to be international. Age does not matter in that game.

Only one of my clients is local. All others are between 100 miles and

6000 miles away.

But when starting out again after a multi-year hiatus you do need to make cold calls and throw your hat into the round here and there. Otherwise not much will come of it. Oh, and under your sig line there should be a web site :-)

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I've got a Kindle, and I have bought stuff there, but you can't really brow se on Amazon.

I've done stuff over the web, but not a lot of it.

I've got myself a new web-site, and the URL's look a bit more professional.

At the moment the graphical bits of the web pages aren't showing up, and I need to fix that, but I'm hosting a kidney stone at the moment - laser demo lition didn't work (as happens in 5% of the cases) but the stome is now bac k in my right kidney, where focussed sound waves (lithotriptor) have a 90% success rate.

That's scheduled for next Thursday. Meanwhile I'm coping with a stent in my right ureter.

--
Bill Sloman,Sydney

I know I'm in the country when I walk into a store like TSC and there is a whole selection of whips that are designed for use on animals rather than people.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com 
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Sno-o-o-ort ;-) And no paddles ?:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142   Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I buy tons of stuff on Amazon. Batteries. LED light bulbs. USB stuff. Hard drives. Books. It's absurdly easy... a few clicks, and it shows up in a day or three. Ebay, too; I just got a couple of chunks of aluminum tubing that would be hard to find locally. FR4. Optics. Test gear. Lasers. Manuals. Electronics to take apart and study.

There is an absurd shortage of people competant with analog (ie, real) electronics. It shouldn't be hard to get some good consulting biz going. I told Sloman how, but he doesn't seem interested in actually doing anything.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

We love Truckee Hardware. Paint. Guns. BBQs. Electrical and plumbing. Lumber. Furniture. Fishing gear. Bungee cords. Kitchen stuff. Tire chains and snow blowers. Gardening. Cable TV and Ethernet and USB stuff. Clothes. Kayaks. Shoes. Concrete. Keys cut. Expresso drinks.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

John Larkin told me what I should have done, if I'd been John Larkin with a decade or so's worth of contacts.

In fact I did what both John and Joerg recommended back in the late 1990's, and got very little business out of it.

More vigorous advertising - cold-calling and making absurd claims about my competence or sci.electronics.design - might help, but my estimate of the cost-effectiveness of this approach isn't high.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Know a website where people look for such consultants?

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply 
indicates you are not using the right tools... 
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) 
--------------------------------------------------------------

There is such a thing as speculative design, create the working core of a technical product and then sell it to interested parties.

I've got a design for an interesting low-distortion sine-wave oscillator, and I've managed to get all the components together, but I'm proving remarkably unenthusiastic about assembling them onto a prototype board.

Covering most the flat areas in our flat with the hundred-odd components involved wouldn't make me popular with my wife.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney