resetting a filter

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This is a relative statement. My prime was actually pretty impressive

- not that you, as a functional illiterate, are in any position to appreciate that. And I'm not so far past my prime that I'm going to tolerate any nonsense from the likes of you, whom even Michael Terrell could run rings around - you are precisely the kind of engineer whom technicians justly despise.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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And krw would know? He hasn't had an original thought in years.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The fed I can believe - though you do claim to be skinny. If it did keep you amused, you wouldn't waste so much time being the most prolific poster on this user-group. If you did something revolutionary for once, rather than tiny incremental evolutions of your design inventory, you might find something better to do with your time.

We are moving to Sydney in October. It may not make things better, but it will probably make things different.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So your guess is the 555? Not a bad guess, but the 555 output is N/C.

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Such a stickler. Around here, cube is a common equivalent. As in "cube farm". google it.

So, by your standards, people who get paid are slaves, and people who don't get paid are not slaves. Hairball logic, again.

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I probably post too much, but I don't waste time on TV or junk like that. On balance, I've had a pretty good return on my posts to s.e.d.

I can imagine several useful and profitable and interesting things you could do with your skills and intelligence in Sydney, with an investment of nothing but your time. But you would have to be willing to be friendly and helpful, which you probably aren't willing to do.

Moderate cases of depression can be overcome by brute force.

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Stub toe? You wish.

P doesn't have a cube farm. He only gets one cube.

When Carly took over as CEO of HP, one of her first acts was to downsize all the company cubes. We decided to make ours twice the area of theirs.

To paraphrase Sophie Tucker (among many), I've been paid and I've been not paid. Paid is better.

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You may have had a good return on some of them. William Lever

famously said that half of the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but he didn't know which half. You should be able to do better.

Do tell.

Why would you think that? Actually, I know - you regard any correction as an unhelpful and unfriendly act. In reality, you can't work with people if you let them make fools of themselves by asserting things that don't happen to be true. In theory you can be diplomatically silent, but when people recognise that you could have corrected them in private before they'd made fools of themselves in public they tend to get a good deal more peeved than they would be by the private correction.

It's called cognitive therapy. I've read a bit about it. Having people to collaborate with is probably all that I actually need.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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--- Good on you. :-)

It'll surely make things different, and probably better since you'll be back home again.

Although we've had differences in the past, I wish you the best and I'll never forget the harsh lesson I learned from you about TTL gate-based timers.

-- JF

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He's an embedded system programmer. He went to SF State to learn how to do that. Now he does it and I pay him for it. He enjoys it. And all you can do is whine about it.

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Become an unofficial sales rep. Research local OEMs and universities that might need stuff, locate companies worldwide that have appropriate products but no local reps, and offer to represent them on an unofficial, commission-only basis. 10% is standard. The principles have nothing to lose, so some will take you up on it. That will get you into the door in lots of places. Once there, other opportunities will arise if you are obviously interested, helpful, and flexible. This game is 80% attitude.

Another thing to do is try to become an applications engineer for some company, maybe part time. Apps engineers get exposed top all sorts of interestring situations, because they are helping people who have problems; they *expect* you to know more than they do. Help them as if that's all you want to do. That is so much better than the classic resume-interview game.

You don't have to be silent, but you do have to be diplomatic. You're still dealing with people who have feelings.

Probably.

Not my thing at all. I did a bit of that for my "better confocal microscope" friend in Australia, and didn't like it and didn't think that I was any good at it.

I'll do that - in the first instance - via the employment agencies. There are people in Sydney who specialise in finding short term expertise to solve particular problems. The universities tend not to use them - too expensive - and the route there would be via my "better confocal microscope" friend who has had academic collaborators from time to time.

Sure. It could work, but it isn't the kind of work I like doing.

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You've got to knock on a lot of doors to parlay that into the kind of opportunity that I could exploit. It would take a few years to build up the kind of customer base that might generate interesting work. I'm already 69 and I can expect to live to 85 so I could do it, but I'd prefer an approach that worked faster.

That's basically what the short-time hire employment agencies are about. Very few of them know enough about electronic engineering to be able to match potential employees to potential jobs - there have been two in the Netherlands that were that good, but one went bust and the other lost interest in me when I turned 65. There was one in Sydney who seemed to know enough to be useful, but when I was there for only three months in each year, I wasn't around for long enough for him to want to put me forward, since potential short-term employers want you to be accessible to come back if something goes wrong.

That wouldn't be difficult.

Sure. But the classic interview-resume game is popular because it works.

I have been known to be diplomatic. If you overdo it, people won't notice that they've been corrected. It's easier face-to-face when you can see whether you've got through, and up the dose if you haven't.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

My point about repping or being an app engineer is that it would get you out and meet a lot of companies who have problems... without the formal hiring/resume/interview loop. Leverage that.

opportunities

Not for you lately. So don't play that game.

As I think about it, nearly all the good people that I have, we didn't find them that way, ad/resume/interview. We found them by accident, by word of mouth, and one from s.e.d. I may never do the ad/resume thing again; there are better ways.

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Like I said, it relies a set of inter-personal skills where I'm under- equipped. I can do close collaboration fine - probably better than most - but I treat customers as collaborators, and this always drove the serious marketing people nuts, because I was missing opportunities to make our products look insanely good. To my mind, implausibly good, but marketeers don't think like that.

pportunities

It hasn't worked for me in the Netherlands since I turned sixty, and for people with less to sell, it stops working in the Netherlands at

1. I know for a fact that age discrimination wasn't as bad in the U.K., and Australia long since dumped mandatory retirement at 65, so it's probably a bit premature to write it off for the Sydney job market.

When I was working around Cambridge, it helped a lot that I started off working at Cambridge Instruments - ex-Cambridge Instruments people were spread all over East Anglia, and they rang up their old colleagues and asked about people applying from Cambridge Instruments, or with Cambridge Instruments time on their CV's. I got a few call like that. The resume was merely the basic information that got filled in by a lot of word of mouth. I won't have that advantage in Sydney, or at least not so much - UK engineers do emigrate to Australia and carry some word of mouth with them. Even in the Netherlands it can help - I got to hear that Dave King at Cambridge Instruments has been known to say good things about me to people who now work in the Netherlands.

We hired him on the basis of his resume, and a couple of brilliant interviews, one of them with me. If you are that good, pretty much everything works.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In the cases I suggested, there would be no marketeers, no managers. Just you and the customers that you think you would be good at collaborating with.

What I say to potential customers is "That's an interesting problem. Tell me more. What can we do to help?" I also research their speciality on the web, to better understand their field and to learn the limits and buzzwords of their thing.

It's not hard to get business. Just be determined to be helpful.

opportunities

If you work 1-on-1 with real people with real problems, and you can help, they won't care how old you are.