Really.....

[Famspear]

Another thing from years past that young people today would not comprehend:

The indescribable joy of receiving a package in the mail with a return address of Battle Creek, Michigan.

I assume you're talkin' about a toy from......

..............................Kellogg's.... of Battle Creek!

[Cpt Banjo]

I assume you're talkin' about a toy from......

..............................Kellogg's.... of Battle Creek!

Of course. Scotch tape a quarter to a box top, mail it in, and wait with bated breath for the package to arrive.

By the way, did you hear about the cat who ate a pound of cheese and waited outside the mouse hole with bated breath?

[Famspear]

I assume you're talkin' about a toy from......

..............................Kellogg's.... of Battle Creek!

Of course. Scotch tape a quarter to a box top, mail it in, and wait with bated breath for the package to arrive.

By the way, did you hear about the cat who ate a pound of cheese and waited outside the mouse hole with bated breath?

[drumrolllllllll.......]

[LaVidaRoja]

He didn't catch anything... His breath was bated, not baited.....

[Gregg]

Wow, what a fun read....

Some of my own random comments

I own a michofiche reader, until 2001 many auto technical documents were still on micro film and I used it. If anyone wants it, I'll gladly send it to you.

I am formally trained as an accountant, and later in finance and economics, but most of my working life has been in jobs usually held by engineers, and the difference in the way I did the work and the things I learned from being surrounded by engineers has been, well, interesting. I can't tell you how many times when I explained something obvious to almost anyone was answered with a blank stare when I tried to explain it to an engineer.

Almost everything listed here is something I have used or seen, my fondest recollection reading this was the old washtub with a ringer that sat on the porch of my grandmother's house in Greenup, next to the insanely huge freezer, which I think may have been capable of holding the entire take from a head of cattle and maybe a pig and a more.

I am also reminded of the near impossible task of properly tuning a 2 carburetor setup on a flathead Ford.

My 2013 Mustang was the first car I ever had with no actual keyhole to the trunk, and when the battery died I had to go through the backseat to get the jumper cables out.

That's all that comes to mind just now, fun read...

[webhick]

My 2013 Mustang was the first car I ever had with no actual keyhole to the trunk, and when the battery died I had to go through the backseat to get the jumper cables out.

That sounds like a design flaw. If only you knew someone who, say, doubled for Dr. Evil. Then maybe the problem could be resolved in future models.

[Gregg]

My 2013 Mustang was the first car I ever had with no actual keyhole to the trunk, and when the battery died I had to go through the backseat to get the jumper cables out.

That sounds like a design flaw. If only you knew someone who, say, doubled for Dr. Evil. Then maybe the problem could be resolved in future models.

I do transmissions, trunks are for people above my pay grade.

[Gregg]

I just remember that I told you about "Dr Evil", for a minute I was getting self conscience about it.

[The Observer]

I don't think Dr. Evil has a conscience.

[Pottapaug1938]

My last two cars (2004 Nissan Altima, and 2010 Toyota Camry) had no keyholes in the passenger side front door. With the Nissan, it was especially irritating, because I bought the car used and the clicker was long gone; and if my wife was in a hurry to get into the car I had to open my side first and then unlock all of the doors. With my Camry (bought at the beginning of this month, with 6800 miles on it), I now have a clicker to unlock the door and open the trunk.

[Kestrel]

I just bought a 2015 Camry. You're right. Only one outside keyhole, on the drivers' door. (At least it has that.) But it still has a lever on the floor by the driver's door that tugs on a cable to open the trunk. At least, I think it's a cable. It also requires the trunk to be open to access the back seat fold-down levers.

I know of other cars that have a powered trunk button on the driver's door. I guess you just hope that whoever comes to jump start the car has his own cables.

My 2001 Camry has keyholes on both front doors and on the trunk, and has pull-up buttons on the back seats that you operate from the passenger compartment. Bonus: it even has a valet key feature to secure things in the trunk when using valet parking. You can throw a lever in the trunk to disable the back-seat buttons, lock the trunk with the master key, and give the valet a key which will only operate the door and ignition.

With every generation of technology, we lose capability.

[Famspear]

.....With every generation of technology, we lose capability.

Sadly, I have to agree. One of my great frustrations about losing capability is in the area of computers -- and specifically with programs, such as Microsoft Windows. The classic example is the "search" function in Windows 7 and 8, which is (as far as I can tell) degraded from what it was in Windows XP. They have actually made it harder, not easier, to get things done. With what I perceive as an almost pathological desire to change things just for the sake of change, Microsoft seems to be slowly destroying some of the advances they have made over the years.

[JamesVincent]

One of the things I loved with my Montana was that you could lock or unlock everything from the driver's door. While turning the key in the lock if you held it for 5 seconds it would lock or unlock everything. Sadly, they stopped importing the Montanas back in 06 and I don't think they even make them anymore.

Speaking of valets a buddy of mine, when we were building his '72 Chevelle Pro Street, decided to actually setup the feature of his MSD box that allows the rev limiter to be set for 1500 RPM, just for valet service. When him and his wife would go out to dinner he would pop the chip in real quick and watch the valet get upset. Something about turning lose a 900hp monster with a valet would scare me too.

Fam, I've noticed that too. Back in Windows 95-98 days you could do a lot more. You could access MS-DOS a lot easier, you could update as much as you wanted. Microsoft even put out special updates for Beta testers that you could download. We lost a bunch of cool things to make things more streamlined and "easier".

[Arthur Rubin]

But ... Windows still has the option to Index a disk (allegedly in the background). The new search doesn't even use that index?

[Kestrel]

Yes, we always lose something...

Except birds. We never lose birds. Birds LOVE shiny new things. Birds love to PERCH on shiny new things, and sit there for a while. Like brand new cobalt-blue 2015 Toyota Camrys.

As evidenced by the TWO big bird s#!ts I just found on the side of the car, one under the side mirror, the other under the door handle.

[Famspear]

But ... Windows still has the option to Index a disk (allegedly in the background). The new search doesn't even use that index?

In Windows 8.1, I believe there is such a thing called "index", but I don't know how to find any information on what it is, or how to use it -- without wading through mountains of irrelevant informational "help" garbage (either through google or through the links provided by Microsoft in the program itself).

And, that's only part of the problem. What good is "Index" if you can't even design a meaningful search? In Windows XP, you could specify a search for, say, all the files in a given folder that were last modified between, say, March 2 and March 10 of 2014. This is a very common, important kind of search that I need to do on a regular basis. In Windows 7 and 8.1, it took forever for me to find a way to do that, and I really discovered it by accident. Microsoft simply is not providing meaningful guidance any more on how its programs work. The information may be there, somewhere, but it's buried amidst mountains of irrelevant information.

If they would just stop changing the "interface" between the user and the programs, that would help tremendously. Stop making me have to re-learn how to do the most basic tasks -- as they did when they scrambled Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel in the 2007 version. I finally re-learned how to do what I needed to do, but: What was the point? How was Office 2007 an improvement over Office 2003? Answer: It wasn't. For 99% of the basic operations, they just forced us to waste a lot of time having to learn a new way of doing what we already knew how to do in version 2003.

The Microsoft people do not seem to understand that TIME IS MONEY.

[Famspear]

From Tony Bradley at PC World's web site on Nov. 21, 2013:

How to find everything in Windows 8.1
It’s inevitable that upgrading to a new version of an operating system or application comes with a bit of a learning curve. With Windows 8.1, though—and its predecessor Windows 8—the curve is steep, and just finding simple tools and features can be a challenge.

(italics added).

This is precisely what I am talking about. There is no valid, logical reason why Microsoft has to design these programs so that NEW versions force the user to have to start almost from scratch to figure out how to use the "simple tools and features" they were using in the earlier version of the program.

Bradley continues:

Windows 8 isn’t just a new version of Windows, it’s a completely different OS [operating system] in many ways, with its own unique features and conventions that may confound even the most ardent Windows users. Under the hood, most of the familiar Windows tools are still there, but they’re buried in strange places where they can’t be easily located, especially not when Microsoft took away the coveted start button.

When Microsoft launched Windows 8.1, it solved much of the dilemma by bringing back the concept of the Start button.

(italics added).

In other words, Microsoft screwed up, and then realized it had screwed up. Microsoft then added back a button they should never have deleted in the first place. And, why "bury" useful, familiar features in new, strange places? Certainly, they could have improved the program without doing that.

It [the Start button in Windows 8.1] is not identical in either form or function its predecessor, but it does provide simple access to a wide variety of common tools and functions.....

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066020/ ... s-8-1.html

(italics added).

That's what I want: simple access. There is absolutely no marginal net benefit to me or my clients for me to have to waste time to learn a NEW way of doing exactly the SAME things I was doing in an earlier version of the program.

Look, I'm a Baby Boomer. Our generation was brought up on CHANGE. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Talk about change! But the folks who implement changes need to be rational about it.

There are ways to improve these computer programs without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[The Observer]

This is the problem when you have technocratic engineers dominating the creativity process for any product. They tend to like complex, intricate and detailed designs and implement this in all of their creative output. "Holy cow, this widget would be more impressive if I add a quantum input calibirator underneath the manifold housing so that that user will have just that more many options to work with!"

However, our engineer geek has not considered that accessing the calibrator is difficult and time consuming, that the user may not have any need at all for most of the options, and that the user may not even understand what you are supposed to do with a quantum input calibrator. Worse is the fact that in order to used the device at all, the user is required to access the calibrator regardless if he or she woud have any use for it.

I have seen this happen in software design frequently, even with something as simple as adding menu selections to the software package. The software design team will use tech language or terms that only bear a faint resemblance to the actual function of the menu item, the flow of access to the software is counterintuitive and there seems to be a very shallow learning curve* in trying to learn how to use this crap that they threw at us.


*Contrary to what the common wisdom and Tony Bradley would suggest to us, a steep learning curve actually indicates that something is easy to learn. Plotting the amount of learning on the y-axis over the time x-axis will quickly demonstrate that you want a steep learning curve as opposed to one that rises only slowly.

[Burzmali]

Search in Windows went away in largely because as the operating system became more complex, a plain old text search would take too long. If you want a system that "just works" and you aren't too picky about having to do things their way instead of how you think is best, just pay the Apple tax and be done with it. If you don't like change and you want your system to damn well work the way you want it to, just go linux / BSD and be done with it.

[bmxninja357]

god mode for windows 8: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/unlock-godmode-windows/

god mode for windows 7: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GodMod ... ,9345.html

that should help out those who cant find stuff on the windows. i know it did wonders for me. and my ego really likes stuff that makes me a god, or at least a minor celtic deity....

peace,
ninj