Randomness XVII: The Madness of the Quorum

[Glitterwolf]

Here I was walking Brutus in a little piece of the woods nearby.

Suddenly there was an encounter with some myconids!

We were lucky to get out of there without any harm.

 

@malefactus could you keep your shrooms in check  please? They're popping up everywhere!

 

 

[haldir]

5 hours ago, Cyradis said:

Heyo - are the West Coasters here doing okay?

 

I'm locking myself in my box in Vancouver and not doing my usual Saturday night bike ride due to the smoke. My mom is sandwiched between two fires in Oregon (not yet in an evacuation warning area, but the air is crazy thick for her). Even locked inside, without a well sealed apartment, I'm feeling the smoke on my lungs. My air purifier can only do so much.

 

We are getting the smoke from the west here. Since i was in s open garage yesterday,  I'm kinda feeling the affects of breathing it in for a few hours. Just goes along with everything else this year.....

[TGP]

1 hour ago, Glitterwolf said:

 

 

I think those rounded headed ones offer a lot of scope for placement of features like eyeballs !

 

Nice reference photo for @malefactus there @Glitterwolf   I wonder what the leafy plants are?

[Glitterwolf]

11 minutes ago, TGP said:

 

I think those rounded headed ones offer a lot of scope for placement of features like eyeballs !

 

Nice reference photo for @malefactus there @Glitterwolf   I wonder what the leafy plants are?

 

The ones in the back are nettles ( they leave you with a burning sensation when touching your skin!)

The ones in front, I've no idea.

I know a lot about animals but not so much about plants.

[Kuroneko]

1 hour ago, Glitterwolf said:

 

The ones in the back are nettles ( they leave you with a burning sensation when touching your skin!)

The ones in front, I've no idea.

I know a lot about animals but not so much about plants.

 

They look like something from the puffball family, we get a similar species around here.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffball

 

I used to be a fauna/flora surveyor, which mean I have a lot of random info on such things. Mostly it's just enough to stay away from poisonous stuff 

Edited September 13, 2020 by Kuroneko

[Rob Dean]

Good morning, world.  Each new day is an adventure. 

 

Actually, yesterday was pretty good out in Delaware.  I talked to various family members, painted a few miniatures, went for a bike ride, made some sourdough bread, made a batch of soup to freeze for later, made chicken stir-fry for dinner, went for a walk, played a game of Potion Explosion with my brother on Board Game Arena, and ate the leftover homemade peach cobbler from the night before.  I somehow doubt today will be quite as productive. 

 

[Rob Dean]

On a different topic, this is starting to look dangerously inspirational.  After a game of Chaosium’s Prince Valiant at virtual GenCon in late July, I picked up the first three volume of the collected Prince Valiant comic strips, covering 1937 to 1942.  The Hal Foster panel the editors chose for the cover of volume 2:

 

 

is just the sort of thing I want to be able to put on a table.  And I already have the 1/72 impressive castle, the siege towers, the covered ram, and the rock throwing engines in the basement ...

[Crowley]

18 hours ago, Kangaroorex said:

19 hours ago, TGP said:

Wouldn't a more correct answer be to leave one blank? if you didn't know the answer; rather than just throw in a number?

 

As a working professional, seems like if some accounting problem was so bad the answer defied you, you'd stop, say I don't know, I need to look that up. (?)

Depends on the standardized test.  Some tests penalize you for guessing (like the SAT back when i took it) but others, Like the EIT, offer no penalty for a wrong answer over a blank so why not?

 

Of course the first case leads to some interesting cases where you can get half credit for turning in a sheet with just your name...  

Yeah, the way this test works, you get zero credit for a blank or a wrong answer. You can get partial credit in the simulation parts of the exam. so that's why I was filling in what I could. Nothing to lose, everything to gain if I got it right.

 

 

Quote

Quote

 

That is cruel…

It's a gate tool.  I'm guessing the goal is to limit supply to the truly gifted or dedicated.

 

@Crowley. I hope you succeed!  For all the work you put into this, you deserve it!

 

Thanks!

 

Last night I watched the 3.5 hours of Star Trek panels from Star Trek Day, painted a little finishing off the shaded metallics dwaft mini, then got a solid 8 hours sleep... can't remember the last time that happened.

 

This morning coffee has been had, thinking about eggs, sausage, and bagels for breakfast. Need to do laundry and grocery shopping... but also gonna get some painting in! Then D&D tonight!!

 

COFFEE!!

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

11 hours ago, kristof65 said:

This immediately brought to mind an incident in my Navy ET school that still makes me chuckle. 

We were doing a troubleshooting test of high frequency radio receivers.  Class was broken up into pairs, with each pair troubleshooting a unit that had a different fault that was introduced by the instructors.  

 

When you identified the faulty module, you took your troubleshooting paperwork over to the instructors, and if you got it right, you passed. If you didn't, you were sent back to try again.   Most of the class was breezing through it, but one pair was having trouble.  They were among the first to think they found their problem, but were told they were wrong, and sent back.  Eventually they were the only ones still working on the test, and had given the wrong answer at least 6 times. The instructors and they were getting frustrated. 

Finally the instructor tells them what the problem is. They tell him, no it's not. He gets irritated, makes the fix, and proudly flips it on to show them how stupid they are. It doesn't work. He double checks his sheet that listed the problems, double checks his fix, still doesn't work. Then he goes through the troubleshooting himself, and finds that the pair got the right answer the first time - the unit had developed an actual fault, one that did not match any of the ones the instructors had done. 

The one instructor kept working on the unit while the other instructor started us through the next lesson.  All of a sudden the entire class jumps because of loud bang.  The instructor had pulled the unit drawer out and slammed it back into position. He realizes what he has done in front of us at the same time the unit starts working again. He turns to us with a red face.

"In this school, this is not a legitimate troubleshooting or repair method for you students," he says.  "But out in the fleet, things may be different."

 

The MX-9102 Computer Processor Drawer of the AN/WLR-8 Countermeasures Receiving Set would occasionally throw faults due to vibration unseating the cards over time.  The tech manual took  the whole long troubleshooting method to determine which card was the culprit and had you reseat/replace the card.  Actual practice in the fleet was to rack out the drawer, open the top and tap all of the cards with a rubber mallet (as the cards were really tight to seat by hand).  30 second fix vs 1-3 hour fix.

[PaganMegan]

8 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

I'll let Megan tell you the story of when the bookstore she worked at got a new system.... (USER:USER and PASSWORD:CHANGEME hard coded in... on the Admin level... on PoS software. (PoS in more ways than one.))

 

The Auld Grump

Not USER:USER it was USER:ADMIN, but, yah, permanently coded in.

[Chaoswolf]

12 hours ago, kristof65 said:

This immediately brought to mind an incident in my Navy ET school that still makes me chuckle. 

We were doing a troubleshooting test of high frequency radio receivers.  Class was broken up into pairs, with each pair troubleshooting a unit that had a different fault that was introduced by the instructors.  

 

When you identified the faulty module, you took your troubleshooting paperwork over to the instructors, and if you got it right, you passed. If you didn't, you were sent back to try again.   Most of the class was breezing through it, but one pair was having trouble.  They were among the first to think they found their problem, but were told they were wrong, and sent back.  Eventually they were the only ones still working on the test, and had given the wrong answer at least 6 times. The instructors and they were getting frustrated. 

Finally the instructor tells them what the problem is. They tell him, no it's not. He gets irritated, makes the fix, and proudly flips it on to show them how stupid they are. It doesn't work. He double checks his sheet that listed the problems, double checks his fix, still doesn't work. Then he goes through the troubleshooting himself, and finds that the pair got the right answer the first time - the unit had developed an actual fault, one that did not match any of the ones the instructors had done. 

The one instructor kept working on the unit while the other instructor started us through the next lesson.  All of a sudden the entire class jumps because of loud bang.  The instructor had pulled the unit drawer out and slammed it back into position. He realizes what he has done in front of us at the same time the unit starts working again. He turns to us with a red face.

"In this school, this is not a legitimate troubleshooting or repair method for you students," he says.  "But out in the fleet, things may be different."

 

Just like @Dilvish the Deliverer, I may have used that same repair method from time to time; it's hard to argue with it if it works.

The secret is to know exactly how much force is required to show the machine spirits that you are tired of their shenanigans without overdoing it and causing damage.

[Kangaroorex]

53 minutes ago, Dilvish the Deliverer said:

The MX-9102 Computer Processor Drawer of the AN/WLR-8 Countermeasures Receiving Set would occasionally throw faults due to vibration unseating the cards over time.  The tech manual took  the whole long troubleshooting method to determine which card was the culprit and had you reseat/replace the card.  Actual practice in the fleet was to rack out the drawer, open the top and tap all of the cards with a rubber mallet (as the cards were really tight to seat by hand).  30 second fix vs 1-3 hour fix.

If it starts to fail, hit it with a solid object.  if it starts working again, its earth technology!

[redambrosia]

Well, I was sorta feeling better... then the sky turned brown. And I’ve just remembered I have two air purifiers, but both of them are in storage.

 

I want to take our ACs out and seal up the house, but it’s going to be in the 90s the next two days. So frustrating.

[Inarah]

9 hours ago, CaptainPete said:

So, I saw people trying to figure out if they were Gen X or Gen Y/Millennial. Here's a quick test from a Gen Xer I knew:

Do you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? If so, did you know what it meant?

If yes to both questions, you're Gen X. If yes and then no, you're an early Millennial. To see if you're a Millennial, here's the questions:

Do you remember 9/11? Did you know what it meant?

Again, if you answer yes to both, you're a Millennial.

 

I can answer all 4 questions. That just means I'm old.  I remember Watergate. My husband remembers the moon landing. 

 

If you did your homework on a typewriter while listening to cassette tapes, you are probably GenX. 

 

If you did homework with a computer keyboard while listening to CDs, you are probably Gen Y/Millennial.

 

 

[ShadowRaven]

I remember Challenger, but I was a wee little, I understood the Berlin Wall, though I was still quite young (my brother has a couple small pieces of the wall actually)