DSF

If I had thought clearly about what I was doing I probably would not have put it in, my thought was more on the art work, but once the stable door is open and the pig was out there was very little I could do. You always sound so rigid when you reply to a post, you must have been or still be a lecturer and that comes across in your post. Making a mistake like put a wet usb in a pc is foolish and could have caused a short out, it didn't and I was lucky, not everything you do wrong goes wrong and by the same definition what you do right doesn't always go right. The trick is enjoy the moment it goes wrong but doesn't and to enjoy the moment for that person.

jennywren;27700 wrote: You always sound so rigid when you reply to a post, you must have been or still be a lecturer and that comes across in your post.

Sorry if I upset you or spoiled the moment Jenny; that really wasn't my intent... :redface: I wasn't having a pop; honestly.

Yes; as it happens I do lecture part time. :redface:

As a youngster I taught myself basic electronics from books. I taught myself TV repair; from which I derived a bit of an income. And I taught myself photography, film making on super-8... Built all sorts of kit from scratch..

At 16 I was lucky enough to get apprenticed as a technician at Strathclyde University - with their AVA department. Largely on the basis of some films I'd made and the fact that instead of allowing the guy from Human resources to interview me I engaged the head of engineering in a technical discussion on the workings of the Rank A774 chassis!

I was lucky enough to join at a time when their studio was being converted to colour. Oh I was handy enough! - I knew 'just enough' to be dangerous!! Three or four times I was on the carpet for getting out of my depth! You may keep a pig in your stable Jenny - I think I had a heard of wild-boar piglets in mine!

I had two good gaffers to whom I own much - Jim Kennedy was at the time a youngish bloke (only about 26) and quite a fun guy; very talented engineer though - And the redoubtable Ronnie Gibb.

Ronnie came across as 'dour' and rigid as I hope I have become... BBC trained; and a highly disciplined engineer he taught me that the value of logic and caution over the gung-ho approach I had previously adopted. It wan't 'till Ronnie had shown me what COULD have gone wrong that I realised how very very lucky I was to have made it to the age of 16!

Old tellies - even if they've been 'dead' for some time can carry some extremely high (lethal) stored voltages - I'd been poking about with these things at the age of 11! - and some of the reapair 'tips' I'd picked up along the way from local sparks and others (who weren't best placed to advise on this sort of equipment) were pretty-much Russian roulette with wires!

Those aircraft you were t-cutting and waxing - Do the pilots just roll up to them hop in, pop the keys into the ignition and take to the wide blue yonder? 99 times out of 100 a pre-flight check will reveal exactly nothing wrong and you 'probably could' get away with just starting up and taking off; but you only have to fall out of the sky once.

It's rigidity that helps ensure that rarely happens!

One of the difficulties I have to deal with in the role of Lecturer /Class Tutor - and indeed in my main business which is video production - is students (and clients) who have 'read something' off the internet where somebody has 'got away' with doing something in an ill-advised way and writes about it... Such that it becomes 'received wisdom'.

I personally deal with around 80 students every year working at HN level. Every year I'll have five or six people who wind up throwing up to two years of their lives down the drain because they've been 'careless' with their data and the portable devices that data is stored on. Equally well I've known clents to waste literally tens-of-thousands of pounds through the loss of essential data. - often lost becuae they've half-understood something and relied on that flawed knowledge.

- Trust me; it's a pretty awful thing to have to stand in front of some teary kid of ninteen or twenty and tell them they've failed their HND because they can't re-produce material that has been lost due to one silly mistake. Equally well I've often (too often) sat in my lunchbreak or at night at home trying to repair some skint kid's PC that they've done something silly to and have no way of paying to be repaired...

I had one particular lad - a 2nd year just four weeks away from completion loose 2 years of production paperwork though snapping the connector off one of these USB sticks. Stupidly it was his ONLY copy! - Not a soft lad by any means but a 16st Rugby Player who spends his summers logging in the Highlands; he sat there and cried like a baby!

Others HAVE lost data and broken college computers through getting these sticks wet and just pluging them in!

It's human nature to prefer to hear what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear - And another person in a similar situation to you might not be as lucky. I'm simply arming people with the information they need to ensure they don't turn a minor disaster into a major crisis.

Lucky escapes are great - enjoy the moment by all means. However, boring and rigid though it is I really don't want to read six months down the line of anyone putting themselves out of business because they didn't know that what happend to you was basically down to good luck...

That's a novel way of getting a nice clean image to work from

DJ

If you have put it on a hotter wash cycle you would have ended up with a mini usb :biggrin:

No you didn't offend me and I knew you wasn't having a pop, but you long long post makes my eyes glaze over, and I have to read twice for the vital point which you have to make, ie don't plug it in the lap top it might blow up, I use be a cleaning supervisor for a cleaning company that had a huge contract for airports, inside and out. plus the turnaround for aircraft that landed and needing cleaning before the next take off. I did three airports, employing staff, doing the health and safety, working out the cleaning routines. Plus at the end of the day the aircraft went to the hangers where they was give a clean inside thoroughly and on a rota t.cut and wax on the outside. The biggest part of the job was keeping staff as our job had no social status. most people think cleaners are thick as pig s..., they get paid generally poor money and unsocial hours. Nobody notices when you have good cleaning only bad, I was suppose to mange the teams, but when a clearer didn't turn up I stepped in, it was a role with no glamour, no prestige, low wages, but I loved it, Most of the thirty strong teams I had stayed with me for 10 years more of less.
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Lucky escapes are great - enjoy the moment by all means. However, boring and rigid though it is I really don't want to read six months down the line of anyone putting themselves out of business because they didn't know that what happend to you was basically down to good luck..
sometimes that is all that is needed. I think it can be also called positive thinking. It's like saying I had my car stolen, but I was lucky to get it back with only the window smashed. How many times have we all said this sort of thing when something bad happened. Same thing in business, you can do all the preparation. do everything right, and still fail, I believe luck does play a part.

Matt Quinn;27731 wrote:Those aircraft you were t-cutting and waxing - Do the pilots just roll up to them hop in, pop the keys into the ignition and take to the wide blue yonder? 99 times out of 100 a pre-flight check will reveal exactly nothing wrong and you 'probably could' get away with just starting up and taking off; but you only have to fall out of the sky once.

This reminds me of a quote I heard the other week which was, 'You don't need a parachute to go sky-diving but, you do need one if you want to have a second go'

I've found in the past if you get something wet like Jenny's USB stick is to dry it gently with a hair dryer on a low setting.

Whenever I've got anything wet (mobile/satnav) I take it to bits, pop it in a bowl of rice (the rice absorbs the moisture) and leave in the airing cupboard overnight and that usually dries it out

Now that's a. good idea, common sense, trouble is sometime I just do it,don't think, and think later how stupid could I am, if someone panicking I am great to have around, cool, thinking straight and generally get things sorted, my own panics I some how throw caution to the wind and do the daftest things

My eldest daughter dropped her samsung mobile phone down the toilet, well she actually lost it. We found it by ringing it from another phone and following the sound, yes it still rang in the toilet as it was on vibrate :biggrin:

We dried it and popped it into the airing cupboard for a few days and guess what...............................




































It still didn't work :rolleyes:
Grounded for a week

Was the tune I'm swimming in the rain,