51–60 of 90 posts
The waker uppers are up all night. Were there no alarm clocks at all? Can't a grandfather clock wake the waker upper?
I was trying to find the Simpsons clip where Lisa borrows the Native American technique for pre-dawn ambush: drink so much water that your bladder wakes you up early!
A hangover from this, mid-late 90’s boarding school in the U.K., one of the fags (household duties for first and second years - one-on-one fagging no longer officially existed, but did) was knocking up. Just comprised walking the corridors and banging on everyone’s doors at 7:00-7:15 (seniors later, head of house last), as the bells weren’t audible in much of the house. It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came…
Coming from a north american public school, I can't imagine one's family paying large sums of money to send you to a boarding school... just to be some older boy's servant. Get your own ass up, or don't, not my problem. I am by no means a rabid libertarian but that kind of environment would drive me to it.
[He went to boarding school on scholarship, so that may have been another reason to have been treated poorly by the full-fare students?]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was. It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People have more time to think about what they can achieve. I vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or something, just cause of all the resources they had to mobilize from around the world. Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could be far better than one that goes to 100%.
Lazy Edwardian industrial workers demanding 8 hours sleep after 16 hours work! "Oooohh we used to dream of living in a corridor..." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
My ag coop magazine had a recent article on how pre-mechanisation (some places here, into the 1950s) agriculture worked: the tl;dr is no private life under strict hierarchy for 12+ hour days, so it's no wonder they'd run off to the city to get factory jobs instead. One pull quote was a 1920s era law: " Servants and agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at least 4 hours off "
A hangover from this, mid-late 90’s boarding school in the U.K., one of the fags (household duties for first and second years - one-on-one fagging no longer officially existed, but did) was knocking up. Just comprised walking the corridors and banging on everyone’s doors at 7:00-7:15 (seniors later, head of house last), as the bells weren’t audible in much of the house. It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came…
> ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for the week. I need to know more about "mandatory milk at the same time" to understand this
It appears that milk was delivered to the dormitories first thing in the morning, after the same fashion as "the milkman". Distributing said milk was a separate duty from waking up the students, but occurred around the same time; both duties being on a weekly rotation. Therefore it was mutually agreed that the student on milk duty would also bang on the doors as he went, thus relieving the student on Official Door Banging Duty that week from having to get up early to do it. It's unclear why this is described as as a "lie-in", as one would still presumably get woken up along with everyone else...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it fascinating that I don’t understand a sentence of this.
'mandatory milk' Many primary schools in the UK in the 1960s/1970s would have had 'milk monitors' - pupils whose job was to help distribute small servings of milk to their classmates. The milk distribution was an attempt to offset child malnutrition. The role continues to evoke strong feelings today. The Brit ex prime minister Rishi Sunak was described as a 'jumped up milk monitor' and when (in the 1970s) Margaret Th…
I can't really remember the timing, but perhaps in the first half hour before lessons had started I would go to the classrooms of the 5-8 year olds, and if the teacher wanted I'd switch on the classroom computer and load the required program. (Maybe a different child did the 9-11 year olds' classrooms?)
Time related: "Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust…
NTP server.
As I'm sure we all know here: The four horsemen of the IT apocalypse are NTP, DNS and BGP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for just how manual everything was. It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other. Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
> All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets. Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing that provided early insights into human/machine interactions as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited…
Time related: "Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 – 7 December 1943), also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock, each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look at the watch and adjust…
She had clients till the end of her life, though no one took over the business when she died.