Prehistoric Creature Day
November 13, 2009
Originally uploaded by miketransreal
As it’s Friday the 13th again, it’s also Prehistoric Creatures Day again!
As a treat, I let one of the big mammoths run the shop for a while; he spent most of the time online, researching his genealogy!
My Flickr stream has at least one other shot of this November’s PCD, as we also went to a restaurant for breakfast (not with a big mammoth, though!)
There’s a link here to the story behind Prehistoric Creatures Day
I didn’t take anybody out to dinner, but I did spend part of Friday the 13th with a genuine dinosaur, a new General Electric Remote Terminal Unit. It has had, over the years, Mod-bus serial protocol added on top of the core, then they added grouping 2 16-bit registers together to simulate a 32-bit register, then TCP/IP layered on top of Mod-bus, and finally DNP3.0 power service transport added on top of the TCP/IP. At it’s core, though, it is still the antediluvian GE RTU from 45 years ago.
We and a few of our clients have spent the last 2 months getting after GE to fix the fact that it can take 20 minutes for a value downloaded by us to appear the register of the RTU. We have sent them screen shots and data dumps, annotated with where the problems appear. GE’s reply is that maybe WireShark, our data capture utility, has a bug, since they don’t like what the data implies. They also seem to ignore us when we tell them that we have installed RTUs from 5 other vendors which don’t have this problem.
Finally, one of the clients pointed out that his plant has a data system overhaul scheduled for next year for which he had issued to GE a $3.5 million purchase order. He told them that if the problem wasn’t fixed by the end of the year, that order would be canceled and he would be going out for open bids. That got their attention.
Giving or withholding, dinosaurs always appear to respond to food.
I’m glad to hear that Madeleine is healing quickly enough that you can go out to eat. Hope the prehistoric creatures at home took her condition into account and refrained from trashing the place.
Hi Paul, all that techie computer stuff made my mammoth’s head hurt!
There are other embarrasing photos if you click on the Flickr link, btw. With dinosaurs, not mammoths!
Madeleine’s health continues to improve but the dark nights and colder weather mean we’re not getting out walking about and building her stamina as much as after the first op. But that’ll come, especially once she’s able to travel more easily and we can go beyond what’s in walking distance.
The prehistoric creatures at home were very well behaved, but they had been bribed with some chocolate-coated gingerbread and a comic! http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=22978
Sorry, meant to comment on this before- I’m really shocked at your exposure of innocent animals to the dangers of machines with pictures – I think the SSPCA should be contacted … Otherwise glad to hear that Madeleine is progressing – sounds as if she’s done really well so far – true grit indeed! Elsewhere have a look at the real menace (19secs only but truly terrifying) “the Imperial March of the Ducks” on YouTube …..
As you can see, Gordon, the mammoth was using the picture machine very responsibly; more so than some people I could think of!
And Star Wars Alpacas is pretty neat, too…
Tomorrow’s task is to accompany M to the dentist and back before opening time.