Some years ago, I found myself with a dead battery in the office parking lot. One of my coworkers tried a jumpstart. His puny little four-banger couldn't do anything more than produce a sad little click on my very large heavy-duty V8, so he took me down the street to the nearest store and I bought a new battery.

Now, it's important to put yourself in the shoes of an average city-dweller with no particular mechanical or automotive interest to understand what happened next. He'd always lived in town. He'd had a cell phone for years. He'd always had AAA. If you look at a modern engine and then at all the fasteners involved in changing the battery from the perspective of a totally non-mechanical, non-electrical, non-handy type, you can see how it might be a little intimidating.

After he saw me replace a battery in the dark in only a few minutes without even getting my office clothes dirty, he realized that it was actually pretty easy, just a step-by-step process you had to understand and a couple of tools. It inspired him to do a little learning, even though he always had help close at hand, simply because he saw value in being just a little more self-sufficient.

But that didn't make him reckless. The next time he had a problem that, at a glance, seemed like it should be easy, he sat down to do his own research. He saw that it was clearly more than he could handle, so he had a shop do it.

That's the best possible outcome. He will never do much of his own work, nor should he because that's not his background or his interest. It really isn't mine either, and he knew that, so seeing me just casually do something that had always looked like black magic flipped a switch in his head. It gave him the power to make his own decision, and he had the wisdom to know his own limitations.

Excerpt from a police report on an accident:

A preliminary investigation has found that the vehicle was traveling east on 223rd Street. The vehicle went over the railroad tracks in Bucyrus, lost control, went into the south ditch causing it to go airborne. The vehicle crossed 3rd Street in the air, struck a tree, struck the roof of the residence and landed on its side trapping the driver. Speed is believed to be a factor.

The driver lost control at the railroad crossing and hit the ditch fast enough for the car to go flying over the street, bounce off a tree, bounce off a roof, and land in somebody's back yard. Yes, I think there is a chance that speed might have been a factor here.

Rolling down the interstate.

@HammerheadFistpunch That class is clearly not named correctly. It should be "Leadership in Large Companies".

@HFV The engine doesn't have boost so they use boosted paint to make sure every car can have boost. But if they put that paint on a car with the turbo it would be too much boost and the car would explode.

I had to hit a Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep/Ram/foo/bar/baz dealership parts counter, which was near the back of the lot in a separate building with all the service and repair work. This was on display by the door. I was short on time and the light was bad, so no really good pictures.

When people make a mess at S.H.I.E.L.D., they really make a mess. So I think I should make the budget work to get myself a Viper.

The Viper AS1050R runs dual brushes at 240RPM and can scrub a 3-foot swath at 5mph. They claim it can clean over 84000 square feet per hour and scrub its way up a 16% grade. It has 53 gallon solution and recovery tanks - no running dry at critical moments. And I can use its USB power outlet to keep my phone charged while I work to ensure that I'm always reachable in case of a custodial emergency.

To be clear, wanting a Viper isn't about the bragging rights, or the night shift basement corridor racing scene, or the women. Sure, all of those are great, but really it's about the heroes. I don't mean me, no matter how often people say I'm the real hero I still don't feel like one. I mean the field agents who lay it on the line to keep the rest of us safe. You can't afford to have your team distracted by a grimy floor when the fate of the world could be hanging in the balance. After all, all of us in the business know that Kim Philby used spills to distract people when he smuggled secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War, and a key strategy in the HYDRA infiltration was leaving greasy fingerprints on the interview room walls.

A while back I got a call from Kraus who cleans the Avengers compound. Almost her whole crew was down with the flu. Next thing I know, there's a big battle on TV, and then half the world turns to dust. And who had to clean up all that dust? Only about half the janitors were left. I had to give Bobby's wife a vacuum cleaner bag of his remains, and I didn't even have time to go get a flag to drape over it even though he died in the line of duty wiping down the doorknobs in corridor 3C.

People were still finding that stuff two years later. With the right cleaning equipment maybe they could have stayed focused and reversing the snap might not have taken 5 years. See, the real reason I want- no, not want, need a Viper AS1050R is for all of you, and for the rest of the world, and for the whole universe.

Here's some footage of this baby in action:

@ranwhenparked Isn't there a third possibility? You could murder the seller. It's important to keep an open mind about your options.

@Demon-Xanth Obviously one end is for inch measure and the other for metric.

It was a National XT Commando, if you care.

@flatisflat

@dogisbadob Yeah, but people don't usually put fart-can mufflers on hybrids.

@MUSASHI66 said in New (work) computer day:

As long as my battery chugs along, I can be on a 10 year old machine just fine, as I remote into servers. If my laptop can run outlook, a browser for oppo, and remote desktop manager, I am golden!

The problem I've been seeing in recent years has been that companies are deploying endpoint management/protection packages that are so bloated you need a beefy modern machine just to be able to keep working when the agents start their background jobs.

@tae said in Computer oppos, a question:

If x86 is becoming obsolete because of how complicated it has become over time... why doesn't intel just make a new version that drops support for regularly unused features. Is that even something that can be done?

That kind of change is very difficult. Intel sort of tried it years ago with the Itanium processor line. If you've never heard of that, then you can take that as a sign of how well it went.

Intel and HP partnered in the late 1990s to create a new 64-bit CPU that was later branded as Itanium. It would have started in the high-end server and workstation market that was dominated by RISC chips at the time, then gradually filtered down to lower-end servers/workstations, and eventually would probably have started landing in normal desktops in some form.

As ambitious projects often do, Itanium fell behind schedule and accumulated many compromises. Competing CPUs (including x86) had gotten much faster by the time they made it to market. The first-gen Itanium performance was disappointing by comparison. AMD had also announced and published a spec for 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set, an approach that Intel had decided wasn't practical.

AMD released their x86-64 chips 2 years later. They were cheap and ran 32-bit x86 code much faster than the Itanium's x86 compatibility layer, while also providing a path to a 64-bit future. Intel surrendered to the inevitable and added 64-bit extensions that matched AMD's spec. The few vendors who had supported Itanium gradually dropped it because there wasn't enough demand. Intel fully retired the Itanium line last year.

There was nothing all that terrible about the Itanium processors. Losing compatibility with everything that already existed was just too much change for not enough benefit. Itanium vs AMD64 was a very expensive lesson for Intel, so I expect them to keep x86-64 (or at least the instruction set) for a while yet.

@HFV Too bad it's not on non-hybrid Civics, then you'd randomly see people with mufflers that match their VINs.

@Darkbrador What about fat earthers?

@CarsOfFortLangley I smell an opportunity for a sideline business! Black market gasoline, smuggled in from the US.

@fintail You could still be hallucinating, but yes, column shifter manual transmissions were sold in pickups all the way in to the late 1980s. At a guess, it had to do with the typical pickup of that time having a properly-small cab with a bench seat where a floor-mounted shifter was very much in the way of anybody sitting in the middle.

@dogisbadob Coolio opens his eyes. "Awww shit, I died." He sits up and looks around. Everywhere he looks, he sees nothing but Amish people who appear to be very happy.

@CarsOfFortLangley Ran when parked. I know what I've got!