P Ford, very off topic.

[Schoolmarm]

I just want to publically thank you for the very kind and considered advice you gave me when I asked how I could help my son with his career.

He went on the Cisco course which I asked you about and then he ferociously applied for every and any networking/software engineering job within 100 miles of his home :lol: .


Last week he was given a week long "interview/trial" at Sirran in Thirsk and they have offered him a job starting at 24k. 8)

Absolutely over the moon here so many thanks.

 

[Pford75]

Congratulations - I hope he enjoys his new job and all goes well. Tell him not to stop there - the more certification he can get (and with specialisations) the more in demand he will be. Well done to him.

 

[Schoolmarm]

Thanks

 

[LadyArowana]

Excellent news!

 

[JoceAndChris]

Oh, it is nice to read good news. Well done to all concerned, and it really does sound like this is the beginning of a great career for Carole's boy. I heartily recommend computers and IT as a path for the youngsters and wish schools would do a bit more to promote and inform. All you hear about is how there aren't enough jobs, and then you see all the jobs going in this sector and wonder what on earth is going on with training and expectations of young people today.

If we're doing some public thanking, I'd also like to thank Mr P for mentioning the Census last year. It was a great little job for me, and if he has any ideas for this year's pin money, do pass them along. :wink: Not computers though, I'm sure people would pay me not to mess up their nice machines. Perhaps he, or Mr Pford, could persuade the govt we need another Census?

 

[Penners]

Well done to the lad, Carole. He's had some help from P in the right direction, but without his own tenacity he wouldn't have made it.

And well done to Pford, too, for his effective help. There couldn't be a better start in life, today, than a career in large scale networking and cloud computing. So you've set him on a wonderful career path.

When I was his age, I had ambitions, too. I wanted to retire. It took me a while, but I got there. :wink:

 

[Flyfisher]

Oh, it is nice to read good news. Well done to all concerned, and it really does sound like this is the beginning of a great career for Carole's boy. I heartily recommend computers and IT as a path for the youngsters and wish schools would do a bit more to promote and inform. All you hear about is how there aren't enough jobs, and then you see all the jobs going in this sector and wonder what on earth is going on with training and expectations of young people today.

I quite agree, and it's quite topical, really, in light of recent reports about how today's 'online' generation may be fluent in using computers and associated technology but have little clue about how they actually work and, more importantly, how to actually make them work - i.e. programming the things.

I'm old enough to remember the first 'microcomputers', as they were then called, and they were quite limited straight out-of-the-box. But the one thing they all came with was some form of programming language (usually BASIC) with which the proud new owner could actually write a program and make them do their own bidding. For those who became hooked, programming was (and is) a great intellectual challenge.

I blame Windows for the decline in home programming. While it made computers far more accessible to the average user, it made programming a far more complicated process requiring complex Software Development Kits and compilers costing £100s.

But for anyone with a yearning to revisit their micro-computing youth, help is at hand in the guise of Rasberry Pi. I'm just waiting for production to get going this year before ordering one to play with.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/sample-page

It may be cheap and cheerful at about £25 but it's vastly more powerful and capable than the Apple II I bought in 1978 for £600. :shock:
Though given how my career worked out, that was probably the most productive £600 I've ever spent.

 

[Penners]

Mr P .... if he has any ideas for this year's pin money, do pass them along.

Glad it worked out Joce, although I might have thought twice about suggesting it if I'd known that it would involve you in knocking on strangers' doors. Slightly risky for a young lady, I would have thought.

As for this year - hmmm... let me think. Do you give personal tutoring with strict discipline? Judging by the number of business cards for such services to be found in London phone boxes, there's a lot of demand in this field.

 

[Penners]

I'm old enough to remember the first 'microcomputers', as they were then called, and they were quite limited straight out-of-the-box. But the one thing they all came with was some form of programming language (usually BASIC) with which the proud new owner could actually write a program and make them do their own bidding. For those who became hooked, programming was (and is) a great intellectual challenge.

Ah, halcyon days! My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. If you could survive the tribulations of loading and saving programmes to that pig-of-a-machine from a tape recorder, you had the patience for anything.

I actually wrote a business programme in BASIC to run on the ZX81 (and later on the BBC 32K). I had my own furnishing accessories business at the time. I could enter a complete list of all the products we had to manufacture in any month and the computer would print out (on a roll of silver thermal paper) a list of every component that we needed to order, for that production plan. Exceedingly simple stuff by today's standards, but it saved me a hell of a lot of work.

My first proper business machine was a Sirius, with twin, variable speed 5.25-inch floppy drives. You could run the MS-DOS or CP/M operating system.

Cutting edge or what?!

 

[Flyfisher]

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Ah yes, cassette tapes as a 'mass storage' medium. A wonderful test of character. I vividly remember spending all day on some programming masterpiece then "saving" it to tape and never seeing it again. I used to call them "write-only" memory.

I eventually managed to save up enough money to buy a 5.25" floppy didk drive for my Apple II. What a revelation! It could store about 140KB (so only about 30 disks needed to store a modern digital photo!) and was both fast and reliable - relative terms you understand. :wink:

I can't remember what I paid for it but it must have been well over £100. I bought a 1TB hard drive last year for about £50, the equivalent of about 7.6 million of those Apple II floppy disks. :shock:

 

[MdB]

Ah, halcyon days! My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81.

Pah, you youngster....
I started out on the ZX80. It was ages before the ZX81 came out.

 

[Flyfisher]

They were both later than the Apple II though. So there!

 

[Feltwell]

ZX81? Pfah, you were posh then. A Dragon 32 for me - anyone remember those?

I still remember seeing an Atari games console in an American neighbour's house in what must have been about 1976 - plugged into a transformer to make it work on UK voltage if I remember rightly (I was very young!). For a small boy in rural Norfolk it was truly the stuff of the space age. It had bat and ball AND space invaders 8)

And, lest I forget, very well done to Son-of-Schoolmarm!

 

[jocelyn plummer]

Anyone remember the Dansette record player :!:

 

[Gareth Hughes]

I had a second or third hand dansette. It used to smell of burning fish (something to do with the wiring, I imagine), and played Marriott Edgar monologues performed by Stanley Holloway on 78rpm discs.
I'm of the generation that was exposed to the ZX80 at school, slightly too early not to be baffled by it with the result that I lost interest in computers very quickly (there are only so many times even I could type "10: PRINT Gareth is ace / 20:GOTO 10 / RUN" before getting bored with the effect). My brother is four years younger than me and had access to the computer as a means to play games (by that stage I was reading Pevsner) and as a result doesn't find them baffling, has a job in computing for a firm with an incomprehensible name and a "mission statement", but he can't explain over the phone how to sort out the simplest of my computer problems ("Mark, it's stopped working, just frozen up!" "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" "yes" "oh, it might be the bumbletyrumbletum then")

Congrats to Son of Schoolmarm on entering that world though

 

[LadyArowana]

My brother is four years younger than me and had access to the computer as a means to play games (by that stage I was reading Pevsner) and as a result doesn't find them baffling, has a job in computing for a firm with an incomprehensible name and a "mission statement", but he can't explain over the phone how to sort out the simplest of my computer problems ("Mark, it's stopped working, just frozen up!" "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" "yes" "oh, it might be the bumbletyrumbletum then")

Computers are like any other machine, they can smell fear, so if they overhear you discussing how to fix them they chuckle and misbehave even more. The trick is to act casual, walk away like it doesn't matter and try things randomly over a period of a few hours, and of course always backup data etc, they KNOW when you havn't :lol:

 

[Schoolmarm]

I just ring my son up and he links to mine online and takes control from his end. So peculiar to sit watching your own screen running through strange programmes and commands etc.

 

[Penners]

I had a second or third hand dansette. It used to smell of burning fish (something to do with the wiring, I imagine)

Mine was exactly the same. I'm sure the wiring was insulated (if insulation there was) with kippers. After a while the turntable motor went kaput, but the tone arm still worked, so I used to push the turntable around with my finger. The Everly Brothers never quite sounded the same, though.

 

[Juju]

Well done Carole's lad.
Joce - have you looked at the National Trust website for seasonal jobs? Go to their main jobs page and there's a link at the top for seasonal jobs. They have lots of very part-time jobs going at the moment. Also English Heritage has masses of seasonal jobs too. There might be something near you.
I still love my unpaid NT work - it seems to be almost full-time at the moment but never mind! I'm doing something different all the time - recruiting other volunteers, writing a garden exhibition, gardening, and yesterday helping an archaeologist do geo-phys... Mind you, I have no paid work at the moment myself so need to get my act together on that front.
Juju

 

[JoceAndChris]

I never cease to admire what you're up to Juju, I think you have a fascinating job.

Sadly there are too many demands on my time, and outgoings, to work voluntarily. I'd only want to work if it could fund £1200 pelmets and pre Civil War necklaces, just two of the latest things I've fallen in love with...

http://www.edwardharpley.com/category/pelmets-and-corona/

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ESTATE-ANTIQUE-14K-GOLD-1825s-VERY-FINE-PEARL-GREEK-KEY-LINK-TASSEL-NECKLACE-/230513592205?pt=US_Fine_Necklaces_Pendants&hash=item35abae478d

No, Chris will just have move on upwards, that's all. :wink: