old skool

A while ago I commented on cmotion's blip of an oscilloscope pointing out that I was an old duffer and that in my day (takes puff of pipe, strokes beard) it was all analogue and 20MHz was as much as one could hope for.

We have an intern working with us over the summer, a joint EE/CS student from Strathclyde. One of the projects he's working on involves checking to see if a particular problem a client is experiencing is being caused by electrical noise. To do this we needed to borrow some equipment from his university and this is what they gave us: something from my era... not Hitachi but pretty close to what I used to use more than 20 years ago. Fortunately it'll do the job just fine. /me wanders off mumbling about how they don't make 'em like they used to...

Today was a good news day: +3/3's passport application was examined, passed, printed and posted in about 10 minutes this morning so we may be able to go on holiday after all! We also had our planning application approved! Yeah!

Quick summary: we applied for a passport for +3/3. Application posted, payment enclosed, it should all have been fine. However, it turns out that the payment was £3 short (due to requesting secure delivery of the passport... which I would have thought would happen as a matter of course). What's the default policy in this case? Halt the application and send a letter explaining the problem. This is all fine apart from the small issue of not finding the letter until Thursday last week (it had arrived when we were both away on business and got filed under a big pile of other stuff; it lay there for about a month). Cue frantic calls to IPS only to be told by the helpful helpline staff "no, no chance it'll be done in time; you didn't pay in full so the application hasn't been processed". Gah! Much pleading with the call centre staff got us nowhere fast. We tried pleading with the payment processing staff: still no dice. Eventually we managed to find out that the application was going to be examined in the Peterborough office. +1/2 called them today to find that once the paperwork finally reached an examiner it was processed almost immediately! Fantastic work from the examiner in Peterborough, not so brilliant from the call centre staff. I know, it's not the call centre staff's fault; they're just following what's on the sheet.

It doesn't stop it from being annoying when you get the "nah, the computer says no..." treatment...