Cycling UK Forum

That moment when you realise you've been doing something stupid for years...

I've had 2 recently.

I always use a bar bag for my commutes. I have always tucked the handle into the top of the bag and then closed the lid. This causes the sides of the lid to stick out a bit. My wife asked me why I wasn't the front pocket for the strap. Doh!

I work in computers. I finally realised I could do server restarts from the comfort of my house by remoting onto the servers. I have done this in the past for emergencies, but for some reason it never clicked that this would be the easier way to do restarts for software etc.. Doh! (I don't know why either... it's not like I haven't done the stuff before, but I would always come into work out of hours if I needed to do something like this...)

Anyone else?

On my British style motorcycles, I always used to remove the whole rear wheel assembly including brakes and drive until some fifteen year old kid helping me noticed that you could just pull out the wheel leaving all the rest in place.

I remember something from many years ago. This was long before the universal appearance of USE BY dates on foods. We got our milk from the milkman back then, in glass bottles. Every day I used to make a dent in the aluminium top with my fingernail, on the older bottle(s), so we'd know which one to use up first.

Then Mrs P pointed out to me that the dairy embossed a number in every milk-bottle top, representing a USE BY date - an early example....

For computers it depends on acceptable downtime, and the time it takes to get to the office if it all goes wrong...

IPMI and LO boards make that easier though...

661-Pete wrote:Then Mrs P pointed out to me that the dairy embossed a number in every milk-bottle top, representing a USE BY date - an early example....

I've just visited the fridge to check - so I know you are correct, but my first thought was "No It's the date of bottling!"
It certainly was back in the late 60's when one of my jobs while on holiday in Wales was to stroll down the lane to buy farm bottled milk. Back then fridges were so much more variable than today, and there were still so many people relying on a stone slab in the cool room that a use by date wouldn't have meant much.
Did anyone notice the change, or was our supplier just doing it all wrong?

In reality, you checked the milk against its USE BY date by giving the bottle a good deep sniff....

661-Pete wrote:In reality, you checked the milk against its USE BY date by giving the bottle a good deep sniff....

If it starts to smell a bit off then you can just make yoghurt with it.
I've even used in on cereal (for some reason it just makes the cereal slightly 'nutty' but makes tea taste a bit too odd).

Hi,

beardy wrote:On my British style motorcycles, I always used to remove the whole rear wheel assembly including brakes and drive until some fifteen year old kid helping me noticed that you could just pull out the wheel leaving all the rest in place.

I think even back then they were called QR.
Honda also copied the idea on most of their chain drives.

Trying hard to think of a job which is also vehicle related that I have done many times, and then I saw a short cut Doh.....
Cant finger it at the mo.............worse still when someone else shows you your errors

A couple of years ago we bought a Samsung monitor for our upstairs PC. I connected it up utilizing the cable that came with it, namely a VGA cable. Ever since then my daughter who is the prime user has complained of getting headaches and shadows when watching you tube clips etc. Plus when looking at a word doc, the text was never 100% clear.

We have played and messed around with the monitor setting and in the end concluded that it was the monitor and nothing more could be done, it was what it was.......

So now we fast forward to last Sunday, and cutting a long story "very" short, I replaced the VGA cable with a HDMI cable.........and ........WOW, what a difference, vibrant colours, no ghosting and crystal clear text.

A simply unbelievable difference just by replacing the cable.

I once ripped the power supply out of a pc that had stopped working, sat there with it in bits, multimeter and scope in hand and traced back trying to find out what was wrong and whether it was repairable only to discover it had been turned off at the wall...