26 Jun
2013
26 Jun
'13
10:13 a.m.
On 26 June 2013 17:48, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
The thing is, I understand that he is absolutely swamped in kit as it
as and has no room to take any more... well, not unless he *really*
wants it, badly enough to get rid of something else. He thought he
would not have space to work on something as big as a 20" iMac G5 and
wanted to come to mine to do it. Which is fine, except that I live a
mile from the nearest Underground station, which he feels is too far
to walk, especially with a toolkit.
Negotiations, as they say, broke down and now I don't have the spare
money. I'd hoped that selling some fixed items would pay for fixing
other ones.
On Wed, 26 Jun 2013, Liam Proven wrote:
I think it started out as that, but we both wound one another up too much. :-(
Given that the message to which he was replying
was a comment *to me*
and Tony and I have exchanged many private emails -- on the subject of
me trying to pay him to repair some classic computers for me -- I took
his comment as a dig at me. He has often criticised me, publicly and
privately, for my lack of ability to solder, my board-swapping
approach to hardware repairs and so on.
I was merely replying to that. I did not expect it to be taken so very
negatively by all concerned, and I have already apologised.
I mistook that whole battle for friends chiding each other! What more
would you have me do?
Show up on his doorstep with an offering of a boot-load of classic
skipware? If Tony were in USA, we would inundate him with vintage
crap^H^H^H^H goodies. Ask him to teach you how to solder
[in exchange for teaching him to drive?]?
The key difference is that I don't want to be able to. I /can/ do
basic soldering, but whenever I tried (in my youth) to build a PCB up,
I fried the components. I'm capable of cables, not much more.
But I hate doing it -- it's fiddly, annoying, and expensive (and
painful) if you get it wrong. I'm more of a software guy, really.
(Solder for somebody, and his project is done;
teach him to solder, and he can make burn-scars on his fingers for the
rest of his life;
drive somebody somewhere, and he will be there;
teach somebody to drive, and . . . )
Well, yes. Saying that, although I can drive, I don't. I have never
owned a car and neither of my motorbikes has run in 5-6yr now. I live
in one of the cities with the best public transport systems in the
world; I don't need to. When the weather's OK, I mostly cycle --
bicycles being something else Tony doesn't approve of.
I offered Tony a free dual-CPU Athlon machine, preconfigured with
Linux. He didn't want it; no schematics, so he couldn't fix it. I
said, don't worry, I'll give you a lifetime warranty -- if it goes
wrong, I'll come and fix it for you. But how, he asked? You can't
solder, you can't use a 'scope. I don't need to -- I'll just replace
anything defective. It's a PC. It's disposable and built of disposable
bits. But no, this is not how he believes in repairing stuff, and
there's no room for a PC, anyway -- he prefers to use internet caf?s
for the WWW. He does not have broadband or a home network, apparently.
I really did try to be cooperative. Thus it rankled a bit when he
commented that if one were serious, one learned to solder, etc.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884