Glad to hear Bob is ok.

Not sure how he is going to cope. His SS aint much and bills keep going up.

Didn't he retire from the family business?

I know for a fact that a few years ago, a good wireline truck cost about 2 mill to assemble, and billed out for 50k/day with crew. :eek:

Also know several guys that run cranes and they will have cranes on locations for weeks at a time. Cranes that bill for $400+/hr. Its crazy the amount of money that goes into a hole in the ground! Hell, the guy who hauls the condensate crude off the job in a truck is making 80k+/yr

He was actually fired from the "family" business twice.

By half brother Tom married the founder's daughter and was the only son in law of only daughters active in the family business. My Dad worked at the company as a machinist before Tom married into it, but also refused any of the promotions he was offered. It wasn't because he felt like they were offering him the promotions because of my brother, it was because he hated the politics going on in management and wanted to just do his job and go home. Stayed working as machinist the rest of his life there. Sad because he could have easily worked up to being shop foreman and made a HECK of a lot more money.

For a few years in the early 70's Bob worked for Kimray when the company was also doing medical stuff. He built the kidney dialysis water bath they made. They had to let him go because he was not getting his hours in, showing up late, etc.

In the late 80's Bob came back to work at Kimray as a night shift machinist after failing at trying to be a free lance head hunter. He had worked at a big personnel company for years and thought he could do it on his own. He did a horrible job at Kimray. He only did 60% production on any of the jobs they put him on and was constantly complaining about the job, how things were being done, the management and how the company was being run. After 5 years of it Tom finally had to fired him.

Bob got grand kids and moved to Tulsa to be close to them and worked for Walmart so he could get discounts on sporting goods. He was fired from Walmart 2 weeks before he had worked there long enough to get company retirement benefits.

Kinda sucks because what he did at Kimray made me have to work even harder NOT look like I had the job just because I was family. When I worked night shift in the machine shop I did 110% production and was moved around a lot being put on the rush jobs because of it. There was one job I was running a machining center with two chucker machines and 8 drill presses and tapers that did all the machining on a valve body. One chucker would machine on end of the part, the other the other. During those machines cycle times you used the drills and taps to finish out the part. Was doing 110% of what time studies said was 100% production. The day shift had two people running that machining center and were only doing 85% production. When I got production caught up and was moved to a hotter job they had to put 2 people on it because one couldn't keep up the drilling and taping with the cycle time of the chuckers. Was really pissed when I found I was the lowest paid machinist on night shift.

Found out the night supervisor thought it was funny he was able to keep the president's brother from getting pay raises. Didn't run to my brother though. Thought that since the though it was funny I would have some of my own fun. Walked into his office at the beginning of a shift and said I wanted to talk about a raise...holding a shot gun. He turned white, looked very shocked, and excitedly said, "You got it." Then I looked down at the gun, looked at him laughed and said, "Oh I'm sorry. Me and a couple of guys are going quail hunting as soon as we get off and I didn't want to leave this in my Blazer with all the parking lot break in's we've been having. Can I keep this here," and set it in the corner of his office. Then I set down and discussed my pay and production numbers and how disappointed to find I was the lowest paid machinist and that I wonder what my brother would think of him if he found that out." He tried to give me some crap about how I was always goofing off. Which I am sure was the excuse he was officially giving them. Told him it didn't matter if I WAS goofing off if I was doing the highest production for a shift on any job they put me on and reminded him there are production records I can pull to prove it. Got a big raise and the normal raises everone else did after that. Arsehat zombishes.

That kind of BS is why my Dad didn't want to be any part of management. Nobody ever said anything to me, but I think it got around what I did. A couple of times after that I noticed the founder watching me work. One time he even came up and told me I was doing a great job and I could do that for him any time.

Good Friday morning everyone. TGIF.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1477052646.jpg

Sid, this is just one of the four sites they were doing. It is just part of the site. This one has two rows of trucks, 6 on each side. The trailers are full of expensive gear. No doubt they spend a bunch of money on each well. And they don't do it for fun or as a hobby. That well will be pumping a lot of hydrocarbons out of the ground.

The first fracking was done in the 1800s but modern fracking really started in the 1940s. It is a very mature industry.

Wow. Feel a bit sorry for him but I guess when you make your bed.....




Another milestone with the Hankster: He slept all night again and this morning, after eating his breakfast, he went BACK into his kennel and went to sleep.


I asked but I think it got lost in the hospital story. Can you retrieve stuff off a corrupted hard drive?

Short answer yes. But is depends on what went wrong with the drive.

If it is just an error on the boot sectors you can use a running computer to read that dive and see the data easily. If the drive crashed totally, you will need to send it to a drive recovery specialist. Those guys are crazy expensive. They seem to think it is worth hundreds of dollars per hour to recover data. You might ask Sid if he still knows any of those guys. Back in the early days when he was in college he took a course in forensic data recovery.

On TV they make it looks easy, they just pound on the keyboard on just one row of keys, never using the space bar or backspace ever and don't touch the mouse and they can have the computer do anything even a locked and password encrypted computer that was in a foreign country and language.

Thanks Glen. The computer guy told me he couldn't read on a running computer so I guess it's gone. Nothing earth shattering on it but had lots of pics from the last couple of years.

Should I be saving them on a flashdrive in the future?

That is the single biggest problem with digital photography. How to keep them long term. I have many boxes of photos from my childhood, my parents childhood and even my grandparents childhood. I scanned them and put them on my Ancestry.com page. Now any relative that wants them can find them online. I have even had distant relatives I had never know about send me a thanks for the photos.

As far as keeping your photos long term, there are not many good options. The best is redundant computer hard drives. A RAID system. Those are usually expensive and suck up electricity all the time.

One other option is "the cloud" but if you have to pay a fee for that storage for the rest of your life, and most important have a good way to store the password and log on information and the web site itself. How will your kids get to that site in 30 years?

Good old analog is the easiest way. Make a high quality print and pass them out to all the relatives.

If you have an Amazon Prime account you have unlimited storage for your pictures. Otherwise a flash drive or multiple drives works. Especially if you have a fire resistant safe or can store them at a family members house.

The first drive I sent off to Drive Savers was a Raid array that had crashed and would not reboot. The controller died and farkled the drives.

You need to check, the last drive I recovered Drive Savers had software I downloaded and was able to access and pull stuff off a drive that would power up but not mount or be recognized by the computer without their software. It was not all that expensive.

Remember and old computer book, I think it was The Tao of Macintosh, Had the 10 comandments of computers.

1. Computers are fun.
2. Easy is hard.
3. One, Two, Three many backups.

For my computers I have 3 main backups.

1. An Apple Time Machine backup.
Does hourly backups of changes in the background.
Keeps hours backups for 24 hours.
Keeps Daily backups for a Month.
Keeps Monthly backup for as long as your have drive space with oldest deleted when drive full

2. A Bootable backup that is updated nightly on a drive for each computer.

3. Bootable backups also made to partitions on a drive that is fireproof and waterproof.

Can easily find and restore individual files and/or versions of files from Time Machine backup.
Was able to restore Glen's MIL's email she had accidentally deleted.

Can restore a computer from either the time machine (slow) or bootable backups (plug in and boot).
Was able to get a server back on-line in minutes that the raid array had crashed on.

If there is a catastrophe can use the bootable backups on the fireproof/waterproof drive.

The server and all the drives that keep my backups cost me 20watts. Checked it with my Watt Miser thingy.

My Photos are in the app Photos (formerly iPhoto) on my Mac. It is also backed up to my iCloud account as is my Music that is in iTunes. Can also access either from any device.

Used to be incharge of all the data files for the drafting/engineering department. The problems wasn't keeping the backups. It was keeping the data in a file format that could still be accessed. Most of the literature and drawings we made PDFs for archival backups and highest quality jpegs for photos.

Several years ago a friend of mine passed away that had all his family photos in iPhoto. His photo library was HUGE. So big that I helped him set up iPhoto to keep the library on an external drive. He also had an iCloud account and paid for extra storage over the basic 5GB. His family still uses his computer as their photo album.

One of my nephew's wife keeps all their family photos in iPhoto and uses the book feature and buys books to print out nicely bound high quality printed photo albums with captions.

The founder of the company I work for had a large photo library of negative and slides. I went thru several boxes of slides and scanned them in and uploaded them to a photo library program. Family members can access and go thru it with a web browser and add captions to the photos for things they remember. One of the family members retired husband took over. He downloaded all the photos and copied them to CD and sent copies of the CD to everyone. The photos I didn't scan he just scanned a copied to a CD and sent copies out.

Let him stay with you a couple of days. The word sympathy will leave your vocabulary.

Last month Tom sent him money plus to pay off all his bills.
The plus money had some stipulations on it to put it in savings to prove to Tom he could be responsible with it. Tom has helped him financially many times in the past and Bob blew it.
Bob had plenty of money to pay this months bills.

I had talked to Bob a couple of weeks ago after Tom had bailed him out but before his phone got turned off and Bob mentioned taking some new classes and some new ET whistle blower books I needed to read that were just published. AND complained that he barely had enough money to eat.

His phone was turned off because he didn't pay the bill.

Think Tom has about reached his charitable limit with him because he is not doing anything towards improving his situation.

Bob's wife divorced him because he took the grocery money and went deer hunting in Colorado with it leaving her and the two school aged kids without anything to eat for two weeks.

After the Hankster ate breakfast you took him out to poop and took him to the specific poopy place in your yard and gave the command you want too use for poop and gave him lots of good boys for it, Right?

Pepper knows "Do number 6" for poop and "Do your stuff" for pee. She poops in the same place so it makes it a poop zone to make sure I don't step in it and less searching involved in scooping. It was kind of a hassle at first taking her to the poop zone on leash. But now I can just let her outside. It's great when I want to take her someplace with me to take her outside to her poopy place and tell her to do number 6, then tell her to do her stuff, and she goes if she can. Then I can take her without worrying if she needs to go. It's even gotten to where if I ask her if she wants to go for a ride, if she has to use the bathroom, instead of going to the garage door she goes to the back door so she can do her stuff first.

We had a English Bulldog that would stick his butt against the hedge and leave the biggest "bird dropping" ever suspended on the leaves. It was great for walking around in the yard but the hedge trimming sucked.

One of our friends have Irish Wolf Hounds, two of them! It is like having a pony in the house. If the dog steps on your foot it really hurts. The dogs weigh 200 pounds and up. When they leave a deposit on the ground it will kill a lawnmower it it is run over. They shovel a LOT of dog poop at their house.

Dog poop? Are we talkin' about dog poop now? What happened to pole dancing, nipple lube, or Max's love life? :D

We just got home from paddling our kayaks around the marina. Sunny and warm here, so it was great for kayaking. Happy Friday (Saturday)!

Thought maybe dog poop, pole dancing, and nipple lube were Max's love life? Maybe not in that order.

Have been trying to train Pepper to bark at people when they fart. It's not a bodily function I can do on command and the opportunity to train doesn't happen often. Which isn't a bad thing. There is also the risk of trusting a fart to consider.

I thought Max got married to that racer girl.

I have let a couple loose in front of the dogs. The beagle jumps back in terror.

It has been ages since Max updated us on his social life. I guess engineers do get married to other engineers but a racer? That would be cool.

i bought an old MB 240d last weekend. The clutch hydraulics are buggered, but otherwise, it's solid. Towed it home and today was the first day I had to really dig in. I tried to bleed it (weird procedure. They made the clutch system use the brake master reservoir and the clutch system has no return spring. As a result, you connect the bleed nipples of the clutch slave and right front caliper and pump the brakes to bleed) I disconnected the supply line for the clutch master and dropped it in a plastic bottle. What came out was closer in consistency to water than DOT3/4 and had the appearance of well used motor oil...then it froze up entirely. New slave and master will be here wednesday, along with new radiator hoses, thermostat, oil filter and air filter.