Toadfish Monastery

Quote from: Swatopluk on March 13, 2014, 07:48:00 AM
They are Austrian but apart from the accent quite different from the Austrianism I despise. Hey, they got sued a few times for pointing out the hypocrisy that is Austria's state virtue #1.

Which reminds me of the, shall we say, mixed response in the Austrian media when Elfride Jelinek was awarded the Nobel prize for literature...

Quote from: Swatopluk on March 11, 2014, 01:58:57 PM

I think the last thing I played on that ancient audio device was an early Russian opera.

As long as it's not anything by Gitti & Erika, it's all OK... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfO-ZxLhiYc

(Caution: clicking on the link might have adverse effects on your sanity and fragile sense of esthetics)

Quote from: Swatopluk on March 11, 2014, 01:14:14 PM

Quote from: Opsa on March 11, 2014, 01:08:26 PM
Swato- I thought it was some kind of baked apple dessert. Apfel strudel? Is that racist or something?

Do you take me for an Austrian?

Isn't that a Mozartkugel behind the computer screen? And I bet that stereo is playing something by Franz Lehar... 

To further elaborate on the words of Qwertyuiopsad (or Qwertyuiopå¨ as his name is pronounced in Swedish), keeping an active interest in something outside your main interest/field of study/work/ is, I believe, absolutely vital.

Too much of a good thing can absolutely choke you -in the worst case, turn something you genuinely love into something that is only a burden. Likewise, you can get quite narrow-minded and have your perspective limited by mental blinders. Doing something completely different from time to time helps stimulate you, moves those mental blinders away, excercise different parts of your mind and hopefully gives you a different perspective on things. Heaven knows that nowadays I try to keep what little time off I have as free from trains as i possibly can.

On the proper and not-so-proper methods of lubricating your trainees
===========================================


First of all, I must say that the current bunch of trainees that I have are really an excellent lot. There's a general sense of comradeship, enthusiasm and all-around good will in the class, and I do enjoy working with them tremendously.

At the moment, half of the class is away on practice secondments, and the other half is having a theory block with me back in school. We are going through a basic vehicle technology course, having looked a bit at the fundamentals of electric traction (series motors, separately excited motors, asynchronous AC motors, what is the point of a traction converter, how do modern computerized trains really work...)

Part of this course is having a look at reality, in the form of going to a nearby goods yard and borrowing a locomotive from my former employer Green Cargo and letting the trainees loose on it under my supervision. The locomotive class, Rd, is actually a very good teaching aid, since it is a late seventies construction that has been extensively refurbished and modernized just a few years ago, so get a lot of rail vehicle development in a single convenient package. Also, you can make pop corn in the microwave in the B end cab.

Now, I had had the trainees in small groups all day -it was a marathon day for me, since I wanted to get all the groups done in a single day due to scheduling issues. Time had come for the last group, and we had crawled round on the loco, looking at this and that, opening the high-tension cubicles and looking really closely at the transformer and main circuit breaker and all that, and were wrapping it up for the day.

Then, one of the trainees, M, opens her mouth and says those fateful words: "Would it perhaps be possible to have a teeny-tiny look at one of the diesels, too, since I am about to drive that very class on my practice secondment." I like M. She is a good student, not only keen and intelligent, but also someone who has a lot of common sense and is very down-to-earth. She is also not afraid to pull up her sleeves and dig in when that has to be done. The other trainees are also a good bunch -K is a quiet guy with a very nice attitude and a keen sense of humour, N is the kind of girl who doesn't say that much and mostly keeps quiet, and when you are not looking, it's her who puts the matchsticks in the tire valves of that illegally parked SUV.

So I said, OK, if everyone is up for it, we can take a little look.

Of course they are up for it, so off we go to have look at the T44-class diesel loco. Licence-built by NOHAB here in Sweden back in the early seventies, a big hunk of Detroit Iron with a GM 12-645E diesel engine, antediluvian technology, but also some very interesting and extremely robust technical solutions. We open some of the hood doors to have a look at the engine, we pop the cylinder top covers to have a look at the cylinder tops with the rockers, camshafts, injectors and all that, and then we fire the diesel up and look at all those parts moving.

Then, I get an idea.

Ideas that you get after having worked for 12 hours straight are seldom that well-thought out.

I decide to show them how you can manually operate the motor governor, opening up the fuel rack and increasing the speed of the diesel engine.

The cyilnder heads are cooled by lube oil being sprayed on them and circulated in a oil circuit. The lube oil is pumped around by a plunge pump that is directly driven by the engine. If you increase the engine RPM, you also increase the pressure in the oil circuit and the frequency of the spraying.

You can see where this is heading?

I couldn't.

Lindorm leans on rocker shaft to motor governor, engine revs up, slowly and with the characteristic GM/EMD lag, and accompanied by a very nice bass throbbing. And literally a shower of lube oil, out of the ejector nozzles and straight on top of my trainees. N managed to duck behind a hood door, but K and M where looking like dalmatians.

I wanted to die of shame there and then. I felt really, really terrible. Good lord, what had I done?

And then M said "Cool, they would never have taken me seriously if I had shown up in clean hi-vis at my practice secondment. Anyone got a tissue?"

Anyhow, we all helped in getting each other mopped up, and then took the loco out for a little spin -but this time, with all doors, covers and hatches properly closed. And lots of bad jokes about "Hey, teach, thanks for giving us a few splashes of reality" and "Is this how train drivers are baptized?".

I don't think I will do that particular blunder again....


But the kids are a really, really nice bunch!  

If it is possible, perhaps she should look into taking a first introductory course in a subject that is "only" interesting, but not "Yes! This is what I want to do"-interesting. It might be a good way of coming to grips with the change of going to university, adjusting to university studies and moving away from home and all that, and since the stakes aren't too high, an occassional speed bump isn't such a disaster.

I myself have a dual degree, and I think I have mentioned that I was orignially aiming for a doctorate in history, ending up with a degree (but not a phd) in history, a degree i computer science aimed at human-technonoly-orgaizational issues -and work with something completely different. I can't say that I regret having done all those courses, and I actually find use for quite a bit of what I have learned even today, in my current line of work. Studying history was a very good way of learning how to analyze and evaluate sources of information, how to structure your arguments and how to express yourself in writing -all skills that I find tremendously useful today. A grounding in the humanities is probably a good stepping-stone for just about anything.

Opsa, please pass on my best wishes for the Opsalettes coming university studies -and please do tell us in a few years what she actually chose to do!

Quote from: Darlica on March 07, 2014, 09:26:39 PM


The desk isn't so pretty, it needs a clean-up.

I say we take off and nuke the desk from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.


Actually, perhaps we both ought to get up and step away from our computers and do something constructive today? 

Yesterday: A Moravian white wine, "Tramin Cerveny" (with a few diacritics here and there) from the Jedlicka & Novak winery, 2011 vintage. The wine was a souvenir from our trip to Prague last year that had somehow esccaped being drunken before. A very nice traminer, lots of fruit and minerals, a nice sweetness very well balanced by a bit of acidity. Very pronounced grape character, with a sprinkling of allspice and ginger aromas. Lovely! 

Today, it's black tea time.

Yesterdays dinner: Duck legs, honey-roasted and then braised with plums, squeezed orange juice, vermouth, star anise and chili. Served with pea sprouts, cucumber and rice noodles. A bit of an experiment, but one that turned out very well. 

Graded 30 140-point tests for my wee darlings. And then mailed the results to them, so they wouldn't have to wait until monday to find out the results (we have no lessons tomorrow). My writing hand is now somewhat sore, and I have emptied one red biro of ink. And I hope to God it's a long time before I have to go through the four occassions when a shunting movement may pass a main signal without authority from the signaller again...

A mandarin orange which, according to the growls from my stomach, is far from enough

One keyboard for the left hand, one for the right hand, and a centrally mounted one to bang your head against!   

Lunch was young green beans fried with a bit of cured ham and garlic, tossed with pasta. Quite nice! 

At the moment, I do long for the days when my desk looked like this:

Here´s my desk at work.

On the left, you can see the hi-vis hedgehog Darlica made for me when I took up my current position.

The background picture on the monitor is the coat of arms for the local municipiality that we collaborate with here in Stockholm and rent our local offcies from. Their wonky IT system also means that I have to keep everything important on my computer desktop, otherwise it risks getting lost in their network servers.

The book on the right is  Fahrdynamik des schienenverkehrs, a german text book on the physics of railway operations. There's nothing like handing out photocopies of four pages of equations and tables in german to the eager-beaver trainees to make them realize that, no, they don't have to learn everything about how brake force is calculated right now. 

The blue label on my desktop computer says "Dare to refuse Facebook" in Swedish. The thing leaning in the window is a cab signal display from some very old rolling stock from the Stockholm metro.

On the left is a stack of paper a k a my bad conscience -documentation from a course for minder drivers that I held a while ago and really ought to have processed by now, but haven't done so. Well, if they have been laying about for so long, another week won't hurt.