Obsolete Skills

[jeffnc]

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For instance, when I was growing up, my dad used to change his own oil, repair his own truck (most any type of repair), he built a tractor barn and a storage shed, lay bricks, landscaped his yard, repaired his own plumbing, tiled his shower, built his own deck, added stonework to his house, installed electrical wiring, repaired his own lawnmower, built a hydraulic/gas engine combo wood-splitter, etc. etc.

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I do almost all that stuff myself. I enjoy learning, if I don't already know how to do it. Plus, I almost always do a better job than the "professionals". Not only do they not know as much as they should, but I just care more than they do.

Having said that, after I've experienced some things, I make a call based on practicality. If it costs $40 to change my oil, I just have it done. It's very inconvenient for me to dispose of the old oil. Plus the damn Japanese cars are so sophisticated, that it's very tight under there. There's not a lot of space like there was on cars from the 60s. I burn my arm half the time I try it because it's so tight in there, and have to really twist to get the cap on. The lube garage has a big advantage with the lift, or bay, where they can walk under the car.

[jeffnc]

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I used to be able to tap-dial any number on a rotary dial phone.

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Good one. How lame that technology was, when you figured out what was going on.

[jeffnc]

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I still play my Nintendo these days, but I'd have to assume that most of today's children have no idea about the old school games.

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Nintendo "old school". Ha ha. That reminds me of a comment my brother overheard when he was managing a record store.
Young girl 1: "What's this?" (looking at a Ren and Stimpy video)
Young girl 2: "Oh that's like the Beavis and Butthead of our generation."

I know the values of all the UFOs in Space Invaders. And yes, that involved hitting a UFO with your first missile of the game, on the second missile, etc. This is damn near impossible, in case you were wondering. I might be the only person to have ever done it (I posted it to the internet somewhere sometime, I'm not aware of anyone else having figured it out that way, so at least I think I'm the only person who's ever recorded it.)

For those of you who are "aficianados" of the game and wondering what I'm talking about, this comes from Wikipedia:

"Space Invaders had no hardware for the generation of random numbers, so the seemingly random point values awarded by the UFO actually utilized a hash function based on the number of shots that the player had fired in the current invasion wave. It did not take long for experimenters to determine that the maximum 300-point value could be achieved every time if the player shot the wave's first UFO on the 23rd shot, and subsequent UFOs at 15-shot intervals thereafter."

The reason that worked is the UFO values followed a predictable, predetermined cyclical pattern. I "proved" the pattern, starting from the very first shot. As I said, almost impossible to pull off. (Since the pattern repeated every 15 shots, the UFO was actually worth 300 before the 23rd shot, but it was very difficult to hit the UFO on the 8th shot, so this wasn't well known. As I said, try it on the first shot sometime!)

Maybe I'll add that to the Wiki sometime.

[jeffnc]

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I write in cursive all the time. It's way faster, not having to lift my pen off the page nearly as often, and I can do it perfectly legibly, thank you very much. Why does anyone write any other way?

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Because a custom hybrid of cursive and print is actually faster.

As to why someone would print, it could be a number of things. One reason might be that only cursive reveals aspects of your feelings and personality (if you think there are tells in poker, wait until you study handwriting analysis.) Writing in block letters hides many of these things. Subconsciously someone might be wanting not to reveal much. Of course one of the things they might not want to reveal could be the fact that they have lousy cursive writing :-)

[Matt Flynn]

I used to do newspaper design and layout for a weekly newsmagazine. We used special IBM typewriters to print the articles, then cut and pasted articles in using Xacto knives and a wax gun. Headlines were done letter by letter using a special machine. Now it's all computerized.

Not a new story. My grandfather was a hod carrier in his youth. Hods are those little triangular boxes on a pole used to haul a few bricks at a time. A younger brick mason that I know did not know what a hod was. His Dad did of course.

[Kimbell175113]

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Not a new story. My grandfather was a hod carrier in his youth. Hods are those little triangular boxes on a pole used to haul a few bricks at a time. A younger brick mason that I know did not know what a hod was. His Dad did of course.

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Hey, my dad did that, too. And then he wrote a book about it.

jeffnc,
I agree about a hybrid cursive/print style, but a lot of people just seem to be totally against cursive at all for some reason.

[suzzer99]

Running oats in a straight line?

[gumpzilla]

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cooking, how many people do you know that can prepare a full meal from scratch? or even just buy a chicken some veggies, etc, and get a meal out of it, w/o freaking? honestly I think that men are becoming more adept than women nowadays in the kitchen.

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yeah. this is a huge one that really sucks. I find that unless your parents/grand parents were immigrants, you will never learn how to cook. All of my friends that are 3rd generation american and on have difficulty scrambling eggs. I cook 10x more than my girlfriend does.

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Huh? I think all that's needed to learn how to cook is a little bit of desire to do so. It isn't rocket science. How old are your friends? I find that I started taking food for granted less as I got older, which is sort of a key step in getting interested in actually making it.

[ZeeJustin]

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I still play my Nintendo these days, but I'd have to assume that most of today's children have no idea about the old school games.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nintendo "old school". Ha ha. That reminds me of a comment my brother overheard when he was managing a record store.
Young girl 1: "What's this?" (looking at a Ren and Stimpy video)
Young girl 2: "Oh that's like the Beavis and Butthead of our generation."

I know the values of all the UFOs in Space Invaders. And yes, that involved hitting a UFO with your first missile of the game, on the second missile, etc. This is damn near impossible, in case you were wondering. I might be the only person to have ever done it (I posted it to the internet somewhere sometime, I'm not aware of anyone else having figured it out that way, so at least I think I'm the only person who's ever recorded it.)

For those of you who are "aficianados" of the game and wondering what I'm talking about, this comes from Wikipedia:

"Space Invaders had no hardware for the generation of random numbers, so the seemingly random point values awarded by the UFO actually utilized a hash function based on the number of shots that the player had fired in the current invasion wave. It did not take long for experimenters to determine that the maximum 300-point value could be achieved every time if the player shot the wave's first UFO on the 23rd shot, and subsequent UFOs at 15-shot intervals thereafter."

The reason that worked is the UFO values followed a predictable, predetermined cyclical pattern. I "proved" the pattern, starting from the very first shot. As I said, almost impossible to pull off. (Since the pattern repeated every 15 shots, the UFO was actually worth 300 before the 23rd shot, but it was very difficult to hit the UFO on the 8th shot, so this wasn't well known. As I said, try it on the first shot sometime!)

Maybe I'll add that to the Wiki sometime.

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When was this skill NOT obsolete? [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[guids]

[ QUOTE ]
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cooking, how many people do you know that can prepare a full meal from scratch? or even just buy a chicken some veggies, etc, and get a meal out of it, w/o freaking? honestly I think that men are becoming more adept than women nowadays in the kitchen.

[/ QUOTE ]

yeah. this is a huge one that really sucks. I find that unless your parents/grand parents were immigrants, you will never learn how to cook. All of my friends that are 3rd generation american and on have difficulty scrambling eggs. I cook 10x more than my girlfriend does.

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh? I think all that's needed to learn how to cook is a little bit of desire to do so. It isn't rocket science. How old are your friends? I find that I started taking food for granted less as I got older, which is sort of a key step in getting interested in actually making it.

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I dont think anyone is saying cooking is necessarily hard. Good cooking is, and I agree if you arent 2nd/3rd gen you probably were never taught to cook at a younger age. The reason it is obsolete is because of all the premade stuff out there and fast food.