Share Pics of People Hauling or Towing Something Wrong

[Jstpssng]

Back in the late 60s when I was a student at Purdue, a dorm buddy asked if I could pick up a printout of a program he submitted at the computer center, since I walked by it on the way to one of my classes.
Went it went to his cubby hole where the printouts and punch cards were placed, and there was a note to see the operator. Uh oh!
Went in and gave him the note, told hime i was picking it up for Rick, and he pulled out a stack of printout paper about an inch thick, and said he had a flaw in the Fortran program logic that caused a repetitive loop. He was not amused. Rick found the error and the next time, the printout all fit on one page.

Talk about thread drift!!! I had to backtrack and find out how we got to towing computer programming wrong.

 

[California]

Back in the late 60s when I was a student at Purdue, ... printout paper about an inch thick ...a flaw in the Fortran program logic that caused a repetitive loop.

BTDT. Also late 60's. It wasn't my Basic program that did it, rather, the IBM 360-20 compiler at the regional milk processing plant that ran our cards, differed from our textbook. I got back pages of the hometown bank's confidential data, their mortgage lendings.

I puzzled over my listing and found the specific line that caused it to jump into an unexpected universe. Prof gave me full credit for clearly defining the problem despite the garbage printout since my coding conformed to the textbook.

Hauling something wrong? Well the campus 'IT Professional' who daily carried our cards over and brought back the resulting printouts - for the entire campus, admin and everything, did it in his VW bug. Close enough?

 

[groundcover]

IT and towing do have similarities, " Garbage in, garbage out " !

 

[3Ts]

This has been an interesting diversion. I worked in the college's computer center while I was taking the advanced programming courses. The Halt and Catch Fire was a real instruction, although it didn't actually catch the computer on fire, it might as well have. The recovery from that was very lengthy. As for:

Went in and gave him the note, told hime i was picking it up for Rick, and he pulled out a stack of printout paper about an inch thick, and said he had a flaw in the Fortran program logic that caused a repetitive loop.

Well, there was someone who decided they needed some extra note paper and wrote an assembly language program to access the printer character controls. There is a command to slew the paper until reaching a particular channel. We did not have all the channels defined and he slewed to one that was undefined. That printer could empty a box of paper in seconds. First time we accepted that it was unintentional, the second time we required their program to be reviewed by staff before running it.

 

[Grumpycat]

Back in the late 60s when I was a student at Purdue, a dorm buddy asked if I could pick up a printout of a program he submitted at the computer center, since I walked by it on the way to one of my classes.
Went it went to his cubby hole where the printouts and punch cards were placed, and there was a note to see the operator. Uh oh!
Went in and gave him the note, told hime i was picking it up for Rick, and he pulled out a stack of printout paper about an inch thick, and said he had a flaw in the Fortran program logic that caused a repetitive loop. He was not amused. Rick found the error and the next time, the printout all fit on one page.

Back in my ancient days of say 1979 on a Sperry Univac our Fortran card stack started with a job control card which stated limits on how many $ of CPU time and pages of paper this task was allocated.

 

[lilranch2001]

Back when I still had to go to the office for work every day…… (That reads before retirement), somebody, from another location, for some reason would run some report (on the wrong printer name or they were messing with us) and it would print off reams after reams of reports that we as a user could not kill the print job.
If you could not get a hold of somebody in IT, (they were in corporate 600 miles away) you had two options, fill the paper tray enough with enough paper to finalize the print job or kill the printer and wait until somebody in IT would kill the print job and then be able to start it (the printer)back up, but in a many cases the printer was so backed up for other jobs that needed to get done…. So we did the expedient thing and just let it eat paper and toner.

We never did figure out who was running those reports and IT didn’t care enough to investigate it, and if they ever did, I never found out the answer to it.

This would happen about once a month…..

Hey, it’s only trees and dollars!

Now back to the regularly scheduled screwy trailering pics!

 

[two_bit_score]

Hey, it’s only trees and dollars!

Which is always much more important when someone else’s project is delaying mine.

 

[California]

IT and towing do have similarities, " Garbage in, garbage out " !

GIGO!

Garbage In, Garbage Out. GIGO was the name of the program that hauled posts between FidoNet and Usenet. Written by Smoky Layton.

 

[duramaxsky]

It's sticking out about 6 feet with no flag and the tie job is interesting. And the ladder rack would have held the long one properly.

 

[California]

It's sticking out about 6 feet with no flag and the tie job is interesting. And the ladder rack would have held the long one properly.

What are those 3 legged ladders used for?

We use 3-leg orchard ladders, but in ground where both feet and the third leg can be embedded. (or just as often, punched down a gopher hole.) Much more stable than a 4-leg ladder for rough ground.

 

[WinterDeere]

What are those 3 legged ladders used for?

I've always seen them used by landscapers and horticulturalists. Your mention of orchards makes sense too, although I've never seen them spiked into the ground. I think they're just for any place not level enough for a regular 4-legger.

 

[masseyrider]

I've always seen them used by landscapers and horticulturalists. Your mention of orchards makes sense too, although I've never seen them spiked into the ground. I think they're just for any place not level enough for a regular 4-legger.

Grew up on a fruit farm using that type ladder in the orchards.
Learned not to use them on a cement surface the hard way.
Why would I go get a 4 legged ladder to change some light bulbs in the barn?
These were right there.
That middle leg swings out as far as you need to set up around trees. It digs into the grass/soil and is very stable.
Not so on cement, as I painfully discovered.
The middle leg has nothing but friction to stop it sliding out to 180 degrees.
Concrete doesn't have much friction.
I was on top of an 10 foot ladder, fully stretched out to reach the bulb, when i was face first on the cement.
The middle leg slid out so fast I didn't even have Willie Coyotes moment of, "OH CRAP"
Surrounded by broken glass and in some serious pain I slowly got up. I was sore for weeks.
I use the right ladder now.

 

[California]

Grew up on a fruit farm using that type ladder in the orchards.
Learned not to use them on a cement surface the hard way.
...I use the right ladder now.

Yeah. I have a couple of wood 4 leg ladders for building maintenance. That seems a lot safer for anything near electricity as well as avoiding that inevitable leg-slip.

Tallman seems to be the best orchard ladder now. Lightest weight and a much better attachment of the pole at the top. Durable. My neighbor who harvests here just piles a dozen of them randomly on his flatbed, straps them down, and I've never seen one dented.

I bought an 8 ft Tallman for wife. Then 11 ft for me, the heaviest that I want to carry hundreds of ft on rough sloping ground. These are ideal.

Here's a photo from 2007 just before I bought the Tallmans. I got the ancient 14 ft wood orchard ladder from a cherry farmer who was retiring. Its too flimsy, shaky, to use anywhere that you can't steady it against a limb, high up. The one on the right is a 10 ft aluminum Stokes, notably heavier than the 11 ft Tallman.


And for Subaru admirers, my 'farm truck'. 1999. At 24 years it still looks as nice as this old photo. A clean California original with no rust at all. (The Hauling part of this post. )

 

[ning]

Do these 3-legged ladders not have anything to limit how far out the third leg can go? Seems like a strap could be used for this and still allow it to be used over shrubbery or smaller trees.

 

[California]

Do these 3-legged ladders not have anything to limit how far out the third leg can go? Seems like a strap could be used for this and still allow it to be used over shrubbery or smaller trees.

The decal inside one leg, says a strap is mandatory for firm ground or a hard surface. But I've never seen a strap used.

An urban landscape contractor might have straps on everything.

It's normal to jump on each side of the first step before mounting. Then after climbing a couple of steps, buck back/forward to sink the front leg and make it secure. In my apple orchard at least one of the three legs will usually sink in a few inches due to gopher runs that weren't apparent.

A major advantage of the 3 leg ladder is its ideal for sloping ground. (everything here). On a steep slope, the front leg can be set way out front to get to where each stair is level. Also for a slight side slope, the front leg can be offset from straight ahead to center your weight above the weight-bearing points.

In summary, a specialty tool that is excellent for orchard use.

 

[goeduck]

Do these 3-legged ladders not have anything to limit how far out the third leg can go? Seems like a strap could be used for this and still allow it to be used over shrubbery or smaller trees.

That probably depends on the brand. On mine the hinge at the top limits the opening. Mine are aluminum and I never use them on hard surfaces.

 

[California]

On mine the hinge at the top limits the opening.

Interesting. No limit on mine. it's not unusual to lift the front leg high and put it through a crotch in a dense apple tree then plant it on the far side, to get in close and harvest the center of the tree.

 

[34Willys]

We have a 12' Stokes with the telescoping 3rd leg and hard surface kit options.

Tripod Ladders, Tripod Orchard Ladders | Stokes Ladders

Stokes Ladders, Kelseyville, California. Producers of high-quality orchard ladders, tripod ladders, industrial ladders, fiberglass ladders, citrus ladders, stepladders, step stools, billboard posting ladders, and custom ladders.

www.stokesladders.com

Picked it up from the factory when we lived in Lake County. Best ladders ever.
Patrick

 

[Tinhack]

Back in my ancient days of say 1979 on a Sperry Univac our Fortran card stack started with a job control card which stated limits on how many $ of CPU time and pages of paper this task was allocated.

Back in my school days, they were still teaching us how to hard-wire those old IBM Accounting machines. They had vertical type bars with alpha, numeric and symbol segments which were hit with hammers. It was actually fun to watch all those bars going up and down independently as it printed one line at a time. As I recall, it took about 5 minutes to print a page of green bar. They had memory listed in characters--Typically, 1400 so you couldn't add up very many columns. They were as noisy as a metal shredder.

 

[Grumpycat]

Back in my school days, they were still teaching us how to hard-wire those old IBM Accounting machines. They had vertical type bars with alpha, numeric and symbol segments which were hit with hammers. It was actually fun to watch all those bars going up and down independently as it printed one line at a time. As I recall, it took about 5 minutes to print a page of green bar. They had memory listed in characters--Typically, 1400 so you couldn't add up very many columns. They were as noisy as a metal shredder.

By late 1991 made the mistake of demonstrating competence at Unix, in the midst of my employer’s DoD contracts getting re-written by the government (apparently they can do that) and I was transfered from an engineering development and analysis position to a well funded contract as a security officer and system administrator. Had $4M of state of the art SGI machines. 12 machines, 9 with the GT graphics hardware.

We had a couple Linetronix dot matrix green bar printers. These printers had dot matrix print head the full width of the paper. Not sure how many pins but not enough to cover the page, the print head was on a shuffle back and forth a quarter or half inch. The fastest printer could push the paper out the top so fast it would shoot up out of the top if the cover was not in place. And deafening loud if the cover open.

Got back to embedded design in 1993. Software and hardware.

Was also an Apple ][ guy, then Mac, and FreeBSD on PC hardware, and ever so thankful Apple MacOS X was Mach/FreeBSD based in 2000.