Forgotten skills...
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Perhaps it was Schrodinger's pet...
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me me, in pictures
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I've been doing this computing lark for quite a long time and still like to get my hands dirty crafting beautifully manicured code. What I don't do, nor do I recall ever having to do, is create a custom sort algorithm. I don't think I could without looking it up; oh, I know what many of them are called and recall, vaguely, the workings but I doubt I could articulate any of them without looking it up first. There are probably many other 'skills' I learnt in the dim and distant past but have now forgotten due to lack of use (like Visual Basic :-)). What did you learn and never get around to using or, in fact, ever need to use?
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me me, in pictures
mark merrens wrote:
What did you learn and never get around to using or, in fact, ever need to use?
Nothing, I used everything I learned and the "good" jobs always required a little more to make the job challenging instead of boring. However, there are skills I haven't had to use in some time, but I'm sure they'd come back quickly. In fact, there have been some that my arcane knowledge has been a boon. For instance, one company I worked at required a specialized printer to be able to print barcodes using ESC sequences. To everyone else, ESC sequences were total FM (Field Magic is the polite decode of that). So being of the vintage that I used to need to use ESC sequences to print Bold and Italic on my Epson MX-100 14" wide carriage dot-matrix printer, the task was a snap. For years they kept coming back to me to modify the program because no one else at the company had a clue. Other skills languishing are Assembly coding, spooler writing, communications packages, real time controls, the list is extensive.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I've been doing this computing lark for quite a long time and still like to get my hands dirty crafting beautifully manicured code. What I don't do, nor do I recall ever having to do, is create a custom sort algorithm. I don't think I could without looking it up; oh, I know what many of them are called and recall, vaguely, the workings but I doubt I could articulate any of them without looking it up first. There are probably many other 'skills' I learnt in the dim and distant past but have now forgotten due to lack of use (like Visual Basic :-)). What did you learn and never get around to using or, in fact, ever need to use?
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair. Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection nils illegitimus carborundum me, me, me me, in pictures
Talking at the dinner table or at the pub. Nowadays you can see a load of people sitting in a circle messing with their phones. They just sit together but nobody talks anymore. I've seen a family of 4 go out for a meal. They are messing with their phones before the meal, during the meal and after the meal. They've actually forgotten the skill of verbal communication.