Luke...you are WAY smarter than I will ever be...deriving measurements from pictures...how did you do that??...thinking about high school does bring back memories though....when I was in High School, I was trying to figure out ways to get my dad to let me have the car....being the youngest of 6 kids...my parents had pretty much seen everything...so that made my prospects of getting the car kinda difficult at times...I graduated high school in 1981..and I can remember when my school got brand new desk top computers....I think they were something like 16k in memory....we were amazed. We also had one of the old computers....one of those room size monsters that you had to feed the computer cards into it to program it....technology has changed a bit....still amazing that we made it to the moon with that technology. Have to take your hats off to that generation...they did it with what they had..and they did it spectacularly.
Don't sell yourself short... I'm just the head of the "useless information" department... LOL
Meh... I'm a nerd and proud of it!
My teachers used to ride my case all the time about applying myself. I was a farm boy, born and bred, and it's all I ever really wanted out of life. I coasted through school-- school was what I did when I didn't have field work to do (my ag teacher used to laughingly say he knew when it was dry enough to work in the field, when me and one other kid missed school on the same day!) I made passing grades without trying; I never took notes or other crap, just half-listened and could pass the test with a 70-80 or so, sometimes a 90. I did what homework I could in school during lunch or on the bus and blew off the rest. I was SO bored in high school that I worked in the library, did drafting, and was an ag nerd in FFA. I read every science and technology book that I could lay my hands on, about everything that interested me, from electronics to hydrogen bombs. I used to doodle H-bomb designs during class. I was actually a pretty good sketch artist back then... I even designed a turbine-engine (jet) powered tractor in ag one time-- got laughed at pretty good for that one! (Of course at the time I didn't know that Allis Chalmers and International Harvestor had experimented with gas-turbine powered tractors a decade before! HA HA laughs on the morons I went to school with now! LOL
) Anyway, my teachers were all over me to go to college and "apply myself" and I was like "I don't care about that stuff-- I'm a farmer... Besides, what would I do-- invent some new kind of super-bomb that would kill millions of people more quickly and efficiently?? Why bother!" I graduated in '89, 47 out of 103, so nothing special. Won a diesel scholarship as a junior in high school by winning the Texas State Tractor Mechanics Contest and then went to UTI in Houston for diesel technician training in late 89-early 91, with a couple pauses to put in a crop and get it back out again. No jobs in mid-91 due to Bush I's "it's the economy, stupid" recession and all the vets coming home from Gulf War 1, so I stuck with farming. Drought wiped everything out in 96 so I went to the police academy that year, got my Texas Peace Officer's license in May 97, a week after I put in the next crop. Farmed and tried to get on as a reservist to keep my license, couldn't get a spot until after my license was up, so I just kept farming. Drove a schoolbus the last 9 years until I got canned last year-- apparently it's okay if kids get maimed for life in a bus wreck, but just DON'T yell at them to sit down so they stay safe!
The new boss turned it into a chickens#!t operation anyway and made it miserable to work there, so I don't care... SO, I'm pretty much doing what I've always done-- gettin' by and reading to alleviate the boredom...
I remember dinosaur computers... here in Texas, long before he ran for President, we had the billionaire H. Ross Perot deciding (and getting the state legislature to go along with it) that every schoolkid in Texas needed "computer literacy" training in the early 80's and on... when I was in junior high, we had those STUPID MS-DOS computers that you had to program with "10, 20, 30, 40" instruction lines to do ANYTHING with them... what a COMPLETE waste of time... I HATED it! I was always like, "who cares?? By the time you program this crap box to do the stuff and debug it you could have done it yourself with a calculator and been done!"
Never had much use for computers. When I was in high school, in one of my favorite classes, which I aced, Mechanical Drafting and then Architectural Drafting, (despite not having the "prerequisite math classes" to be in the class-- I HATED math and never took anything over Algebra I, and should have been in Geometry to take drafting 1 and Trig for drafting 2). I could knock out a drawing we were given a week to do in about 2 hours and then I got to play on our new computers... these were "top of the line" for about 85 I guess-- the Junior College two towns over revamped their college drafting courses with some new fangled thing called "Auto-CAD" and we got their leftovers... you had to remember all the commands like an MS-DOS machine and type them in by hand-- "Line" for line, then it would prompt you "from point" and "to point"... stuff like that... it was the first computer I ever saw that used a mouse (to delineate the start and end points on the screen). It was fun to play with, but not much use in my eyes-- I could type in commands FAR faster than it could digest them! SO, you sit around waiting on the computer to whir and creak and decide to pop up the box asking you "from where" and "to where"...
The thing was SO old it used those 5.5 inch floppy disks... remember those??
After I graduated my mom and I actually went partners and bought a new 8086 machine running a new thing called WINDOWS... FINALLY something that actually made a computer worth having! It had 512kb of RAM, ran programs off 5.5 inch floppies, and ran at the BLINDINGLY FAST clock speed of 8 MHz! No hard drive at all! I mostly used it for playing "F19 Stealth Fighter" to all hours of the night... Later my folks upgraded computers and got something called the Internet. Mom became addicted to ICQ and I discovered something called computer dating. Met my wife that way after a few years, actually!
Later! OL JR