wiretap wrote:

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I love nuclear plants too, and have visited a number of those when I was young.

Currently, the Bulgarian Kozloduy NPP was back in the media due to an unplanned shutdown.

Its 1960s vintage technology is just beautiful.
(click this link to witness a tour into the insides of that well-worn-out nuclear plant).

But for aesthetics, the old UK gas-cooled reactor stations just rock. Timeless aesthetics.

Dungeness, Kent

Hunterston, Scotland

Imagine Strelok going amok in these facilities, equipped with a backpack full of RPGs.
I guess you must also have liked the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games 😀

One day I hope to travel to the Wish Granter too.
Nowadays it is open for tourist pilgrimage:

Watch this thrilling footage of a guided tourist tour through Unit 4, visiting Elephant Feet, other artifacts and finally the Wish Granter, deep inside the sarcophagus.

They're only cool until you work at one for 10+ years.. 🤣. 50% boredom, 50% max stress. Every minor task is blown out of proportion and treated as top priority. You get called in almost every holiday/vacation, and random times during the night. I even got called for troubleshooting when I was at my wedding 1800 miles away in the Caribbean. Refuel outages are grueling -- I've worked 90hrs per week for 84 days straight without a day off when we ran into startup issues with our reactor feed pump turbines. I've had to sit in front of every top NRC official in the US and explain a false positive we received on a shitty Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager. I could write a 500 page book on how shitty it is to work at one. But yea, 1960's technology is beautiful until you have to maintain it. The only thing keeping me there is the pay because they just keep throwing money at me. haha

Sounds like your employers need to find a way that allows you to scale. What if instead of being in the Caribbean you had been hit by a bus? Also, Symantec Endpoint? Let me guess, it's a corporate mandated solution?

Cool thread! It's been an interesting read. 😀

My hobbies:

Music, in pretty much any capacity...
I have a small collection of late 80s and 90s synths and ROMplers. Kurzweil K2500; Roland D550, D110, MKS50, JD990, XV3080, SC880, MT-32; Korg TR-Rack, M1R EX; Ensoniq MR Rack; Yamaha MU100R, TX802, TX7, VL70m.

I play bass in local bands just for fun. I play an inexpensive 5-string Squier, but looking to upgrade to a Modulus. mmmm... My amp is an Ampeg SVT 3 Pro. I have SWR Big Ben and Goliath cabinets, but I'm building a fEarful 12/6/1 which should sound better, weigh less, and won't require a second amp to drive it.

I spend way too much money on pro audio stuff. I have two licensed Waves Horizon bundles, 32 channels of MOTU I/O for the MIDI stuff, and 24 channels of PreSonus interfaces via FireWire for somewhat mobile recording. Looking to upgrade to Metric Halo once I find a winning lotto ticket. I have a decent collection of mics - a handful of Shure 57s, a 58, Beta kick and condensor clip-on instrument mics, two KSM27s; Sennheiser kick and clip-on tom mics; three Rode NT5s; some Dayton electret omnis; a Sennheiser D1 digital wireless system..

I have a nice Pearl Vision birch set with Paiste 2002s that I have no room to set up and play. Still feel better knowing it's there. Some day.... Oh, and a !%#$ harp. 🤣

I have a PA with Crown amps, Yamaha mains, and DIY BFM Tuba horn subs. I use it with the band since most house systems are little more than a cheap 8-channel mixer, some blown speakers, and an SM58 that has been dropped too many times. I also run sound for occasional events. I've DJ'ed some weddings (Traktor), and provide sound for the local Air Cooled VW club's annual car show.

I build speakers. The horn subs above for PA, a smaller tapped horn for my office, working on some HT speakers with Eminence pro audio drivers (they're just fantastic for dialog and sound effects), and lots of little bookshelf projects with whatever raw drivers inspire creativity. (I get them from Parts Express and Madisound, mostly.)

That blends in to wood-working. Mostly utilitarian, not really "art". Aside from speaker cabinets, I've built some workbenches for the garage and electronics work in my office, some desks (very simple), and have plans for audio racks (for my MIDI synths), shelves (for game carts and discs), and cabinets for my office (video game console collection and old PCs).

I've gotten into photography a little bit. I have a Panasonic GH3 Micro 4/3 body with 20mm prime, 12-35mm, and 35-100mm lenses. About to add either a 100-400mm tele or 8-18mm wide - haven't decided which yet.

The video game thing mentioned above: NES, Famicom, FDS, SNES, Super Famicom, Genesis + 32X, Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, GB, GBP, GBA, 2DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita. More games than I will likely live long enough to play. 😀

I used to ride a Ninja 250 bike, but it needs some work. I'll probably have it fixed (turns out I don't really like working on engines) and sell it on. I'm kind of leaning towards something a little bigger -- maybe a Yamaha.

My pride and joy, though, is a 1974 VW Karmann Ghia convertible. Found it a couple years back with a seized engine and (of course) in need of a little body work. I am in the process of converting it to electric with a HPEVS AC motor. Once that's done, I'll probably do an electric bike. Would love to have a Thing and Transporter as well. But... time, space, and money.

In between, I do some coding (C, perl, ASM) and DIY electronics.

All of these hobbies tend to bleed together -- that's usually how I get into something new, by trying to solve a problem and realizing the solution is a journey of its own. Unfortunately, the side effect is I'll never be stellar at any of it, but I have a lot of fun with all of it.

gdjacobs wrote:

Sounds like your employers need to find a way that allows you to scale. What if instead of being in the Caribbean you had been hit by a bus? Also, Symantec Endpoint? Let me guess, it's a corporate mandated solution?

We're already over compliment in every department -- we're actually scaling down now, so it is even worse. Nuclear problems/solutions are 100x more complex than non-nuclear industry problems/solutions. Everything has to be fully documented down to the wire, software version / update version, model, make, serial number, drawing, tractability to origin, etc.. and it has to be kept up to date. Changes, projects, mods, and the like all have to meet NRC guidelines. Safety related stuff is an order of magnitude more expensive than normal equipment/hardware/software. For example, a small window-sized air conditioning unit I'm installing on a rackmount cabinet is going to cost roughly $2M when said and done due to location in the plant and the equipment it is attached to. In any other industry, I could do the same thing for about $2700. As for Symantec, it was the only NRC approved solution at the time which met all requirements for the Cyber Security guidelines. All other software was missing certain features that were required. I have more options now, but as you guessed, I can't just uninstall it and use something else -- it would require a new modification package at over $1M with fully integrated and documented changes that doesn't impact the proprietary software running on that computer system. It has to go through a full factory acceptance test which takes months.

Man, I bet the whole "cloud" thing is fun for you guys. From updates to back-end AI to SaaS to hosting... NONE of it is static for any appreciable time. How do you document or qualify something that is constantly changing?

SirNickity wrote:

Man, I bet the whole "cloud" thing is fun for you guys. From updates to back-end AI to SaaS to hosting... NONE of it is static for any appreciable time. How do you document or qualify something that is constantly changing?

There is no cloud usage. 🤣 Everything is offline/islanded. If data needs to come out, it goes through a data diode. If you need to bring something in, it has to be hash verified with the vendor, then scanned through an Opswat kiosk, then loaded onto approved portable media with secure firmware. (ex: Kanguru SSD/USB, write-once CD/DVD, etc) Yea, doing OS updates is fun.. every system has an offline WSUS server or similar. It's very close to how a TS/SCI network functions.

I work for AREVA/Framatome so I know your pain with the NRC and all the requirements.

wiretap wrote:

We're already over compliment in every department -- we're actually scaling down now, so it is even worse. Nuclear problems/solutions are 100x more complex than non-nuclear industry problems/solutions. Everything has to be fully documented down to the wire, software version / update version, model, make, serial number, drawing, tractability to origin, etc.. and it has to be kept up to date. Changes, projects, mods, and the like all have to meet NRC guidelines. Safety related stuff is an order of magnitude more expensive than normal equipment/hardware/software. For example, a small window-sized air conditioning unit I'm installing on a rackmount cabinet is going to cost roughly $2M when said and done due to location in the plant and the equipment it is attached to. In any other industry, I could do the same thing for about $2700. As for Symantec, it was the only NRC approved solution at the time which met all requirements for the Cyber Security guidelines. All other software was missing certain features that were required. I have more options now, but as you guessed, I can't just uninstall it and use something else -- it would require a new modification package at over $1M with fully integrated and documented changes that doesn't impact the proprietary software running on that computer system. It has to go through a full factory acceptance test which takes months.

I knew safety and documentation requirements were substantial in the nuclear industry, but I didn't know it extended so pervasively into less critical areas of operation. Still, I hope they let you out of the asylum every once in a while for a real vacation.

gdjacobs wrote:

wiretap wrote:

We're already over compliment in every department -- we're actually scaling down now, so it is even worse. Nuclear problems/solutions are 100x more complex than non-nuclear industry problems/solutions. Everything has to be fully documented down to the wire, software version / update version, model, make, serial number, drawing, tractability to origin, etc.. and it has to be kept up to date. Changes, projects, mods, and the like all have to meet NRC guidelines. Safety related stuff is an order of magnitude more expensive than normal equipment/hardware/software. For example, a small window-sized air conditioning unit I'm installing on a rackmount cabinet is going to cost roughly $2M when said and done due to location in the plant and the equipment it is attached to. In any other industry, I could do the same thing for about $2700. As for Symantec, it was the only NRC approved solution at the time which met all requirements for the Cyber Security guidelines. All other software was missing certain features that were required. I have more options now, but as you guessed, I can't just uninstall it and use something else -- it would require a new modification package at over $1M with fully integrated and documented changes that doesn't impact the proprietary software running on that computer system. It has to go through a full factory acceptance test which takes months.

I knew safety and documentation requirements were substantial in the nuclear industry, but I didn't know it extended so pervasively into less critical areas of operation. Still, I hope they let you out of the asylum every once in a while for a real vacation.

Yea, I try.. 🤣. Everyone tries. It is slightly better now that we have a 24/7 emergent response engineering team. However, I'm the sole individual who manages the entire protected area and owner controlled area security system -- roughly 3000 components, from servers to workstations, military grade FLIR security cameras, microwaves, thermal rifle scopes, encrypted radio, alarm stations, explosives detectors, xray machines, etc.. Currently in the middle of a $33M upgrade for the protected area system, I'm quite busy. 😵

Great job security, shitty schedule!

retardware wrote:

Its 1960s vintage technology is just beautiful.
(click this link to witness a tour into the insides of that well-worn-out nuclear plant).

You can see that safety and health of employees was not on their priority list 😵 Still, it could have been worse; at least they could call Houston in case of a problem 🤣

Anyway, I have several other interests besides old computers. I'm quite a car nut, especially old French cars that almost nobody wants to own have my interest (I can not afford new fancy cars anyway). They have unappreciated quirks and features. I'm one of those guys who simply likes looking at cars and drives a car on a Sunday afternoon just for fun. I currently drive two old Renaults (one is an almost 19 years old Megane and the other one a 20 years old Safrane). I also have a passion for photography; every now and then I take photos outdoors of nature, cities, the nearby port, trains, airplanes and cars.

Im level designer too, speaclly to retro games.

My two other main hobbies are painting wargaming miniatures (Warhamer 40,000 mostly) and Lego. And now, some images..

I collect memorabilia from Silicon Valley computer companies. ( Shirts, pens, key rings, etc ).

I’m into solar and green living, EV, spreading awareness and etc these days. The computers you’ve seen me post have been running on solar-battery. 😀

Computers was one of my first hobbies.

For a time I got into building and modifying cars and small block chevy engines but have given all that up in recent years. Might get back into it on the DIY electric vehicle side of things. I started building a electric truck but sold the project because result to cost ratio was all off compared to buying a new EV 🤣.

I actually wasn’t even really into computers much in the last 10 years until recently. This has been a fun walk down memory lane building these retro socket 7 machines and getting back into the fun hobby. Very glad to have found this group and am very grateful for all the help!

I do a hell of a lot of reading, even if it's mostly Star Wars EU/Canon books. There's very little past the thrawn trilogy in the old EU I haven't read, and little in general for canon. Luckily for the canon books, I can listen to an unabridged, well produced version while out walking as well.

BetaC wrote on 2021-04-02, 02:13:

I do a hell of a lot of reading, even if it's mostly Star Wars EU/Canon books. There's very little past the thrawn trilogy in the old EU I haven't read, and little in general for canon. Luckily for the canon books, I can listen to an unabridged, well produced version while out walking as well.

I’m not much of a reader but star wars and star trek novels would be fun to look into if I ever decide to get into reading 😀 I tried listening to some of the dune books and hitchhikers guide on CD not long ago and was put off by how slow they are at getting to the next scene haha

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-04-02, 02:23:

I’m not much of a reader but star wars and star trek novels would be fun to look into if I ever decide to get into reading 😀 I tried listening to some of the dune books and hitchhikers guide on CD not long ago and was put off by how slow they are at getting to the next scene haha

The Star Wars stuff has full sound effects and ambience, and often fitting music. If you want an easy start, go with something like Lost Stars. It starts out slow, and a bit young-oriented, but as the characters age so does the story. It's also a "just off screen" story for a long while, so it's not hard to follow. Otherwise, the new Thrawn books by Timothy Zahn are also quite good.

- I write and record music on bandlab - https://www.bandlab.com/creepingnet
- I build and modify guitars and basses for fun, as well as pedals
- I work on my old truck sometimes, I'm getting more into Auto Mechanics
- Though computers are involved I do sometimes make youtube videos - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet