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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I mention real work as opposed to work one does in the role of a pansy boy, I certainly mean this both seriously and tongue in cheek.<\/p>\n
Only if you spend your days with real work will you ever understand. You will be dripping wet from sweating. Your clothes will be so entirely smelly from external causes. Your materials will be in dire need for cleaning ever so comprehensively. You have worked for many hours. And you will go back to do it all over again. A prosthetic arm that is built to last 3 years dies within 5 seconds, 15 minutes, or 2 months – using stock commercial parts, it burns and dies like paper consumed by a slow fire, component by component.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the world of real work.<\/p>\n
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The idea of clarifying\u00a0 what real men do as opposed to quiche eaters is certainly not new or mine. It existed when I grew up, and it probably was part of me growing up. When my godfather became ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis around 1983 or so and los his ability to speak, I was a teenager, and so without further ado I used my Commodore 64 computer to solder a large wide switcht to it, that could be used to switch a bit or so. We had these plugs and wires lying around, and there was some documentation that we got our hands on as we were networked under the Commodore 64 Anwender Club in Zurich with the funny abbreviation “CAC”. There, we swapped all kinds of interesting insights and there sure were photocopies of documentation that otherwise was not so available. At any rate, I then used the hardware switch to set or unset a software bit and that then could be read out in order to direct software program loops and so I had one very large character on the screen that was made up from little blocks (on a 25 x 40 character resolution CRT screen) and that serially went through alphabet, numbers and a few diacritical signs as well as a “delete”, “new line” and “print” command to print stuff on the attached line printer. So my uncle could press his head against the switch, and by virtue of my software, thus relatively easily write sentences. With that I had thoughtlessly provided the more ergonomical solution for him than my aunt, who had asked her chief programmer to help out whereas that chief programmer’s stuff was not legible and lacked the elegant hardware hack I had came up with, and the computer she had that stuff run on cost around 20 times as much as my C64. At any rate, the “family council” decided that my solution was technically too good, and would make the attempt of my aunt pale in comparison, or look bad, so it was decided to best remove my stuff and have my uncle having to use the device auntie had provided even though that was really hard for him. Clearly, I had landed a solution in the domain of real programming, with a hard programming approach to a then totally new area of assistive devices.<\/p>\n