Howard's Zoo

In all this business with Canada I'm distracted from fitting in APPH stuff, however, Brendan linked the blog to Howard Van Netton and he asked if I mentioned his walk.

The first stressman I ever met was Howard, a youthful "old school" suit and tie man, he walked me to the engineering building which had been relegated to the back of the industrial lot, upstairs and out of sight, something that seemed to happen in Aerospace companies for some reason.

John Wingate sat next to him, and John was an easier target than Howard, who was more private and had less obvious character traits. One thing though was he had a very upright walk, feet almost at the "ten to two" position, in addition, he would approach corners in a straight line and sort of swivel through ninety degrees instantaneously.

The musketeers nicknamed him Howard the Penguin.

In the early ASAS and Patran days we all had an uphill challenge to get analysis files running, the things were based on punch card format, even though punchcards had long since vanished from the workplace, syntax was very important.

The tomfoolery spread to the computer system and occasionally an input file would be modified slightly, a full stop added, or replaced with a comma, or an extra space included. This was actually quite evil as the syntax system was difficult enough without sabotage to drive you crazy, although more justified trip wires were used on the young upstart Mark Overton.

One day, we noticed that Howard had used an animal name for one of his directories or files, so over a period of time we added files, of course Howard noticed long before it reached this level: