Acquired skills?

[Jim Leonard]

I would imagine many of us have acquired skills along the way during our 
hobby/career/life with old computers.  I'm curious; what acquired skill are you 
proud (or ashamed) of?  I'll start:

I am proud of:

- Memorizing at least half of most POST beeps of early PCs (unfortunately for 
me, mostly the fatal ones :-)
- Being able to take off up to 1/3rd of an inch of tractor feed in a single 
swipe (none of this "tear-move-tear-move" stuff:  I fold it once one way, then 
the other, then I move all the way down with a quick "schrrrrrip!" and it's off)
- Being able to land most screws on a single quick lunge of a NON-magnetized 
screwdriver (of course, the 1% of the time I miss, it's a PITA to hunt for the 
missing screw with little wire claws)

I am "ashamed" of:

- Running a badly-shielded sound card inside a PC at full volume (or an AM 
radio tuned to static) so that I can "hear" what the PC is doing (hey, I was 
able to troubleshoot something many times this way!)
- Resting my finger lightly on a drive (hard, floppy, tape) to sense what it is 
doing, again during a troubleshooting operation.

Others?
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project?             http://www.mobygames.com/
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