Harry Palmer

Given my propensity for not thinking rationally when I see cool stuff on eBay. I couldn’t resist this original Belstaff “TrialMaster” waxed cotton jacket. As worn by Lambretta time trialists.

I have to admit that I’ve been moving away from the Mod look recently. I’m mixing my rose tinted history a little as it’s very un-mod and by looking at other items being sold by the seller he was a specialist in rocker gear (I didn’t know that the best rocker gear was made by “Lewis Leathers”!).

Having said that I’m re-aligning myself slightly more with the scooter “enthusiast” community which you could say lasted from the fifties right into the late seventies. They weren’t into music and fashion but time trialing and scooter racing. These Belstaff jackets appear to be standard issue and in many pictures they are wearing what will keep them warm and dry (leather boots, submariner roll neck jumpers) rather than what looks cool.

This is not quite he same thing (it’s a Barbour jacket designed for submarine Captains, with slanted top pocket for quick pistol draw) but who can argue with Steve, the king of cool.

Oh dear, the Lambretta Club of Belgium has had it’s forum defaced by Turkish crackers. There’s been a bi’ o’ bovver with the Turks and Kurds in Brussels lately. Or as they’re referred to collectively, the “Turds”.

I can’t do much on the Li150 engine project until I gather the right tools. I’ve started cleaning at least

This image was used in a lot of AT&T publications related to UNIX :-

I have several early shell scripting guides from my time at Lucent featuring it on the cover.

Nancy received an early christmas present this weekend and I couldn’t resist stealing a few.

I was thinking about the way my first employer, Compuware acted after we had finished the Y2K testing project in Brussels. They were left with this oddball team of mainframe junkies and they had no idea what to do with us. They had only one sales person trying to sell our team part time and they treated us like dirt, refusing to give us our own PCs and forcing us to “hot desk” etc. I remember that we were told off for reading the newspaper in the office when there was simply nothing else to do. We’d go off and play cards in an empty meeting room.

Of course you can’t put up with that for long and everybody left after a couple of months, just what they wanted. I came to Belgium and the rest of the team joined a competitor in the city. I think many of them were happy to get out of Slough and into central London.

I think I was the only one of the team actually interested in the technical workings of MVS. I bought this extremely expensive book in Foyles :-

I even got into Rexx programming and wrote a very bad version of Hangman for the terminal. Looking back through old floppies I couldn’t find any of my own JCL so here’s a bit from Wikipedia :-

//IS198CPY JOB (IS198T30500),’COPY JOB’,CLASS=L,MSGCLASS=X
//COPY01 EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSUT1 DD DSN=OLDFILE,DISP=SHR
//SYSUT2 DD DSN=NEWFILE,
// DISP=(NEW,CATLG,DELETE),
// SPACE=(CYL,(40,5),RLSE),
// DCB=(LRECL=115,BLKSIZE=1150)
//SYSIN DD DUMMY

$ SET PROCESS/NAME=”THX-1138″
$ ACS SET LIB [.ADALIB]
$ ACS SET SOURCE [.ADALIB.SOURCE]
$
$ COLPR :==”PRINT/QUEUE=ITC$COLOUR_PRINT/NOTIFY ”
$ LASER :==”PRINT/QUEUE=SYS$LASER/NOTIFY ”
$ LQ :==”PRINT/QUEUE=SYS$LQPRINT/NOTIFY ”
$ P281 :==”PRINT/QUEUE=J281$LPA/NOTIFY ”
$ PRINT :==”PRINT/QUEUE=ITC$PRINT/NOTIFY ”
$ PS :==”PRINT/QUEUE=ITC$PSCRIPT/NOTIFY ”
$
$ SHCOLPR :==”SHOW QUEUE ITC$COLOUR_PRINT/ALL ”
$ SHEN :==”SHOW ENTRY/FULL ”
$ SHGEN :==”SHOW QUEUE GEN BATCH/ALL ”
$ SHLASER :==”SHOW QUEUE SYS$LASER/ALL ”
$ SHLQ :==”SHOW QUEUE SYS$LQPRINT/ALL ”
$ SHP281 :==”SHOW QUEUE J281$LPA/ALL ”
$ SHPR :==”SHOW QUEUE ITC$PRINT/ALL ”
$ SHPS :==”SHOW QUEUE ITC$PSCRIPT/ALL ”
$
$ CLS :== “WRITE SYS$OUTPUT CLR+HOME ”
$ COOL :== “SET ACL/ACL=(IDENTIFIER=[*,*],ACCESS=EXECUTE) GRAPHICS.DIR”
$ FTP :== “$UCX$FTP/ULTRIX ”
$ LO :== “logout/f ”
$
$ LOCAL :== “SET DEF DISK$LOCAL:[SCRATCH] ”
$ M*AIL :== “MAIL /EDIT=SEND ”
$ MAIN :== “SET DEF SYS$LOGIN ”
$ NO*TES :== “RUN SYS$SYSTEM:NOTES$MAIN ”
$ R*UN :== “RUN ”
$ TNB :== “SET TERMINAL/NOBROAD ”
$ TYB :== “SET TERMINAL/BROAD ”
$ USESYS :== “ASSIGN/USER_MODE SYS$COMMAND SYS$INPUT ”
$
$ SA :== “SHOW ACC ”
$ SB :== “SHOW BROAD ”
$ SCPU :== “SHOW SYS/NODE=V8800 ”
$ SDEV :== “SHOW DEVICE ”
$
$ SM :== “SHOW USER BLEWIS/FULL ”
$ SN :== “SHOW USERS/NODE=ALL/FULL ”
$ SO :== “SHOW USER OPERATOR/FULL ”
$ SQ :== “SHOW QUOTA ”
$ SS :== “SHOW SYSTEM ”
$ ST :== “SHOW TERMINAL ”
$ SU :== “SHOW USERS /FULL ”
$ TIME :== “SHOW TIME ”
$ WHAT :== “SHOW SYMBOL/GLOBAL ”
$
$ E*VE :== “EDIT/TPU/NOCOMMAND ”
$ EL :== “EDIT/TPU/NOCOMMAND [BSCIT00IS01.BLEWIS]LOGIN.COM ”
$ PHOTOLOG :== “PLAYBACK PHOTO.LOG/OUT=EDIT.TXT/TYPE=RECORD/STRIP ”
$ T :== “TYPE/PAGE ”
$
$ SAY :== “WRITE SYS$OUTPUT ”
$

Just took the plunge and bought a Lambretta engine on eBay. The plan is to teach myself how to rebuild it over the winter. It would then be a standby in case the others go wrong or I could built it up as a sportier option. The price was ok. I asked about on the Belgian Lambretta club forum and Irish John said it looked ok and that was the going rate.

I’ve read all the books but now I think it’s time to take the plunge and get my hands dirty. I can’t rely on trucking the scooter up to the garage every time something goes wrong. However I didn’t want to dismantle a working engine for no reason, hence the purchase of this non-running “but turns over” engine.

Next step is to start assembling some tools and find or make an engine stand.

I found this plan at www.eurolambretta.com :-

There are a couple on eBay and given the price of steel stock at the moment it may be cheaper to buy rather than make.