Huge wrote:


Yeah, but they're really hard to get hold of... )

(referring to rare-earth magnets). Not these days. Apart from raiding
obsolete hard drives (i.e. anything over 5? years old, which had an
astonishing capacity when you bought it and is now only just big enough
to hold the startup grafix for your mainstream OS ;-) they're sold by
our mates at Axminster Tools (www.axminster.co.uk), being as they are
ever so handy for holding down little jigs wot one might make up.

Additionally, they're now sold by many office suppliers, as ways of
affixing bits of paper or larger/heavier things to filing cabinets and
similar. As it happens, our office is awash with them, since the people
designing the Upscale Swanky New Premises wot we moved into in the New
Millenium decided that drawing pins were too lo-tech and declasse, so
issued all occupants with a score or so of rare-earth magnets in varying
sizes for securing the small number of tasteful approved objects to the
cubicle walls. (Y'know how it is - the furniture nazis try to exert
control until the first batch of architectural-prize photos have been
taken. Only contrarians would (a) go out to Focus next door and buy a
20-quid cheapie MDF shelf (pointedly on company money) in the first
week, to house the textbooks and reference works the Official Allocation
Of Shelves (a massive 8 linear feet in total) deemed more than a
Knowledge Worker would need, or (b) run a washing line laden with the
cyclists' clothes (for which there was initially no provision) across
the so-called "Street" - central atrium - to the tune of Coronation
Street, during our internal Welcome-To-The-New-Building ceremony. But I
digress...) On vaguely systematic experimentation, they proved to be
harmful to removeable magnetic media (floppies, Zip drives, and DAT
tapes) only under acts of quite deliberate 'wiping' - repeated passes
within no more than a millimetre or two of the magnetic surface - rather
than the instant-foulup-of-magnetic-meeja-within-a-coupla-feet which
some doom-mongers expected...

Stefek