The Nest Is Almost Empty Today......

The stepson and his girlfriend will be moving to the Fort Collins area at the end of the month, and her Dad (a really cool guy) got down here Saturday morning to load up her car and most of her stuff to haul back later today.

"The Kids" have been working pretty non-stop all week sorting things out, packing stuff up, and help her Dad load the truck. They made a really big dent over the weekend, and I'm astounded how much stuff they got loaded.

Her entire car is floor-to-ceiling with her belongings, and loaded on the flatbed he towed down here.

The box of his crew cab dually is completely packed, up to about 6 feet! He had plenty of tarps and tie downs, but I gave him a 4-pack of ratcheting cargo straps "just in case".

So, now that we're back from dinner, the hands have been shaken, the hugs exchanged, and we waved them off on their way to Fort Collins.

They're going to overnight in Las Vegas, and then finish the trip Monday.

She'll be coming back out here in two weeks to be Maid of Honor at her best friend's wedding, and then she and stepson will load up the rest of her/his/their stuff, and motor on out of Kaliforniastan.

I wish them well, but DAMN....they're taking BOTH dogs with them.

Looks like we'll have to start the puppy search again.....

Vacuum Tubes, a "Modern Aladdin's Lamp" by AT&T

Some of the early glass tubes used in transmitters were truly works of the glassblower's art.

When I worked at Fermilab, the RF Power Amplifiers used in the Booster and Main Accelerators used water-cooled metal-ceramic tubes made by Eimac.

They were 4CW100000X, indicating they had a Plate Dissipation of 100,000 Watts!

A quick look at the "Eimac" website doesn't show them listed anymore, so I'll have to get a hold of my buddy Dave who still works there and find out what they're using these days.

Anyway....a friend of mine sent me the link to this AT&T video about the Good Old Days.

Enjoy!

The Twelve Truths In Engineering

This was originally published as an April Fool's Day RFC, but I thought it was relevant to all of us who do geeky things.

Enjoy!

The Fundamental Truths


   (1)  It Has To Work.

   (2)  No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority,
        you can't increase the speed of light.

        (2a) (corollary). No matter how hard you try, you can't make a
             baby in much less than 9 months. Trying to speed this up
             *might* make it slower, but it won't make it happen any
             quicker.

   (3)  With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
        not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
        are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
        as they fly overhead.

   (4)  Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor
        understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in
        networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither
        builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational
        network.

   (5)  It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems
        into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases
        this is a bad idea.

   (6)  It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving
        the problem to a different part of the overall network
        architecture) than it is to solve it.

        (6a) (corollary). It is always possible to add another level of
             indirection.

   (7)  It is always something

        (7a) (corollary). Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't
            have all three).

   (8)  It is more complicated than you think.

   (9)  For all resources, whatever it is, you need more.

       (9a) (corollary) Every networking problem always takes longer to
            solve than it seems like it should.

   (10) One size never fits all.

   (11) Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and
        a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.

        (11a) (corollary). See rule 6a.

   (12) In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there
        is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take
        away.

OUCH....Hard Drive Failure In My Weather System

Well.....Sunday afternoon I decided to clean all the dust bunnies out of the little PC that controls and logs the data from my Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station.

I shut it down, unplugged all the cables, took the cover off, and took it out on the back porch to blow the dust out like I've done many times before.

Yes, both the PC *and* the air gun were properly grounded. I've seen boards get blown out (pun intended) by blasting them with compressed air, which can generate quite a healthy static charge if the air gun isn't grounded.

Got it all cleaned, put it back together, and it wouldn't boot.

Going into the BIOS showed that it recognized a SATA drive was in there, but couldn't read it.

Thinking I'd maybe (crossed fingers!) knocked a cable loose, I pulled it out, took it apart again, and reseated all the cables.

No dice....

So, off to Newegg to order a new drive, as all the drives I have "in stock" were way too big to dedicate to this PC.

A new 120GB Samsung Solid-State Disk was installed, and I'm loading OpenSUSE 12.3 64-bit on it now.

Then I'll update it, download the wview software and all the special libraries it requires, and configure the whole shebang.

*IF* I'm lucky, I might be able to recover the archived data from the "failed" disk, and transfer it to the new SSD.

Otherwise, well......I "start the clock" all over again recording weather data, and sending it to the CWOP, and on to NOAA.

Really OLD Radio/Electrical Magazines

I was at a board meeting for my radio club this afternoon, and one of the board members had a sack of OLD magazines with him.

He saved them from the dumpster as he figured they have some historical value, and I agreed to scan them.

They're from 1911!

They're in remarkably good condition, but some have tape holding the covers on, and some of the pages are starting to deteriorate, so I'm going to be extra careful as I scan them.

After I get them all scanned, I'll make a DVD with the magazines in pdf format, and I'll also post them on the web if I can find a place that doesn't charge.

In the meantime, here's a scan of the cover of one of them.

RCA "Indian Head" Test Card et al

Most people call these a "Test Pattern", but this particular one is more accurately referred to as a "Test Card" since in the early days of television, it was printed on heavy card stock, and held or positioned in front of the camera.

Wikipedia (where else these days?) has a very good article on this particular RCA Test Card, along with some external links to a guy who found one of the originals in a dumpster back in 1970.

When I worked for DirecTV, we used one of these, showing how far technology has advanced sine the early days of TV.

The history of optical targets, or "test patterns" is quite interesting if you're geeky, and covers everything from the TV test patterns to the strange markings painted on aircraft and missiles to track them during flight, and conversely, strange patterns painted on the ground or roof tops to serve as resolution checks for high-flying cameras.

Unusual Movie Prop Gun Cartridge

During the last few weeks when I was off work on Medical Leave, a movie production company that had contracted with us came in and set up all their gear.

They did a lot of filming up on the bridge, down in the engine room, the Launch Control Center, and what we call "Room 101", which is the Rocket Assembly Room where the payload gets mated to the rocket and tested before we transfer it over to the Launch Platform.

Almost all of the filming was done on 2nd and 3rd shifts, and since I was AWL (Absent With Leave!) when the schedules were made, I didn't get asked to assist the production company while they were on board.

It was mostly assistance to keep them from getting lost, making sure they didn't get into places they shouldn't go, and escorting them to the rest room.

Well, they finished filming over the weekend, and started breaking things down and moving them off the ship Monday morning.

The filming they did was a lot of "action" sequences, and according to my friends who were observing, involved  LOT of prop gun shooting.

So much so, in fact, that people were sliding around on the spent brass in between takes before they could get the floor swept up for the next take!

One of my friends said they were taking 5 gallon buckets of brass off the ship!

Even after "cleaning up", they were still finding brass rolling around, so one of my friends saved a spent case for me.

He had no idea what kind of gun they were firing, other than "It was some kind of machine gun!", and since it was a prop gun, might have been rechambered to fire these blanks.

It's obviously a blank from the crimped end, but the head stamp indicates it's a "9MM Win Mag", which I had never heard of.

A wikipedia search turned up that it's considered an obsolete cartridge, designed in the 1970's to duplicate the ballistics of a 357 Magnum in an auto pistol cartridge, sort of like a prehistoric 357SIG, I guess.

So, here's a couple of pictures of a cartridge you may have never seen before.

.
.

Bringing the Mighty Saturn F-1 Engine Back to Life

Interesting article over here.

Never thought I'd see the F-1 roar again.....

.

.

.

 

Salesman Joke

From a buddy of mine.....

A young guy from North Dakota moves to Florida and goes to a big "everything under one roof" department store looking for a job.

The Manager says, "Do you have any sales experience?" The kid says "Yeah. I was a vacuum salesman back in North Dakota."

Well, the boss was unsure, but he liked the kid and figured he'd give him a shot, so he gave him the job.

"You start tomorrow. I'll come down after we close and see how you did."

His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down to the sales floor.

"How many customers bought something from you today?" The kid frowns and looks at the floor and mutters, "One". The boss says "Just one??? Our sales people average sales to 20 to 30 customers a day.

That will have to change, and soon, if you'd like to continue your employment here. We have very strict standards for our sales force here in Florida. One sale a day might have been acceptable in North Dakota, but you're not on the farm anymore, son."

The kid took his beating, but continued to look at his shoes, so the boss felt kinda bad for chewing him out on his first day. He asked (semi-sarcastically), "So, how much was your one sale for?"

The kid looks up at his boss and says "$101,237.65".

The boss, astonished, says $101,237.65! What the hell did you sell?"

The kid says, "Well, first, I sold him some new fish hooks. Then I sold him a new fishing rod to go with his new hooks. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn't think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4x4 Expedition."

The boss said "A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and a TRUCK?" 

The kid said "No, the guy came in here to buy tampons for his wife, and I said, 'Dude, your weekend's shot, you should go fishing'".

.

WTF Is Going On With Blogger???

Well.....DUH!

I've tried to reply to posts on other blogs, and it will NOT let me post with my super-secret "drjim" ID.

It keeps insisting I use an old ID that I only use for a few Yahoo! groups.

This is getting REALLY annoying!

Maybe I should just move to Wordpress, or just get another domain, and run everything from there....

VERY Good News From The Hospital

My wife's grandson has been released, and he's back home.

They held him and extra week so they could wean him off the drugs they had him on. I don't know what they used to put him in the induced coma, but after they took him off that, they put him on Methadone so he wouldn't go into withdrawl.

They finally got him off that, and he went home on Tuesday morning.

Pretty amazing when you consider they had the Chaplain and the grief counselor team team there not that many days ago.

Again, THANK YOU for all the prayers and support. My wife was amazed at the number of people I "know" through this blog that poured out sympathy and prayers.

Thank you all, again......