Silicon Valley Redneck

Crap.

Crap crap crappity crap crap.

Aside from poor cash flow this year, and having lost about a month's work lately, and having a meeting today that steps on the last potential billable day of the month....

My refrigerator (a 17-year-old Maytag) seems to have croaked.  Air circulates, and the refrigerator compartment is cool, but things in the freezer compartment are gradually softening.  I'm guessing that the gradual softening of frozen stuff is the only thing keeping it cool.

Unfortunately, I just tossed a bunch of older stuff from the back of the freezer, thinking that air circulation had gotten blocked, so there's not as much keep-it-cool as there might have been.  Blasting a bunch of dust off the condenser coil (or, at least, where I think the condenser coil is) had no effect other than frightening the kittens.

Guess I'll buy a good-sized bag of ice this morning to keep things somewhat under control, and ponder (a) whether I might be able to fix it myself in the next day or two, and (b) how much a repairman might cost as compared to a replacement refrigerator.

Update: After spending most of the day in a half-hour meeting, I returned home, pulled the offending appliance clear of its niche, and commenced investigating.

Observation 1: kittens are curious.

Observation 2: there's a huge clot of dust at the bottom left (as seen from the front) of the bottom rear cover.

Observation 3: the cover having been removed, there's dust everywhere.

Observation 4: contrary to information received yesterday, the condenser coil isn't underneath, despite the presence of a grille thing under the front.  It's in the back.

Observation 5: much of the dust having been vacuumed up, the condenser fan can be seen to turn.  According to the wiring diagram, this is on the same circuit as the compressor, modulo the start relay and fuse.

Hmmm.  So, how do I tell whether the compressor is working?  It's a quiet bugger, though the plumbing does gurgle when the compressor stops.

Observation 6: the compressor is quite warm.  This strongly suggests the presence of electrical power to it, recently.

Observation 7: the air circulating within the freezer compartment now seems at least somewhat cool. Maybe it's working?

Time to take a break, hope no inquisitive critters get into the condenser fan, clean the crud off the back cover, and see if the compressor/fan circuit eventually cycles off.

Observation 8: after a couple of hours, the condenser fan is still going.

Observation 9: the air being circulated within the freezer is not getting actually cold.

Hm.  It's just possible that the start relay (PTC thingy?) is at fault.  That's a cheap thing to replace, assuming I can find one locally.  I'm guessing that a failure of that part could cause the compressor motor not to turn, while getting warm.

Failing that... it'd be the compressor, which appears to be a $350 part, and needs to be installed by someone who has the tools for the job, and the coolant needs to be scavenged and replaced, and... that's gotta cost north of $500 to fix the dang thing, which is getting into whole-new-refrigerator territory, even with the conspicuous increases in refrigerator prices these past 17 years.

Update 2: Found the official replacement start relay locally; plunked down $37 for it.  Installed it, with great difficulty (main difficulty was in removing the old one).  Compressor housing gets warm; cooling fails to happen.  So... dead compressor.  Great.  Looks like replacement-refrigerator time.  Have to check the ads for any Deals on a new one, and check out the used-appliance stores to see if there's anything cheap-ish that looks like it'll hold up for a year or so.

Update 3: Made the rounds of the stores that carry appliances, looking at Basic White Standard-Sized Refrigerators.  Not much choice; all the refrigerators they're pushing lately are Big, Fancy, and Stainless, and way out of my price range; seems like the major-appliance folks haven't heard there's a recession on.  First stop is Lowe's, where there's a basic standard-sized (18 cubic foot) Frigidaire for $467.  Then Home Despot (cheapest option maybe $500 after discounts), Orchard Supply (major-appliance department has vanished, but they've got lots of grills on display this fine October afternoon), Fry's (nothing standard-sized under $600), and Western Appliance (ditto).

So, back to Lowe's.  Turns out there's a sale on, and I can actually get that Frigidaire for $420 plus tax.  Should be delivered today, between 0830 and 1030 (just about optimal timing, except for stepping on morning-walkies time, but I maybe shouldn't go walkies anyway when I've got a cold).

And that, folks, is how I spent the money that I needed for overdue car maintenance.

Update 4: Replacement delivered on schedule, and now it's gradually cooling down.  Configuration is rather different from the old one; with the shelves in reasonable positions, having two gallon milk jugs (one in use, one full), and a jumbo bottle of grape juice appears problematic, so I guess I'll have to go back to buying the juice in normal-sized bottles (or even frozen).

The kittens are having PTSD over the whole delivery thing.  It was almost as traumatic as that time the little waggy-tailed dog stopped by for a visit.

Another dumb list

Buzzfeed has a list of many things a guy over 30 is supposed to have.

Starting with a tailored black suit.  Which I know I'll need after I relocate, 'cause you need to wear a suit to drive the tractor, right?  I saw it on one of those YouTube instructional vids, so it must be true!

(Actually, I do have a tailored-ish black suit, left over from Grandma's funeral.  That was a long time ago, and I should probably get rid of it, 'cause it'll never fit again unless I come down with a wasting disease and lose a lot of muscle.)

Aside from that... as the first commenter remarked, "Consume, consume, consume!"  Lotta those things seem to be alcohol-related.  Then there's cologne.  No.  Absolutely, definitely not.  No cologne.  Never, under any circumstances.

And, yeah, I've got several of the things on the list.  In the case of "Produce, produce, produce!" items... well, let's just say that my sewing kit is vastly better than the dollar-store thing they show, and my tool kit, unlike the one they picked up in the checkout line at Home Despot, includes real tools such as various vises, a chainsaw, and a vertical mill.  And books?  Books I got.  Trashy novels, classic literature, cookbooks, college textbooks, reference books for a variety of fields and eras; mostly in genuine paper form.  Few with fancy binding; I bought 'em for reading, not for showing off.

And a decent bottle of booze?  Well... after relocating, I'll probably pick up a case or two of medium-grade hooch to squirrel away in the cellar as trade goods that I won't be tempted to consume myself.  (Alcohol.  Yuck.  Ptooie!)

Numbers

So: Auntie Beeb has an article about retiring to furrin parts for a mere $40/day!

Which works out to $14,609.70 per mean solar year.

Just because I happened to look the place up on Wikipedia this morning: for reference, income per capita in Jamestown, Tennessee is $11,135.

Which suggests that there are places right here in the Uninety States where it's possible to get by on $40/day.  Especially if you bring some capital along, and can own your home outright.

Poor choice of world-leader endorsement?

One of the overnight spams in my e-mail has this subject:

Obama endorses herbal supplements

It appears to be one of those herbal, er, anatomical embiggenment products.

Really, is this an endorsement they want to claim?  "Here, eat these herbs and your wife will go on vacations without you!"

Couldn't they claim an endorsement by Tsar Vladimir, or maybe some South American dictator?

Ah, the joys of short-run SMT builds

With fine-pitch parts and lead-free solder, no less.

I had one earlier this year; a moderately busy little board with a couple of DFN-packaged voltage regulators; despite the perfectly orthodox footprints, these didn't get all their pads properly wetted during the manufacturing department's soldering process, so I ended up doing some rework.

Then there's this thing I'm working on now.  I assembled one myself, then we had five built by the professionals.  Trying to track down some strange behavior with the first two pre-production units (both of which have been heavily reworked, and generally mistreated, by now), I dug out the other three...

...And noted that some critical components, while being installed OK from an electrical standpoint, had various tilt & skew on two of the three boards, and this is sure to cause problems in this application...

...So I took the best-looking specimen, applied a dab of solder to one pad that hadn't gotten any solder at the factory, and spent all day characterizing some parameters that had been confusing in last week's testing.

The results were even more confusing, and by evening I had some measurements that just made no sense at all unless, say, a ground connection was missing.

This morning, with a microscope: ayup.  Looks like the ground pad on that dinky QFN chip probably doesn't have any connection to the pad on the board.

Argh.  Attempt to get some solder in there: no soap.  Apply flux and unreasonable amounts of heat (Sn-Cu-Ag solder, yuk) to remove the chip.  Clean up; apply teeny-tiny dabs of Sn-Bi rework solder; install brand-new chip.

Now that it's had time to cool off, it's time to see if the behavior has changed in a manner indicative of having all pads of the chip actually connected where they should be.  Then to try, again, the measurements from yesterday.

Update: Yeah, now it behaves itself.  Interesting thing is, it was trying really hard to work, even without the ground connection, as long as at least one of the inputs was sort of low-ish.  Puts me in mind of a tale I heard from the early days of CMOS, in which a V_DD pin was left unconnected... and the chip worked fine as long as at least one input was high.  Caused very confusing intermittent malfunctions.

Not thinking it through

Golly, UAVs could be used by terrorists, maybe!  Who'd a' thunk it?

Consider this scenario:

• During a large public event in a stadium, a terrorist launches a Mini UAV, which is equipped with a machine gun, from a building at some distance. He directs the Mini UAV into the stadium and remotely fires the machine gun. In the panic that occurs in the stadium numerous people are overrun and die.

Okaaay... and how about (a) a Mini UAV doesn't have enough cargo capacity to carry much of a machine gun + ammunition; (b) the recoil of the first shot flips it over, and by the fifth shot it's been shaken to pieces*.

Yeah, they're talking about people being trampled to death in the panic.  Doesn't require a UAV with a machine gun.  How about a powerful amplifier and a .MP3 of a machine gun?

And, that stadium scenario?  I've got a plausible attack plan for that one.  With mass fatalities, and not from trampling.  No, I'm not sharing the details, 'cause some dangerous idiot might go and do it.

Article via Tam.

 

* Actually, there wouldn't be a fifth shot.  The gun would have jammed by then, owing to extreme limp-wristing on the part of the UAV.

Oh, look: another quiz thingy!

According to this...

You are Gandalf from the trilogy the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. You are a visionary with grand ideas and courage to match. You are thoughtful and often spend more time thinking about the future than the present.

The Lord of the Rings is an epic trilogy which is often considered to portray the mythic past of England. Published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, the story is part of the mythology that Tolkien had been working on in 1917. Another well-known work that precedes this is The Hobbit.

So, I'm a grouchy, mostly solitary old geezer who'd rather think than fight, and who spends a lot of time wandering the wilderness, am I?

Er... yes.  But I refuse to grow a long beard and wear a pointy hat on a daily basis.

Found via OldAFSarge.

Update: Hey, I wonder how much it'd cost to get a proper wizard's tower built in Dogpatch.  Not that Gandalf ever had a tower, mind you.  Hmmm... needs stone, mortar, and labor, plus some civil engineering (AKA target design).  Just another thing to ponder.

On the mend

In a fit of madness, I decided to try short-edition morning walkies on Friday before heading down to the lab, just to see if my leg would hold up.

I ended up going about three and a half miles, so not really all that short.  Pace was not up to my usual, but not all that slow either.

By the time I got back, my leg was somewhat tired, but not spazzy.  Oh, and quite a few people had been wondering where I'd been the last few weeks.

It was, however, important to keep my hands in my pockets, with the left hand pulling the leg of my shorts up & forward so as not to rub against the nerve endings which seem to extend beyond the actual skin just above my knee.  (This condition seems to be reduced this morning, so perhaps it'll go away.)

After walkies, I proceeded to spend several hours in the lab, bouncing between sitting at a card table with my laptop on it and standing up to run tests in the temperature chamber - a gadget which had been apparently working almost-fine at room temperature had turned out, earlier in the week, to fail miserably at modestly different temperatures; Thursday afternoon, I came up with a fix, which was working pretty well.  We still need one key outsourced part made right, and I've just developed a suspicion that some critical components on my PC board were hand-soldered in slightly wonky positions; they really need to be reflow soldered with just the right amount of paste so the position will be consistent.

Anyway, the standing-and-moving-around time didn't seem to do much harm.  I'm still having Issues with one of the large muscles (this'n?), whereof I lack fine control - if I try to apply just a little force it gets twitchy and low-frequency PWM-ish.  Also, the knee is still overly sensitive, so maybe I need to wear extra-short shorts for a while (but not a kilt, sorry) to avoid setting it off.  There's also a bit of stiffness in the front of the knee, but I should be able to work that out.

Update: maybe it's the shifting weather, but now my sinuses are killing me.

Life's like a box of Cracker-Jacks

OK, maybe not so much, but every little shipment from Digi-Key does come with a FREE CAT TOY INSIDE!!!!

Namely, that slitty brown packing paper, which, in this household, doesn't stay thrown away (nor thrown in the recycle basket).  The little furry dumpster divers are all over it.  Seems the only way to keep the critters from appropriating it and shredding it is to toss it directly in the outside recycling bin (which gives them an opportunity to escape to the patio).

Mike Lee has a tax plan. I have a question.

Well, Mike Lee has this plan for income tax reform...

Says 15% of income up to $87,850, and 35% of income above that.  Simple, right?

But here's my question: for those of us who don't have regular jobs, there's this thing called "self-employment tax", currently 15.3% of every earned dollar from the first to the last.  Is this bundled into that 15%, or is it in addition to it?

If the generational transfer taxes (Social Security + Medicare) aren't included in that 15%, then I'd be paying 30.3% on my first dollar.  Not exactly an improvement.

How do you say "Ivermectin" in Motie?

So I finished re-reading The Gripping Hand...

I didn't remember anything from the first reading past about the first third of the book; this seems to be about par for the course when it comes to sequels I first read a couple of decades back.

There were some interesting bits of outdated tech; for example, there's the assumption that any audio recording can be erased by vigorous application of magnetic fields.  OK, so digital audio stored in flash memory wasn't a thing yet, back in 1993 (and I guess we can assume no surreptitious recording on wax cylinders).

Then there's a key plot element, toward the end: defeated tribes will get infected with the Crazy Eddie worm, turning everyone into healthy, long-lived sterile males.

Which works fine for keeping the population under control, including that of uncooperative tribes, until someone invents an anthelmintic for Moties.

(The fuzzballs need another dose of their praziquantel*, so of course I made the connection.  If the fuzzballs are reading this: eat your funny-tasting processed mouse loaf!  It's good for you!)

 

* Named after the Aztec god of yellow imported machine tools.

Recovering

I finally seem to be on the mend: I can walk around, in moderation, without triggering spasms in any large muscles, my metabolism seems to be more or less back to normal, and the Buttery Pat Syndrome has largely subsided.

Still got the sore knee, and some lower-back and hip pain, but I'm guessing that another few days and judicious exercise will get those under control.

Now, if I can get a proper night's sleep... a few nights in a row... perhaps I can return to normal productivity.  (Having dinner around 2000, so I can take my last pills of the day with food, is maybe not such a good idea.  Got to have dinner at a more normal hour - 1700 or so - and a light snack with the pills.)

Update: just spent about 15 minutes on my feet, in the kitchen... and the large muscles are getting just a little bit spazzy.  So, a ways to go yet.

Random thoughts regarding hyperdrives

In my awake-but-not-working time, I've gotten up to The Gripping Hand, which inspires the question: if the Crazy Eddie Drive takes a ship from one Alderson point to another, can't the return trip be made pretty much immediately?  So, why did the Moties never send a probe ship with a clockwork timer to jump, take some hasty pictures, then jump back?  Seems like that would be a way to get at least some information about the destination from which no (Motie) ship had ever returned.

This resembles a thought I had, years ago, when watching some episode or other of Babylon 5: a Narn scout ship pops into an unfamiliar system, is approached by awesome spacecraft of unknown origin, and is destroyed while the pilot waits helplessly for the jump engines to recharge.  Um.  So, why doesn't anyone make wartime scout ships with two sets of jump engines, or at least two sets of whatever it is that needs time to recharge?  Seems like that would greatly improve the odds of getting information back from hostile destinations.

Then there's the business of having specific jump points, at locations determined somehow by the local shape of space.  Many writers have used this.  Somehow, the jump points are always at moderately inconvenient locations.  Wouldn't it be totally boring if jump points only happened in places where space was really, really flat?  Like, at the point where the two nearest stars' gravitational attraction cancelled out?  OK, so maybe there's a reason no one writes stories around that assumption.

And I still think that the Nothing that's outside the windows when using a Niven-esque hyperdrive should appear as a perfect mirror, not a mysterious Blind Spot, but maybe I'm not understanding how the drive works.  (If it creates a little private universe, the boundary should be a mirror, as there's no outside for radiation to escape to.  This also implies a need to drop back into normal space every so often, to cool off.)

Also: If FTL travel happens through wormholes, Alderson points, or whatever - you engage the special drive at Special Point A, and soon appear at Special Point B, possibly having to do some esoteric navigation in between - why would merchant ships routinely carry their own jump drives (and, if applicable, specialist wormhole pilots)?  Wouldn't it make sense to set up a ferry service for each often-travelled pair, with a giant jump-drive-equipped carrier making regularly-scheduled jumps?  Price the service just below the cost of lugging a jump drive around, and sit back and collect the tolls.  This is obvious enough that it ought to happen just about anywhere there's a lot of traffic.

So anyway:

When I saw my regular doctor two weeks ago, and he figured the problem was more like sciatica than bursitis, he referred me to a physical therapist.

That appointment was this morning at 0900 (giving a date/time combination reminiscent of Herman the Cainster, nein-non-нет and all that).

She asked a lot of questions, poked and prodded, and figures the symptoms aren't really consistent with a nerve thing (so, not sciatica), but probably just some muscles are getting all crampy from always being used in exactly the same way.  So, a set of recommended stretching exercises (which, initially, seem to be of some help, though I can't stretch the afflicted areas very much just now).

If she's right, adding some stretchies to my daily routine should be a long-term solution, hurray!

I can't haz privasee?

According to the latest account, The NSA has compromised all the usual encryption schemes, so all your lovely encrypted chatter is Theirs.

Really, now: the NSA, spying on domestic communication?  The very idea is utterly unprecedented!

And it's inconceivable that any of the knowledge of how to exploit crypto weaknesses could ever be leaked to unauthorized personnel.  Like, via a rogue sysadmin or anything.

Metabolic disruption

I had mentioned that the sciatica - or the associated pain and stress - was messing up my metabolism, no?  So, I'm producing ridiculous amounts of excess heat, and sweating copiously to get rid of it?

Well... lately, the sweat has been quite greasy, and carrying (or acquiring over the hours) some volatile organic compound with a distinctive odor.  Makes me feel like the Breadmaster's henchman.