Category: General

I'm still here...but barely.

It's been a crazy few weeks.  Why?

Older son graduates High School in a couple of weeks.  He also turns 18 around that same time.  So we have been working on getting his Eagle Scout Rank application done.  He finished all of the requirements.  The paperwork associated with the Eagle Scout Rank is kind of crazy.

Older son also has been finishing up his last requirements for Duty to God, which also must be completed before he turns 18.

Older son got a job at Seven Peaks, then decided not to keep it.  Why?  Because they pay less than minimum wage, offering a bonus if you work through the whole summer.  Stupid. But he also was made a Flight Director at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center, which is a paid position that he can hang onto while at college.

Speaking of college, we've also jumped through several hoops getting older son registered at Utah Valley University for the fall.  Next step?  Pay a lot of money for tuition.

Older son also had his final High School orchestra concert.

Younger son is driving.  Younger son got backed into by a neighbor, who did everything in his power to try to avoid responsibility for said accident.  We got the check from the guy's insurance company yesterday.  Between the accident on 18 April and yesterday, I've spent way too much time on the phone with insurance companies.

Younger son is also volunteering a LOT at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center, and since he only has a learner's permit, we've been ferrying him back and forth.

Younger son's final Junior High orchestra concert was last night.

Thank heavens I didn't teach the summer term course I was offered at UVU.  Teaching on top of all of this would have been WAY too much.

Life is crazy busy.  It probably won't get much better very soon.

A friend that I grew up with--a rather squirrely young man at the time--has grown up to be a loving, kind father of six children.

On Friday, his 12-year-old daughter, through a terrible accident, was deprived of oxygen for a time and was being cared for in a pediatric ICU.  Early the following morning, his daughter passed away.

On Friday, this friend's plea was for everyone to pray for an Easter miracle.  Yesterday, when he informed everyone of the passing of his daughter, he said the following:

For all who prayed for an Easter Miracle we wanted to let you know there have been four marvelous Easter Miracles. Because of Elizabeth, 2 people will receive sight, a young man will walk again, and a baby will receive a new heart valve. We prayed for an Easter Miracle, and were blessed with 4. We love you all. Thank for your love, support, and prayers.

My heart aches for this friend and his entire family.  They are taking comfort in the message of Easter--that Christ was resurrected, and that through Him, this same miracle will be given to Elizabeth.  Their faith that there is life after death is sustaining the family during this very difficult time.

It's amazing to me to see a father who has just lost his daughter turn away from anger and despair and instead see the miracles wrought by his daughter's life and death.

I was kind of waiting for something more exciting for my 500th post on my blog.  My commute this morning certainly qualifies.

This morning, as I drove to work, the traffic signal by Wal-Mart in Lindon wasn't working.  It's pretty simple, right?  Just treat it as a four-way stop, right?  Would this morning's commute turn into a blog entry if everything were that simple?  Of course not!

People inevitably get impatient, and one driver that was more impatient than most tried to sneak through the intersection by closely tailgaiting the driver in front of him.  The driver turning left looked to his right to make sure he wasn't going to get hit by someone else, but then didn't look back to where he was going in time and he clipped the back of Mr. Impatient's pretty little black Mercedes, nearly tearing the back bumper off of said pretty little black Mercedes.

Mr. Impatient, instead of getting his not-as-pretty-any-more little black Mercedes out of the intersection, jumped out of his car, SCREAMING at the top of his lungs at the driver of the car the clipped him.  Not to be outdone, Mr. Clipper jumped out of his car, SCREAMING at the top of his lungs at Mr. Impatient.

Mr. Impatient and Mr. Clipper then proceeded to have a screaming match in the middle of the intersection, effectively blocking two lanes of traffic in each direction including my lane.  I was stuck.  I couldn't go anywhere.

The screaming match continued as follows:

Mr. Impatient:  Dear, kind sir.  I do believe that your fine vehicle has caused a blemish on my fine vehicle.

Mr. Clipper:  A million pardons, good chap, but I do believe that your fine vehicle should not yet have entered the intersection, thereby not being present for my fine vehicle to cause said blemish.

Mr. Impatient:  Let us then move our respective means of conveyance out of said intersection, so as not to further impede traffic whilst we wait for friendly officers, who protect and serve, to come and determine who is at fault in this unfortunate incident.

Mr. Clipper:  A capital idea, dear fellow!  Let us do so!

Ok, so it was nothing like that at all.  The two got in each others faces, waving arms, and pointing fingers.  The shouting match continued for a couple of minutes.  I'm sure much more was said (screamed?) than heard, because neither stopped screaming and gesturing long enough to hear anything.

Then, Mr. Impatient became impatient with this "conversation" and decided to further his point by punching Mr. Clipper in the face.  Mr. Clipper, not to be outdone, returned the favor.  The pair of them, fists flying, started careening around the intersection, sometimes being narrowly missed by the vehicles that were trying to sneak by in the lanes not occupied by the pugilists' cars.

After a couple more minutes of fisticuffs, a couple of drivers whose vehicles, like mine, were blocked in got out of their vehicles, ran in, and started trying to restrain the street fighters.  That's when the first police vehicle showed up--and parked directly in front of my car, almost touching my front bumper.  Another police vehicle showed up, and soon the two offenders were in handcuffs in the back of two separate police cars.  Apparently, what they were trying to communicate was still rather important to them, as they both appeared to be yelling at each other from the backs of their respective confined spaces.

Since I had a "front row seat" to the whole spectacle, I was asked by a friendly officer to fill out a police report.  Fun.

Mr. Impatient might learn some patience today.  He was trying to save a few seconds by hurrying through the intersection when he should have stayed put.  It will end up costing him a LOT of time dealing with the Lindon, Utah Police department.  He will also be spending a lot of time getting the rear bumper put back on his Mercedes.  He'll likely spend time and money on attorneys to defend his indefensible actions.

And Mr. Clipper?  Although he was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would have saved us all a lot of time if he would have just stayed in his vehicle until the police arrived.

And that is not only exciting to be my 500th blog post, it's also why I was 45 minutes late to work today.

The radio is ready to put back together again.  We'll see if all the king's horses and all the king's men can do it.

It's been a bit of an adventure, to be sure.  Old engineering diagrams can certainly be problematic.  But I have been REALLY enjoying myself.  As I said before, it's been quite a long time since I've worked on a "hands on" project like this.  I've had some problems along the way though...

The first problem that I ran into was that I could not, for the life of me, find C14 (Capacitor 14) in the engineering diagram or in the radio itself.  It was just not there.  I asked around a bit on a Philco Radio forum, and was told that that particular capacitor (or condenser, as they call them) was part of the AVC (Automatic Volume Control) circuit, and the radio wouldn't work well without it.  I figured that I could see where the capacitor is on the schematic diagram and I could use that to figure out where it SHOULD be on the radio.

The second problem was that a 50L6-GT tube appears on the schematic, but when I pulled the tube out of the radio, it was a 50C5 tube.  This is a problem because 1) the 50C5 is much smaller and 2) the 50C5 has a different number of pins!  A little research led me to a site that contains spec. sheets for vacuum tubes, and using the diagrams on the spec. sheets, I was able to figure out which pin on the 50C5 tube would match up with which pin on the 50L6-GT tube.  It's not a small difference!

Because of the second problem, it was difficult for me to determine which resistors in the radio matched up with 3 of the resistors on the engineering diagram.  Tracing around the schematic diagram and looking at the engineering diagram, I was able to determine with certainty which resistor was which.

Once the replacement parts arrived, I started pulling parts off of the radio, and suddenly I found C14!  When I checked the engineering diagram again, I found that it was labeled as C9.  Also labeled as C9?  C9.  C14 had been mislabeled on the diagram.

As of last night, I have a nice, clean radio chassis, ready to solder replacement parts into.  I have pulled out mouse-chewed wires, beeswax and paper capacitors, and several resistors.  Once it's all put back together again, I'll check all of the connections and plug it into my dim bulb tester (without the tubes) to check for obvious shorts or other problems.  Hopefully, I won't "let the smoke out" of any of my new parts in the process, but that's what the dim bulb tester is designed to prevent.

I'm probably going to wait to put the tubes into the radio until after my tube tester arrives.  Yes, I bought a 50-ish-year-old tube tester on eBay that is in working condition.  That way, if any of the tubes have shorts, I can replace them BEFORE they destroy anything in the radio.

Once I have good tubes, it will finally be time to see if this 62-year-old radio will again come to life.

I recently got my hands on a 1950 Tube Radio made by Philco.  It doesn't work, and appears not to have been used for quite some time.  My son and I opened it up the other night and found it to be in pretty rough shape.  There's rust here and there inside and it's very dirty.  It even had a mouse nest in it behind the tuning knob.  I'll post the "before" pictures soon.

I think it will be fun to get the radio working again.  I found the schematic online and there are lots of people out there that restore vintage tube radios who share information freely.  Interestingly enough, it's still easy to find vacuum tubes.  With a bit of work, it's going to be a nice, working radio again.

It's too bad that the programming on AM radio isn't what it used to be.  Maybe my next project will be to make an AM transmitter that I can use to "broadcast" old-time radio shows to the radio.

It's been a long time since I've done any "hands on" work like this.  It's going to take some time, because I don't have a ton of free time on my hands, but it's going to be a lot of fun and very rewarding.

After my class at UVU yesterday, a young man came into my classroom and told me that he wanted to talk to me as a "potential student."

The next twenty minutes were very VERY strange.

This young man started out by asking me what is the best way he could learn Calculus.  I told him that the best way I knew of was to take a Calculus class.  He explained that he was working as a theater tech up at Sundance, and that he wouldn't be around long enough to take a class.  He would be leaving for another job in another state in the next couple of months.

Then he started to explain WHY he wanted to learn Calculus.  He asked me if I had heard of the Millenium Prize problems--seven math problems that have until now been considered unsolved.  The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts has offered a prize of one million dollars for a solution to any one of these problems.  I was familiar with these problems.  I read about them in 2010 when the first was solved.  Interestingly, the the prize was declined for "ethical reasons."

This young man told me that he needed to learn calculus because he has solved two of these problems and needs to know calculus so that he could publish his solutions.

Wait, what???

I don't completely discount the fact that someone without a formal math education may have solved previously unsolvable math problems.  Isn't that how Calculus was invented in the first place?  But the chances that THIS young man has solved TWO previously unsolvable problems is extremely remote.

He also told me that he had created a "sub-octal" computer that uses seven bits instead of two.  Again, I don't rule out the possibility that such a thing could exist.  I merely don't believe that this young man created any such thing.  Even if he did, how would this be the game-changing even in the world of computers?  I really can't see it.

I pointed him to MIT's online Calculus course.  He liked that, then asked if I knew someone at UVU that would be able to help mentor him through the publication process for his solutions.

I told him that he was in the wrong place--that UVU is a teaching institution.  He would need help from a professor at a research institution like the University of Utah or Brigham Young University.  He kept pressing me for a name of someone that could help him.

I guess I finally convinced him that I really DIDN'T know anyone that could help him because he finally gave up and left.

The whole experience has left me a little bit unsettled.  I don't know whether I was interacting with someone that is brilliant or someone that is mentally ill.  There were some things about his behavior that actually triggered a bit of an alarm response in me--that made me feel as if he was hiding a darker, more violent side of himself behind the eyes that never seemed to smile with the rest of his face.

Well, I tried the NaBloPoMo thing.  I didn't really like it.

*shrug*

Now people can't tell me that I shouldn't bag on it until I've actually done it.  Because now I have.  It's one of those things I just can't seem to get excited about.

*shrug*

In August, 2009, I underwent surgery to repair a tendon in my elbow.  I tried playing racquetball for the first time in January, 2010 and again in February, 2010.  Because the tennis elbow pain came back after playing a little racquetball, I was convinced that I would never be able to play racquetball again, which sucks, because I honestly enjoy that sport.

A friend here at work told me about a tennis elbow brace that he really likes.  It wasn't very expensive, so I decided to give it a shot.

Today, I tentatively hit a ball around a racquetball court for a while.  No pain.  No soreness.  So I started hitting the ball a little harder.  No pain.  No soreness.  I continued to hit harder and harder until my arm was pretty tired.  No pain.  No soreness.

I know that one session doesn't necessarily mean that I'll be able to play racquetball again, but at least I have a tiny glimmer of hope that I might be able to play again.

Only time will tell.

To the guy a couple of cubicles over who talks very very loudly on the phone:

1. I know you're not happy, but that language isn't appreciated in a professional situation.  You lose respect when you spout profanity at the top of your lungs.
2. Think about what you are saying before you say it.  Understand that everyone in this wing of the building can hear it.  Clearly.
3. Point #2 is especially valid when talking about financial things.  Now I know that I make more money than you do, but your team members might be upset to know that.  How do I know?  Because they started talking to each other when you went to lunch--wondering why you make more than they do.
4. Using a company-provided phone during regular business hours to work your side real estate business is just wrong.
5. A little bit of tact goes a long way.  Try it.  You might like it.
6. Weekday names are pronounced Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.  NOT Mun-dee, Tues-dee, Wends-dee...  (Yes, I'm nit-picking, but I'm going for a longer blog entry.)

Thank you,
Mr. Me

Yes!

For another month, I now have a "Feline Free Zone" in my house.  Every Christmas, we have to keep the cats locked away from the Christmas tree or they end up trashing the tree.

So now I can spend hours by the Christmas tree and I don't have to even think about cats intruding.

Yet one more reason to love the holidays...