Shoe Gazing

Special Effects Pedals

My son bought a new guitar and amp, and then he went out and scrounged a bunch of used special effects pedals. You plug the cable from the guitar into the pedal, and then you run another cable from the pedal to the amp. This puts the pedal in-line between the guitar and the amp, and when you tap the foot switch it activates the special effect. You can connect several of them in series and turn on as many as you want. Evidently this is a fairly common practice and bands that use lots of these pedals are known as shoe gazers because, duh, they are looking at these foot pedals while they play and it looks like they are gazing at their shoes.

What I didn't realize is how much of a band's sound depends on these special effects. John has been playing some bits of tunes using these special effects pedals and he is producing sounds I recognize much more readily than I would if it was just the tune without the effects.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

FAFSA

That's FAFSA, not FASFA. FASFA sounds better, and it works just as well in Google, so maybe it doesn't matter. Not sure just what all the letters in FAFSA stand for, but the last three stand for Federal Student Aid, i.e. money for college. I looked into this a couple of years ago, but all I found was a bunch of yahoos telling me to fill out this gawd awful form and send it in. No indication if I (or more properly, my kids) would qualify for a grant or not. I could just see filling out this form that looks even worse than a Federal Income Tax form, digging out all the required financial information (how much do you have? how much did your dog make? are you now or have you ever been a member of the triple A?), filling in all the blanks, dotting all the i's, crossing all the t's, mailing it in and getting a response in 6 months that says, no you don't get no stinking money because your dog made more than a dollar and a half back in ought nine. It sounded like a giant cluster foo.

And I don't care about student loans, I don't want no stinking loans. That's the last thing anyone needs. But I've been out of work for a while, and my wife was making some noises, so I said I would look into it again, and I finally did.

This time I found an on-line estimator that lets you fill in a few blanks and comes back with your "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC). From this it looks like I've been contributing more than my share, so maybe we would qualify for a grant, so maybe it would be worthwhile to fill out the stupid form and mail it in. The glass-half-full part of me says probably not, but my better half will disagree. So it looks like I've got some paperwork to do. Bah.

I also found a link to a federal page that had the government's actual rules for calculating eligibility, but the link is dead. Stupid bureaucrats. Probably just as well. I imagine it is probably as opaque as the page describing Abby's Military grade Tom-Tom.

I'll let you know if this ever pans out.

Quote of the Day

“Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask ‘What the hell is wrong with the projector?’ and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.”

— Colin Wilson, author, who was born today in 1931. Found on Bill Peschel's Blog.

Quote of the Day

California Bob has some words of wisdom:

"I decided to become an optimist late 2008. As a matter of policy, anyway. It has its advantages in that I don't have to worry about anything anymore.

"For example, someone like me who isn't working has to field a lot of questions about why I'm not working, what am I doing to find work, what are my plans to overcome the unendurable misery of not working, etc. If one is not an optimist, one has to provide detailed answers addressing one's goals, experience, interviewing strategies, etc. Now I just say "I'm looking, and I'm an optimist." Most people find this unanswerable -- because questioning optimism makes one an evil pessimist, I guess."

et la piece de resistance:

"It's like being a christian, or a republican. No one can touch you."

Quote of the Day

My youngest son: "I am going to be a hamster today."

Ignite Salem 1

I drove down (down means South, right?) to Salem yesterday evening for my five minutes of fame. I gave a five minute speech about my idea for a multi-level city. It seemed to go pretty well. The event was held at the Northern Lights Theater Pub on South East Commercial Street.

The theater was interesting. Projectors are finding new uses all the time. Our church uses a projector to display the words to songs, dispensing with the need for hymnals. Northern Lights uses a projector to display the menu above the concession stand. They also had a theater size projector that they used for the speakers presentations at this event.

This picture was an experiment. It is a picture of Ross Schwartzendruber, who organized the event, taken from across the theater at full zoom, using a water bottle as a tripod. No flash, the distance was too great. I used Picasa's fill light slider to bring some of the surrounding stuff out from the background. Can't really tell who it is, but Ross deserves credit for putting this show together.

Here are the slides that went with my speech:

Update March 2016. Replaced missing pictures with copies from my archives.
Update April 2020. Replaced missing slideshow with new embed code.

The Mechanic

Yesterday's hot email topic.

Working on the boat, shop-vac-ed out the "rain water" from the engine compartment bilge yesterday. Many projects, you all are welcome to working vacation, free lodging on the boat! One of the local millionaires has two nice boats near mine, after replacing the 4 new looking batteries, one of the 2 - 465 HP engines starters hung.... 2 days later a Mercruiser mechanic thinks that a cylinder is filled with water not allowing the engine to cycle. Those big engines are accessed via a automatic hydraulic hatch, clean and bright, but appears engine has to be pulled to access starter....not sure about the plugs. Lucky for you (me) my 160HP Mercruiser is fully accessible in its 10' x 6' x 4' compartment.

Andy

Your story about the millionaire and the boat motor that won't start got me started on a wild goose chase that lasted longer than I care to admit.

Some weeks ago I read a story by a millionaire yacht owner about a speed problem he was having with his 50 odd foot yacht. I remember reading the story and thinking this guy was an idiot and deliberating not bookmarking it because the last thing I need is another example of stupidity. Or so I thought.

This is the story as I recall it. Guy buys a brand new 50 foot yacht with twin Volvo engines. It will get up and plane at 22 or 23 knots. It works fine for a while and then one day it won't go over 18 knots. So he starts looking for the problem. He has the boat hauled out of the water. He has it weighed. They can't find anything wrong. The factory recommends that he change the pitch of the props, so has them flattened. Lots of fooling around and nothing helps. Finally they get some expert Volvo mechanic to come take a look and he finds an air pressure sensor (manifold pressure, I think) and there is water in the tube connecting the sensor to the engine.

That was the whole problem. Sensor was not reading the pressure right, so the computer wasn't giving the engine enough boost, it wasn't generating enough power and it wasn't going as fast. Guy spends thousands of dollars trying to find the problem, and the problem wasn't he didn't have the right person working on it. And after all was said and done, he had to buy a new pair of propellers, 3 foot in diameter, bronze.

Of course, we don't know what kind of jerk he was, or how smart he was, or how smart the people he was dealing with. Still, it bothers me. I don't know whether it bothers me because they were dumb and did all the wrong things, or because I suspect if it had been fixed easily right off, he would not have been willing to pay the same amount of money. And how much should he have had to pay to get it fixed?

All this reminds me of a story I heard about Panovision motion picture cameras. Some people were making a film and one of the cameras got a scratch on the platen that sits behind the lens that the film slides over. Who knows how the scratch got there. They had to fly in a Panoflex camera repair man at some exorbitant price to polish the platen and make the camera all better. At the time I heard this, the price seemed astronomical. I don't remember what it was, but now I understand. Motion picture film cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars. If it breaks, it could easily cost five grand to get it fixed, and it would be well worth it. One of those cameras can probably consume ten thousand dollars of film in a day.

As for your millionaire. If they can pull the plugs, they might be able to get the water out of cylinders and get it started, but how did the water get in there in the first place? Might be freeze damage from the winter. Pulling it out and tearing it down might be the best thing.

ccp

Yes exactly same sort of phenomena: Wealth-holder experiences technical problem, hoping to get rid of it, he throws money at it, experts are summoned, perplexed at description of problem, much futile complicated work is performed, problem is finally resolved simply and easily. I experienced this once with my 1986 Mazda B2000 PU, mysteriously misfiring, somehow I thought carburetor, started a complicated dissection of that, stopped and rebuilt before losing parts. Still misfiring, replaced plugs, problem solved. Big-boat-simple-problem just another example of check the simple most-probable things first.

Big boat problem update: Yes, removing the plugs to allow the uncompressible water out sounds like the right course. The aircraft mechanic friend didn't want to pursue that because of the awkward working angles. They were bringing a expert Mercruiser mechanic up, whom I think resolved the issue because I saw the boat out yesterday.

I have been sleeping soundly since working on my boat.

Andy

I see that millionaire boat situation somewhat differently.

Criminal who stole fortune from American taxpayer blows it on Volvo powered penile implant, and it doesn't work right. Whines to normal working guys, who REALLY care about his problem. Guy escalates problem to corporate level, who REALLY care about his problem. They decide to take a look and suggest a way for guy to spend more of his money, keeping a serious face. Guy spends money. "Gee, didn't that fix it? Sorry. We were sure that was it. Let's try something else. It'll be cheaper."

Guy parts with more of his ill-gotten money. Used props go onto secondary market and get sold for profit to normal working guys. Boat awaits next whiny complaint.

"Screw him", says boat, mechanics, and corporation. All laugh.

Oh, and I remember a problem with the Mazda. It was the vacuum advance.

MP

Yes there is a screw-the-rich-guy mind-set out there. I saw it at Maaco, Corvette repairs/painting, automatically 50% higher. Rationalized by "corvette owners are more particular, and we will more issues with them, besides they have too much money. I see it at our house, "big brick house, clay tiles, I can replace your 200 linear feet of gutters for $20,000". I see it for child support "you used to make a good salary, you have money, pay child support like your making $60K even though your not"

Andy

So isn't it the trend to be capitlized on, especially in these pinched times? Or is it somehow more Christian in the freakish Reaganesque manner, to continue to worship the wealthy? All I hear here is sympathy for the difficulty of the wealthy, or some twisted empathatic self-identification as such. Isn't that self-defeating, or do you truly believe you depend on the wealthy or will be wealthy yourself?

MP

No, it's not sympathy for the wealthy you are hearing, though I am not sure what it is.

Rich man with broken boat is willing to pay huge sums to get it fixed. If the problem is a tiny technical failure, a smart mechanic can sometimes track down problem and locate culprit for a relative pittance.

Sometimes tracking down the problem can take a long time. I remember trying to diagnose a reset problem with a CPU board at Intel. If memory serves it took about a month of hair pulling to finally track down the culprit.In this case it wasn't because the board had failed. There was a design flaw that affected all of this particular model of board.

Finding a mechanic who can diagnose the problem can be more difficult than finding and/or fixing the problem.

Straight forward mechanical repairs are relatively easy to deal with. People have done these repairs before, they know how long it is going to take, they know how much it is going to cost. They can compare that with the value of whatever is broken and decide whether to proceed with the repair or not.

Broken complex systems can be much more problematic.Hard to determine what the problem is without lots of information, most of which needs to be contained in the head of whoever is searching for the problem, and some people have a problem with paying for that kind of information.

All of which reminds me of this story (found on WPI):

EXPERTISE --There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion dollar machines. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, "This is where your problem is". The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly:
One chalk mark $1
Knowing where to put it $49,999
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

I suspect this story is more of a fairy tale.

As systems get more complicated, the diagnostician becomes more specialized. As systems become more reliable, the demand for good technicians goes down. Only a few companies with wide reach can afford to keep a smart guy on staff to track down these weirdo problems. Companies without the expertise make do with what they have.

Problem is figuring out which technicians really know what they are doing, and which ones only look like it. Makes it hard for business people to figure out how much to pay them. Business people are generally not that bright, so asking them to figure out which technician is more smarter than they are is a waste of time. They couldn't do it if they tried. This is where certification comes in, but I am pretty sure that all certification does is set some low minimum, like they can tie their shoes. Complex system diagnoses require someone with a specialized brain, and I am not sure anyone knows how to accurately determine what kind of brain someone has.

ccp