I hate Philips

I have a Philips VCR. It can't play half the tapes I bring home from the video store. Take the tapes back and they try them and they work fine.

I have a Philips boom box. There is a hinged lid on top that covers the CD. There is no button to release it. Simply pull up to open and push down to close. But it doesn't snap open or shut. It has one of those drag deals built into it so it opens slowly, and closes slowly. Pain in the neck.

I have a Philips DVD player. The remote control has 47 buttons on it. There are like three that I use, and they are small, hard to find and are awkward to reach. Turn it on and it takes five seconds to figure out that there is no disk in the drive, and it won't let you open it until it has figured this out. Stupid design.

Now I'm trying to look up some information on a Philips electronic component on the Internet, and I've got this fancy schmancy web site that tells me everything I never wanted to know, but nothing that I do need.

What is it with these guys? The bigger the corporation, the stupider the people that work there? I'm never buying any more Philips anything.

Mr. Domestic, Part II

We have two parts because I still haven't been able to figure out how to get html to do what I want.

Looking for 60 watt lightbulbs at Home Depot today. Flashy packages saying buy me! Look closer and they are all for extra long life bulbs. Don't want any of those. Got burned once before on that deal. Bought some light bulbs that were supposed to last five times as long as a regular bulb. Well, they might, but they also produce one-fifth the amount of light. It was like turning on the dark. So, no thank you, I don't want the extended life bulbs, I want the original, short life, extra bright bulbs. But where are they? I finally find them. They are the ones in the non-descript packaging that are almost all sold out. Made by Philips. Bah. But they are cheap: 25 cents each.

60 Watt Lightbulbs	Home Depot	4/13/2010
Watts	Lumens	Life	Brand	Type	Number of Bulbs in package	Package Price	Price Per Bulb	Price Per 1000 Hours
14	900	10000	ECO	Soft White Compact Fluorescent	4	5.85	1.46	0.15
60	860	1000	Philips	Soft White	4	0.97	0.24	0.24
60	830	1500	Philips	Soft White Dura Max	4	1.44	0.36	0.24
14	800	10000	ECO	Daylight Compact Fluorescent	1	3.54	3.54	0.35
60	780	2000	GE	Soft White Double Life	6	3.17	0.53	0.26
60	630	1000	GE	Reveal	6	4.27	0.71	0.71

You might wonder why I don't go for the compact fluorescents. I don't like them because they take too long to come to full brightness. When I turn on a light it's because I want to see now, not in five minutes, or fifteen minutes or however long it takes those things to get their act together. By the time they are ready to go I've moved on to something else.

And if I want bright light, why don't I go for something bigger, like 100 Watt bulbs? I'll tell you why: because all the fixtures in the house are only rated for stupid 60 Watt bulbs, that's why, and I'm too cheap to go replace all the fixtures with something better.

Eventually, LED's will become common, and they will come with a lifetime battery & a wireless remote control. They will have a screw on the back and you just screw them into the wall wherever you want a light. No wiring involved. They will be so cheap they'll give them away in Cracker Jack boxes. All I have to do is wait.

---

I paid for my purchase with cash and the automatic machine gave me 59 cents in change back. Why would you use three dimes instead of a quarter and a nickel?

Update February 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Light Bulbs

Many, happy, 60 watt incandescent light bulbs. Burn, baby, burn!

My house runs on 60 watt incandescent light bulbs. Half the ceiling fixtures use them, and most of them are fully enclosed. I'm looking on Amazon because I need some and I don't want to have to remember to get them and I can't put them on the list because I may not be the one going to the store, and I'm not going to put the burden of finding the right light bulb on my wife. I mean, I have a hard time finding the bulb I need when I go to the store. (Am I being sexist? Maybe. Maybe I'm just picky, or cheap. Or maybe my wife and I have divided the household chores and I got the light bulb straw.)
       So I'm looking on Amazon and there's a 12-pack of old fashioned incandescents right at the top for $14 which makes them only a little over a dollar a piece. There are a zillion other varieties and being a glutton for punishment I take a look at a couple. I need bulbs that will work outside in the dead of winter, so no CFL's (Compact Flourescent Lights), they take forever to come up to full brightness. They might be getting better in this regard, but I don't think cold weather will help and I don't want to spend the time to find out. Then there's LED's which have come way down in price so they might almost be worth trying EXCEPT you can't use them in enclosed fixtures.

Question: can i use this bulb indoor on an enclosed ceiling fixture?
Answer: Philips recommends against it. The base of the bulb has this printed on it: "not for use in totally enclosed luminaires". The box says nothing about this restriction, which I feel is quite misleading. I have yet to see a Philips LED bulb that is rated for use in totally enclosed fixtures. 
By rrr on June 21, 2016

That's just weird. I would think that if a fixture can handle the tremendous amount of heat generated by an incandescent bulb, it should be able to handle the minimal amount of heat coming from an LED. I mean 100 watts versus 8 watts, you shouldn't even be able to detect the heat from an LED bulb. But that's Philips for you. Corporate new doublespeak at its finest.

Floating Heads

1960s Norelco santa ad
"Floating heads, floating heads, . . .' I'm telling my son about the song in this old Norelco TV commercial. He doesn't believe me, so I go looking for it, and . . . bupkiss. Seems I am not the only one to remember it, but so far, no cigar. The ads I've seen look similar, Santa gliding over the snow on a sleigh made from the business end of a Norelco razor, and the tune sounds the same, but none of them use "floating heads" in the lyrics.

I tried to find someone at Norelco I could ask about this, but Norelco belongs to Philips these days and Philips, well, there is something wrong with Philips.

Home Theater, Part 3

So (three weeks ago) the DVR blew up Friday night, I called Verizon Saturday and they sent someone out Sunday afternoon. He brought a new DVR with him, plugged it in and it has been working ever since. I was impressed.

The console had a small hole about an inch in diameter for threading cables through. It worked, but it was a real pain. When I finally pulled the cabinet away from the wall I found that the back panel was cracked in two. I pulled it off, and cut out the section that was behind the shelves with the glass door, which happened to be where the crack was. From the weight of this cabinet, I suspected that it was all made out of particle board, but apparently not. The back panel, which is usually cardboard was 1/8" plywood. Some of the cabinet was particle board, like the interior partitions, but other parts like the shelves and drawers were solid wood. The drawers were even constructed using dovetails. On the other hand, the back panel was put on using a power screwdriver without bothering to drill any pilot holes. A real mish-mash of craftsmanship and shoddy production. But it is a good looking piece of furniture. Made in China, in case I haven't already mentioned it.

Now it is much easier to string the cables. We could get by with three foot long cables except for the fact that the console and the equipment and the TV combine to weigh about 300 pounds, and I do not want to have to move it anymore. I set the DVD player and the DVR on an ottoman in front of the console, plug in the cables into the TV, drop them in back of the console, and then pull them out the front and plug them into the back panels of the electronics. Now I just slide the electronics back onto the shelves, the cables fall out the back, the shelf slides off its' support brackets. Oh fudge. Start over. I may have to screw the shelves to the support brackets. Good, everything is in place.

The home theater amplifier/DVD player has a built-in five disk changer, which means it is really deep. It was a squeeze to get in the cabinet with the back panel in place. Only problem here now is that you can see the wall and all the ugly cables hanging down in the back, no panel in back of the equipment shelves to hide this stuff anymore. I take the piece I cut out and drop it down in back and it does a fair job of camouflaging the mess. Someday I may fix this, but everything is working now, so I will probably just leave it.

I finally got around to ordering the HDMI cables from Newegg.com. Not quite $20 for two, including shipping. Also ordered an S-video cable, but for some reason they couldn't fill the order. Not only that they wanted to ship it separately which basically means I have to pay the $8 shipping charge twice. And just to rag on Philips a little more, the $60 cable at Freddies was made by Philips, and the S-video cable that got canceled was also a Philips item.

So I replaced the component and composite video cables with the HDMI cables and now we can get by with one remote control instead of having to juggle them. Oh, wait, I haven't tried a DVD yet, or have I? But the power button on the Verizon remote turns on all three devices. I think the Verizon remote sends a signal to the DVR, and then one to the TV. The TV in turn sends a message over the HDMI cable to the DVD player to turn on. So it all takes a couple of seconds before the amp says "HELLO".

Only problem now is that my feet are in the way. In the basement, the player and the STB (Set Top Box) are above the TV. With this new system, the electronic boxes are below the TV, about the same level as the seat of the couch. When I put my feet up on the ottoman, they are almost exactly between the remote and the electronics. You might think that that should not be a problem, but I wonder if the glass might be attenuating the signal a bit. Oh, the price we pay for fashion.

We moved the old wardrobe upstairs by my bed. I run into it nightly. We still need one more little piece to go at the other end of the couch to support the speaker. We could just set it on the floor, but when the room gets vacuumed, it is liable to get clobbered. I would rather have it up off the floor than have to worry about it. I could just get a cardboard box or a concrete block, but that would be a little tacky for such a fancy room. Never mind that we are talking about a corner that no one except the housekeeper ever sees. On the other hand, it would be nice to have somewhere to set your drink, so we went looking at end tables today. We found several pieces that would work, from $15 to $250. I am hoping we can get by with the $15 solution. I do not need to keep spending large sums of money. Of course if it was up to me, we would probably be sitting on folding aluminum lounges from K-mart and using a Coleman cooler for a table, and the TV would be hanging from a lag screw in the wall. Okay, maybe two lag screws.

Oh yes, more on the DVR. It can handle two channels simultaneously. This means you can record two channels, or you can watch one and record another, or you can record two and watch one of the ones you are recording. It also supports HD recording. But wait, there's more! You can watch shows that have been recorded on the DVR on the TV in the basement, even though the there is no DVR in the basement. Of course this extra STB costs an extra $10 a month. This was the deciding factor in our neighbors NOT signing for Verizon FiOs TV. They have four TV's, so they would have been paying $50 a month for the DVR and the STB's, and that was just too much. This, of course, is on top of the all the shows that you are paying $45 a month for.

I still don't know how much this is going to cost me. There is the land line, the television service, internet access, long distance, the DVR & the STB, and HBO. And taxes. And fees. And other stuff. I expect the whole bill to be in the neighborhood of $100 a month, maybe $150. We shall see.

Weekend

DVD Player, Part 1

Friday night (or was it Thursday night? I really don't remember and it doesn't make much difference anyway) the remote control for my DVD player quit, or at least I thought it was the remote. Changed the batteries, no help. So Saturday morning I start looking into the problem. Maybe it has fixed itself (remote controls are notoriously flaky in my house), but no, and the new batteries check out. So I look on the Internet, and Philips has replacement remote control that goes for $10. The also have a remote control that goes for $400. The blurb I read about them claims they have sold hundreds of thousands of them. I was stunned and amazed.

http://www.remotecentral.com/tsu3000/index.html

Eventually I realized that the remote controls for both the TV and DVD could be programmed to run the other one. So I tried it. I tried a dozen different codes in the TV remote but none of them enabled it to control the DVD player. Then I tried programming the DVD remote and got instant control of the TV. So it wasn't the remote after all.


Books

Saturday afternoon Johnny and I walked to downtown Hillsboro. He was very angry with his brother. He steamed and stewed and fussed most of the way. But then we went to the used book store and he forgot about his troubles. He found five or six "Star Wars" paperbacks. I found a mystery by Sue Grafton ("L is for Lawless"). You've probably seen her books in the supermarket. She has a whole series. They are not great, but they are entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was finished by Sunday evening.


Fund Raiser

Saturday evening a friend of mine (Bob Coussens) invited Anne and I to join him and his wife at a fund raiser for the Hillsboro Schools Foundation. They fund educational enrichment programs for the Hillsboro Public Schools. It was held at the "Tiger Woods Center" on the Nike campus in Beaverton. A very bizarre experience for me. There were some real heavy-weights there. Three former Intel employees: Keith Thompson, Luis Machuca and Steve Packer.

I didn't get to speak to Keith. He and Luis were VP's at Intel. I actually couldn't remember his name till several hours later when it finally popped into my head. The only time I talked to him was 15 or 20 years ago when I was working at Intel's Deer Valley facility in Phoenix, Arizona. There was a big meeting with all employees and Keith was the speaker. Something about Intel making CPU chips for PC's and selling them to people who were making motherboards, and not wanting to be in the motherboard business because we would be competing with our customers. I stood up said it sounded like Intel was afraid. What's the difference if we sell chips on our own motherboards, or we sell chips to other people to put in PC's? Every PC is going to have an Intel chip, it doesn't matter who makes the motherboard. Anyway, before that, Intel didn't make or sell motherboards, and after that they did, and it was all because of my conversation with Keith (ho, ho, ho).

I had never met Luis before. He asked whether I was with "the labs" and I said I couldn't tell, we were being reorganized every two weeks when I was there. He said that was his doing. He is now running Kryptiq:

http://www.kryptiq.com/

Steve Packer was a manager in PCEO (Personal Computer Enhancement Operation) when I was working with the "SatisFAXtion" faxmodem there. He has forsaken computers and gone into politics as a liberal and I believe he is fervent about his cause. Time for men of good will to step up the plate and squash these neo-conservative fascists.

http://www.washcodems.org/



DVD Player, Part 2

Sunday we went to Costco to pick up a new DVD player. I wanted to get a DVR (digital video recorder), but the only one they had was a Tivo and it comes with a subscription requirement, and I continue to be opposed to monthly payments if I can avoid it. We picked up a Toshiba unit for $50. It is much smaller than our four year old Philips model (also purchased from Costco for $190). The old one barely fit in the new box with all the foam packing material removed. The TV and DVD player both support three kinds of video signals:

• Composite
• S-Video
• Component or Chrominance/Luminance
  

Composite uses a single cable with "RCA" phone plugs, similar to an audio cable. S-Video uses a special cable. Component uses three cables, similar to the composite or audio cables. I had hooked up the old DVD player using the component connections, as it promised the best picture. While I was fooling around with the old DVD player I must have plugged some cables in wrong
because component video no longer works. When I tried it with the new DVD player I get a picture, but it is completely red. Must have blown something on the blue input circuit. Hard to imagine, these are just low level signals, no current to speak of, but something bad happened. So now I'm stuck with composite video, not that I can tell the difference.


Coffee

While we were at Costco we also picked up a "Senseo" coffee maker. It uses little premeasured packets of coffee and it only makes one cup at a time. It says it will make two cups, but the cup size they are talking about is four ounces, so two of their cups only makes one of my cups. Anyway, I thought it might be a good idea. Quick, easy, good cup of coffee. Turns out it's not that much quicker or easier, you still have to fill the reservoir. It's made by Philips, one of my least favorite companies. While I was hemming and hawing about whether we should get it or not, Anne picked it up and put in the cart and walked off down the aisle. I made a cup of coffee with it when I got home, and it was pretty good. But the unit leaked a little bit. I could have lived with that, but it was horribly noisy. It has some kind of pump inside it makes a horrible racket. Anne couldn't abide with the leak, so we packed it up and she took it back. I'm glad to be rid of it, but I still need to find a new coffee maker.

Blinking LED's

After almost a week of fussing, I finally got to the point where I could control the LED's on this project. You might think I exaggerate the difficulties, but I assure you I do not. You see, these little lights are not controlled directly by lines to the CPU, but by another chip, an intermediary. This intermediary is not what you would call civilized, growing up as it did amongst hard nosed gates and latches. It is a child of the hardware world and never learned any of the protocols of civilized discourse. The only language it speaks is that of clock and data. In short, it uses the I2C interface, an uncouth manner of communication somewhat analogous trying to talk to the king of a Byzantine empire using Morse code. I2C stands for Inter Integrated Circuit. It is a serial communications protocol used for transferring data between chips on the same circuit board. It was invented by Philips, which gives me one more reason to hate Philips. I had numerous examples to study, and one piece of code written specifically for this board. After numerous trials I got this last program to turn on all the LED's for one brief moment. I never got it to work again. If it hadn't been for that one shining (!) moment I would have been ready to toss in the towel. I waded through the instructions, and tried to write some code that followed the directions, but there are layers and layers. The worst part is I do not know exactly what I did at the end that finally made it work. So far it seems repeatable, but I am keeping my fingers crossed. One thing that struck me is the use of mnemonics for some things and numbers for others. Writing code for this project involves addressing registers. The processor has 100's of registers, each of which has a name, like I2C2CON which stands for I2C (2nd Module) control register. Each of the bits in this register likewise has a name. The manufacturer has conveniently provided a file which has all the names of the registers defined, as well as providing mnemonics for all the bits in all the registers as well. For some reason, the register names do not seem too bad, but the names for the bits within the registers are too clumsy to use easily. Things like I2C2STAT_BCL_MASK are just more trouble than they are worth. It is much easier to just say BIT10, also slightly more reliable. For this project I had to deal with each register often enough that I learned it's name. I never bothered to learn it's address. I might not deal with all of the bits in that register, and I might only deal with any particular bit only once. To use the bit, I read the reference manual that describes the function of the register. It's position within the register, along with the register's name is documented in the manual. However the mnemonic assigned to the bit is in another manual, or in a header file. So using the mnemonic requires an additional step to find out what it is. Well, that explains why I didn't use the mnemonics for the bits within the register, but I did use the names of the registers themselves. Huh.

Key to Happiness

I left my key to the house under the door mat this morning. Darci is coming to clean the house and I have a doctor's appointment at the sleep clinic 8 AM. Last time I saw Dr. Matsumura she told me that when I wake up in the middle of the night I should not get on the computer or watch TV or basically don't use any electronical gizmos. This time she tells me that should avoid these devices because they emit light which goes right to your retina. It must be a matter of brightness. Indirect lighting, i.e. light coming over your shoulder, is not going to be as bright as light shining in your eyes. Guess I need to find a deck of cards so I can play solitaire the old fashioned way.
     Got home and the front door is locked. Ring the bell and knock but Darci doesn't answer. I try the keypad for the garage door but nothing happens. Hmmm. Guess I'll go to McDonald's and eat breakfast. Pancakes, sausage, orange juice and coffee, $7.15. Coffee is $1, any size. Orange juice is large, like 12 oz. Surprised me. Usually they are half that size. When I was younger and drank a bit I thought those puny little juice servings were pitiful. Now that I don't need the big ones, they give them to me.
    Back at the house, I ring the bell again but still no response. I'm tired, I didn't get much sleep last night, I'll just take a nap in my truck. I actually manage to sleep for a bit.
    I look at the keypad. I can't remember the last time I used it, the battery is probably dead. The battery cover says 12 Volts. Shoot, I can jump start this sucker with my truck, if I can just get the cover off, but that requires a Philips screwdriver. Usually my Swiss Army knife (Tinker model) has one, but this one doesn't. I try a couple of other blades but the screw doesn't budge.
    I hear my neighbor banging away in his backyard, I know he has a Philips, I'll go ask him. When I wander over I find him knee deep in excavating a flat spot for a patio. Probably a bit rude to interrupt him to solve a problem that shouldn't have happened. I leave him be.
    Okay, fine, you stupid keypad, your battery cover is coming off whether you like it or not. I figure I'll ruin it by prying it off, but no, it stretches enough that it just pops off. The battery is about half the size of a triple A. I buff up the contacts, put it back in, give it a couple of twirls and presto! The garage door opens.
    Turns out when I was ringing the bell Darci was in the basement and running the vacuum cleaner. No wonder she didn't hear me.

Coffee & Coffeemakers

I am finally getting my taste for coffee back. I had a nasty sinus infection two or three years ago about the time my Dad died. Terrible, I can't remember whether it was two or three years ago? Let's see. He was 87 when he died, he was born in 1918, so his last birthday must have been in 2005 (7 plus 8 equals 15, and 2005 is the most recent year that ends in 5). He died in January, so that must have been 2006, so it was only two years ago, not three. Thank you, memory.

Anyway, back in August we took a trip to Chicago and spent a few days at the Chicago Hilton where they had these little two cup Cuisinart coffee makers that made pretty good coffee using these little prepacked bags of coffee. There was a coffee man who came around every day, dropping off your allotment of these coffee packs.

So I am getting my taste for coffee back and I would like to have a cup of coffee without having to put my shoes on and drive the two miles to McDonald's. (I think their coffee is fine, and it is about as cheap as you can get, and they even put the creamer in for you, which may be to your liking or not). A while back we bought a Senseo one cup coffee maker at Costco. It looked like it was everything we wanted. Put the packet of coffee in, pour in a cup of water, put the cup under the spout and press the go button. Wrong. Looks good, but sounds terrible. Noisy like a freight train. Coffee was okay, but the noise was unacceptable. I think it was made by Philips. Another reason for me to hate Philips. Took it back.

This Christmas I took another swing at coffee. My wife got me a Cuisinart two cup coffee maker. This one is much bigger, it is about twice as tall as the one at the Hilton. It is designed to use travel cups (supplied) and has a small filter basket. Well, we have a regular coffee maker with a filter basket, and we use it sometimes, but you never know how much coffee you are going to need. On weekends it will usually all get consumed, but weekdays, that does not happen. And besides, it uses a filter, which means you have to get the filter out, futz with it to get to stay open so you can pour the coffee in, and then hope that one side does not fall over and let grounds into your drink. That is a real bummer. And then you have to figure out how much coffee to put in. I do not want to have to figure this out. The directions are conflicting and vague. For instance: How much coffee does a 10 cup coffee maker hold? About five. They use four ounce cups! Nobody drinks four ounce cups of coffee. Who do they think they are kidding? And then the instructions on the coffee want you to measure one and a half tbsps for each cup of coffee. What the heck is a tbsp? More importantly, where is my one and half tbsp measuring cup? And then when you measure it out it you get coffee that is strong enough to peel paint.

The last place I worked had a Bunn coffee maker. We had a green measuring cup of some arbitrary size we used to scoop coffee into the filter. Some people used one and one half of these scoops. Some people used two. So you never knew what kind of coffee you were going to get. Good, weak, or wacko strong.

I am not interested in measuring coffee. I do not want to make several pots and see which one is best. What I would really like is a coffee vending machine. Fill it with 50 pounds of coffee beans and hook up the water supply. Press the button and it grinds the beans and brews one cup of coffee. No waste, no measuring, no fooling around. But vending machines are very expensive. So I am trying to make do with my two cup Cuisinart.

I bought some Senseo pods at the local grocery store and have been trying them out. It takes two to make one decent cup of coffee, four for a travel mug. I think this may be because the Senseo machine brews coffee under pressure. So more experimentation is in order. I think my next attempt will be with Folger coffee bags, which are similar to tea bags. Since they are made to work without pressure, they may work out all right.

Okay. I finished writing this entry and then I went and looked for pictures, because pictures are worth a thousand words, and that's when I found the picture of Hilton coffee maker. So now I am going to see if I can find one. Cheers.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Speakers

Pyle PL63BL 6.5-Inch 360-Watt 3-Way Speakers (Pair)

Before I get started on building my dream car, let's see if we can make a minor repair to my truck. It came with a semi-fancy audio system from the factory, meaning 4 regular speakers and a couple of tweeters. A few years ago I let younger son borrow it and when they came back the speakers were blown. Sure, it could have been age and normal wear and tear, but when there is a teenage boy involved, well, you figure it out.

The blown speakers make the radio pretty much unlistenable, and since I'm still driving across town a couple of times a week, not having any tunes was kind of a bummer. The trip to Miami and my Thunderbird fantasy finally pushed me over the edge and I decided to do something about it.

I could have taken it to an audio shop, but it probably would have cost a minimum of a couple of hundred bucks, and being easily suggestible I probably would have opted for the upgrade which would have been another hunert bucks. But I'm in cheapskate mode and I'm trying to fix things around the house, so let's see if we do this our own self.

The easiest solution would have been to buy the original speakers. That way they would bolt right in and the electrical connectors would plug right it in and the whole installation would be easy-peasy. But OEM speakers are a little hard to find (maybe they have them in stock and maybe this listing was posted 15 years ago and nobody has bothered to update it since) and a little expensive (like $50 each). Okay, we'll buy generic speakers and suffer the hassles that every kid who ever upgraded the speakers in his car suffered.

I finally got started on this project this afternoon and it was fraught with all the pain-in-the-neck hassles that I expected. I started with the drivers door and the first thing is to pull off the inner door panel. There are five screws, three Philips head and two Torx. Pull those out and now you can lift the panel and pull it loose from the door. Except not really because of all the wires and the door handle latch. The door handle (in the inner door panel) connects to the latch (in the door) through a steel rod about an an eighth of an inch in diameter (1/8"). The rod has a right angle bend on the end that goes through a hole in the end of the door handle lever. It is held in place by a clever little plastic clip. All you need to do is unclip this clip from the rod and the rod will come free. Dang, it's a tough little clip, but with some forceful finger action I persuade it to let go and our last mechanical connection comes free.

Now all we have are the wires, and there is more than one. I can't remember how many exactly, but they are all these modern plastic connectors with a latch that you press to release before you can pull them apart. That all went fine until I got to the power window / door lock connector, which has like a dozen wires. Cannot see how this one comes apart. Google provides a clue: remove the switch from the door panel first. At the top of the switch there is a little metal spring clip (this in on the inside of the door panel). Using a screwdriver I was able to push it down which allowed me to pull the switch from the panel. At first I thought it was one of those nasty spring jaws where you push the switch into the panel and the spring clip is like the inward facing teeth on a shark: they grab hold and let you go farther in, but you cannot pull back. But actually it's not. It's part of the switch, not the door panel. Pushing the switch into the panel causes the spring clip to compress, but once the switch is in place it pops up, locking the switch into position.

Now we have the door lock switch hanging loose and we can get a good look at the connector, and there, on the door panel side, where we couldn't see it before, is the locking tab! I use a medium size set of Channel-lock pliers to squeeze the release tab, grip the connector and pull it loose from the switch. We finally have the panel free of the door. Glory Hallelujah!

When I take door panel off, a sound insulating pad falls off on the floor. That is going to have to be glued back in place. Do I have a suitable glue? I root around and finally find a can of contact cement that I used on a kitchen table project 25 years ago. It is still at least semi-liquid, so it might work, if it doesn't eat the door panel. I put a dab on the panel and on the pad. We shall see.

Anyway, we are finally where we can think about replacing the speaker. It looks simple enough, there are three big Philips head screws holding it to the door but taking them out does nothing. The speaker is still firmly mounted to the door. Using my pocket knife and a screwdriver, I pry it loose. More screwdriver work and I pry the speaker loose from the plastic spacer that holds it half an inch from the door. Everything is sealed: the spacer is sealed to the door, the speaker is sealed to the spacer, the grill is sealed to the speaker, and there is some kind of cushion that seals the grill to the door panel. Geez, they sure went to a lot of trouble to seal all this up. Is it worthwhile or necessary? Somebody sure thought so. Maybe we should try to replicate all this sealing.

Meanwhile there is the electrical connector. The factory speakers have a factory connector that mates with a connector on the wiring harness. My economy speakers don't have this. Splices will have to made. Perhaps I can salvage the connectors from the original speakers, that way I can make up a pigtail that will plug into the existing wiring harness, which means I won't have to be soldering stuff while sitting on the floor in the garage. Getting the connector loose from the speaker is not too tough since the speaker is shot and we can pull the cone back so we can access the lock tab that holds the connector in place. Desolder the wires and the connector is free.

Now all I need to do is:

• make up a pigtail,
• glue the pad to the door
• glue the spacer and the grill to the speaker. Probably ought to screw the speaker to the spacer.
• screw our glorious speaker assemble to the door, and
• mount the door panel.

Then I get to repeat for the other door. And the back seat speakers. Happy Father's Day.

Driving Dream

1969 Dodge A100 Van

I'm driving some kind of rattle trap contraption, maybe one of those old style vans where you sit over the front tire. There is no front to the body so I have an unrestricted view of the road. It has a manual transmission because I have clutch and brake pedals, but no steering wheel. It has a steering box where the steering wheel would normally connect, but there is only a stub shaft sticking up with a screwdriver slot in the end, so I am steering this thing with a screwdriver. This works fine as long as I can keep the tip of the screwdriver in the slot, but because it's simply a slot and the vehicle is bouncing around, like vehicles do, sometimes the screwdriver slips out of the slot.

The steering box is down by my feet, but my screwdriver is only a regular size screw driver, maybe a foot long, and I am not having to bend over even though I am sitting upright, so we have some dream distortion happening here.

In any case I pull up to the edge of a main street and stop to check for traffic. Oh, yeah, it's raining just like it always is in Portland. When it's clear I pull out into the road, making a left turn. All goes well until I am in the travel lane and then the screwdriver slips out of the slot and since the wheels are still turned to the left the van continues it's leftward course and we make U-turn before I can correct the steering. Now I am looking for a place along the left side of the road where I pull over as the first step in correcting my course. And then I woke up.

Old Electrical Outlet

Does this dream have anything to do with real-life messing around with old electrical outlets where all the screws seem to be slotted instead of Philips?

NYC Wiki Wander

A newsletter from FEI got me started.

Katayun Barmak, Philips Electronics Professor in Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at Columbia University, stands in the newly constructed Electron Microscopy (EM) Laboratory located on the first floor of Havemeyer Hall. (Photo by Jeffrey Schifman)
Presumably that is an FEI scanning electron microscope behind her.

Havemeyer Hall, Columbia University, Morningside Heights, New York City
The part of the building to the left (that is just one story taller) is Chandler Hall, a different building. The building to the right (the corner of which is just visible) is the Department of Mathematics. The front of Havelock Hall faces the 'alley' between the two. The modern building sticking up in the background is the imaginatively named 'Northwest Corner Building'.

Morningside Heights is a neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. The area's bigger occupants include Columbia University, a number of parks and churches, and The General Grant Houses.
    Looking at a satellite view I'm wondering just what the 'General Grant Houses' are. Is this another park with a bunch of old houses that used to be owned by General Grant, kind of like one of those historical reenactment places? Sorry, no. It's a public housing project built in the 50's. It's one of those places that is referred to on cop shows as 'the projects'.

New York City Subway map, late night service only

    The Wikipedia entry is a little thin, so I go looking for more and I come across The Rough Night Wiki. It's basically the story of one person's search for a room, but it's done in a 25 page Wiki. I've never run into this format before, but it kind of makes sense.

Speakers, Part 2

Driver's door complete, passenger door was much quicker and easier. Imagine that, once you have figured out what needs to be done, doing it again is a piece of cake. Only thing is I forgot to write down how the speaker wires are connected. If they both end up being connected the same way, then they should be in phase. If not, they will be out of phase. I wonder if I will be able to tell? Another thing: the locking tab on the speaker connector has to be pulled up, not pushed down like all the other connectors.

Now I look at the speakers in the back and, shit, this looks like a huge pain in the ass. There are no screws in evidence, except for the seat belt bolts. Google turns up Club Cab Rear Speaker Install, that gives me a couple of clues, like just pull on the back panel above the rear seat backrest and it will come off. It takes some forceful tugging, but it does indeed come loose. That gives us access to two (2!) Philips head screws that hold the side panel on. The screws come out but the panel is still firmly installed. More forceful tugging separates it from the truck. 

At least one big fat Torx screw that holds the front seat belt needs to be removed. I used a socket that I bought a zillion years ago when I did the brakes on my 1989 Chevy Celebrity. I knew I needed a big one, but I didn't know which size so I bought four. The one I needed now was still in it's shrink wrap packaging. I had never needed it before.

Once the panel is off you are home free, so to speak. The speaker is revealed and it's fairly straight forward to replace it. The hole is just slight smaller than the speaker, so if you center it, the holes for the mounting screws will intersect the speaker hole, so I offset it just a tad, maybe an eighth of an inch, and I only used 3 of the 4 screw holes. The screw hole at the bottom edge of the speaker missed the sheet metal completely, but the edge of the speaker caught the edge of the hole, so it's mounted good and solid, though not mathematically perfect. I sealed the speakers to the body with some old silicon bathroom caulk I had lying around. It shouldn't make any difference, Dodge didn't make much effort to seal off these speakers.

Putting the side panels back was a colossal pain. There are a bunch of places that need to be engaged. Some of them just slide together, but some will only go together if you hold your mouth right, and that takes some doing. But I eventually got all the little hooks and whatnot engaged and got the panels back in. Only problem was the plastic pushpin on upper rear of the drivers side panel. That one did not want to go. Get it all lined up and push and it folds over. I eventually lost it down one of the holes in the body and decided to just leave it. Now that everything is done there doesn't seem to be any difference between the drivers side, which is missing a pin, and the passenger side, which isn't.

Curious thing is I was only able to work on this project for about an hour at a time before I was tired out and needed a break. The work wasn't that hard, not like breaking rocks in the hot sun. I think it was because I was using muscles I normally don't use, and contorting myself into positions I don't get into.

Wrong Side of the Tracks

Wrong Side of the Tracks ( ENTREVÍAS ) Trailer YouTube | Drama Movie
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This is a great show. Remember Clint 'Get-Off-My-Lawn' Eastwood in Gran Torino? Well, Wrong Side of the Tracks is the Spanish version expanded to an eight part series.

We have Jose Coronado playing Tiros, a hard-as-nails grandfather to Irene, his teenage, adopted, Vietnamese granddaughter. The entire family is dysfunctional. Tiros is a big fat jerk. He has driven all his family away. His daughter isn't much better, so Irene is a bit of a mess. So doing what stupid teenagers have done since time immemorial, she makes it worse.

Tiros runs a hardware store in a section of town that is slowly sliding into a slum. According to Tiros it is all because of the Spics, Spanish speaking immigrants from South America. Who knew Spaniards could be racists against people who are so similar to themselves? Reminds me of the Emo Philips story about the heretic scum.

We've got Amanda, a good, pretty cop and Ezequiel, a flamboyant bad cop, Sondra, the local drug kingpin, a bunch of high school kids, and Tiros and his old war buddies. The show bounces around from the cops to the kids to family arguments to sleazy thugs and the mood changes with each bounce, from serious to terrifying to cringe-inducing to very, very funny. It's a great show.

Netflix, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Update August 2025 replaced missing video. Replacement is dubbed, not the way I watch foreign shows. Stupid marketing pukes.

Screws

Sometimes it seems like our whole world is held together with screws. Screws can be very handy, and since the advent of the power screwdriver, they have found even more applications. Drywall used to be put up with nails, but nowadays it is more likely to be installed using screws.
    Screws come in all shapes and sizes and they are cheaper than dirt. The larger the quantity you buy, the lower the unit price. If you want a railroad-car's worth they might be free.
    Oftentimes when doing repairs around the house I will need a few screws. Generally my requirements are not too specific. They need to be long enough and strong enough to do the job, so I will go rummaging through my collections to see if I can find something that will work. About half the time I do, which is great because it means I can get on with the job with having to interrupt my project for a trip to the store where I will have to spend (gasp!) money.
    I was cleaning up in the basement this weekend, gathering tools and old computer parts from all the odd places where they had been squirreled away, and I came across a box of small computer screws that my youngest had abandoned. I'm looking at it and it's a jumbled mess. I hate looking for stuff. If I need something that I have I want to be able to lay my hands on it, so a box of screws like this is worse than useless - it's a time trap, just waiting for the unwary to get sucked into pawing through it looking for the one screw they need, the one screw that isn't there.
    I decide I will sort these screws out. I spend some time at it and I get them sorted into a dozen or so different categories, or maybe two dozen. And then I look at what I've got, and what I've got isn't pretty. Half of them are the screws that are used to secure add-in cards in the computer. Anyone who has every done any work on a computer undoubtedly has a pile of these. Another bunch are not screws per se, but special little widgets used on one specific brand of computer. Another bunch are too small for me to ever want to use. If you need them, you need them, but they are so small that working with them is a real pain. We're talking tweezers and spit on the end of your finger.
    On occasion I have bought screw assortments where there are a number of specific screws, all selected for being useful for home repairs, sorted into separate compartments. These have proven to be very useful, even unto the very last piece that I forced into an application never intended by the inventor.
    What I am wondering is how many of these screws are worth hanging onto? I have a bunch of old wood screws that require a a straight bladed screwdriver that I doubt I will ever use. They generally seem to be the wrong length, and I always prefer Philips head screws because I can use my drill with them. You can use a power screwdriver with straight blade screw heads, but it is not as convenient.

WWII RAF Ammo belt assembly

    I liken this business of sorting screws to assembling ammunition into belts for use in a machine gun. Tedious work, especially in peacetime. But if you ever need to use that machine gun, you will be glad you spent the time to assemble those belts.

Semites

Joan of Arc, a famous heretic

I think I have figured out why there is so much trouble in the Mid-East. We were talking at lunch today and somebody implied that Arabs were Semites. Now I had only heard the term in reference to Jews, as in Anti-Semitic, but it turns out both Jews and Arabs are Semites. From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a definition of Semite:

1 a: a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs
b: a descendant of these peoples

Which brought to mind the old joke about the two protestants:

heretic scum by Emo Philips

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. I immediately ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
"Like what?"
"Well ... are you religious or atheist?"
"Religious."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
"Baptist."
"Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
"Baptist Church of God."
"Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God."
"Wow! Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!"
To which I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.

People tend to fight more about the smallest things.

Update December 2018 replaced missing picture.

My clock radio antenna.

GE 7-4966A Clock Radio

Uniberp reports:

I still use a clock radio. This may not seem odd, but in case the technological world of hip trends has left me in the dust of obsolete behavioral control devices, it seems safer to announce it up front.

In fact, I just got another one. This one has nice obvious controls, and the off button is right near the top right corner; cannot miss it.

However, what prompts me to write this is not the functionality but the performance. I previously had a new Philips CD clock radio which I really liked, but it hit the floor too many times, as did the replacement Timex brand. This one far surpasses either one, in that it actually picks up radio stations, and not just strong local ones. When I moved here I was very disappointed in the poor radio reception. This one picks up and plays both AM and FM signals throughout the dial with no static or fade-in-and-out like my previous ones did. This is nice. I can listen to the radio better on this one than on even my pricy desktop Boston Acoustic system (although that one requires an external antenna which I haven't got around to, plus it's a lousy clock radio). I plugged it in and crawled into bed to read and listened to BBC America clear as day. I rowed around the dial, heard classic rock and classical, nutso political and religious talk.

I thought it was my new location that caused such poor radio reception, or that radio had disappeared from the dial altogether or that due to de-regulation broadcasters were pounding the spectrum with noise in order to destroy each others signals, or something. Turns out it was the instrument, or in fact all three instruments that I had previously tried.

The very odd thing about all this is that this new one is a thrift shop radio, a GE 7-4966A, that is so old it actually has a cassette tape player (there's one on ebay), and a "select" button that let's you choose time, alarm1 or alarm2. Yes it is dual alarm. And it has a replaceable backlight bulb. It's nice and clean.

So what's going on? Why does this have the best reception. It was a cheap device even back then, surely not more than $35. Surely antenna technology has not reversed course? No rare earth materials are used, I don't think. It's just a piece of copper and some circuitry. Is solid state circuitry really becoming less performance oriented, toward cost savings?

Could this be the manufacturers way of weaning us off free broadcast and onto something expensive? I'm telling you, it's suspicious.

BTW my audio cassettes are so old some of them have lost magnetism. Pre-recorded ones seem to hold up better.

In case you are wondering, no, Mike does not live on the upper peninsula, a thousand miles from the nearest radio station, and no, he is not stuck in the bottom on some canyon. He lives in large city that is on relatively flat ground.

Update June 2019 added picture.

Resistance Is Futile

Picked up a plastic doo-dad from the pharmacy yesterday. It's just a plastic tube that goes with an inhaler, makes it easier to get a full dose of medicine or something. Whatever. It's just a piece of plastic, no drugs on any kind. Still, the pharmacy would not sell it to me without a prescription, probably because it's a "medical device", and insurance won't pay for it unless a doctor specifically orders it, and because of all this administrative overhead what should cost a dollar ends up costing the insurance company a zillion bucks.

Came with a roadmap size sheet of instructions printed in 14 languages. I think that has to be a new record. I don't even recognize half of them. It was made by Philips, the Dutch conglomerate that I really dislike because sometimes their "corporate group think" seems to overshadow common sense. Now here they are, trying to make sure they are not discriminating against anyone, or are they just trying to assimilate everyone, like the Borg?