I need advice from my friends into building electronics. I have grown frustrated with years of using $8 soldering irons from Radio Shack and want to get into a Weller or Aoyue soldering station. My quandary is deciding between just a soldering station or a hotair rework station. My next two projects will be 1) replacing some bad caps on a circuit board and 2) resoldering some bad joints on another board.
I’m currently looking at the Aoyue 937+ Digital Soldering Station
Evan, 5 years old: "Amy! You know that girl on the bus who sits by herself and never talks and stares at me? She…talked…to…me! She really did. She talked to me. Me!"
In the Spring of my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I sold flowers at an Amish market in New Jersey. Had nothing to do with the Amish market itself, that’s just where I was stationed by the teacher who made ends meet by shipping flowers to New Jersey from South America and paying teenagers minimum wage to stand in front of stores pushing the flowers and plants. I enjoyed it because the flowers came wrapped in newspapers printed in Spanish so I’d practice my Spanish by reading the comics and news. I felt I was pretty knowledgeable about plants at the time. This proved to be wrong when I became a homeowner.
I bought my house in the Fall of 1997. The previous owner kept the yard immaculate. With each season surprises of color and fragrances would pop from the ground and vines on the trees. But I was running a business…rather my business was running me. And in an effort to keep the business alive, I neglected everything. By the time, the business died, so had the yard and its landscaping. Nature reclaimed it. Wild honeysuckle and privet sprung up everywhere and grew 8 feet or higher with thick, viney trunks. I had lots of animals. Birds. Raccoon. Possum. Snakes. Chipmunks. Hawks. And so much more. Keeping part of the yard "wild" for habitat was an attractive proposition. But wild does not mean unkempt and, unfortunately, that’s exactly what became of my yard.
In any other neighborhood, inspectors would have been called upon me for codes violations. Neighborhood associations would have fined me. Neighbors would have posted nasty notes on my door. Mine were forgiving to an extreme and I was a lousy neighbor.
This week Cathy had enough and demanded I pay someone to knock down our waist high weeds. Every lawn mower I bring on the property dies so doing it myself was not an option. I called a friend with a landscaping business. He must have worked his tail off! The yard looks better than it has since 1997! I feel I can use the yard, something I haven’t experienced in a decade. I am flabbergasted! My wife is thrilled! And my neighbors are ecstatic!
Today I am wearing a pair of pants which has declare this to be the last day they will ever be worn. This clothing article is in the process of having multiple simultaneous structural failures, none of which have resulted in embarrassment…yet. Think of it like one of your expensive electronic devices whose warranty expires and one day later it quits working. Well, the warranty on these pants must have run out just after I got in the Jeep to drive to my client’s office today.
After many weekends dedicated to work and bad weather, we’ve resumed construction on Amy’s birthday present, the playhouse. Last weekend the overcuts on the roof sheeting were corrected and the roof sheeting completely secured. This weekend, the porch railing was added making Amy very excited as it gave a more finished look to the playhouse. We’ve completed 12 ½ steps out of 27 but at this point each step will have an significant outward impact on the appearance and a feeling of nearness to the end of the project.
Now I just need to buy a table saw.
As the Republicans prepare for a battle to reclaim some power in Congress, they have announced a pledge discussing what the Republican party will do for this country. Jon Stewart with the Daily Show covers this very artfully! This is a must watch.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Postcards From the Pledge | ||||
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As I drove home a vivid memory from my early teen years struck me. I lived 2 miles from the New Orleans airport. I used to ride my bike down to the westmost runway that ended at the swamp and lay down on the levee at the end of the runway to watch jets landing just over my head. There was a white box with a tinted window in the top right at the end of the runway I’d put my head over and imagine the controllers in the tower would see strange imagery on their screens. That may explain my Swiss cheese memory.
Based on 2000 census data, this is how Knoxville is segregated. Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. [Source, Flickr – Eric Fischer, Race and ethnicity]
And here’s Memphis:
And Nashville:
[Source, Atlantic Wire, Mapping the Segregation of U.S. Cities]
You can lead people to knowledge but you can’t make them think. [Source, Chicago Tribune, How to spread ‘dumb-ocracy’]
The country that brought us Chernobyl will now be floating 8 nuclear power plants on top of the world. Granted, the United States had Three Mile Island and I’m told by an old timer that apparently there is was a reactor meltdown in Oak Ridge in the 50s that was buried physically and by public relations but I cannot validate that. Let’s not forget who is the world leader in exploded nuclear bombs. As the arctic ice shrinks and exposes more land, a battle is brewing for the possible gas and oil reserves previously hidden by the ice. The major players will be Canada and Russia but other countries could try to stake claims. With these ships that could supply power to 45,000 for 12 years at a time..that’s 12 years without needing to return to port..Russia certainly has an advantage.
[Source, BBC, A rare view of Russia’s floating nuclear power station]
Last week I thought, "I’ll actually send my mother a card for her birthday." Naturally, I considered my brother’s birthday too since both my mother and my brother were born in September. Life, being what it is, came and went and I didn’t purchase or make a card. I decide to call her on her birthday. Only I didn’t call her on her birthday; I called her on my brother’s birthday. Her’s is 8 days later! It would have been fine and dandy since it was a good excuse to talk to the folks. Only, I never called my brother…
Happy Birthday Dean!
For 2 weeks I fretted over an incident. During this time, my blood pressure spiked 20 to 50 points higher than normal and remained there. My doctor and I discussed a medicine change but he suggested that I wait a couple of weeks first. Today my blood pressure registered the lowest since I started tracking it. I think clearly my blood pressure has far less to do with physiology and far more with a need to sun myself on the beach of some tropical island for 3 or 4 weeks.
It took me nearly 2 years to get a freeze plug installed back in the engine and two weeks to change the brake calipers. Now I understand I should have dismantled the whole Jeep!
