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Mike Fang wrote:Uh huh...so, missing one joke because it sounds so plausible due to the corrupt nature of our judicial system makes me an idiot?

*narrows eyes at Narnian and gives a derrisive snort*

* puts paw on Mike Fang's shoulder *

We're all clueless at one time or another friend. Sometime I'll share the story of how I accidently dropped trough in front of Chuck Colson

Narnian wrote: We're all clueless at one time or another friend.

Mmmm...yeah, guess that's true.

That's nothing, I once completely screwed up a filksing being led by none other than Spider Robinson. Talk about overly-enthusiastic, that was me...I was another verse along when I noticed that Spider had stopped playing his guitar and was simply looking at me with a gaze of infinite patience... -:oops:

Calbeck wrote:That's nothing, I once completely screwed up a filksing being led by none other than Spider Robinson. Talk about overly-enthusiastic, that was me...I was another verse along when I noticed that Spider had stopped playing his guitar and was simply looking at me with a gaze of infinite patience... -:oops:

Gadzooks! I suspect I would have crawled into the nearest hiding place and gibbered quietly until they took me away to begin my therapy...

And I've taken an entire TV station off the air, with no ill effects...

UncleMonty wrote:And I've taken an entire TV station off the air, with no ill effects...

Aaannnndd this was a bad thing?

S'aaruuk

Laywers can come in handdy. For example:

Nip could show the script to a laywer because of confedentalaty. I'm pritty sure I spelled that wrong but hey.

The laywer could argue that the script was harmful to all the actors since it hurt all their reputations and they were made to think the script was about something else, thus missrepresentation on mikey's part.

At the very least, "if" the movie got released, the actors could come together in a very public lawsuit for defamation of charater aginst Mikey. In Layman's terms, it would be a PR nightmare for both Mikey's film career and the Liberal movement.

Sharuuk wrote:

UncleMonty wrote:And I've taken an entire TV station off the air, with no ill effects...

Aaannnndd this was a bad thing?

S'aaruuk

Ancient wisdom dictates: It is a bad thing if you are in the employ of said TV station.

UncleMonty wrote:

Sharuuk wrote:

UncleMonty wrote:And I've taken an entire TV station off the air, with no ill effects...

Aaannnndd this was a bad thing?

S'aaruuk

Ancient wisdom dictates: It is a bad thing if you are in the employ of said TV station.

Ohhhhh.....t'was your own station you took out eh? OOoooo...not good, NOT good!

S'aaruuk

Sharuuk wrote:

UncleMonty wrote:

Sharuuk wrote: Aaannnndd this was a bad thing?

S'aaruuk

Ancient wisdom dictates: It is a bad thing if you are in the employ of said TV station.

Ohhhhh.....t'was your own station you took out eh? OOoooo...not good, NOT good!

S'aaruuk

I'm making more of a story out of it than it's worth, actually.
But yeah... You gently tug on a wire to see where it goes, and hey presto! It comes apart!
Pieces of BNC connector rolling on the floor!
And look! It's the video feed to our transmitter!
How fast can you grab a cable from the ready box and snap it into place? I may have broken a record.

UncleMonty wrote:

Sharuuk wrote:

UncleMonty wrote: Ancient wisdom dictates: It is a bad thing if you are in the employ of said TV station.

Ohhhhh.....t'was your own station you took out eh? OOoooo...not good, NOT good!

S'aaruuk

I'm making more of a story out of it than it's worth, actually.
But yeah... You gently tug on a wire to see where it goes, and hey presto! It comes apart!
Pieces of BNC connector rolling on the floor!
And look! It's the video feed to our transmitter!
How fast can you grab a cable from the ready box and snap it into place? I may have broken a record.

Now THAT's funny! I can just see the paniced scrambling for the ready box and the replacement cable. And then you hadda reach back into the rats nest of other cables to re-connect it. And while I haven't had exactly that happen, I can SO easily relate to it...and appreciate it as well.

S'aaruuk

UncleMonty: We had lots of fun at Ye Olde Phone Company (GTE) with incidents like that, there were lots of interesting circuits going through there that would break really easy. That's when you learn to unwrap, strip and re-wrap a jumper Real Fast before somebody notices.

The long nights when the Pointy Haired Boss said to just slash cut the new mainframe lightning protectors, get it done under budget and make him look good. And we called in for clearance on the circuits with Special Service Protection anyways...

And found that they were such wonderful things as alarm circuits for petroleum and natural gas pipelines (that would have thrown them into Emergency Shutdown), bank alarm systems (that would have rolled the FBI and LAPD), the main data lines into a regional bank's computer center... Like the United Airlines commercial says "Saving your Boss from himself - again."

And reading all the old horror stories about the maintenance of the original KFI transmitters - 50 KW RCA tube monster running deionized water through the jugs and air chimneys around the outside, too. Locking the doors with a tech sitting INSIDE the cabinets and firing it up with the room lights off so he could see where the HV was flashing over at...

--<< Bruce >>--

Bruce Bergman wrote:Locking the doors with a tech sitting INSIDE the cabinets and firing it up with the room lights off so he could see where the HV was flashing over at...

--<< Bruce >>--

Now THAT I can relate to I'VE been that particular suicide jocky because I was the only one small enough to fit in the cabinet with the door closed.

And I do so well remember the water cooled jugs with the pressed carbon plates (813's ring a bell..I know they're air cooled but it's the first thing that popped into my head) that glowed so nicely when you loaded them......

S'aaruuk

Oh, yeah... Our old RCA 30 Kw Klystron transmitter was cooled in two stages, water-cooled and steam-cooled. The steam was generated by the first cooling stage...

The cabinets were laid out to form a small room, about the size of a closet. That meant a man could stand inside while the transmitter was running and check the exciter cabinet, the visual transmitter Klystron cabinet, the aural transmitter Klystron cabinet, the 35 Kv high voltage power supply cabinet, or the control cabinet, from behind, just by slowly shuffling his feet in a tight circle and trying not to sweat. Sweat conducts electricity!
Yes, in the dark.

I really should have gone to college instead of technical school...

UncleMonty wrote:Oh, yeah... Our old RCA 30 Kw Klystron transmitter was cooled in two stages, water-cooled and steam-cooled. The steam was generated by the first cooling stage...

The cabinets were laid out to form a small room, about the size of a closet. That meant a man could stand inside while the transmitter was running and check the exciter cabinet, the visual transmitter Klystron cabinet, the aural transmitter Klystron cabinet, the 35 Kv high voltage power supply cabinet, or the control cabinet, from behind, just by slowly shuffling his feet in a tight circle and trying not to sweat. Sweat conducts electricity!
Yes, in the dark.

I really should have gone to college instead of technical school...

Monty.....y'ever wonder how we've managed to survive all these years...despite our best efforts? Why we've never been crispy fried from the HV, or, in some cases with me at least, vaporized by the HE!!!

Between the two of us.....our guardian angels GOTTA be tired!!!

S'aaruuk

UncleMonty wrote:I really should have gone to college instead of technical school...

Well, then instead of 35 kV HV cabinets, you can help me troubleshoot our locomotive's cranking inverter which involves looking for a 1-2 V signal on top of 800 V wrt ground; I was able to see it by using an isolation transformer and a cheater plug to float the scope, but still got a lot of nice sparks between the ground tab of my cheater plug and the ground pin of the adjacent outlet on the iso-trans

Next time I need to do that, I plan to have the lab build my own diff-amp circuit to knock the 800 V down to 10 V, then step it back up again 40X...

I just hope I don't have to do it in the field for the latest problem - if somebody ends up going out, they've got the choice of driving 8? hours with a car load of stuff, or trying to get it through airport security these days

And I'm the one who gets stuck with it even though I'm a signal electronics engineer, not power electronics, since I seem to be the only one left around here who knows how to run a scope

Why is it the only secure jobs are the ones you don't want?

Ron, BSEE 1981

RDB wrote:Why is it the only secure jobs are the ones you don't want?

Ron, BSEE 1981

Because the reason they're secure is that no one wants them. So, once someone's been trapped... err... HIRED, yes, hired, successfully, the company throws in anything and everything to try and keep you, bribery included.

RDB wrote:

UncleMonty wrote:I really should have gone to college instead of technical school...

Well, then instead of 35 kV HV cabinets, you can help me troubleshoot our locomotive's cranking inverter which involves looking for a 1-2 V signal on top of 800 V wrt ground; I was able to see it by using an isolation transformer and a cheater plug to float the scope, but still got a lot of nice sparks between the ground tab of my cheater plug and the ground pin of the adjacent outlet on the iso-trans

Next time I need to do that, I plan to have the lab build my own diff-amp circuit to knock the 800 V down to 10 V, then step it back up again 40X...

I just hope I don't have to do it in the field for the latest problem - if somebody ends up going out, they've got the choice of driving 8? hours with a car load of stuff, or trying to get it through airport security these days

And I'm the one who gets stuck with it even though I'm a signal electronics engineer, not power electronics, since I seem to be the only one left around here who knows how to run a scope

Why is it the only secure jobs are the ones you don't want?

Ron, BSEE 1981

I'm assuming you've tried the easy answers first, and used capacitive probes to block the 800v DC while passing the 1 to 2 v signal?
Isolating the 'scope from earth ground with that transformer was a good idea, but you can add some distance with a cheap 2-wire extension cord. A safer method might be running the 'scope from an inverter and battery, or using a battery-powered 'scope.
You'd be surprised at how cheap inverters are getting these days.
I paid about $30 for a 400 Watt model at a an auto parts store...

Does this thread have a topic, and am I on it?

UncleMonty wrote: Does this thread have a topic, and am I on it?

Topic?

What is this topic thing that you speak of?

I have heard of these once, there was something about contiguity and consistency.

Feh, all overrated!

Where was I anyways?

Ahh, that's it!


PITTSBURGH'S GOIN' TO THE SUUUPERBOWL!

(I can't believe I just said, that, I'm such a bad nerd, *sigh* time to go read a book on technical writing as penance... =X.x= )

Tbolt wrote:

UncleMonty wrote: Does this thread have a topic, and am I on it?

Topic?

What is this topic thing that you speak of?

I have heard of these once, there was something about contiguity and consistency.

Feh, all overrated!

Where was I anyways?

Ahh, that's it!


PITTSBURGH'S GOIN' TO THE SUUUPERBOWL!

(I can't believe I just said, that, I'm such a bad nerd, *sigh* time to go read a book on technical writing as penance... =X.x= )

How can the home of Heinz be an A-1 team?

Tbolt wrote:

UncleMonty wrote: Does this thread have a topic, and am I on it?

Topic?

What is this topic thing that you speak of?

I have heard of these once, there was something about contiguity and consistency.

Feh, all overrated!

Where was I anyways?

Ahh, that's it!


PITTSBURGH'S GOIN' TO THE SUUUPERBOWL!

(I can't believe I just said, that, I'm such a bad nerd, *sigh* time to go read a book on technical writing as penance... =X.x= )

AND THEY ARE GOING TO LOSE! GO SEAHAWKS!