Obama Administration Vetoes Ban on Sale of Some Apple Devices

WSJ ^ | 8/3/2013 | BRENT KENDALL

[fireman15]

Thank you so much for the courtesy of responding again and sharing more about yourself. The Boy Mechanic was one of my favorites as well. There are editions available free on-line for others who might be interested...

http://archive.org/details/theboymechanicvo12655gut
http://archive.org/details/boymechanicthin00cogoog
http://archive.org/details/boymechanicbook200chic2
http://archive.org/details/boymechanic03popu

There are others similar books also available on-line that are excellent as well.

http://archive.org/details/everyboyhisownme00jone

I was fortunate that our library system used to keep these old books on the shelves when I was growing up because I loved them.

I also enjoyed the earlier editions of the Popular Mechanics Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedias and also their Shop Notes books a great deal. I managed to work on quite a few of the projects over the years. I was fortunate to grow up on acreage and had tools and a shop available for my use.

I also still have my Timex Sinclair 1000 computer and a number of other “home computers” from that time period. I have stored them carefully and most still are functional. It is hard to believe the amount of creative energy that I invested into them. I am not sure that it was of great benefit, but I do believe that those of us who had that type of experience do have a greater appreciation and understanding of later small computers and devices.

We know many people who use iPads as navigation aids while flying. It seemed almost miraculous when small portable aviation GPS units first became available for general aviation use. I remember flying one time with a friend of mine, who was a pilot for American Airlines... He had his head down playing with his new little GPS and I had my head down playing with my new little Garmin 95 AVD. We asked my wife to keep her eyes peeled for other traffic, although we were basically out in the middle of nowhere.

We paid what seemed like a small fortune for a King IFR KLN-89B panel mount unit approved for non-precision GPS approaches. The displays on these early units were tiny, monochrome in most cases, and low resolution. Although people still “use” KLN-89B units because it is so expensive to get electronics certified for IFR use. In reality they are often using newer, better devices that have not been approved and the KLN-89B is there for legal reasons.

My writing was unclear about the guy who was teasing my wife about her HTC TP2. I have no idea what type of phone he was using just that it was new and he was quite proud of it. We have three older “smartphones” on our “grandfathered” plan with texting and all with unlimited internet usage for a little more than $100 a month with taxes. Sprint won't let us upgrade our phones without to a different plan. I am aware of the various Sprint employee plans but none offers as much for so little. In some ways it is good for me to have these artificial limitations because it has defiantly kept my ETF (Electronic Trinket Fever) under control at least in this one area.

Very, very interesting about your dad. My wife comes from a military family and she sets up displays honoring the service of women veterans. Earlier this summer she set up a display at one of the Officer's Clubs on Joint Base Lewis-McChord. There are two Doolittle Raiders still alive. One is in pretty rough shape but the other was the guest of honor at the event and he gave a very good presentation with slides. I was allowed to tape the event. I would have liked to post it on YouTube, but was unable to get permission.

My wife has a huge collection of vintage women's military and service uniform. She has been interviewing women veterans for many years and is working on a book. Our good friend, Gary Cowart who has written several books and screenplays came by just the other night to share his mother's scrapbook from WWII and show us the finer points of using CreateSpace.com for self-publishing. It is probably the best way for her to go forward. We are not sure how much interest there will be in the subject she has been working on.

Gary's book on his experiences as a young Marine in Vietnam, “Blood on Red Dirt” is extremely moving. I wish it were required reading for young people. It is available on Amazon and I highly recommended it to anyone who would like a first person account of what it was like to be a young man during the Vietnam Era.

I have got to go, but I truly have appreciated meeting you here and will look for your posts in the future.

[fireman15]

Because you shared so much with me and we seem to have much in common I felt like sharing more about myself. If you have time you can read it, but it certainly will not hurt my feelings if you don't.

I also wanted an oscilloscope very badly during my electronic kit building days. I finally did find one for a reasonable price from a television and radio repairman who was retiring. It was an old single trace with very limited capabilities by today's standards, but it was quite useful for troubleshooting and calibrating.

I also spent hours scouring through the Heath and Tandy catalogs. I must admit to being a terrible pack-rat... I still have a few of them stored. If there is something that you remember that you would like me to scan, I will take a look and see what I can find.

I am extremely impressed by what you said about your background. Mine is far more limited. I went to college for a year after high school but my father made a bad investment in a lumber re-manufacturing business. We made finished wood products from rough cut lumber. My father had no experience in that field and neither did I, but to save money I spent the summer after I got out of college working at the mill, mostly doing sweeping and cleanup to start with and of course feeding the machines and stacking wood.

The machinery we were working with was all quite old... mostly from the 1930s and 1940s. While I was working I closely observed the people that my father had hired to run the business and I found library books that told the proper way to run the machinery. At that time the people in that business were quite sloppy about how they set up the machinery. I quickly realized that they were not following proper procedure which was part of why their productivity level was not adequate.

The biggest problem however was that the machines and saws were constantly getting clogged with shavings and sawdust. At first I spent my evenings fashioning sheet metal in a way that assisted the shavings and sawdust into the large diameter tubing that came from the blower. This allowed us to run the equipment considerably faster.

Shortly after that I was looking at the giant squirrel cage type blower and wondered how it was that such a huge piece of equipment could be making such ineffective suction. I asked the person who had been managing the operations for my father what would happen if the blower was running backwards. He stated firmly that it would blow air instead of sucking it and acted like I was stupid for even asking such a question. The blower had come with the building and no one had touched the wiring for it.

I have always been skeptical of what other people have told me and was not convinced. That night I set a tall ladder up and removed a dozen or so bolts from the front of the blower and pulled back the front plate from the enclosure. When I started up the blower... it was running backwards.

As I was aware from my building and experimenting with electric motors as a child that 3 phase induction motors can be reversed by switching just two wires. When the light company had reconnected the building to power after my father purchased the building... they had switched the wires from the transfomers to the service drop. After I switched two wires in the motor control box and reversed the direction of the blower... we had no more problems with the machines clogging with sawdust and shavings. My father had hired several high priced consultants and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the previous three years because of this issue.

After this discovery my father decided that he had more confidence in my abilities than that of the current management. Because I had spent several months working there I had learned who the good workers were. We fired everyone who was dead weight the very next day. I began setting up the equipment myself. Initially I hired friends and acquaintances, and as they moved on to more lucrative endeavors we replaced them with new people we found from help wanted ads.

Our productivity went up and our expenses went down and we began making money. My parents were saved from almost certain bankruptcy. Unfortunately, a few years later we had a fire and we had an insurance snafu that left us with almost no money to start back up again.

I was offered jobs from our competitors, but my Uncle and I cleaned up the entire mess ourselves... I rebuilt some of the equipment that went through the fire and purchased other equipment at auction. I convinced the head electrical inspector for city light that I was capable of doing all of the three phase wiring myself. We built shelters for the equipment and buildings out of wood we salvaged from the fire.

After a couple years we were back up and running on a more limited scale. Almost unbelievable, two years later we were burned down a second time. I decided at that point that I wanted to pursue an engineering degree and enrolled at a local community college.

I was doing well at school, but my brother-in-law's sister-in-law was working for our local fire department as their EMS educator. My family encouraged me to take the firefighter test. There were several thousand people who took the test. It was held at a local convention center; almost every macho guy I saw looked more qualified than me but I have always been an extremely good test taker. I was one of sixteen hired by the fire department that year and six of my classmates were hired through affirmative action.

It has been a good career, and has allowed me to have a steady income and keep my family comfortable. I have also had a good schedule that allowed me to pursue other interests to a limited extent. Although I have done well, I have always felt a little like a square peg forced into a round hole. Now that all of our kids are grown and we have several grandchildren, I am looking forward to retiring early and getting back to pursuing my real interests.

In many ways I feel that I have been squandering my true talents, first with the lumber mill and then sticking with my cushy government job. But fortunately I am in good health and feel like I have enough time left to pursue other interests and even start a new career. So I am just months away from starting a new chapter in my life. Because our retirement system has not promised the huge benefits that other systems have, it is well funded and secure. I won't get alot of money, but enough to go to school or study independently and provide for my wife and I.