Tag: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Let’s rotate the board.

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Several times in my adventures working on broadcast transmitter sites, I’ve walked in on a facility absolutely roasting itself to death because the batteries died in a digital HVAC thermostat.

Today was another one of those and it was the strangest. I’m not even going to try to explain what the hell happened because I don’t even know, but I can tell you that apparently, the Maxiva XTE exciters react by just turning everything into a bad game of Numberwang.

https://klack.bandcamp.com/track/nummerwang

In all seriousness though, one exciter developed massive phase noise which led to viewer complaints of not being able to watch the channel, and the other drifted off frequency and wouldn’t go back. I wonder if it’s got packing foam glued over the oscillator like the old Apex?

Another day in paradise
Hooking up the GPS antenna along with the external 10 mhz reference… Look at this graph! But alas
This whole thing is uh, never mind, here’s some TCFW.
Picture unrelated, but I just love how this looks with translucent circuit boards.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Evil Quantum Entangled Cock Cage

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Please forgive my unusual reaction, the stress of current events and a grueling work schedule have affected my state of mind a bit.

If I told you too much about this system it’d make your mind snap like an overstretched rubber band

Nobody who works here now was responsible for this all getting so fucked up, they just inherited its load-bearing zombie corpse.

who took my nice fluke anyway

Chaos Butterflies

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A former engineer (who was eventually banned from the facilities for various people problems including throwing a chair at a DJ) had made dozens of these splices where almost anything that’s an analog stereo pair goes into an electrical tape covered Y connection into some kind of 4-wire shielded cable.

Out of curiosity I unwrapped the tape from one of his splices to see what was inside.

Oh, no. No no no no no no my entire facility is wired like this no no no no NOPE FUCK AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNOPENOPENOPEARONIWITHCHEESENONONONO

Diesel-Electric Shitpost

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I propose we rename the notches on diesel locomotive throttles to the following:

  • Stop
  • Idle
  • A
  • AA
  • AAA
  • AAAA
  • AAAAA
  • AAAAAA
  • AAAAAAA
  • AAAAAAAA

I mean it makes sense, it controls how loud the locomotive screams and the ammeter that shows how much load you’re putting on the traction system is labeled in amps – A.

This A meter is pretty cool and it appears it’s been installed to a model railway for extra coolness. (This model of Weston meter is easy to open if you want a custom scale but this one looks 100% original!!)

And yes this does look like the right meter– EMD just put it behind a panel, likely with a small lamp behind to light the face. I’d post the link to the original if I could find it, but it seems the metadata on railpictures.net just doesn’t match up for me to find it. The picture is of an EMD GP7 cab.

The other coast.

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I’m in California, cooking dinner on this glorious range. It’s almond, chrome, and fake wood behind glass.

And it glows.

I’m up in the small towns north of Sacramento. They don’t have traffic reports up here because they don’t need them. Can I retire my #trafFUCKED tag?

Grocery bags seem to cost 10 cents each at the stores but they’re a very thick, strong plastic, intended to be reused “up to 125 times”. I’m not complaining… Just kinda a new thing.

Also there are mountains and there’s this one road, California 20, from Donner Pass to Nevada City, that I’ve named “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Highway”.