This is officially my first repair as a television engineer.
It’s what remains of an HD-SDI cable that got chair wheel’d a few dozen times too many.
Well, that was easy. 😉
Subterranean spunk trumpet?
What. What even is this?!
I’m not getting close enough to investigate further.
It looks like snot. Or, uh, NOPE.
My guess is slime mold caused in part by our unreasonably wet winter.
To-do list:
* read Neilsen ratings tomorrow to see how amazingly sharply the ratings share plummeted for the latter half of the Grammys after the opening number of Hamilton ended
* prepare to laugh
The strange tale of the broken Easy Card.
Oh hi. What nonsense is this?
This is what my easy card looks like on a Tri-Rail ticket machine right now. On a Miami-Dade Transit machine, it looks the same but also shows “day pass… Pending” in the bottom pass list.
No matter what kind of pass I load to this card, it will fail to be activated on first use, and will lead to a negative cash balance for the amount of the regular fare for whatever I rode. The display on the bus fare box or rail station gate reads “Transfer 12:00 AM” when this happens.
The card also won’t let me add to its nonsense negative cash value, so it’s now useless.
I’ve spent $17.05 today so far on the day pass that got stuck in limbo, individual fares on each bus (the card won’t work for bus transfers in this state!), Metrorail parking, and a new Easy Card with one Metrorail fare on it that will replace this broken piece of 💩 that keeps eating my passes.
What is going on here?! I’ve never heard of this happening to anyone else’s Easy Card, so I’m guessing I have a unique and beautiful corrupted snowflake here. The customer service staff don’t understand it either.
I wonder what to do with this card. Send it to MDT so maybe they can work with Cubic Corporation to identify the fault and roll out a software fix*? Microwave it? Will It Blend?
What even is this card?! That’s like asking, “what are birds?” … We don’t even know.
And maybe $17.05 was still worth not having to drive through the boat show traffic.
* this is about as likely to happen as one of the buses running on schedule, or the Prog Stom Assy still working properly on a train. Also, MDT will likely not respond to this post, as their response to me asking for information or reporting issues via social media was to block me, so far on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. MDT blocks: Gotta Catch Em All.
Ⓜ🚂🚃🔩💩🌀🚃🚧⚠💫
Bonus silliness:
This is what the Train Tracker has to say. No clue.
But at least it’s bullet resistant. TAX DOLLARS GO WHERE ??
Ding! DingdingDINGDINGDINGARGH
A few weeks back I unloaded a pound of silicone caulk into this bell. Now it’s all gone and the dumb thing is loud again. Can I please go Office Space on it? Somehow? I’m guessing I’d need to use a cutting torch.
HF antenna fail.
Before using any conductive objects, LOOK UP. If there are power lines nearby OR within range such that the object could fall and hit them on the way down, STOP!!!
Otherwise the whole world will laugh at you after you EXPLODE your radio and knock out power to a fairly large area…
Image by WU2F, link to Reddit thread.
The ham responsible all but vaporized a nice Flex Radio HF transceiver, power supply, and the electrical wiring in his camper. LUCKILY, nobody was injured, but it could VERY VERY EASILY have been much worse. You don’t get a second chance with contacting power lines.
For extra lulz, let’s see if he tries to sell this radio for what it’s ‘wurf’ on eBay in the future. 😉
For those of you Miami people at Hamcation:
You lucky jerks
You’re missing out on all the, uh, phun… With the Coconut Grove Arts Festival and the Miami Boat Show going on simultaneously, the greater Miami-Dade area is on rich idiot lockdown.
Last night I ran afoul of the grubbiest thing I’ve seen out of the Shitty of Miami for years: they had the exits from Watson Island blocked just beyond a city owned plot of land being used for valet parking for the mega yacht portion of the boat show. In preparation for the show, they wrapped the Miami Children’s Museum in ten foot chain link fencing to keep the pesky commoners away from the rich idiots going to see the multi million dollar floating poo barges*. Well… The Shitty of Miami cops erected a road block to ensure that nobody could drive out if they were not coming out of the $50 valet parking….
For several hours… They would let one vehicle out at a time, half an hour or more apart. I was first in line for the exit for 45 minutes. I sat there a very long time watching a quite unskilled valet with bad tattoos try to park a Rolls-Royce.
Screw you, Miami. Screw you and the political favors you rode in on. I’ll be over here avoiding paying more than my daily take home pay in parking.
Hey guys I heard you like lens flare
I really need to take pictures on a real camera.
I got to watch the sun pop up over the horizon. Couldn’t photograph this worth a damn, but it was pretty cool. I kinda wasn’t expecting it to be so abrupt – it’s like someone turned on a switch and a blurry glow at the horizon jumped into focus instantly.
Now I can cross that off my list of natural wonders I’ve never actually seen before. Next up is snow. 😀
Anyone know where I put my MU cables?
“All mentions of the word ‘chameleon’ should be preceded by five commas. In all other instances, they come and go.” – @FakeAPStylebook
Now this is why you don’t let me play with your model trains. They wind up with gnaw marks.
This one needed to be put on a track where it moves forward when triggered by a sensor, then moves back.
I had two options here:
A) interface to the locomotive’s onboard controls and use extra sensors and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—–
B) simple DC control using relays and diodes
Oh my glob it’s busy in there
The motor has a tachometer sensor – I guess you can really tell it “okay, go scale speed of 79″…
Yaaaaccckkkk. Wire nutted leads go to chassis ground and third rail.
One of the drive motors and the smoke machine
Bro, do you even vape? (I opened it to see what the motor was all about. It’s a fan to propel the smoke upwards.)
One of my favorite Arduino clones, and the relay board. This controls two identical train setups. One relay on each side starts and stops the train, the other sets the direction.
Leftover parts. I removed the extra bits because it’s remarkably hard to get the top back onto the locomotive with all that in there– it kind of barely fit!! I’m keeping the harnesses as intact as possible in case anyone ever wants to reverse the modification.
The way it works: I have each track installed with a gap in its third rail.
At each end of the line is an isolation block to stop the train. Its travel direction is determined by the DC power polarity. That being the case, I used a diode in line with each end section to essentially make it a one way street leading back from where the train just came in. The train will move until it loses power due to the diode being reverse biased, but flipping the polarity will give it power again to move the other way.
Originally I thought I was going to need more relays and other jank until I realized it just didn’t have to be that hard. 🙂
As for the title, no, I’m not just referencing the Principia Discordia again, it’s referring to the Multiple Unit cables used to control a locomotive from the cab of another leading or trailing locomotive, or from a cab car on the opposite end of a passenger train. Prepare to laugh about the fact that the Woodward Governor is basically a mechanical digital to analog converter with pseudo BCD inputs feeding a hydro-mechanical comparator to set the engine fuel rack for a commanded rpm… Cute, right?
We’re getting the hamfest back together.
Yes, I know, it’s not in Miami– but it was never the Miami Hamboree, was it?
February 3-4, 2016, at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. See hamboree.org for more.