On Saturday 17 March 2018 06:07:18 Gene Heskett
wrote:
On Saturday 17 March 2018 07:09:34 William Morder wrote:
On Saturday 17 March 2018 03:08:21 Baron wrote:
Hi Gene,
On Friday 16 March 2018 23:33:59 Gene Heskett wrote:
>I pulled the one I gave out of "you
>
> > know where". Blame it on oldtimers...
Not to worry I'm only 70 :-) so a bit of catching up to do :-)
> There is another possibility I should have mentioned. If your
> sata data cables are red, theres something in the red dye that
> destroys the cable in 4 or 5 years. pull the covers so you can
> see the cable(s) and give them a gentle push with a stick,
> after putting a tail -fn50 on the syslog. If the log blows up
> when you do the stick bit for a 1/4" movement, its time for
> new cables, hopefully not red ones.
>
> This has been a problem for cables with that dye since the mid
> 70's of the last century when the J.A.Pan company started
> using it in their cb radio microphone cables. You can cut the
> red wire off 1/2" from the end that has broken, and pour the
> copper out of the red jacketed conductors plastic sleeve as a
> dark brown powder. Its a very poor conductor in that state.
Useful information ! All my sata cables are red.
> In addition to being an oldtimer at 83, I am also a C.E.T.
> with 68+ years of chaseing electrons for a living.
I'm struggling with poor health at the moment and this cold one
day and warm the next isn't helping.
It feels good for once to be the youngster in the group. (I just
turned 60 about a month ago.) I am sad to say that, though
reasonably healthy, I am also starting to feel my age. Worse yet,
I am surrounded by people who believe that life ends at about age
35.
This is some interesting and useful information about SATA cables,
as all of mine are red, as well. Indeed, I don't recall ever
seeing them any other color.
They come in black, tan. blue and yellow. As the retired CE of a tv
station, whose IT guy was buying HD's in 24 packs for the video
servers he's built, he has a standing order to stash any cables they
come with away for me if they aren't red. He was using the 10k rpm
stuff, whose lifetime is less than the red cables, cable failures
are not a problem, keeping the 10k rust cool is. So I manage to keep
1 or 2 non-reds to go in whatever I might build handy. For what I
build to run linuxcnc on, I've also found the $50 on sale 60GB SSD's
are noticeably faster than spinning rust.
Nice thing about getting older, though: one tends
to remember what
is really important (stuff like this), and only forget things like
appointments, or where I put my glasses.
Yeah, I was supposed to go let the vampires have a sample yesterday
to check my INI on my warfarin dose, but plumb forgot about it what
with pulling a gear out of a lathes apron for a guy in WI who's gear
is missing a tooth, a tooth I'll never need because the computer, an
r-pi-3b, does all that better than the gear, ploting a wheel chair
ramp into the front deck in between these ^%$#@ nor-easters, and
taking some clean clothes to the shop where my wife is currently
wearing a cast on a broken leg, and its not scheduled for removal
till late May. A heavy smoker, she has paper mache bones, and at 83
lbs, zero padding. I quit cold turkey 30 years ago, just before we
got married, but she is well and truly hooked.
I'm a DM-II and have managed to lose from 215 when I retired in
2002, down to around 155 which helps with the sugar, and an abused
back. I'd like to lose another 10 or 15, getting totally rid of the
bay window, but I like to eat too.
I am a big guy, so it I could get my weight down below 230 or 240, I
would think about training for the Olympics. But right now my weight
has been going way up, because I also like to eat, and unfortunately
that's about my only means of entertainment.
Got myself a bike, but it needs work; but I really like biking to get
around and run my errands, do shopping, etc., and just happen to get
exercise as a fringe benefit. However, when living in SF (or nowadays
almost any big city), just owning a decent bike is a source of
constant stress, because the bike thieves are incredibly bold, and the
police (except for occasional press releases) do little to stop the
thefts.
However, if you live somewhere that biking is a viable option, I
highly recommend it. You dislike it for about the first week, and then
you get to like it so much that you cannot imagine life without it.