Песец

Today I received the first email from my new batch job.  Each day it throws away the hourly stock quotes I got from Schwab and replaces them with more accurate quotes from barchart.com, to prevent "drift" in my technical indicators.  Because Barchart delays their data by 15 minutes, and sometimes there are "price corrections" a few minutes after 4pm, I have the batch job running at 4:20 pm.  *snerk*

And why do I have to do this?  Because Schwab gives "real-time" quotes, while I want "top-of-hour" quotes from several seconds earlier.  Schwab offers those, but not to robots (their website is carefully coded to make it difficult to extract this data).  Stockcharts.com offers top-of-hour data, but not to robots (terms of service say "no bots").  Barchart offers this data, with a delay.  It's a conspiracy to ensure that I can't get the numbers I need when I need them!

And... *still* no capacitor!  USPS says it left their country ten days ago.

"Even if a network administrator does not wish to ban, say, role-playing games outright, there is value in saying that such uses of the network should not interfere with real work like reading XKCD."

--- link (talking about the Linksys WRT54GL wireless access point with custom Linux firmware).

T₀ = Friday, May 29th: We came home from a long homeschool outing.  As usual, I put my laptop (mentioned previously) at the top of the basement stairs and went to bed for a nap.  When I woke up, the computer had this big dent on the top and the LCD screen no longer worked.  Apparently Wifey had asked Kid #2 to get something from a shelf over the basement stairs and he had... stepped on my computer!  Of course, this sort of thing only ever happens on a Friday night.

I dug out a 10 year old CRT (that hadn't been used since the move from NJ) and plugged it into the VGA port.  Works!  But there's a reason why the old monitor hasn't been used: it's extremely heavy and it makes yucky "static discharge" noises whenever the screen resolution changes—which is appallingly often.  It's so heavy, I can only use this laptop+monitor combination at the dining-room table, which has hard wooden chairs that don't lean back.  But I managed to spend several hours setting ‘D’ file attributes to prepare for the full backup that this computer has never had (I've had problems in the past that got solved by using file attributes and the dump/restore pair of programs).

T+1 Saturday: Went to Walmart and bought a $150 LCD monitor.  Well, Wifey needs a new one anyway: her old monitor must be at least 15 years old and it's now too dark to play Runescape.  The new monitor weighs much less than the CRT, but it's still heavier than the laptop.  I am able to set it up in the basement so I can have the keyboard in my lap and then crane my neck leftward to see the screen.  Well, at least I have a means of income again.  Also got that full-backup done, which took 3 hours over wireless, and that's *after* marking several gigabytes of Ubuntu files with the "do not back up" attribute.

T+3 Monday: Called Plan‣IT‣ROI, from whom the laptop had been purchased along with a 3-year extended warranty (not my idea).  They won't fix it.  Before purchase, their warranty covers everything except the battery and "cosmetic damage".  After purchase, they stuffed a document into the "packing list" envelope on the box which excludes the motherboard, the LCD, and everything else that might actually break.  This is fraudulent—you can't change the warranty terms after purchase—perhaps I'll get around to calling NJ police on them.  They want $1500 to repair a computer that they know was bought from them for only $1000.  It seems they pulled this price of the air just to get me to go away.

Later: Called Panasonic Canada.  They'll fix it for $600 parts + $150 labour.  Ouch!  But obviously Plan‣IT‣ROI's price is farcical.  I once replaced the LCD on a ThinkPad 600, so I went looking around the web for parts.  Most places that sell LCD's don't have the one I need, but one place has it for $179.  Unfortunately the person answering the phone has a heavy Chinese accent, so I can only communicate with them via email.

T+9 Sunday 6/7: Bought the service manual from 9manuals.com for $6.00.  This is the "consumer service manual", rather than the one Panasonic employees actually use.  The main purpose of the manual seems to be to convince people not to try this at home.  It is written in idiomatic Japanese translated literally into meaningless English.  Example text:There are many warnings to "please use new parts" because so much glue is used in the design.  I suppose I *might* be able to do this installation, but if Panasonic's goal with this manual is to convince me to use their repair service, the instructions in the manual are probably not reliable, even if I could figure out what they mean.  When I Google for "intuition combination" I find other computer manuals poorly translated from Japanese, but I still don't know what that phrase refers to.

T+10 Monday: Called Laptop Centre of Toronto.  They offer same-day service for $185 parts + $65 labour.  I'll be in Toronto this Friday anyway for a homeschool outing—maybe the disaster will end soon!  Also, Laptop Centre will buy my various broken old laptops for about $30 each, which is better than *paying* $10 each to have the Province of Ontario recycle them.

Hopefully this won't turn out like the last disaster that I used "T+n" notation for.  My Move to Canada project finally ended at T+5½ years.

Here are my vacuum tubes.  I've been collecting them for over 30 years.
As you can see, I haven't treated them very well.  They've been moved from one home to the next several times.  Some of them may no longer be functioning.  Standing up in the background is a Tung-Sol bridge rectifier, for which I don't have a part number (but the 10D1 looks similar).  Next to it is one of my five examples of the 6336A dual triode.  shockwave77598: As can be seen from the linked close-ups, these "vacuum" tubes are full of metal, so it cannot be said that I am collecting tubules of "nothing".  The base of the 6336A has a magic-marker annotation "10/12", indicating that I once tested it (back when corner drugstores had tube-testing machines) and it was in good shape at that time.

In 1998 I found a website that sold tubes.  I checked their prices and determined that my 98 tubes had a replacement value of about $358.  The 6336A is one of the more expensive items, with a "used" price-tag of $25 back then.  I contacted the website operator to ask if he wanted mine, but got no reply.  I am pleased to be able to recall these tidbits for you, but in order to find this price list I had to search through a CD I made, named "Our Family 1999", that contained all home-made files from the family computer at that time.

Today I checked eBay.  Here is a used 6336A, perfect 115/115 test score, $28․00.  This one is never-used for $15․00.  This sad sack is the sort of auction my son will have to run if I don't get rid of these tubes before I die: set of six 6336A's plus a single 6336, unknown quality, current bid $10․50.  Well, at least he's getting bids!

Unlike tubes, it seems tube testers are now collectable items, costing hundreds of dollars and often out of stock.