Re: DTV antennas?

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:45:47 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:41:18 -0700, "Joel Koltner"
<zapwireDASHgroups@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yep, and call up their tech support number and complain that it's "not
working." Grrrr...

Most of my customers just want someone to talk to when things go
wrong. I often feel guilty reading them the manual, but that's what
they pay me to do. For the GUM (great unwashed masses), there's the
Geek Squad and clones that perform the same function.

My worst experience was that i had to read my comments to another
engineer before they could understand them. The experience was
disgusting, the other engineer had a PE license. Functional
illiteracy is rampant, as is innumeriacy.


Better watch out... these days the likes of Google and Microsoft with their
"whitespace" initiative are probably even harder on you than the FCC would be
if you get caught. :-)

Ummm... the local pirate radio station has been busted perhaps 3 or 4
times in 13 years of almost continuous operation, without any visible
effects. Radio Free Santa Cruz:
<http://www.freakradio.org>
I'll spare you my opinions of the FCC.

I've done a bit of computer clean-up in the past and just charged people by
the hour. I started out writing up reports of what I'd done, but it turned
out that most people didn't even care -- I had several people ask me not to
spend the 10 minutes writing the reports!

I've had it both ways. Most of my customers are happy with one line
descriptions. When I do housekeeping, I keep a running log of what
was added, deleted, updated, or replaced. However, that's just so
that I have something to tell them when they ask. When I send them an
invoice, I usually leave out the detail. However, when they ask for
detailed invoicing, it usually means that there considering an
insurance claim. Those have invariably blown up on me. To cover
myself, I take photographs, screen captures of the problems, and
occasionally make an image backup (Norton Ghost 2003) of the entire
hard disk BEFORE I start working on it.

Do you have a memory tester? Or something more heuristic like running Doom in
a loop or whatever overnight on a "tester PC?"

I used to have a dedicated memory tester, but it only worked with
ancient SIMM's. I sold it long ago.

These daze, I use:
<http://www.memtest86.com>
<http://www.memtest.org>
These boot from floppy or CD. Really gross memory problems show up
almost immediately. Insidious and subtle problems require an
overnight burn-in. I run the test in the machine that will be
upgraded. To prevent accidents, I usually unplug the HD power and
ribbon cables.

For ECC chips, I'm very careful to watch the degree of error
correction. Even though they work, a high rate of error correction is
a sign of impending doom. I just happen to be running Memtest86+ on a
Dell PowerEdge 600c for the last 3 days. The two sticks of 256MB ECC
RAM are not showing no errors, but 3 ECC error corrections. I just
dumped a towel over the case to raise the inside temperature. Let's
see if I can make it fail. For mission critical machines (i.e.
servers) where I pre-test the memory and CPU, I never have any
problems. The one's I throw together, without adequate testing,
sometimes fail. The absolute worst thing to do is buy some RAM on
eBay and plug it into a machine that hasn't been backed up. After
trashing a few hard disks, thanks to defective RAM, I don't do that
any more.
.