Friday, November 27, 2015

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  There's a 26" long icicle outside our office window right now.  Sunshine on our dark grey roof is melting a little snow, and the 22°F temperature is making it freeze again quite quickly.  It's a beautiful morning here, not black at all – but cold as heck :)

This morning I worked on the next section of my clock kit, finishing the tens-of-seconds counter.  It all worked on the first try.  I'm not sure whether I'm happy about that, though – it's kind of fun for me to troubleshoot the problems :)  In the second photo below, you can see (sort of) my 'scope, a Rigol DS1102E.  I bought it several years ago, when it cost nearly twice what it does now – and I thought that was a real bargain!  It's really quite an amazingly capable oscilloscope for the money.  It's also (to my ancient sensibilities) amazingly small.  'Scopes like this, back in the '70s, weighted over 100 pounds, were the size of an oven, and were generally rolled around on carts.  They also cost $15,000 or so, and didn't have nearly the feature set of this little thing – most especially they didn't have the spectrum analyzer capabilities...


Black Friday in Paradise...

Black Friday in Paradise...  It will be great!  It will be ... exactly like every other Friday in Paradise :)

We are participating in exactly zero store sales, online sales, or any other kind of sales.  Most of the day we'll be wondering just what the hell is wrong with all those crazed shoppers we see on the news web sites.  Haven't seen any around these parts, though.  Last week there were a bunch of local stores that had signs saying “Black Friday is today”, or something much like it.  If they were attempting to generate a shopping frenzy, it was a dismal failure.  If they were trying to say Black Friday is nothing special, they may well have succeeded...