The Weather

Hah!
I could say: that's cold man.

But what I will say is: reminds me of the song/tune called Trigger 22 by Ugress, there are some vocal samples from a movie, part translation of an excerpt follows: "the only responsible place to live is here! In, and of human waste! The human thought itself is not even worth viping your *** with! When the material is victorious over our minds, our place is here!" In a somewhat manic voice. I like that one a lot, has some good beats, and a very nice low level background low frequency noise. Ugress - Trigger 22

Not a cloud in sight, 20c in the shade.
 
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That in a nutshell is it. Everything we do brakes the rules. Life, Forum, Manners. Hopefully a good heart offsets that.

One thing I heard years ago now seems to have lost followers. It claimed the Earth and the Sun might resonate together which suggests both are in a simple way lifeforms. I liked that idea. I didn't need to believe it nor disbelieve it. All I needed was to have heard of it.
 
Ronald McDonald would be crying himself to sleep and sucking his thumb if he knew what his products did to this entire planet

It's sad that I have to pass a long line of cars waiting to turn into the golden arches every morning on my way to the gym where the parking lot is empty. I believe that many of the mega corp CEO's have no conscience.....including the one I worked for. $15 million a year will erase a lot of it.

Wow, George as a youth! Cool!

Youth, not really. I was about 5 years into my 41 year career at Motorola when that picture was taken. I found it among my parents belongings after they passed and recognized it as the back yard of my childhood home.

I left home under less than optimum circumstances when I was 20 with whatever I could stuff into my 1949 Plymouth. Most of the projects, pictures and other evidence of my "youth" was left behind and subsequently discarded.

I didn't return until I was asked to help them pack up their stuff and move out of Miami. That's when this picture was taken which would have been late 1977 or early 78. I would have been 25 or 26 years old, but still looked like a kid.

Youth picture......I've got exactly one. I would be the Big Dumb looking Blonde One on the left, hence one of the Pseudonyms I have used .....BDBO. The other, used on test papers in college classes, especially calculus.....I. B. Stoopid.

Second picture, same crew 56 years later
 

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I'm not a big fan of thunderstorms either, some years ago a strike a few feet from the house awoke my wife and I abruptly around 2AM. Blinding flash, sizzle and bang all more or less simultaneously had us up for hours. The chorus of mad beeping devices, alarm system going off, etc was memorable.

It was pretty telling that quite a few TVs and computers appeared on the curb the next trash day.

The second most exciting moment was when a neighbor's chimney exploded at 6AM during a lightning strike a couple of years ago.

It's 30°C out there today.
 
Just got back from a walk in the park. For some reason I was the only one there. Could it be due to the 92F (33 C) temperature with zero wind and no clouds.

The ground (mix of asphalt, dirt and rock) was too hot for bare feet. I lasted for just under 3 miles according to my phone. I should have gone earlier this morning but I was busy stuffing parts into a PC board and slinging some solder. 95 F (35 C) forecast for Saturday and Sunday, with some clouds.

I'm not a big fan of thunderstorms either

They were a daily occurrence in the summertime in Florida. I never had a direct lightning strike on my house, but a hit on my neighbors ham radio tower blew up more stuff in my house than his.

There was an AM radio station with 5 towers near the house where I grew up. I used to stare out the window during a thunderstorm to watch the tallest tower get zapped. Sometimes the station would go off the air for a second or two, sometimes longer....a lot longer, while other times you would never know it got struck unless you watched it happen.
 
I had lightning strike the ground about 10-15 ft from where I was when I was 17. It was funny in retrospect because I and a friend were doing a chair carry for a friend in a cast, but after the lightning she jumped out of our arms and took off hopping on one leg for our yellow schoolbus.

Years ago, early nineties, the modem I was using blew in a thunderstorm.

About 10 years ago there was a bad storm, I lost a hubcap driving home, and then the convergence on my 46" Samsung rear projection blew. It was a latent defect common to that model, but in my case a brown out triggered it.

All in all not to bad for bad experience with thunderstorms (knock on wood).
 
I had lightning strike the ground about 10-15 ft from where I was when I was 17.

Florida is the number one lightning strike state in the US, so big sparks from the sky were pretty common. Common enough to create complacency. We had high voltage transmission lines next to our house as a kid, and again across the street from where I lived for 37 years before moving north. I always thought that lightning would prefer those tasty power lines over the BDBO swimming in a lake of pool 50 feet further below the clouds (cone of protection and all that stuff), so I often swam in a thunderstorm......nothing bad ever happened. I would later learn that the power lines don't always protect what's underneath them.

From age 25 to about 35 I had a small sailboat and spent many days sailing up and down the ocean off Ft. Lauderdale Florida. Lightning strikes are a different story, and something to be feared when you are on a 14 foot boat with a 20 foot aluminum mast acting like a giant antenna to the clouds daring to be zapped.

One morning I was about a mile offshore when I observed a large storm brewing over land and moving toward the beach, so I made a full speed dash for the shore. I got to shore as the heavy rain started, dropped the mast, fetched my van, wheeled the boat to the trailer, and was in the process of tying everything down for the 12 mile drive home when the lights went out.......

I came to on my back in the sand looking up at the rain in my face and a crowd of people staring at me. About the time I figured out that I wasn't dead, and all of my body parts were intact and functioning, the lifeguard runs up. It seems that lightning had struck the large water tank across the street and induced some serious voltage in the mast of my boat which was stowed in its holder on the trailer. I was tying the mast in place with a bungee cord while standing barefoot in wet sand, thus being the ground path.

Witnesses stated that I jumped about 5 feet in the air and a few feet backwards at the same time, landing flat on my back. I was unconscious for a minute or two at most. It is unclear if the electrical discharge, landing flat on my back from an unknown distance in the air, or having my head hit the hard packed wet sand caused the blackout. The lifeguard wanted to call an ambulance or at least have me go to a hospital, but I had to be at work in less than 2 hours. I got to work on time and other than a headache, there were no ill effects.
 

PRR

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...early nineties, the modem I was using blew in a thunderstorm....

1990s, we were averaging one answering machine and two modems every summer.

I did put a knife-switch in the modem line, which got us down to one modem per summer.

Finally the phone line went OUT. Awful sounds and/or no connection. Came to realize that while the power line was put underground in the 1970s, and phone line was run with it, we were still on the overhead phone wires. With a protector block that could have been installed by Vail.

So lightning surge would come in the overhead wire, and go to power ground, THROUGH modem and answering machine.

The telco tech and I agreed the thing to do was connect the underground line, and abandon the overhead line with large spacing. Never a problem after that.

Oh, one problem. The 90 foot pine about 20 feet behind the house took a DIRECT hit. BANG!! Large chunk of wood BOILED off the tree. Think how long it takes your big burner to boil a pot of water; now how much power to do that in a fraction of a second. Don't mess with Thor!

Side-effect: the $$$ microwave did not want to come on-line, and when it did the display flickered slightly dim. Much later I grokked that it had probably zapped a power diode and was running the CPU/VFD half-wave instead of full-wave. So be it. We finally retired it after 33 years apparently for worn cathode in the magnetron (it was taking longer and longer to do the same work; and we found a comparable refurb for $59).
 
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I think its important to remember to unplug your vintage gear from the wall when its not being used. I've got a betamax machine here with a blown MOV in the power supply and a dead laserdisc player with weak MOV's but not visibly blown which blew a switching transistor/regulator combo IC recently.


Both machines will require at least $50 in parts to get them back up to snuff and that is a big investment in equipment that is from 1985 and 1993 respectively.

An external good quality UPS or surge protector is essential too at least to prevent this sort of thing happening again in the future.
 
If you get caught in a storm you might be close to a tree. If so take very short foot to foot steps until clear of the roots which usually follow the same shape as the tree branches. When about 30 meter clear lay flat on the ground if the storm is very close. If you feel a tingle throw yourself down quick. Near trees a wide step might expose you to high voltages. These will be less than the full force, unfortunately still very high. In the true rain forest you might stand a chance as so many trees to draw the strike. By the law of averages you would be safer than most places.
 
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I believe that many of the mega corp CEO's have no conscience......

I'm a huge fan of the old Ronald McDonald and my mum is a huge fan of KFC but only the versions from the 60s and 70s and 80s, after that things went sour for both companies as both companies just couldn't put the same quality into their products as they used to be able to because of overpopulation.

I have fond memories of our family getting KFC every week.

Youth picture......I've got exactly one.
Don't put yourself down so much, I hope you and everyone else in the photo had many children.


When about 30 meter clear lay flat on the ground if the storm is very close. If you feel a tingle throw yourself down quick. Near trees a wide step might expose you to high voltages


I will more than likely be laying down the entire time during a thunderstorm.
 
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I'm a huge fan of the old Ronald McDonald and my mum is a huge fan of KFC.......I have fond memories of our family getting KFC every week.

I grew up in Miami Florida which is the corporate home of Burger King, so guess which fast food we had the most of. We didn't get a Mickey D's until I was in high school. Many high school lunches consisted of a bolt out of the classroom, jump into the 1957 Chevy, rip down the road to McD's, cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke for 99 cents, and a short detour around the radar cop on the way back to school.

We had 35 minutes to make the trip.....unless we chose to skip the after lunch class. The fact that we could eat lunch for less than a dollar put this quite some time ago......1968 - 1970 to be exact.

I hope you and everyone else in the photo had many children.

one, one and two. total of 5 grandkids at this time.

If you get caught in a storm you might be close to a tree.

The school policy in the late 60's was to shove all the kids out the door by 4 PM and lock the place down. This left many kids waiting outside for the school buses which came as late as 5 PM. We took shelter where we could, or I simply walked the 4 miles home in the rain. A group always gathered around the base of a large Ficus tree, and one day the inevitable happened, the tree took a lightning bolt. One kid was killed, several injured.

School policy was altered several times after that to find safe places where we could wait out a storm. The library was available for quiet study only, but I was already not welcome there. It seems that library people didn't like my friend, Mr. Panasonic (cassette player). He was too noisy. Hey, how much noise can 6 "C" cells, a hand full of germanium transistors, and a 3 inch speaker make in 1970?
 
Not near trees is the warning. If you take John Wheeler's ideas of Quantum Physics seriously you might say some electrons go back in time. There might be a connection with lightning. The main charge is in the clouds. Just like the roots of a tree a similar attractive quality is in the ground. The weird bit is a thin tracer seems to shoot up from the ground to the clouds inviting the lightning. One could say in the Wheeler model a time displacement. It's just fun to say it.

Rogue antimatter found in thunderclouds : Nature News & Comment

KFC is a good easy meal for the road. McD also. Surprised you eat meat !
 
Tube Lab . I put forward to Kron and JJ a TR34 version of EL34. Neither were interested. My hunch is not having grids in the way would be great. EL34 still has small wobbles due to that. It needs to be well priced. 20% above the usual would be fair. I was just wondering if a tube works like lightning, I guess it must. I guess it still would allow diode action even if a tracer comes first.

We also use to go to the chip shop for a burger when at school and sit under the trees of Blenheim park to eat it and have enough money left for cigarettes. It was all like a mini holiday and all inside one hour.

Unlike most people I have raised the beef and meat I've eaten. It is said beef is a very poor converter of food in put. This is not really true as they convert grass which is sometimes the only realistic crop for some land, sheep even better as they climb hills and find the last morsel. Other bad practice are the choice of the producer. New Zealand forgets to say it's production is mostly organic. This is because the people to land ration is still reflectively low. They would be bonkers to farm intensively. Doubtless some do.
 
Another smoking day for southern Ontario, mid 30's, humidex in the low 40's. At least it cooled down last night to be able to drive the heat out of the house. Another day in the shade and cool basement for me.
garden has little tomatoes and the cucumbers are already half way up the trellis to the top of the fence. Little cuc's too. Good year heat wise but some irrigation will be needed.
I think I'd gag on traditional KFC chicken now, Swiss Chalet BBQ chicken is as far as I go.
Does the KFC coleslaw still burn your throat? :) It can't be just the vinegar, must be something like citric acid of other preservative that they use in it.
 
I can't imagine what will happen if I go out into a rainforest and start camping during a thunderstorm. I know for one thing I'll brown my trousers if a strike gets too close. As for weather or not my dvd player and solar panel and ham radio gear will survive that remains to be seen.
In my younger days, I volonteered in a Summer church camp, and one night, efter ”fiddling” with one of the girls in the camp we decided to take a swim, naked (did I say Christian Summer camp?!) during a thunderstorm, and as we stood on the bridge ready to get into the water, the lightning struck the water just some 50-100 ft away from us. Did we care?! Oh no .....:p We did swim.
 
I saw it hit a large spruce tree, 50 ft in front of the restaurant's picture windows overlooking the lake at the uncles resort. I heard zinggggg, then a loud snap, when it it ground. it stripped the bark in about a 6 in gap for the length of the tree, it survived and patched itself up.
Also saw it hit a hi tension line right outside of work. watched from the 2nd story building. Luckily, it hit the outside line away from the cars below or it would have even be more excitement . the hydro line skipped across the ground burning up until it ran out at the pole. we went outside later and there was pieces of & a mound of glass at the bottom of the pole.
That's enough for me :)