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Good for you Shelly! I think you'll find that if you give yourself a chance, you can figure out a lot of the hardware issues around your house. After all, think about the freakin' idiots that have learned to do that stuff well enough to charge for it (I've removed, serviced and re-installed the hardware on hundreds of doors and thousands of cabinets/drawers). I'm pretty confident that you have better critical thinking skills than any of those guys.

just delivered

One time, a long time ago I used to smoke and work retail. There was this cashier who would smoke like 5 packs of cigarettes a day. He was NOTORIOUS for bumming cigarettes off of others. I'm not saying I'm a saint, and I eventually took to buying PACKS of cigarettes for others to hold (no joke) to stop but this guy was a menace. So, at this job you got 2 10-minute breaks, one before lunch, one after. Pretty standard, I guess. This guy, the cashier would show up to work early, CHAINSMOKE like 4 or 5 cigarettes, and then take the absolute first 10-minute break. He would regularly smoke 2 cigarettes in 10 min, and could probably do 3 if nobody was looking. Anything he could do to get another cigarette - he was on it. Need someone to gather shopping carts when its like 50 degrees below zero, and windy as fuck - he would be happy to go. Anyways. One day, I'm out there having my lunch, sitting on a fire-exit, having a Marlboro Red cigarette and lunch with one of my other co-workers. And, wouldn't you know it but this guy walks over and asks "what you smkoking" Just like that while holding a pack of (some green who knows whats) and we tell him "Marlboro Reds" to which he replies, in one single breath: "Uggh, Reds? Those are disgusting! Can I have one?" Yea, we gave him a cigarette. The story above about someone telling you your shit is fake, and in the same breath asking to buy is made me think of this. I apologize for not being as good of a story teller as Alex.

Holy smokes. That would have driven me insane by now. Hand in there MA crew! Edit: MasNowsNowsNowsNowsNowsNowsetts.

Changed This To This

I may have fixed the door handle to our front door (that keeps falling off). We'll see...

Two brothers ;-)

NICE!

Very good looking bike, Al. May warm days come early this year.

I always lusted after the single-sided swing arm of the ST.

Look out world, here comes Big Al on the Big Red Machine!

Basically it is all down to RFI control - both into and out of the connected equipment. Works from around 100kHz up to 1GHz and more, and has an attenuation (in EMC lab conditions) of up to 40dB as compared with a kettle lead. Oh and there are no ferrites, which themselves are non-linear and generate harmonics, and no series components either. Works mainly in differential mode, but also has a useful effect in common mode too. Basic rationale is that the mains environment is exceptionally noisy now. Cheap switched mode supplies in fluorescent, LED lighting and CFL's, networking over power, which is now squirting 100-300MHz straight into the domestic wiring at watt and several watt levels with a range of 300 metres, and wifi, cell phones, digital cordless phones etc which all couple into the mains wiring. Once that garbage gets into a piece of audio equipment it gets rectified in semiconductor junctions. How bad is the effect? Well at the extreme end, when your cell phone cranks up the power to locate a cell, we'll all have heard zzt-zzt-zzt from an audio system (even broadcast audio) - and that is high hundreds of MHz getting rectified in your 20Hz to 20kHz audio system. Problem is also that that conventional power filters (like the ones on the back of IEC connectors) are only required to be good to 30MHz, and that is where the specs stop. After which they can actually increase the signal level as the multiple components in there go into self-resonance. Only reason I rolled over on a low royalty (about £30 per cable) was that it will launch in the US directly from Ray Kimber sometime this year, so the market should go up significantly as compared to just the UK. Only a very few (one or two) of the silver variety sell each year over here, which is kind of not surprising. I'm not about to get rich quick with this for sure.

Yes - my thinning the herd sale resulted in selling the Sigma/404's for AUS$1800, but not before some drongo from Europe PM'ed me on Ebay saying I was selling a fake which wasn't as good as the original Sigmas and then asked me what I wanted for them. I suggested he might like to fuck off.

Doesn't surprise me. The Sigmas are getting pretty rare as are good buys of them. About 8-9 years ago I got a low bias Sigma, in excellent condition for $175 along with this cool poster. . A year or 2 back, I turned down $1,950.00 from an unsolicited buyer for my original Sigma/404. They are just not for sale.

Mutant KitKats thanks to our Japanese distributors (Strawberry and Green Tea)

classin' up the aardvark house. w/ a taco bell baja blast freeze.

Yo La Tengo | The Sounds of the Sounds of Science | Grado HF2s

Punch Brothers -- The Phosphorescent Blues