Nobody uses hammers anymore

At least not on "This Old House".  I watch an episode of the antenna day before yesterday.  Which was nice, the cable doesn't carry "This Old House".  What caught my eye was nobody was using hammers and nails anymore.  Not even air powered nail guns.  Everything gets fastened with drywall screws, driven in with battery drills.  No pilot hole drilling, just drive right into the wood.   As fast as hammering in a nail, not quite as fast as a nail gun. 

Daylight Savings Time, the biannual hassle

So I have to reset all my clocks today.  Antique Tiffany mantle clock, bedside clock radio,wristwatch, car clock, celery phone, VCR, and two Windows computers.  I have been told you should never push the hands of antique clocks backward, it will confuse the striking mechanism and other badnesses.  So I open the back, stop the pendulum, wait an hour, and then restart the pendulum.  The bedside clock radio has a straight forward "Set Clock" button, no problem.  Celery phone, bless its little silicon heart,  handles the time change automatically, so does Windows.  The car clock is so confusing that I have to dig out the car instruction booklet and re read how to set clock.  The human factors department at Buick was out to lunch when they designed that car clock. 

Hand Tools. Round Handles

There oughta be a law against round handles.  When you set the round handled tool down on your bench, it promply rolls off the bench and bangs on the floor.  Unless your bench is dead level.  Few people level their work benches.  Tool companies out to put hexagonal or square or triangular handles on tools, any shape that won't roll of the bench.

Xacto, the hobby knife company is a prominent offender. 

Over The Air TV

Gotta have something on the TV.  While my TV cable was still broken, I hooked up my roof antenna to the big Sony flatscreen TV. That antenna is pretty beat up, a lot of fingers have broken off over the years.  . They were still broadcasting analog TV when I put that antenna up on the roof, and that was a long time ago.  Beat up as it is, it still gets enough signal to run my FM radio.  And it gets enough signal to provide 17 digital and 2 analog channels for the Sony TV to tune in.  Hurrah.  Both of the analog channels are WMUR, the NH TV station (ABC) which at least has some local news and weather. The digital channels are all high def which gives lovely video, at least if you like watching Thomas the Tank Engine, Sesame St, the View, Jeopardy, and some other  loser programming.  No Fox News, no Sci-Fi channel, no CNN.  Arggh.  I want my cable TV back. 

Celery Phones

  What with my land line broken in two,  I used my celery phone to call the power company.  That didn't work.  I dialed, got thru to the faraway call center, and listened to their auto answer machine.  It got around to saying " Press ONE to report a power outage." Tough luck, my celery phone (Lucky Goldstar 305C) won't do that.  Soon as it connects, the number keypad goes away.  Without that keypad, there is no way to press ONE, or any other number for that matter.  PITA.  I had to drive down to Mac's Market in the ville to call in my power outage.  I even dug up the celery phone instruction booklet off my laptop and read it thru.  When all else fails read the instructions. No luck.  Not a word about dial ONE or dialing an extension, or dialing anything at all after the celery phone places a call. 

Back on Line!! Hurrah!

Back on the air, at last!  Took long enough.  We had a really serious windstorm go thru here Sunday night, October 28.  At 2 AM a crash and a flash woke me up.  Lights were out on the bedside clock radio.  Since it was pitch dark, blowing hard and raining hard, I decided to stay in bed and go back to sleep. Whatever it was could wait for daylight. 
  Well, daylight came, and showed the wind had blown down two power poles, the ones that feed juiice to all of Mittersill.  The pole right behind my house  went over and pulled my service entrance clean off the back of the house, and snapped my telephone line clean in half, and broke my cable TV coax. The wired society had struck out. 
   It took the power company ( used be PSNH, now they call themselves Eversource) until Tuesday (THREE DAYS!!) to get a crew up here with new poles, and cherry pickers to fix the downed poles.  The pole right behind the house had not gone all the way down;  it just pulled sideways and was leaning at about 60 degrees.  They just pulled that one back up straight.  The other pole had snapped clean off  about 5 feet off the ground.  That one got replaced.  They restrung the electric wires and bingo everybody else's lights came back on.  Not me, I hadn't gotten my service entrance repaired yet.  Power company won't do that, I have to.
  Next day, Wednesday, I got Jim Price, very nice, very competent, licensed electrician from the next town over (Bethlehem) out to repair my service entrance.  He got that done just before dark, and then by the grace of God, the Eversource people came out Thursday morning and hooked me back up the the grid.  Hallelujah, lights came on, furnace started up, fridge started cooling, hot water heater started heating. 
   And, wonder of wonders, the phone company came by later on Friday and spliced my telephone wire.
   Last player, the cable company, Time Warner, who is changing their name to Spectrum, didn't get here until just now.   They ran new coax to the house and spliced it into the main cable on the troublesome pole, and wonderbar, TV and Internet came back. 

General Electric wants out of the locomotive business

Wow.  The diesel locomotive business really got started right after WWII.  All the railroads wanted to replace their steam engines.  This was a huge piece of business.  Between 1945 and 1957 every steam engine in the land was scrapped and replaced with brand new diesels.  The Electro motive division of General Motors got the bulk of this work.  Old line steam engine makers Baldwin and Alco offered  product, and Fairbanks Morse and GE offered product but EMD got all the business.  90% or better of all railroad locomotives were EMD built by 1960.  All the competitors dropped out except GE, who still offered fairly decent product, but wasn't selling much against EMD. 
   Somehow, in the 1980's GE pulled ahead of entrenched EMD and today is the best seller, with EMD just clinging to life.  GE did some $4.7 billion worth of diesel locomotive business last year.  A handsome chunk of change, even compared to GE's other businesses (jet engines, heavy electrical equipment) which brought in close to $100 billion. 
   For some reason the new guy at GE, the one who sold off the GE corporate jet fleet,  wants to get rid of the locomotive business.  No reason given.   That's some 10000 employees.  The Wall St Journal had a picture of the locomotive production line,  giant room,  half a dozen big locomotives under construction. 
   Some business writer ought to do a book on how GE managed to take to diesel market away from EMD back in the 1980's.  There ought to be some good stuff in there.  Was it GE's AC powered locomotives that had greater tractive effort (pulled harder) and cost more?   Was it sloppiness over at EMD?  something else? 
  I wonder why GE now wants out of the locomotive business.