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.

Tempest in Teapot

"Don't Trust the Chinese to make Microchips for the Military"  Headline to a Wall St Journal op-ed yesterday.  The writer, Dan Nidest, clearly lacks experience in the design of military electronics.  Whereas it used to be my day job. 
   US procurement regulations require that all the semiconductors in a military gadget be "Mil-Spec" semiconductors.  Which cost ten times as much as commercial devices, and are of marginal quality.  The Mil Spec thing got started back in vacuum tube days.  The military knew that tubes with extra thick filaments would last longer than standard commercial tubes.  And they bought such tubes, for a premium price.  Trouble is, there is no way to inspect the insides of a glass vacuum tube without ruining it.  And so unscrupulous vendors put mil spec markings on ordinary commercial tubes and sold them to the military.  And so, the military demanded that mil spec tubes only be manufactured on special production lines, under inspection by government agents. 
   This quaint custom carried over to semiconductors when they came into service in the 1960's. 
   So, false alarm.  All semiconducters used in military electronics are made in the US of A.  Not to worry.

Dawn over Marblehead (Wall St) Finally.

Price of Puerto Rican bonds is finally dropping into the toilet.   About time.  Early in 2015 a Puerto Rican bond was selling on the street for 95 cents on the dollar.   This price drifted down gradually thru out 2015, 2016, and most of 2017.  It had reached 65 cents on the dollar by this summer.  Only this fall did the price dive down to 30 cents on the dollar. 
   In actual fact, Puerto Rico doesn't have the money to pay off a nickel of the $93 billion that Wall St bankers were stupid enough to loan them over the years.  It's been obvious for twenty years that Puerto Rico didn't have, and could not get, the money to pay off any of its loans.  And yet,  those clever Wall St banks kept loaning Puerto Rico more money.  And trading Puerto Rican securities and bonds back and forth among themselves as if these securities were actually worth something.   They aren't.
   The amazing thing.  The Wall St bankers only figured things out in the last few weeks.  You gotta wonder where these people went to school. 
 

OK, so Corker and Flake are bailing out

Two US republican senators announce they will not run for re election in 2018.  They are no friends of Donald Trump, but up until now have been more loyal and useful Republicans than John McCain, Susan Collins, or Rand Paul.   
   They both come from reasonably Republican districts, which may elect Republican replacements.  On the other hand, incumbents usually have better odds of winning the election than  challengers.
   Granted, Trump and his friends will have a more tractable Congress if Corker and Flake are replaced by Republicans.  If they are replaced by democrats, life will be harder for the administration.   The Republican control of the Senate rests on a mere two seats. 
  Note to Steve Bannion.  You would do the party more good by attacking democrats, rather than Republicans.