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Here is the link to the Photobucket album http://s291.photobucket.com/albums/ll303/mclmk8d/2001%20Outback%20Ltd/?albumview- =slideshow&track=share_email_album_view_click
Any help is much appreciated...thanks.
Serge
Now for some more bad news; my GF and and I split for now (:-(
I hope they recover it intact, or not at all. I'd hate to see it abused.
Bob
tom
Renee and I got back together less than a week after the last post, some apologies on both sides and now we are stronger than ever; life is good.
Bob
OMG! Get out of the Dark Ages, grandpa! :P
Plus, I have a Google Voice number and I pay $3 a month to call land lines on Skype.
So the next question is do we even bother getting a land line when we finally put roots down again somewhere?
When I first started looking they cost $700, though.
Now $180 buys you a giant 5" screen with everything. Garmins cost a bit more than that.
What did you end up doing for getting those boxes moved?
All my calls routed to one phone, voice mail is transcribed (not perfectly) for free and sent to me as text, plus I can call Brazil from anywhere for 4 cents per minute, half the cost of Skype-out.
My wife still uses a land line but to be honest I don't even give it out any more. No need.
Unfortunately, I buy very few technology items and those seem to be the only commodity that is actually decreasing in price over time. All the stuff I buy, like flour, sugar, fuel, construction materials, and other basics, have all at least doubled since 2002.
:sick:
I went to buy some wood to build a ping pong table and DANG the prices have skyrocketed.
I don't recall exactly what I paid, but for some reason I was expected those thin sheets of primed white plywood/osb to cost the same as last time - well below $20. They were $37 each! More than double what I paid for the same thing in 2005 or so.
Believe it or not - it's because of the earthquake in Chile earlier this year. They've become a huge exporter of plywood and milled lumber products (mouldings). The earthquake was centered in their prime forestry area.
It depends whether the locality where you settle responds to 911 calls from a cell phone. In Chicago, there is often no response to a cell. I have had to go in the house and use the landline (which shows my address automatically to the 911 center). This has happened several times!
But your comment about technology items being the only commodity that is actually decreasing in price over time is exactly why most of the people in my industry are struggling so. Every year we kill ourselves to come up with bigger and better, and you all think it should cost less!!! We barely recover our investment in technology.
On the fun side, I just scored another US Patent (#7,781,733). It took 3 years for the office to process it. I think that's my 10th.
Actually, it wound up 3 hours away from where we wanted it, since the place we're storing stuff is in the middle of nowhere. So we had to rent a 10' U-Haul box truck (13 mpg!) to get the stuff off the trailer to the storage unit (and it was hard tracking one of those down too). But our stuff is in a strategic location now.
We haven't unpacked anything but nothing seems to be damaged so far, even though the trailer wasn't an air ride moving van. One of my ex-neighbors was a freight picker for a couple of years and he did a great job helping me load the trailer.
We're trying to wrap up this leg of our trip this weekend and then head for a friend's place in the Midwest and then probably down to Chattanooga. And we have a cat sitter lined up for the next few weeks on the road. Life is good.
(congrats on the latest patent Fib!)
Speaking of the ever decreasing cost of technology, we just bought another LCD video projector for our church. It's 3 times brighter, 1/4 the size, twice the resolution, and 1/6th the cost of our oldest 10 year old projector!!!
Shouldn't in car GPSs be a lot cheaper by now too?
tom
I found out my father-in-law, a chemist, has 6 or 8 patents, I forget exactly.
The cool part - his are for various processes used power coating, including some used by Harley-Davidson today.
What industry are yours for?
Ask me again in six weeks. And yeah, should be close to snow. We wound up in Port Huron MI today to stay with my wife's best friend for a week or two (and she's going to house sit our cats for us while we go south).
Congrats on the patent. I bet that feels good (though likely tempered by the insane length of time it took for the Patent Office to issue it)!
As far as costing less, I don't know. I figure if people want the biggest, best, and newest right now, they should have to pay for it. The new tech/top of the line televisions are still insanely priced, but you can also get "yesterday's" televisions for reasonable prices. By the time I actually upgrade from my 1996 Sony CRT, I'll be able to get a holo-deck for $1500!
It's been fun watching the big ore ships cruise by too.
I'll ask about the cow in the morning....
I drive to London every now and then to visit one of the DC's for the company I work for. I usually bring some Tim Bits back for the kids, and seem to always stopping by The Keg for some grub.
Getting through Customs can be fun (sarcastic) and sometimes quite a wait going back over to the US.
-Brian
PS The cow was at London Ice.
Plaque? I think I got plaque on my teeth waiting for the USPTO to come to a conclusion. True, we get plaques and a little bit of money (high emphasis on the "little bit" part). But yes, it's better than plague.
You can blame Juice for this, as he was foolish enough to ask!
This particular patent was a neat little optics trick that we pulled. I had a photographic enlarger as a kid. Black & white home darkroom. While cleaning a lens, I dropped it and it cracked in half! Well, I put the pieces back together, and amazingly the image was almost as sharp as before breaking it! Light bending is an amazing thing, and 'missing data' in the analog world gets smoothed out and goes unnoticed.
We applied that accident to a real world problem. How to observe optically and deliver laser heating power at the same time as bombarding a surface with positively charged ions.
Secondary electrons and phonons (sound waves) from the ion strikes can be used to selectively activate surface adsorbed gas chemistry. Localized long wavelength lasers can be used to raise the surface temperture, lowering the chemical activation threshold in a tight region. These more easily energized gases can be used to selectively etch or deposit materials exactly where we want them. Plus we get to optically watch the progress, in addition to the imaging we already have by using captured secondary electron emission.
How do you get it all to the surface at the same time (parallel processing)? Drill a micro hole thru the glass lens and pass the ion beam coaxially thru the optical system! The light optics hardly notice the missing glass. Cool, eh??
So, what is the purpose of doing this? I mean, what is being made? I'm sure you're not doing that to create artistic reliefs, right?
Traffic over the bridge is a problem and people don't like going over to Sarnia for dinner so much any more and dealing with re-entry.
In its simplest form, a highly focused beam of charged particles can slice materials like a microscopic knife. We use it to cut open individual or groups of transistors on integrated circuits to see what's going on inside, and why they don't behave the way they should.
But as I mentioned before, the real magic begins when you introduce gas chemistry into the process chamber. The energy from the beam breaks bonds, and the reactive species formed will etch or deposit only where the beam is directed. Our number one application for this is for circuit rewiring. If a chip designer makes a small wiring error (and its very common given the tens of millions of transistor on a chip today) we can slice it open, etch away a wrong wire, and deposit a new conductor and insulating material to restore a working circuit. FIB Chip Editing, or Silicon Microsurgery or sometimes called 'yellow wire edits'. Remember seeing the circuit boards on old radios with a scratched out copper trace and a yellow wire soldered as a jumper?? That's what we do! Much of my effort goes into refining and improving this process to keep up with ever shrinking and higher density chip designs.
It typically takes 6 to 8 weeks for a silicon wafer of chips to be manufactured. If a designer makes a single mistake, he has to have the error corrected in the mask set, and have another run of wafers produced. A new product under development now sits idle for up to 3 months. But in less than a week we can produce a small quantity of hand build prototypes. With a box running on these parts, the software guys can refine their code, the new system can be stress-tested, etc. We enable time-to-market, and keep product cycles on track.
My lab toys cost millions, but the payback can be in billions of $$.
I presume this is all powered by a Flux Capacitor?