IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Remittance Slip - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Each month, an assortment of bills comes in and each one includes a remittance slip which is supposed to be mailed back with the payment check. That remittance slip bears the return mailing address of the service provider.

A return envelope is also provided which usually has a transparent window through which the return mailing address is supposed to be visible.

Sometime though (always with the same provider), the remittance slip and the envelope sizes don't agree and the remittance slip can slide to obscure the mailing address.

That just plain bugs me. Call me neurotic, but I won't/can't abide that obscuration. Instead, I take a small chunk of the envelope that the bill came in and cut out a small folded tab which I then trim as seen below and place over the remittance slip. That tab is then taped to the inside of the return envelope.

When the whole return envelope is assembled, the little paper tab does not impede removal of the remittance slip, but it does keep the mailing address of the remittance slip in view as the bill makes its way back to the service provider.

Fourth Heart Attack - Part 12 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambrtec, P.E., P.C.

I contacted the hospital where I had been a heart patient to describe the dangers to which I had been subjected during my stay. I received the following letter of reply from that institution:

I felt compelled to reply to the above letter with my own letter as follows:

Trying to engage that hospital administration feels like I'm tilting at a windmill, but maybe ...........

Windows 10 Boot-Up Failure - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When booting up, my HP ProBook 4540s laptop often locks up with the following screen display.

The password entry line that should appear in the darker, lower rectangular area does not appear, the keyboard is locked out and the power on/off pushbutton switch is inoperative. The mouse can move the cursor around the screen, but the mouse has no other effect.

The only way to recover from this is to unplug the AC line cord, let the laptop sit and draw power from its internal battery until the battery gets low enough to cause a power-off shutdown and once that has happened, plug the AC power cord back into the wall. I then turn power on and a normal boot-up sequence will usually take place.

When this laptop had Windows 7, nothing like this ever occurred. Only after "upgrading" to Windows 10 did this problem come about.

Why is this happening? Does anyone know a remedy?

Montana Chubby - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The photograph on the left dates from around 1951. This man lived in Milwaukee and was at least once on television in that city. He performed on the mandolin and the banjo under the name Montana Chubby even though he wasn't chubby and he had never been to Montana. He even performed with Concertina Millie and take my word for it, that was hitting the top in Milwaukee.

My wife, Judy, tells the story of how when she was a child, she, her brother and her parents used to take these really long vacation drives across country and when they happened to be in Milwaukee, she remembers having seen Montana Chubby on television.

She thought that he didn't look like someone from Montana. He looked like someone from Brooklyn. In point of fact, at that time he had never been outside of the Milwaukee city limits.

How do I know about him? Montana Chubby was my mother's brother, my Uncle Harry. Little did Judy know back then that she would eventually marry Montana Chubby's nephew.  

When I hear the expression "It's a small world."................

 

Wheel Sectors - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Automobile wheel covers (hubcaps) are decoratively partitioned into sectors. The usual partitioning is into five, six, seven, eight, nine or sometimes ten sectors. Now and then though, I see some hubcaps that are divided into fewer or more sectors than that.

Maybe this is a useless observation, but it reflects the wide choices we have in many areas of daily life.

Have you looked at the candy shelves in CVS lately?

 

Traffic Hazard in Wantagh, NY - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please see the photograph below of a left lane exit from Sunrise Highway in Wantagh. This picture was taken looking west at oncoming eastbound traffic. This exit is a very dangerous feature of the roadway at this point for the reason shown in the second photograph below.

Drivers seeking to bypass a traffic signal at the intersection of Sunrise Highway and Wantagh Avenue often use this exit to speed as diagrammed below. When leaving the Sunrise Diner, I have personally experienced many instances of near collision along Railroad Avenue as a result of such speeding vehicles. Of late, those instances have been getting more frequent. I therefore submit that the exit in the above photograph should be closed and eliminated.

By letter, this issue has brought to the attention of the Town of Hempstead. We'll see where this leads.

Skin Care Hazmat - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

One of my sons received a little bonus at work. The company distributed some samples of several skin care products. He didn't really feel that he wanted them so he brought them over to give to me.

After my son had gone home, I took a look at the ingredients labels and one of those labels left me astonished. The user is expected to douse himself/herself with pressurized butane, the primary ingredient of cigarette lighter fuel and the primary ingredient in this container?? This is in a skin care product??

Butane is a petrochemical of which I want no part. Would you like to read some scary stuff about butane? Check out these three URLs:

https://www.airgas.com/msds/001007.pdf

https://www.praxair.com/-/media/corporate/praxairus/documents/sds/butane-c4h10-safety-data-sheet-sds-p4572.pdf?la=en&rev=b4b6401855524c07a5e6793ad88db23a

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201460/

This container is going to be disposed of as a hazardous waste material. I no way will I allow this product to be used and vented into my home.

Skimping - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.E.

I have no rational explanations to offer for either of the following. These situations arose several decades ago so I feel I can talk about them now. Maybe reading these horror tales will do some good somewhere else, some other time.

I hope.

First:

I was walking through the area where technicians were testing high voltage power supplies. Those power supplies used tuned class-C amplifiers as drivers to feed resonant transformers that were followed by  rectifier and filter assemblies. If those amplifiers were mistuned off-resonance with respect to their drive frequency, they would consume excessive DC power while delivering severely diminished output and they would severely overheat.

As I passed by this one fellow's work station, I smelled something really noxious. It was like a combination of burning carbon resistors and burning bakelite. I stopped to see what was going on. The fellow at that bench noticed me, turned in my direction, pointed to his oscilloscope and asked "Is this all right?" which it most definitely was not. The class-C amplifier was nowhere near to being in proper tune.

It took just a few minutes to show this fellow how to get the tuning right and how to get each power supply working properly. When I came back an hour or so later, there he was sitting with a whole bench full of properly working units. He smiled at me.

A little later, I asked his supervisor about technician training and to my astonishment, I was told that the company owner who was in charge of manufacturing would not allow any time to be spent on employee training. Instead, anyone newly hired was taken over to a workbench and simply told to get to work so that no precious time would be "wasted".

Second:

We received shipments of circuit boards for µP controlled high voltage power supplies and many of those boards when populated simply did not work. I knew that the circuitry should be okay because most of it had been used before in other products, but picking some of them up and holding them against a strong light revealed the problem.

The boards were two-sided with no center layers so the strong light allowed me to see both sides at once. Those two sides were visibly misaligned by 1/8th of an inch. Pads on one side with transitions or "thermals" going to the other side often missed making connection to the other side. There were also short circuits galore.

I pointed this out to that same company owner and he replied that this was as good as any circuit boards could get. When I contradicted that, the next line that came my way was "You're not thinking of the cost!!!".

Those defective boards took a lot of hand labor to rework to the point of functionality. How about the "cost" of having had to do that?

 

Oleander, Very Dangerous - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We were roaming Planting Fields Arboretum last May where we came across this potted plant with just a tiny little warning sign stuck into the soil:

From:

https://www.hgtv.com/outdoors/flowers-and-plants/trees-and-shrubs/oleander-is-a-dangerous-beauty

"How can some of the most beautiful plants be so toxic? Take oleander—that wonderfully large shrub that, despite high winds and salt spray along our coastlines, somehow manages to produce clusters of gorgeous blooms in summer in white, yellow, peach, salmon, pink or red. And yet oleander is considered one of the most poisonous plants in the world.  All parts of this gracefully mounded shrub contain poison; a single leaf ingested by a child is known to be deadly. "

I'd heard of the name "oleander" in the same way I'd heard of other plants, but I had no idea that oleander is so dangerous. Unfortunately and astonishingly, this toxic plant had been placed in an open courtyard surrounded by all kinds of other presumably harmless plants where I can imagine innocent passersby and young children coming into contact with it.

I have sent an e-mail to call attention to this dangerous situation but the general warning I offer to everyone is don't touch any plant you may not be familiar with.

You never know.

Rising Bubbles - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I've always been a little bit curious about those really small bubbles that are dispersed in tap water, especially during the summer, and which rise so slowly to the top.

These pictures were taken at roughly ten second intervals. It took over a minute for the bottom most bubbles to rise only four inches to the top. Larger bubbles blown through a soda straw rise through that vertical distance almost immediately.

Why are the smaller bubbles so much slower than the larger bubbles?