IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Grandfathering - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When my son entered college in Boston, he moved into a dormitory that was located in a brownstone building on the tree-lined and really beautiful Commonwealth Avenue. He set up a table where he put his PC, plugged it in and in just a few minutes, he got an electric shock between the PC cabinet and a nearby steam radiator.

I measured the voltage between the two. It was half of the wall outlet voltage. Clearly the cabinet had no circuit path to ground and the input line EMI filter was doing a two-to-one voltage division effect to the cabinet.

The wall outlet was a two-prong socket, not the three prong type you see today.  Of course, the building was very old and once upon a time, sockets like this were not commonly used.

Adhesive Failure, A Safety Hazard - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The light bulb in the picture below blew out the other day. It has served for quite a long time in a hanging chandelier , I would guess for several years. Quite impressive in my view. 

 

A Crashed Car - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This crashed car is one of the most sobering sights I've across in quite some time. I'd seen it the day before in front of this auto body shop while its front license plate was still affixed, but clearly this car was totaled. I have no direct knowledge of course, but I very strongly suspect that this car must have had a passenger at the time of impact, a passenger who must have been very seriously hurt.

Municipal Malfeasance Again - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This broken telephone pole's location is at 125 Merrick Avenue  Merrick, NY 11566. It is October 24th at this writing. This pole has been broken since last June. It is directly across the street from The Roland Chatterton Elementary School. 

DEADLY BLAST IN BRENTWOOD--TOT KILLED---Carl Schwab

The headline in the title above appeared one day after the apparent explosion of a house in Brentwood LI. The incident took place August 14, 2012. In January 2011 the writer had put up a BLOG entitled, “RASH OF GAS LEAKS—”. In that BLOG I opined that MANY if not most of the gas leaks causing blasts on LI were in fact from LP gas and NOT from NG, natural gas.  In this most recent incident National Grid got out immediately that NG was NOT supplied to this Brentwood address.

Because of the fatality, the investigation, according to the papers, was under the jurisdiction of the Police Department. The Police indicated that the investigation would be exhaustive and initial implications were that several code violations were involved. Mentioned in the news article was that the owner(s) of the property had two—200 pound propane tanks located outside the house in question. The news article does NOT say how the propane was being used i.e. for cooking, heating, hot water, etc. The Police volunteered NOTHING. The claim is the owner(s) did NOT have a “certificate” for propane use.

Emergency Room Entrapment - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We had a family member, my mother-in-law, in need of hospital care. She was bought to the hospital's Emergency Room where placement was made into Room 35.

That room, unlike some of the other ER rooms, is provided with a lockable door. Please note below that the lock of that door is installed in reverse.

 

Multi-Tasking - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Please study this picture for a little while and imagine that you are seeing a collection of rectangular solids as seen from above and having their top surfaces colored green. Stay with that thought for a little while before reading on below.  

Ernesto and VOIP - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E. , P.C.

Tropical storm Ernesto of early September 2006 is now just a distant memory, but it's a memory with a lesson.

Ernesto had lots of rain and a lot of wind, not quite of hurricane strength, but with gusts up to sixty miles per hour. Stories of fallen trees and squashed cars were all over the news. Utility power failures happened all over the place. Power here in Merrick was off for five hours.

I called the utility company when the lights quit and listened to a list of towns with outages. What a list!! It was like the whole of Nassau and Suffolk Counties had power failures.

Then my wife got a phone call from a friend who was using her cell phone because her regular phone had quit working. That regular phone used Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) but with no power, there was no internet access and thus, no phone service. Then she realized that her cell phone was low on charge and there was no way to recharge it with the power gone.

Municipal Malfeasance - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I took this photograph not too long ago. We see a main east-west street of this neighborhood, looking to the east, where a broken irrigation sprinkler was sending a six-foot high arch of water right into the middle of the westbound lane.

Many drivers of westbound cars when coming to this water would swerve into the opposing eastbound lane, right into the path of oncoming eastbound traffic. I witnessed many near misses of head-on collisions. It is only by the grace of an unseen force that no such collisions actually took place, only the near misses.

 

Cell Phones and Passenger Aircraft - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A power amplifier for CDMA service is described at http://www.maxim-ic.com/app-notes/index.mvp/id/456 where we read of performance that is characterized at an output power of +28 dBm, slightly more than 630.9 mW.

At http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet2/6/0esegl2hrtjs4ohlwyih6gc8p8ky.pdf , we find amplifier maximum output power specifications for W-CDMA service of +28.5 dBm which, slightly more than 707.9 mW.

At http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43456368/ns/business-us_business/t/new-elongated-boeing---debuts-paris/ , we read that Boeing has just introduced their new 747-8 jumbo jet. We also read that this aircraft will have 467 seats. The Airbus A380 can seat even more passengers, but let's just call this a jumbo jet seating capacity of 400+.