From John Cox Art
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Food for Thought – 31 July 2014
He campaigned on the promise of ‘transforming America’. Well…
Observations II
As requested by the two of you who actually care about the things that cause me to ear out the diminishing remainder of my hair, here are two pictures of my sad, sick little transformer.
This first one shows the discoloration that indicated problems afoot. Transformers aren’t supposed to turn brown. Do you know how HOT that had to be to get paint to start changing colors?
This one gives you an idea of how hot we’re getting. That long pipular-looking bit is what is known in the trade as “Sealtite flex”. It consists of a spiral-wound steel flexible pipe (the ‘flex’ part) covered with a flexible weatherproof vinyl jacket. If you look at the picture carefully, where the flex is clamped to the wall of the transformer, the vinyl is melted and charred. A quick google of the characteristics of vinyl chloride tells us that vinyl starts to decompose (turn brown) at 140-160 degrees C. That’s 280-320 degrees F.
This is my second transformer here. The first one caught fire and burned in 2010, looking like this:
Here’s a look at the end of the old transformer after the fire. Note that in the picture above, the fire was that the opposite end of this transformer. yet, here we are, charred, and hot enough to melt the vinyl completely off that flex.
No, this isn’t a product of the S-word. And for you people who are aware of such things, the transformer is rated at 8 MVA base, and if I turn on every bit of equipment down stream and run my big motor wide open, I have 5 MVA of load.
Welcome to a sad corner of my world.
Food for Thought – 30 July 2014
Food for Thought – 29 July 2014
Observations
Transformers are pretty simple things. They’re not supposed to get hot enough for the paint to start turning brown.
Food for Thought – 28 July 2014
Food for Thought – 27 July 2014
The Name Game #372
We got our “Eighty by eight” this morning, Headed for the low to mid-nineties with little chance of cooling rain today. When I walked out to get the paper this morning it was like lifting the lid to a steamer.
Opened the paper, passing up the news of a new casino’s job fair. There’s another thousand low to medium-tier jobs. waded through the news until at last I came to the birth announcements. This week we have thirty-eight new babies born between July 7 & 23. Twenty-one are to unmarried parents and two new mommies sort of fogged out on who the baby daddy is.
Let’s charge over the hill, shall we?
Curtis M. Jr. & Christa C. pick a random word to tag their daughter, so she’s Lyric Leanne.
Andre & Tedriyonne(!!) P. show their son, little Asher Tyeis. “Asher” is a real name. “Tyeis”, on the other hand, is what you get when the dog eats the Scrabble set.
First apostrophe shows up to add class to the son of Jerald N. & April S., Zavieun Ke’Mon. Note that they adhere to the “Capitalize the first letter after the goofy-a**ed apostrophe” rule.
Adhering to the same rule, Daniel L. & Keturan(!) S do a daughter up as A’Niyah Renee.
Willie & Kathy C. give their son one of those manly trade names, Carter Maddox. Either that or they’re into historical governors of southern states.
Kenneth & Alicia G. don’t want you to think their daughter is named for a northern clan of profligate womanizers, so her name is spelled Kenndi Alise.
James & Stephanie V. triple up on their son, little Zachary Michael-Thane.
Sondai(!) B. & Natore(!) J. perpetuate the travesty with their son, Khilyn Jamar.
Another manly trade name shows up with the son of David S. & Samantha B, Mason Eli.
And then John & Rebbica (Yeah, I double-checked the spelling) H. do their son as Hunter John. Wonder if they’re gonna have a daughter, Gatherer Debbie?
Darien S. & Aleatra(!) K. use punctuation to confer a sense of class upon their son, Jeremiah De’Shawn.
Gregory G. & Victoria S. go for geography and history for their daughter, little Londyn McKinnley.
And that’s the list for this week.
Virtuousity Is Where You find It!
Not every virtuouso is on a stage.
(From Synthstuff)
I’ve worked around a few on American jobsites, but these days everybody’s so scared of OSHA that you will seldom see the envelope pushed any more.
Food for Thought – 26 July 2014
Saturday Song #143
Let us attend to a little bit of Beethoven: Sonata in B flat major for flute & piano, the allegro movement.
Shooting My Own Foot
Every now and then things just don’t work as planned.
Apple rolled out a free download of a beta version of the new operating system, OS X Yosemite. I’ve previously been an early adopter of Apple’s releases, so I figured what the heck, and I downloaded it (at work – we have HUGE bandwidth) and installed it.
Got home after work, fired up the MacBook with it’s shiny new OS, cranked open the Apple Mail program, and it started crashing. Bad.
You can’t just re-install the Mail program, and the only way I could revert to the old OS was to go to my Apple Time Machine™ and do a system restore.
Takes five hours.
First time Apple has failed me.
Food for Thought – 25 July 2014
And Obama’s much more ‘flexible’ since the election.