WAYNE CHIRNSIDE wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

-=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to JASEN BETTS <=-

 WC> RE: NiCad CMOS cells.

 RJT> As it is, I do have this nicad sitting here..

 JB> you may as well use it then, it might be worth mounting it remote
 JB> from the motherboard

 RJT> There's a thought.  

 WC>  Darn good one too, use that method myself on such boards.

 WC>  Believe it or not this board has a barrel soldered in NiCad  over
 WC> 11 years old!!! Still keeps time perfectly and no sign of  leakage.

 RJT> I am not in the habit of turning that machine off
 RJT> at all, so I'm not real worried about it.  

 WC> Not turning the machine off at all tends to shorten the lifetime 
 WC> of those soldered in NiCad cells in my experience.

It was leaky when I pulled the board out of the pile and built the machine
in the first place.  That was back in oh,  October or thereabouts,  and
I've been meaning to get back into it ever since.

 RJT> The main thing just now is that I don't have either a monitor or 
 RJT> a keyboard hooked up to that box,  so if we do lose power it's 
 RJT> going to be a bit of a PITA to deal with...

 WC> I gotta get my Pentium going again.

 WC> Stupid 72 pin SIMM socket and RAM in this 486 don't seem to seat 
 WC> perfectly so every now and than an unpredictable amount of RAM 
 WC> doesn't register or disappears in operation crashing Netscape or 
 WC> another application.

Plastic or metal clips?  Those might be the problem,  perhaps?

 WC> I've cleaned the socket and RAM, reseated the RAM, tightened the
 WC> locking clips which held for a while but now it appears if I leave
 WC> the machine on for any length of time bye goes the RAM.

Not a good sign.

 WC> Picked up a soldering iron the other day for like the first time in
 WC> five years or more.

Same kind of time lapse for me.

 WC> Darn T.V.'s remote control's positive battery connection was one of
 WC> those stiff bent wires from the P.C. board threaded into the 
 WC> battery compartment. Broke flush with the board right where
 WC> it was bent to access the battery compartment.

 WC> With little hope of success, bad eyesight and unsteady hands I
 WC> pretinned the broken pieces and blobbed them back together  using
 WC> just fingers to immobilize the lead.

 WC> Imagine my surprise when the repair took without so much as
 WC> a cold solder joint. Got lucky on timing and the solder cooled
 WC> before my fingers moved.

This reminds me of that old cliche about "It's like riding a bike..."   :-)

Last time I was up in NYC I got to demonstrate that one,  finding a way to
get to where I wanted to go in fairly short order,  in the chaos that's
lower manhattan streets.  Tomorrow I go back for the first time since that
visit and we'll see if I can still remember how to drive in that town. 


 WC> Nice surprise and the repair only took me about four minutes. 

 WC> Now does _anyone_ have a clue as to what the remote code for a 
 WC> Montgomery Ward branded T.V. might possibly be?

Not me!  Maybe there's a web site devoted to that stuff?  I haven't looked,
 but probably should at some point.

 WC> I've yet to get the FCC number off the set and try looking it up 
 WC> via google.

Think the FCC number will do it?  I've never tried punching one of those in
there.  Right now I'm looking for info on this printer that I can't get
working right.  It's an IBM 4019 laser with postscript card and at the
moment doesn't seem to understand postscript,  though it did before.  It's
also stopped kicking out this status page every time you turn it on, 
though I'm not sure how I did that either.  The damn linux printing-howto
says that the best thing you can do is get a postscript printer,  only now
I've got one and can't get the damn thing to work right...

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