The Herogoggles And What They Do

This is a follow-up to Friday Night's post.

Been looking up more Golden-Age comics. Herogoggles has a good directory of era superheroes and supervillains, and I've taken notes. I also belong to goldenagecomics.co.uk but because of bandwidth, haven't downloaded much from them. Now I know the titles I really want, tho'.

And knowing is half the battle. :)

Writer's Block: Baby, You Can Drive My Car

[Error: unknown template qotd]

I've had dozens of dream cars. Some I've mentioned here. But I love the car I've got now, and it's done things beyond my dreams. And I'm driving Moonshine to Asheville today.

The Adventure (And Demise) Of The Black Box

A couple years ago, we inherited a piece of nondescript hardware from the estate of our departed neighbor Otis. Dad had no idea what the black box was, so he had me go through the paces of finding out. It was a satellite receiver box from DirecTV. Since we neither had cable nor a satellite dish it was pretty much useless to us, although it was in working order and would have been completely functional if we also possessed the remote control.

During the months leading to the national digital TV switchover, we attempted to use the receiver box as a pass-through (because we had television sets that lacked the proper connecting hardware) but this wasn't a good solution and we soon got newer TV sets.

So this fall I thought about just returning the thing to DirecTV. Took it to the local franchise office, and the clerk told me..."we don't use those anymore. We switched our systems a couple years ago..." and she instructed me to contact DirecTV corporate's website.

And I did and they replied, "It's completely obsolete. It's your property now and your responsibility."

Showed it to my brother-in-law the more-geek-than-me when it comes to electronics hardware and he said, "Don't want it in my shop! Can't use it for anything!"

So tonight it had an appointment with my monkey-wrench and screwdriver and wire cutters. An hour later it was rendered into half a dozen circuit boards, an empty metal housing, a plastic facia, a grounded power cord (that I suppose I could reuse or convert into an extension cord), a plastic circuit board mount, and an assortment of fasteners, brackets and greeblies. The circuit boards await the next scheduled e-waste drive. Dunno if I have any future use for the metal housing, tho' I'm sure I can just donate it to the Tech Center boys...I know they could likely use it as a "breadboard" case.

It's better to take something like this apart and deal with the components separately than to chuck the whole schmeer in a landfill. And it's somewhat theraputic.