Tuesday, March 11, 2008

I been tagged...sorta


(Image from Endoscoperepair.com. Sexy, no?)

Noah at KC Bike Commuting sorta kinda tagged me in a casual, off hand way. The idea is to write a six word memoir. Now, that's going to be difficult because on my home planet, where I'm revered as a demi-god, there's no direct translation for the word that conceptualizes he-of-the-washboard-abs-bulging-biceps-sexual-tyrannosaurus. And that word string is only a clumsy approximation. So I'll have to keep it in prosaic human terms. How dull.

Husband, father, bonhomie, cyclist, writer, technogeek.

Family always comes first. That's been true for a very long time, so long in fact, that I have difficulty remembering what it was like to be single.

Bonhomie. My friend Wade says I treat everyone as if they were an old friend. Like Will Rogers, I've never met a stranger.

Cyclist and writer. We each have our passions.

Technically, technogeek is probably not a word. But it's clearly descriptive. I make a living wearing binocular magnifiers with a soldering iron in my hand.

OK, in the same spirit as Noah exhibited, I won't deliberately tag any of you. Instead, I'll rely on your discretion, knowing that the Usual Suspects will pick it up and run with it anyway.

2 Comments:

Blogger Noah said...

Well, I think that makes two...

And by the way, surface mount components in television tuners are the bane of my existence. No amount of geeky binocugoggles can save me from my post-epileptic shaky hand.

I can fix almost anything else. TV Tuners are the only thing I've ever given up on fixing, but I can replace 'em just fine.

8:13 PM  
Blogger Ed W said...

I've never worked on a television, but I can tell you what works for me when soldering Flash memory chips. The leads are less than 0.010" so I have a Metcal soldering iron with a similarly sized tip. The board goes under the stereo microscope. I wear an ESD strap. My left hand holds the solder and the right hand holds the iron. Both heels of my hands touch the board. If anything moves, they all move together.

The same principle works with larger microcircuits when they're in a board holder. I use that to elevate the board off the workbench so my back doesn't have to bend when I use binocular magnifiers.

I know that working on consumer electronics sometimes doesn't give you the luxury of doing the repair on a bench top. I'm lucky that way - until I have to do an extensive mod that requires about 250 solder joints. Mary says I'm a little peevish on those days.

8:44 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home