Everybody likes pi

When I was a kid, I took everything apart.  I dissected our Merlin handheld game, a Simon game that someone gave us, and my brother Paul’s Tomy Pac Man game.  I disassembled basically everything I could find that I could open up with a phillips screwdriver.  If you were electronic or mechanical based, and in my house in mid 80’s, you would have been nervous.  Some of the things I took apart even went back together, and a subset of them even still worked afterword. Read more of this post

I hate replacing remote control batteries

SONY DSCIt’s not like remote controls are in constant use. They lay on the coffee table all day and night, waiting for the 60 seconds a day that you actually want to use it. It is really frustrating when the batteries are getting low on their charge. I go out of my way to contort my body to ensure that I am pointing the remote directly at the IR sensor of the cable box. I press the button harder in case that helps deliver more juice to the transmitter. When that doesn’t work, I see if the TV remote has batteries that work — darn it, that one takes AAA batteries. Now what? I get up and walk over to the junk drawer in the kitchen that contains a bunch of C batteries, a single D battery, two 9-volt batteries — I put one of them on my tongue to feel the metallic shock like I used to when I was a kid — and a couple of loose AA batteries from different brands in the bottom. I grab those and come back to the couch and replace both batteries. Nothing. Now I take one of the old ones, and one of the ones from the bottom of the junk drawer. Nope. Now I switch them around. Nada. You get the point, by this time it would have been so much easier to get off my butt and walk over to the cable box and change the channel. Read more of this post