Good Morning from my robotics lab. This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am explaining why I am not upgrading my computer this week. Let’s get started.
Long story short, California was set ablaze last week. Our neighborhood saw a glow from the fire burning the next city over. We packed all our most important possessions, like a 100+ year old trunk of photos and my desktop computer.
The Internet dropped out for a day or two and our gas got nixed so it wouldn’t make a flamethrower if the neighborhood burned down. We still had power, and our stove and new drier are electric, so we only really missed our hot water. We tuned in to the local radio station for live coverage.
The station itself was in a badly burned section of town, almost having been burned down themselves. They were ultimately spared, but they did say something about an exploding tree shooting an ember the size of a large fist into their back parking lot.
The stereo we were listening on is almost as old as audio CDs. Fun fact about radio technology: when you are barely getting a station, it gets fuzzy with static. Repositioning the antenna is a minor mitigation, but it doesn’t help when your position in the room can interfere with incoming radio waves, even if you are just sitting up.
I eventually got tired of the static and tried to fix it. The sliders on the front helped, but not enough. Touching the antenna seemed stabilized the signal almost perfectly, but no one seemed interested in standing there with an arm on the thing.
Eventuality, in true MacGyver style, I raided the tool chest and grabbed the first metalic spool of wire I saw, in this case, some sodder for stained glass.
I ended up using a plastic clothes pin to affix the makeshift antenna extension. I later improved my design by curling the sodder around the tip of the antenna to prevent the connection from slipping down. Since then, the radio only complained when adjusting the spool, which was hung up on the wall.
In closing, the fires are still burning, but the firefighters are getting them under control; it looks like my neighborhood was spared. I haven’t seen any national coverage, but locally, the news has been positive in the face of the disaster. Sure there were some looters going through evacuation zones, and people are still trying not to breathe the airborne remnants of other’s houses, but the impression I got is that people as a whole are getting together to help each other.
In the future, I am sure there will be times I am at a lack of overall progress due to one delay or another. What do you think about unplanned mini-side projects?