Rubber Feet, Part III
by Grant R. Griffin
John E. wrote: > > Ha! > ... > As Chris B. points out, USA plugs are un-useful to a lot of us. (Until > recently, in the UK if you bought almost ANY electrical appliance of > WHATEVER value, the mains plug was extra, and you had to fit it yourself!) > > John.
Right, John, I had forgotten why I couldn’t use my handy lab supply for that, but 9VAC is a singularly unfriendly requirement within the context of the normal engineering lab environment true I could have butchered the thing but it was just a lot easier and better to go to Radio Shack and if I had butchered it then I would have voided the warranty which probably was part of their sneaky little plan all along the way meaning that they wanted me to void the warranty before the darned DSK died an early death due to infant mortality due to a lack of uniform quality so perhaps my rant should have been why in the heck do they use a 9VAC supply when they know no self-respecting engineering organization keeps anything on hand that can make anything like 9VAC so they probably were hoping I was going to plug it into 115VAC which would certainly void the warranty but I hold a degree in Electrical Engineering so I wasn’t about to fall for that one do they think I just fell off the turnup truck so although it’s true that it wouldn’t be that hard to butcher the thing to bypass the little AC rectifier to connect it to a lab supply which it should have been designed for in the first place it really makes me wonder if these TI people are living on the right planet inasmuch as they live in Texas not that there’s anything wrong with that no of course not but anybody who has ever been there will know what I mean when I say that to a large extent it seems like a different planet with all the cowboy boots and cowboy hats and those big loud friendly “how-dee’s” it make you think you’re stuck in “Americaville” in Euro Disney or at least somewhere in The Twilight Zone though to be fair virtually all of my experience in Texas was in Greenville which I don’t think anybody would say was a typical sort of place and even Texans would probably say it was something like another planet to them for example have you ever tried to get decent food in Greenville I was amazed at how even the Chinese food is bad there and I mean really bad whereas when was the last time you ever had bad Chineese food because some people like Chinese food and some people don’t not that there’s anything wrong with that no of course not except that for those of us who _do_ like Chinese food we often are amazed at the uniform high quality of it inasmuch as it isn’t a chain like McDonalds which is not to say that McDonalds has uniform high quality it just has a uniform quality inasmuch as the people who help you there all wear uniforms which just goes to show that quality is in the eye of the beholder like when that gal got scalded by that high-quality cup of hot coffee and McDonalds got sued NOT because one gal got scalded by one cup of coffee at one McDonalds but because McDonalds were uniformly scalding gal’s all over the country which just goes to show you the fallacy of uniforms and uniformity and illustrates that six-sigma isn’t all its cracked up to be which makes me wonder who died and got put that guy in charge of how many sigma’s we need I mean if it was up to me I would have just let it go at five sigmas and made things a little easier on everybody but nooooo some yokel had to come up with six sigma which isn’t so bad in itself except that now you gotta wonder when they’re gonna make us do seven or eight sigmas and let’s be honest how many darned sigma’s do we really need and I think we did just fine before we had any darned sigma’s and that’s what made America great but I think TI’s DSK kit would qualify no matter how many sigma’s you wanted because not a single darned DSK comes with a Nintendo power supply yet each and every darned one of them comes with a little book that tells you to buy a Nintendo power supply at Radio Shack which just proves once again that uniformity is a bad thing if it leads extra trips to Radio Shack and gals getting scalded.
=g2