Bravo November

And now, a silly portrait of the engineer at home.

The button at the waist of one of my pairs of pants broke in the dryer. It was roughly a 5/8″ plastic button, kind of thick. Measuring it and the buttonhole with calipers showed 5/8″ to be about the right size.

Searching fabric stores for WEEKS never revealed that size of button to even remotely come close to being correct. The next size up would not fit through the provided buttonhole; 5/8″ would slip out, and anything smaller would do as before, but even worse. Yes, I could have modified the buttonhole, but I’m somewhat slightly lazy and ALWAYS in search of a crazier solution.

I was tempted to try machining a replacement from some scrap plastic before I came across these snap-on “bachelor buttons” in the sewing cabinet. They look a lot like a metal and plastic version of the metal buttons usually found on the waistbands of jeans. The back is a stud with an arrow-shaped end, which is driven into a hole in the plastic stem of the button (which has a metal decorative front on it).

The instructions on the package said to press the stud through the fabric first. Well then… let’s see. About 3/16″ of overlapped cotton twill just refused to be penetrated by any of the large upholstery needles I could find, and certainly not by the arrow tip of the backing stud!

I finally found the answer at my workbench, in the probes on the test leads hooked up to my Fluke 8520A benchtop digital multimeter of DOOM. I had previously cursed these things for being excessively sharp after some accidental pokes. Needless to say, they went right through the fabric.

However, the moment I pulled the multimeter probe tip out, the holes in the layers of fabric conveniently no longer lined up.

I managed to get the stud to follow the probe out of the hole after poking it from the other side, and went to stick it into the back of the button. Oops. The hole there was about half the area of the widest dimension of the arrow shaped bit of the stud. I realize the whole thing stays in place by means of physically jamming into the plastic, but isn’t that a bit excessive? There was no way in heck I was going to get this into place without some implements of destruction. The package, upon referring to it, said to use a mallet. Conveniently nearby was a 16 oz. California Framer hammer.

… With one rather LIGHT tap, the stud went into the hole in the button, bottomed out, shattered the plastic of the button, pierced through the decorative metal front, and ended up in the wood below. Yes, I had just NAILED MY PANTS TO THE WORKBENCH.

After prying all that loose, I tried again with another button from the package, pressing it into place with pliers, and it worked.

So here’s my overall procedure:

Measure once with calipers. Attempt replacement three times. Substitute strange replacement part. Stab twice. Completely, utterly, yet recoverably bollix everything once. Complete quite sucessful repair with inappropriate tools.

I think I have a GREAT new insight into my life based on this…

… So said the cover on the box in the wiring closet. I, of course, HAD to open it to see what was inside. It just contained a couple of monoblock solid-state relays to activate the 120V “On Air” lights when applicable.

How boooooring.

Anyway… I’m now, once again, a student engineer at a college radio station. It feels so good to be back, doing production work, slinging cables, and hanging out with all the nifty people.

Expect to see a lot of related content in the near future. I intend to document my wonderful adventures here, as opposed to posting such things to my personal blog elsewhere and making people interested in that have to read through endless commentary about flying cheese and my dysfunctional family and such.

Oh yes, furthermore… you can find some of my previous silly “hello I am bored in the studio” work at the Soundtrack for Defenestration page. Expect more in the near future. YES. LOTS MORE. Bwahahahahahaha. At some point, I may also add a seperate production portfolio page that I can show off to people who may potentially want to hire me for voiceover work or such other things. (Hey, it could happen.)

As the geek I am, I have far too many devices to use and maintain that use various types of batteries.

My understanding of the chemistries of such batteries is pretty minimal - basically, it’s a little magic box out of which power comes. After a while, you recharge it, or recycle it and get a new one. Simple as that, right?

… Nope.

For sometimes, batteries decide they’re tired of working correctly, and do some very annoying things. One of the most annoying things they do is leaking their internal magic substances, which are totally magical and wonderful when sealed within, but toxic and corrosive and nasty to the outside world. (I’m going to pretend there is no risk of actual explosion or ‘venting with flame’ here, la la la la…)

But.. yeah. Leakage is a pain. I’ve had to clean up everything from slight crystally junk to all-out battery bukkake* in various battery powered devices before.

I thought I’d seen everything, though, until today…. well… what does one make of this?!

My only plausible theory here is that these went into thermal runaway, softening the plastic casings, and inflated like balloons from internal gas pressure.

* This ought to get me some REALLY interesting search hits. XD

Tonight myself and some of the people from my sinister anime overlord agency were over at Dave & Buster’s, and were playing various games on their ‘Million Dollar Midway’. (The i, d, w, and a were missing from ‘Midway’, so it just said ‘Million Dollar M Y’. I wish I’d brought my camera.)

There are basically two areas to the ‘Midway’ - normal games, and ‘redemption’ games, the ones that award tickets or other prizes as a result of skillful play. I had an old card from a Power Combo that had about 2 credits left on it (where most of the games want 2.2… or 2.5… or such.) Along the line I found a crane machine full of candy, which claimed that it would NEVER leave you without a prize after playing! In fact, if it failed to grab a prize, it would add another credit and let you try again! Wow, I would have my sugar NO MATTER WHAT!

And lo and behold, I got a pack of Sweet Tarts, and these… very curious… “X-Men Candy Sticks”.

(The box was originally in quite pristine condition, until it spent some time being transported in one of the pockets of those which I refer to as my ninja pants. Yeah, maybe ninjas don’t wear these specifically, but they’re the most comfortable and wonderful black cargo pants I’ve ever owned and I would certainly wear them if I was a ninja. Moving right along…)

Yes… the sticks themselves look like something purchased right off the street in Opa-Locka.

Well then.

If this is what crack is like, I am sorely disappointed. It was quite tasteless, and barely even sweet. Remember kids, don’t even bother with crack. Le sigh. Here are the apparent ingredients of CRACK, should you be curious:

Remember to tell the cops you got the secret ingredient list off the INTERNET!!!