Not many people get inside Sutro Tower, so I consider myself pretty fortunate. My current employer doesn’t have transmit facilities or other interests at Sutro, so I was escorted through the gate and into the facility by a contract engineer, John Buckham, that our SF station has who also maintains a radio station there for another employer of his.
This was a unique opportunity for a few reasons; since I don’t work there, getting access is impossible unless you know someone and can get something arranged. This is a historically interesting site and it is a unique tower engineering design that has currently weathered 25 years of use. Continue reading ‘Visiting an SF Landmark. Sutro Tower.’
Today I had a brief reminiscing with some fellow engineers about having to deal with the local news crews at former jobs and told a few tales of the regular stampede of useless, re-hashed content, multiple yet pointless liveshots and how they were more funny than informative.
I believe that local news bloopers are one of the big reasons why YouTube has become so popular. So much of what they do is fit only for passive, hilarious examples of short-term amusement.
I have collected a few so you can see for yourself:
For a little something out of the ordinary, today we went down to San Jose and visited the Body Worlds exhibit on display at The Tech Museum.
For those that haven’t gone to see it or know what it’s about; essentially it is a traveling display, which is the brainchild of Gunther von Hagens, consisting of donated corpses that have undergone a plastination process which allows the muscles, organs and bones to be preserved and positioned into various poses. Continue reading ‘Time for a field trip. Corpses on display!’
I have been a big fan of Sushi for years and when my wife and I were living in South San Jose we were very close to a very good (in our opinion) sushi restaurant where we consumed mass quantities of fish on rice.
When I was first introduced to sushi years ago I really liked it, but was unsure about how to eat it properly and thought the nigiri (individual hand rolled) sushi was eaten with chopsticks like the maki (roll) slices. Wrong! It wasn’t until a couple years ago I learned this from the sushi chef who politely corrected my poor sushi eating skills. Continue reading ‘I love Sushi and so should you. Here’s how.’
One of the cool features of the PS3 is that it is a serious computing device and Sony provided the option to easily upgrade its hard drive as well as install an alternate OS. So I did both.
By far, the easiest HDD upgrade known to man (presently). Simply remove a panel and a screw. Slide out the old HDD and slide in the new one.
The Sony PS3 HDD uses a SATA 5400RPM drive and it is recommended that you get one that runs at the same speed. Replacing the old HDD is trivial and all you need is a small flat-head screwdriver to pry open the side plastic panel to expose the HDD tray and a #0 Phillip-head driver to remove the retaining screw and the four HDD screws holding it to the tray. Once you have the blue retaining screw out you simply slide the tray forward to un-seat the drive and slide it out, doing the reverse to install the new one. Continue reading ‘How I spent the Christmas Holiday - Modding My PS3′
