It is an actual hand-made TV circuit. The empirical design is clear with the profusion of jumper wires and joints on what should be the back of the board. Even very close inspection under magnification does not reveal the year of manufacture, but electronics-wise, this is a fossil. If you keep reading, I’ll try to get a picture of the “front side” later today. That is impressive handiwork.But that was the old Sony, not the corporate beast of today with their “authorized dealers” and “service contracts”. The only thing they devise today is new methods to screw the consumer. I remember when if it didn’t work, Sony took it back and replaced it. Try that today. In the end, I was shafted so many times by Sony that I no longer own even one of their products. Sony, where the warranty attaches to the purchaser rather than the product. You see, one can argue with the purchaser.
Today you get another disjointed report because I did get that call-out that throws everything into disarray. The call was to the doggie-wig place where all the computers were stuffed up with the Yontoo virus. Things were not bad considering the last anti-virus update had been 764 days ago. See what happens when you hire whiz kids? “Oh yes”, he said, “I installed the anti-virus.”
This was also family, so I stayed hours more to visit. Remember, this is the lady who combed the hair of my hero, John Lennon. If you scroll back far enough in this blog, you’ll find all of this. Yes, she groomed Nixon, Sullivan, and Hope. You could spend an hour reading the wall of photos in that shop. Sadly, in the modern era there is nobody talented enough to take over such a specialized business. America has been sold out to the lowest bidder. Which is China.
We bemoan the loss of the middle class, but continue to shop at WalMart. There is no recognition that we have also lost the middle class jobs. We are already a third world nation of doctors and nothing in between all the way down to unskilled laborer. And the dividing factor is not skill, but daddy’s money.
The happy side is that I got to drive the batbike down A1A to Bal Harbor and back. That stretch of road has never been so pleasurable. Peckerheads in Porsches gassing it past in pure testosterone-pumped jealousy. Women at bus stops wondering where they went wrong. And hours later so many people saying how they saw me on the road. Try that in your BMWs.
Quick mention of the club meeting over the “keyboard”. This is the attempt to make a rough and ready set of finger-operated switches to match the ROM, now designated “Project 42”. I’m flat out of ideas, so we voted $40 to send Agent M to Home Depot to see what he comes back with.
Here is the component side of the Sony. There are no integrated circuits. Some parts bear a Sony stamp, most are marked “Made In Japan”. The circuit is almost entirely resistors and capacitors, something I thought was a feature of microchip designs. Look at all those trim pots (trimming potentiometers). The board was slapped together and then fine tuned. Ah, here it is. Sony BP6 from 1965. It is sold as a transistor TV. Upon inspection I found the transistor. It is circled in yellow in this photo, see if you can find it, too.I got rained in also last evening when I had planned on hitting the Karaoke at the Legion. What to do? So I sifted through the ads on the musicians list. Let’s see what, if anything, is happening out there. It’s plain everybody is hurtin’ but also plain they are all rock/blues/original type bands. No variation. There is the usual crop of bassists making wild claims. Gee, I can’t compete. You see, I only own one bass and one amp and one microphone, you get the idea.
I’m skeptical of bassists who list the other instruments they play. I regularly run across vocalists and keyboardists (but rarely guitarists) who can tell I used to play the piano, which I now understand. But I don’t know about these bassists who claim to play four other instruments. I can detect most bassists who are not focused, just like I know when a bassist is a failed guitarist. Bassists rarely advertise their shows, so it isn’t like one can drop in to see a particular player on a given evening.
There is an increase in the number of hired guns. That’s musicians who don’t want to rehearse or join your band. They just want to play and get paid. Since there isn’t that much local talent, this spells out the old Florida tradition of multi-banding. It’s pathetic. These guys can’t get enough gigs because of the other band, so they try to join the other band part time. This goes a ways to explaining why so many Florida bands have identical song lists. All their fingers are in the same pie.
ADDENDUM
The reaction to last day’s anti-virus instruction tells me lots of people are not being careful enough. My instructionals usually target a few people, not half my readership. My primary browser is Opera, though some sites will not operate unless you use IE (Internet Explorer). That, and your email, is where most of your viruses are from. I use an older version (IE 7) and I run my anti-virus and anti-spyware programs after EVERY time I use it. MicroSoft is fully aware of the problem because they started it. But here is some advice for the somewhat advanced user.
In Windows, the RECYCLER directory on your C: drive is where most everything you delete winds up. That is why you can recover things from your Recycle Bin—it is not really deleted yet. Don’t confound the two, RECYCLER and Recycle Bin. You normally cannot see the RECYCLER, so it is an ideal place for virus regeneration programs to lurk.
I normally use DOS (cmd) to peek into the RECYCLER immediately after EVERY time I empty the Recycle Bin. I’m looking to see what survived the dump. These have no purpose in my computer but they are nearly impossible to delete directly. When I see them, I use “C: rmdir RECYCLER /s”, which removes the entire directory, then use the md command to create a new, empty RECYCLER directory in the same location. I caution anyone who does not have serious DOS experience to stay away. This is not for you. If you are Vista or later, the directory is called something like $recycle.bin and if so, I don’t know how you delete that. Since Vista, MicroSoft seems to insist you have a permanent folder to keep all your viruses.
Firefox is gaining in popularity as a browser, but I’ve heard just too many complaints about it getting into funny stuff. Too many bad reviews. I won’t use it unless I have to. Some of the worst reviews indicate that Firefox itself is as bad as many viruses for corrupting your system.
