Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Fri, 17 Feb 2012
My fancy new oscilloscope (a Rigol DS1102E) finally arrived. Out of curiosity, I checked out the AM carrier wave on the transmitter I built a few weeks ago. It's... not so good.
That's supposed to be a nice sine wave. Clearly shy of the mark. Still, how cool is it that I have an oscilloscope that can output an image file like that? For $400, that's pretty hard to beat.
Posted at 23:57 permanent link category: /gadgets
A Special Hint for Appliance Repair Businesses
Ok, so I came into the kitchen this morning to find that the refrigerator had drooled a bit. It's been warming up lately, but I wasn't aware how fast -- everything in the freezer is unfrozen, and it appears that all cooling is more or less out of commission. So, fair enough. I ignored a bunch of warning noises from the fridge in the last few months. Something has now gone horribly wrong (however, I'm pretty sure it would have been just as horribly wrong if I'd called someone in at the first bad noise).
I'm guessing the motor needs to be replaced, or possibly there was a leak in the coolant system. In any case, the issue is probably beyond my technical skills, as I'm functionally ignorant of real cooling systems.
My first step, after cleaning up the spilled water, was to pull up a search on appliance repair businesses in Seattle. There are many of them, all apparently businesses which focus primarily on repair (as opposed to businesses which sell appliances, and do repair as a side-line). That's cool, I like a service which knows what it is.
Unfortunately, if you do the same search reasonably soon, you'll quickly notice a problem. Not one of these businesses lists any, let's say, substantial information on their website. There's no indication of price. There's no indication of schedule. There's no suggestion of actual parts in stock, or timeliness should orders need to be placed.
Some of this, of course, is costly to provide on a real-time basis, and that's not what I'm expecting. But a page of prices for call-out and labor-per-hour would be easy to provide, and go a long way toward preparing me for what I'm facing. A suggestion of how long it typically takes to schedule a service call (to be fair, one or two do have this) would be great.
And really, when I call your business number, I shouldn't get a mumbled voicemail that I can't understand, to leave a message which may be returned today, or may be returned in a week (no, saying, "We'll get right back to you" doesn't inspire me with confidence somehow).
What's interesting is that it looks like these places all bought websites from the same developer, or at least all copied their text and layout from the same place. I had to check phone numbers on several, to see if I was getting different businesses or not.
It's only a 12 year old fridge, and was a reasonably spendy one at the time (bottom freezer is apparently an unpopular choice, despite being easier to deal with). I'd rather not trash it yet. The hope now is that repair places won't inspire me to aggravation. I'll add updates as this thing progresses.
Update: No seriously, look at these two sites:
Seattle Appliance Repair Service
Seattle AC, Heating and Appliance Service
Tell me those aren't basically the same website.
Posted at 08:47 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater