For the Fourth of July, I drove to Marion, Ohio, to visit President Warren G. Harding’s home and museum. It is amazingly well put together, and they have almost all of the stuff that was there when he and his wife Florence (“Flossie“) lived there.
Here’s the house from the rear, and you can see the end of the front porch from which the man campaigned for the Presidency. (Hard to imagine running for anything from one’s front porch today, much less the presidency.)
And in the back they have an original metal voting booth from the period.
It was as hot as an oven, although I’m sure it cools off by election day.
Speaking of weather, thanks to the latest local storm, my power was knocked out at a very inconvenient time today. My aquariums were my chief concern, so after fretting, fidgeting, and disconnecting everything, I finally decided to set up the generator. But the time I had readied up the cables and the damned gasoline (something I hate, because along with batteries it is a long term storage item, rarely used and subject to going bad from not being used), the power came back on. Being prepared often means preparing for nothing, although that beats not preparing for something.
Meanwhile I had ordered some RAM memory sticks and today, (thanks to the geniuses who handle the mail) they arrived bent.
The padded envelope containing them showed signs of stress, and it was bent too. I’ll probably end up sending them back, but as I know I have techie readers, I’m curious about something. I have not tried to straighten them out and put them in my computer, but does anyone know whether they would still be good, or is the stress from a bent circuit board likely to create problems. Even if they tested out OK, are they likely to develop problems later?
And that brings to mind something you can’t put in the mail. I drove past this charmer at the Michigan-Ohio border yesterday:
Coco is terrified by fireworks, and she is also terrified of thunder and lightning. Yesterday was pure torture for her, as the former seemed to segue seamlessly into the latter.
Hoping I could get her to like fireworks, I walked her around the block at the peak of the local festivities. Tons of people were setting them off, and I hope that would help demystify the process for her once she realized that they were human behavior. But no! She seemed to think that these otherwise ordinary people had suddenly become demons for no reason at all. The visuals (spooky red, blue and especially green glowing spark showers really freaked her out) seemed to bother her at least as much as the noises convinced her that the Whole World Might Be Coming To An End, and she did her best to hasten the walk and drag me home to safety.
(I guess I shouldn’t have written this; they’re shooting them off again. No matter how many times I tell her she’s being silly, she simply does not believe me.)
Comments
11 responses to “Human and canine survival issues”
I have never seen a board do that. Interesting.
Since the connector is a bunch of gold “fingers” on the board you stand a good chance of some of them not making connection if you plug it in and long term deforming the connector “fingers” (on the mother board) so that the next board will not make connection.
In an emergency I’d give it a try. If you are not having an emergency send it back for a flatter replacement.
Again: I have never seen anything like that before. Ever. And I have seen a LOT of PCBs.
I’ve seen PCBs warp, but not a small area like that DIMM. I would worry less about physical edge connections than I would about PCB delaminations; when that happens the vias between layers of the board and the traces on each layer could become partially separated. Given more heating cycles, that could be a recipe for some really mysterious and annoying intermittant system failures in the future.
The real issue with the boards is that the twisting can stress the connections where the chip is soldered to the board. Even if they’re still working now, after some temperature cycling they can separate. Given that it was the seller’s mistake, why not have them make it right?
1) The Eisenhower museum in Abilene is very much like this. Amazing how such great people grew up in such tiny houses.
2) Call the company to get them replaced. Really. And be willing to pay extra for FedEx/UPS Next Day Air, it cuts down the time the shipped material spends cooking in the summer sun.
3) Ahh, America, where we use Chinese fireworks to celibrate our freedom from British Monarchs. I love it! 🙂
And make sure the next set of sticks are properly packaged in a hard cardboard box.
Get replacements, then wad the damaged ones into a ball for Coco to play with.
I’d send them back if I were you.
My coworker’s mastiff kept her awake until 1 am on the fifth. He wanted to kill the hell out of those things!
I give my dogs tranks, and put them to bed early.
1.) Wouldn’t primary elections be awfully hot, though?
3.) Coco is just showing good instinctual reflexes: if it booms, there’s likely rain on its way; and if there are sparks, seek shelter ASAP. And she wants to keep you out of harm’s way, too, so she is showing loyalty to her best pack-mate!
[…] I heard I’d be out until tomorrow night, it was haul-out-the-generator time again. Figuring on an extended problem, I ran out and filled the five gallon gas can, came home and […]
If you use them you will probably have no trouble. Send them back anyway.
For over 20 years I have had very little trouble with internal components and I’m not very careful. They just run, which makes me suspect that somewhere some poor devil is getting all my bad luck.
Drives fail often.
They were not packaged correctly for shipping. (they normally come in a hard clear plastic package)
bet they work just fine, something heavy was on top of them during shipping
will put some stress the solder joints, but they will either work or immediately fail (low probability)