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car project classic book radio work

Some conclusions

[Today’s run/walk: 7 miles in Starkville]

Today we mounted the hydraulic oil tank on the frame rails from above. We did that this morning. We never did find a way to use the side mounted brackets. So we used some angle iron back-to-back with the aluminum angles under the tank, bolted the iron to the aluminum and the iron into the frame. It uses spring bolts to allow the frame to flex without flexing the tank. Aluminum tanks don’t like flexing.

I believe the only thing left to be done is to hook up the compressed air control lines. He has the lines run down through the cab floor. We have to do some sorting out of which line is which.

I was the drill operator for both angles to tank and angles to frame. Tank drilling was yesterday evening and frame drilling was today. I broke two drill bits today, that last little bit where the drill gets grabby at the end is always a challenge. We probably should have used a drill with a both-hands handle setup. I braced the drill up against the side of the tank with my leg and went slow. So we had some tool damage but no wrist damage.


For the sound card project, I was able to get the USB sound device working both on my test system and on the server. Things played fine on the test system AND on the server using the USB sound device.

So my trouble is in the fancy sound card that I’ve been trying to use. The library program will let me play the cuts individually and in that program they play fine with the fancy sound card.

But the On Air playback program doesn’t play them right using the fancy sound card. One of the features of the fancy sound card is that it will do time stretching/shrinking to make the cuts fit a schedule. And that implies there are programming parts in the On Air program which do that and the library does not. I have the time stretching/shrinking feature turned off. But maybe there is still some unique code for this card in the On Air program.

I have a replacement cheap sound card coming from Amazon and I may just end up using that.

I may try to look at the code and figure out what it is doing. I’m not sure yet.


Our bug-hunt at work lasted two weeks and we did determine that our application program is not at fault. We made some improvements anyway.

The real fault is in a service on the operating system level and we have the source code and looked it over. We can turn off a special efficiency feature and the bug seems to go away… and that works with where we see the error message coming from in the code.

So we have a work-around and we have some improvements. They have gone back to testing. And late Friday they did find an obscure thing, unrelated to the first bug, caused by our code which I think our group have an explanation and fix for.

I’m doubting it will be ready for “release” by “the end of the month” which was the goal. But we’re pretty close.


I had my annual review with my bosses in the last few weeks, my direct boss and the one above him. Everyone seems to be happy. I got a little raise and I get to stay employed so I’m happy too.

2 replies on “Some conclusions”

Congrats on (1) no bashed fingers or twisted wrist and (2) the good job review.

(Personal note: My last job review was bad. I embarrassed upper management in writing (e-mail) when I was wanting them to attend to general ledger risk exposure in the payroll accounting environment after adopting a new payroll and accounting system (“Workday”). A few months after the review they paid me a year of salary to go away and that worked for me. They locked me out of the office when I was in Iowa for Ron’s service.)

You should visit the computer museum out this way. I enjoy visiting it and I do not have _half_ the interest in the subject matter that I think you would. https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/
https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

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