Text Messaging from Cell Phones

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:22:25 -0500

One of my daughters is apparently addicted to text messaging. It's about all she does on the computer. When she got a cell phone, it had IM capabilities so she took advantage of it. It costs her quite a bit of money. Her plan includes several hundred messages and she still goes over each month at a cost of $.10/message sent. In many cases, she ends up having what appear to be long conversations by text messaging. It would have been cheaper to have just called the other person and spoken with them.

Her older sister also goes over her plan's limits on text messaging occassionally and it looks like the same thing in a lot of cases. Instead of calling and talking, she sends text messages back and forth with one of her friends. I wish I had some of the money they're wasting on this. I'd get a few lunches out of it each month.

In any case, it looks like this problem may be as old as electronic communications itself.

Radio Shack is not what it used to be

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 20:23:18 -0500

I was rewiring some speaker cabinets today. These are large speakers that we use with 9 Feet Tall and at the Joy Underground. Some of the internal connections were made with crimp-on connectors and they were constantly cutting out so I figured I'd replace the cheap wire inside with some decent wire and solder the connections.

Each cabinet has two jacks on the back. One goes to the woofer and the other goes to the horn and tweeters. Since we don't have an external crossover, we normally jumper them together outside the cabinet so that one feed will drive all of the speakers. On occassion, we can't locate the connectors we use for this purpose and end up jury-rigging something to get the cabinet to work. I figured while I was rewiring everything, I'd take care of this problem internally instead. If I put a switched jack in place of the horn/tweeter jack, we could drive the whole cabinet off one jack or use separate feeds if we buy a crossover.

I set out for Radio Shack to get a couple of switched 1/4" mono jack. I don't see them. One of the salesmen comes by and offers to help. I describe what I need. He can't find them either. He walks off to a PC and accesses their online catalog. He can't find them there either. There are plenty of 1/4" jacks listed but none are switched.

What is Radio Shack's reason for existence if not to carry such basic parts? I can remember going to Radio Shack to buy resistors, TTL chips, and other electronic components. It seems like they no longer want to sell this kind of stuff. They'd rather sell remote control cars, PC accessories, and cell phones. The closest place I know of to buy this kind of stuff is about 15 miles away.

Bit Decay - Pet Peeves

Text Messaging from Cell Phones

Radio Shack is not what it used to be