I have had a busy, frustrating and somewhat productive day today. First thing this morning I had an appointment at Eastgardens to program some IC’s for a friend. Normally this would be a simple task, but not today. First thing was that one of the ICs started heat up… In fact so hot that I almost burnt my finger on it. I then found that the IC socket was not aligned correctly, and killed the chip. What I did not realize for a few hours was that it killed a 2nd chip at the same tine. Anyway I programmed the chips and they would not work… Or they would slightly work. Nothing I could do would fix things.

That is until I for some reason removed the faulty chip and the device mostly worked – and replacing it fixed the problem. That might sound simple, but there was probably a couple of hours work in that. I also tried to connect to the wireless network at the same time but it did not seem to work. Eventually I gave up and used my wireless card through Vodafone which worked well.

Then I whipped over to Pymble. I was planning to go over tomorrow, but there was some time today after the previous job. This turned out really well – and I was able to brief a colleague on some work – showing him how he should look at the problem, and how he should start. This was fun, and probably took 90 minutes or so.

The other thing that happened today… My Video Recorder failed overnight. It was just the clock working this morning, but when nothing responded and i power cycled it which stopped it working totally. Probably a power supply problem… Maybe… I might have a look at repairing it… But I picked up a new recorder anyway.