I had the unfortunate pleasure of having a blood clot in my lung in March which nearly killed me. According to my doctor, I need to get a medical alert bracelet because I’m on blood thinners to prevent more clots from forming. I’ve looked around and there really aren’t that many that look good. Of course the ones I like are over $600. If any one knows of a good place to get a deal on these, let me know.
Everyone knows what the 3 Rs are - Reading, wRiting, and aRithmatic. I would like to propose a change. I think the 3Rs should be Ruffles have Ridges for a Reason. Let us take this moment to celebrate the unknown person who came up with the idea to put ridges on potato chips. I realize that this break through isn’t nearly as important as say spray cheese but its way up there. Our hero had a dream. A dream that one day we would be able to dip our chips without breakage. That one day we would be free from fishing the carnage out of the dip bowl.
The concept of stiffening panels by placing darts on the surface has been with us for a long time. It’s a technique that sheet metal engineers use to keep your door panels from fluttering as well as raising the resonant frequency of your Fog Lamps. It’s used in virtually all fields of engineering and of course now in snack food.
No team could have come up with the idea. Somewhere out there the single person with the vision lives. You know who you are. You are the visionary that revolutionized the chip business by creating a whole new untapped marketing segment. You spent the time in the lab when every one else went home. You tested chip after chip, evaluating all the possibilities. The width, spacing, and depth of the ridges were critical to it’s tensile and shear strength. The possible combinations were infinite. Some days when you were close to an answer it fell apart at the end just like the broken chip sticking out of the dip vat. The others laughed and went home but you persisted.
I wish I could have been there for the break though. The excitement that you must have felt as that first chip plunged into the dip and emerged unbroken on the other side. There were no reporters there that day, no cheering crowds. There was only you. It was fitting because only you believed. Only you deserved to see that moment. It must have been like Edison seeing the light come on. It was a victory of man vs. chip. You knew in that solitary moment that the world would never be the same. The Pringles guy was good with the whole “chip in a can” thing but you gave us value. In the spirit of Edison and Bell, you gave us a chip that Americans can be proud of. I raise an unbroken dip covered chip to you and say “Good Job my man, Good Job!
I had a little trouble over the weekend with my home network. I’ll post the solution here since I wasn’t able to find anything that could help me online.
It all started with my sons friend who wanted to access my wireless LAN so he could plan Age of Empires with my son. Its been a year since I’ve needed the password to let someone onto my network and I couldn’t remember or find it anywhere. Thinking this would be easy, I just resetted my Linksys WRT54G back to it’s factory settings, and generated a new password. Well, all was find on the home network in that I could see the desktop PC and the three laptops. The boys were even able to play their game. The problem was that I couldn’t get to the internet anymore. I was pretty sure I must have forgot a setting in the Linksys so I kept playing with it for hours trying to get it right. I accessed my neighbors unsecured wireless to get on the internet for some direction but all I found was information that conflicted with each other. Some people said to set it to DHCP while other said that only PPOE would work.
It appeared that I wasn’t getting an IP address (a valid one) from the Westell DSL modem. I disconnected the Linksys from the Westell 2100 DSL modem and plugged my laptop directly into the Westell hoping to at least get online without having to use my neighbors network. I couldn’t get online this way either.
Next day I called Verizon and they were able to get me back online after about 40 mins of rebooting the modem and doing some DNS flushing and told me they would patch me into the Linksys help line for the home network portion. Basically, once they got me online being patched into the Westell directly, they were done with me. They patched me into Linksys which immediately put me on hold. I hung up and here’s what I did to fix it.
After listening to the Verizon guy walk me through this I concluded that when I reset my Linksys back to factory settings, I was still attached to the powered up Westell. I must have knocked some settings in the Westell when I did that. Apparently the Westell was trying to adjust for the new settings in the Linksys and it was then thrown off track. Wish I could be more technically specific here but I really don’t know that much about this stuff. Well, what I did next was make sure the Linksys was disconnected from the Westell and reset it again. I logged into the Linksys using the address 192.168.1.1 and changed it to PPOE with the correct username and password that the Verizon guy provided me, and saved the setting. I then set up the wireless network password. I didn’t mess with anything else. I then plugged it in to the Westell and it worked like a charm.
I guess the moral of the story is that if your going to reset anything in your system and you know you’re going to have to go in and make adjustments to the system, do it when it’s disconnected. I should have known better.
First post here on the new look of Electric Chili. I’m trying something a little new for me here. Typically I’ve attempted to Blog on topics that were very narrow and sort of niche based. I’ve set up separate blogs for each niche and posted to the appropriate blog when an idea came to mind. Well, since I can’t really depend on me having an idea in each niche all the time, I’ve neglected some of my blogs. This time I’m going to post to one blog and the topics will vary a bit. So with that said, Welcome!
Rich Dennison
