Monday, January 17, 2011

2011.01.15 Saturday

Today I slept in a good amount. Felt REAL GOOD.

Most recently I've started utilitizing the Google Calendar feature of Tasks Lists. I'm starting to find that it is rather useful for me. I come up with good ideas at work for things to do at home, and good ideas for work at home. The only thing I don't like is how simplistic the interface is. It might be better to has a separate page/interface for tasks, but still integrates well with the Calendar. Just a thought though.

I spent most of the day cleaning out junk from my room, and organizing things more logically. I have tons of paper stuff that has piled up over the past few years. I'm probably going to need a real filing cabinet soon (which I think is almost insane since everything is electronic these days).

Made some pasta and cheese for lunch. Back to cleaning.

At some point during the day, the roommates decided it was a good time for some Left4Dead2. We played a tough campaign, and couldn't quite make it all the way to the end. It was still lots of fun.

For dinner, and the Ravens/Steelers game, I split a Mr. Gattis pepperoni jalapeno pizza. Yum.

Later on into the evening, in the midst of cleaning, I decided it was time to tackle one of the items on my google task list: gutting a microwave. So what all does a microwave consist of? Well, it's actually very simple, but the parts themselves are expensive. Here is a list of major components:
- Circuit board to control relays, timing, provide button interfaces (the brains)
- motor to turn the dish
- lamp to light the inside
- input power filter (providing cleaner 60Hz and 120VAC)
- Fan that runs on AC, to cool the electronic components
- magnetron (emits microwave radiation, shaking water molecules violently)
- heavy duty transformer, converting 120VAC to something like 2kVAC

The last two items in that list are probably the most expensive part of the microwave. The primary piece that I wanted was that transformer. Once I removed it, the microwave weighed about half as much as it used to. That's a lot of metal and wire wound up in a transformer. The magnetron had some cool shielding on it, I'm sure it's slightly dangerous to power that up without knowing what will happen... so I decided it best to just leave that in the microwave. I did decide to take the fan and circuit board for fun though. While I was digging around, I figured out why the microwave stopped working in the first place: the fuse on the power filter circuitry was busted. That either means something failed inside the microwave, causing a sustained surge of current, or somebody put the wrong stuff in the microwave and caused internal arcing, or just ran the microwave for way too long without decent ventilation.

Finished up enough for today.

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