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The Garage Door Troubleshoot

My garage doors has been operating marginally for quite a while. I’d mess with the settings, watch YouTube videos and basically tinker around with the adjustments trying to get it working right. I’ve resorted to manually opening and closing them because the motors sometimes are not able to do so.

Today, I’m tackling this beast or, dying trying.

Background:
My garage doors are wooden, old and have some goofy situations. I’m not sure if it is normal, but the installer seems to have ran the tracks into the poured cement on the garage floor. This make moving the rails basically impossible… yea I can cut them at the floor but don;t have enough ecperience to be sure that won’t cause a secondary problem.

I’m currently doing a deep education, but I find the info that you really need is hard to find. There’s lots of YouTube videos of varying quality but nobody explains the principles that one should seek. This happens a lot as it takes a higher level understanding to communicate at the level. Lots of people know what to do but can’t explain it in a more general sense so you can morph the understanding into your particulars (something I try to do in all of my teachings).

Anyway, so here I am.

What I have grasped with a mild confidence is that it’s about balancing forces. Like an elevator, the springs provide a balancing force against the door so that the motor in the opener can do less work to open and close the garage door.

You want the door to move smoothly and with minimal effort without the opener before adding in the opener.

The door will naturally fall so the springs are there to pull back on the tension.

I believe the first thing to do is to work on the spring tension and keep adjusting it so that the door is easy to open and close and is not prone to either go up or down when left alone

One safety warning is that you need to add protection to stopping the door from running away free and slamming to the floor. If part of your body happens to be under a heavy, run away door, you could get hurt. The standard trick is to use a vide grip plyers and clamp it to the rail so that the door will be stopped by it, and only slowly remove if. I would suggest a backup safety the first time you remove it in case something is wrong… A problem avoided is a problem solved !

I’ll be posting more about this process but it is happening or I fail after a hard try TODAY.

Uncategorized

October 19, 2019 (0)

Flip Phone Not Charging

So my mom’s flip phone stopped charging. Once I got to her, I did a quick troubleshoot.

I first confirmed that it is not charging, then made sure it was plugged in fully.

Next I moved the charger to an outlet known to have power… still no indication of charging.

Next I took a look at the charging cable which had a break at the phone. I jiggled the wires around thinking one of the wires might be broken in the bundle, but once again no indication. Another thing I did is to make sure the connection and the cable end seem clean and ok.

Next, I checked the power supply end and saw tape had been put over the cable to secure it. Bupkis.

It was time to quit. Practical considerations suggested the time being spent was no longer worth the effort. The replacement cable was a 5 minute walk away, she would be returning home in a few hours and had some battery life and thus the practical choice.

Sometimes you lose in problem solving but it’s usually more of a choice to quit than an outright surrender.

things

October 16, 2019 (0)

Never say “No” to a student

Teachers have to really be on their toes. Monitoring pace, lesson content absorption, breaks impact on subject delivery, boredom of students … and the list goes on.

One important skill is the ability to see why a student is mis-understanding and giving them a face-saving way out of their error.

It’s been my experience that there is no better way to lose a student than in having them feel like they are dumb. It’s not your fault they feel this way (except for really bad teachers), they are already delicately balanced between a perception that they are not the best student, and their hope to understand the material you are delivering.

One additional real-time challenge teachers have is in effortlessly and quickly understanding WHY a student has a mis-understanding, and then redirect their thinking to the correct connections or process. This skill is a volatile little moment where, if done right, you keep them with you, but even a hint of “dumbness” and you have lost them.

Responding “no that’s not right”, “No”, “not quite” are all some things that might come to your mind in response to a question. When a student builds up the courage to speak out and answer, Try to banish these phrases…. to an extreme.

Now, It is my suggestion, that you truly track the thinking a students’ wrong answer followed to reach their incorrect conclusion. There is no shortcut here. Once you truly understand their thinking, you will typically find that there is a logic to their mistake.

What I do next is explain their thinking and make them right for it … kind of “Oh I see you took this thing, and applied this rule to get your answer, that makes sense”. And bingo, you have kept them with you. The student teaching the teacher kind-of thing.

But here’s where you turn the corner to correcting them, You gently remind them that there is a pesky rule that they missed and that microscopic omission led to their mistake.

Something like:
“Oh I see you took this thing, and applied this rule to get your answer, that makes sense.” then: “but doing the problem that way covers many cases, but there is a special case where you have to also include this rule, (or step) etc.”

Make their mistake very small in their mind, and make them right for their thinking. It’s really powerful.

It’s been my experience that the real challenge here is quickly understanding the “why” behind their mistake. When you know how to do it right, this is often quite difficult. The better at this you are, the better you can serve your students.

teaching

October 11, 2019 (0)

Problem Solving Book in Development

So a gift I believe I have is the ability to take a collection of experiences and learning and to distill and simplify those lessons into simple to understand and highly valuable instruction. I noticed this ability as a technical trainer teaching web development and business intelligence software. I often had people compliment me on make things easy to learn. I shy away from insider language, develop real-life analogies,in general encourage my students and truly care about their outcome.

To that, I am in the process of writing a book describing a generalized approach to solving any type of problem.

Over the span of my life, I have fixed cars, bicycles, electronics, software, garage door openers, heat lamps, food processors, business processes, health issues, learning issues, creative writing problems and many other things from wildly diverse fields,

After a while I began to notice that essential patterns emerge when fixing “things”.

The book I am writing is about those observations.

In my opinion, it is much more valuable to learn a more general process than it is to learn a specific one.The general one can be adapted to many circumstances and has value ion all facets of your life. A general approach can be applied to pretty much all facets of your life and bring broad and highly valuable reactions to problems.

Using a general approach to solving problems allow you to save money by not paying experts to solve what are often very simple fixes, save time by not having to call, interview, and deliver and wait for a specialist to perform their task, reduce frustration of feeling like the wolrd of things is in control of you, reduce risk by solving problems where there is a risk like an emergency situation and much more.

Stay tuned for ongoing updates and snippets of my book.

I hope to publish the book in October 2019

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October 4, 2019 (0)