Blog
Wiring an EV charger
Too many trades people estimate their jobs by looking at the house of the prospect, what type of cars they drive etc. Recently I received an estimate of $8,000 to install a charger outlet (but not the charger). My estimate was for an experienced professional, it would take about 20 hours. So they were charging high $300’s per hour for an electrician and a partial helper (For pulling wire).
Instead, I decided to do the hard work instead and to get an electrician out to inspect it (for maybe $100).
I had a few surprises.
The wire had to go from the south end basement wall to the attached garage on the north end of the house. Moreover, there was no direct way to get the wire from the basement to the garage. The route I took was up through the stairwell into the house attic, then down into the garage attic and finally to the distant wall.
Probably the biggest obstacle was hitting a fire-block in the stairwell. Even worse, once I finally got through the block, I discovered that maybe a foot away was another. I did not have proper tools, mostly drill bits for drilling 1″ holes 1-2 feet away from the drill . Needing a variety of tools and extensions, caused me several trips to hardware stores which also ate up some time.
Mobile Development in Xamarin
For about 5 years, I have been developing android apps in the Microsoft product “Xamarin”. I initially chose Xamarin because it is able to share code between Android and IOS and it has close to native speed. Normally I am not obsessed with speed but I have an App in development that needs speed. Over the years, and in general, I have found working with Xamarin difficult. There are very large amounts of background you need in order to build Apps. More importantly, the tools, although powerful also are very particular and often cause hours of lost productivity. Recently, Microsoft indicated that they are ending support in early 2024 for Xamarin Native, and, I would need to learn their newest flavor … called Maui.
Considering my experience with Xamarin, and the fact that I will need to learn something anyway, I’m investigating Flutter, a Google, cross platform development environment. So far, the learning curve is much less difficult, and the support and documentation is solid. I’m in development of my first Publicly available app and am about 90 % done. My initial guess is Flutter is about 3 times more productive for the developer. I’m hopeful
8th Year for Charter School Lottery System
About 9 years ago, I built an online system for taking applications for people looking to get their kids into a charter school in North Carolina.
Over the ensuing years, I will say that the system has been very solid. The biggest problem we had was in using shared hosting. It turns out that Email black-listing spans customer who are on the same server. The application sends a confirmation to each registrant, and on shared hosting, if another person is sending spam or causing your IP address to get black-listed, you are an innocent bystander. I desperately pled to the hosting company (GoDaddy) and my requests fell on deaf ears.
So I moved to Amazon Web Services. My experience was and is night and day. I did have to learn lots about hosting managing web servers, sending emails the AWS way and much more, but having my own server where I can add capacity in a few clicks is a game changer.
Adding the Lottery to the Charter School Lottery Registration System
Traditionally, the Charter School for whom this system was made had external software that ran the actual lottery. It was a cumbersome process where we would need to export the registrant data into an excel format, then import it into this desktop software, the lottery was randomized and run on the desktop and a file exported with results. Then we would need to re-import the data and run SQL co0mmands to match the results to the students application.
This year, we wrote the lottery so that it runs on the actual registrant data. There are some rules about acceptance (such as if one multiple gets accepted, the other(s) do too. Anyway, the system runs in about 1 minute and the results are immediately available.
Defending against Form Spam
Form spam is when a bad actor creates a script that submits lots of fake data to your real data. This is potentially very costly to reconcile and usually not discovered until a significant amount of fake data is submitted.
Although the school lottery system had very little (less than 1 per year) form spam and it was entered manually, We fortified the system to detect strange activity and reject the submission.
I can’t go into details lest I divulge our defenses, but adding the defense mechanisms greatly reduced our risk of this horrible occurrence.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fixing a Pencil Sharpener
Humming Pencil Sharpener
So my pencil sharpener stopped turning and went to only humming when I inserted a pencil.
This totally had the feel of clogging or dirt. I assumed I had not emptied it and all that was needed was to remove the shavings.
I have noticed that kids pencils these days are not painted, but instead there is a plastic wrap on the pencil. I assume the plastic shavings are more problematic.
Fixing The Sharpener
So I took out the tray and dumped the shavings, retried the sharpener and still was getting no movement.
Unplugging the sharpener and removing the screws that hold the case to to main part of the sharpener, I saw a mass of shavings, wood and plastic stuck in various parts of the sharpening heads.
A bit of removing of Dirt …. one of my core principles of problem solving did the trick and I have extended the life of my sharpener, not contributed to the throw away society and also make a microscopic dent in the consumerist society.