Geekularity

Do you want to know how to wow and amaze your friends and family? Well, do as I did the night before last. Have your father-in-law bring you his stash of old computer and electronics cables that he has been collecting for years and identify as many of them as you can!

It turns out that my internal encyclopedia of serial and network cabling standards has a use after all! I successfully identified each one, allowing my father-in-law to toss most of the cables since they were no longer of practical use. I think what impressed(scared) everyone the most was that I named most of the terminators by the ANSI or IEEE standard name (e.g. DB-9, USB-A, 1394, RG-6, etc.) The coupe de gras occurred when I dated a 15 year old modem cable based on the type of plastic used in its construction.

So, if you are ever looking for a groovy night at the O’Steen household, just bring over your rats nest of old, unidentifiable wires and cables and let me go to town. I can’t guarantee that you will have a good time, but you will certainly make my day!

My sister-in-law is without power in much of her condo at the moment due to a dead circuit breaker. Looking for reassurance that her home wasn’t going to spontaneously combust as a result of this broken piece of aluminum and bake-a-lite, she called me for some advice. What she received from me, as I have heard through the grapevine, was “a history of circuit breakers!”

Apparently the 5-10 minutes that I expounded on the purpose and the construction of a circuit breaker was above and beyond what she needed. Nevertheless, I managed convinced her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her house wasn’t going to burn down. Yay…. Mission accomplished!!…With extra credit!!!!

Let this be a lesson to you then. Do as my English teachers did. Please put some very specific parameters into your questions. For example: “Please explain, in 100 words or less, whether my house will burn down if I have a circuit breaker that will not reset.”

Otherwise you are at the mercy of my brain which responds to questions like this as follows: “What? She wants to know about circuit breakers? Yippee! Someone wants to know about this semi-useless piece of trivia that I have spent 4 years working at a hardware store to obtain! Well then, get some coffee, sit down and relax, and get VERY comfortable. I have, at minimum, 2 hours of material on circuit breakers, and without a powerpoint presentation, it may actually take me 3 hours! Oh boy, this is going to be fun!”