Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

I fixed the tire yesterday evening. On the way home I noticed another couple nails on the same stretch of road where I punctured the tire yesterday and stopped to get them off the street. 10 minutes later I had picked up a handful. Must have fallen off a work truck or something ...

While I was waiting for my wife to pick me up with this punctured tire, I picked up a few more nails and screws from the street and threw them away.

I attended a work-related event today. When a reflection exercise came up, it was accompanied by this picture. All I could think of was, "I do not want to be this person. What the heck are they doing?" The railheads are clean and the tracks look reasonably well maintained. This is very likely an active rail line and crossing this trestle in the middle of the woods seems like a sub-optimal idea...

My very first digital Maerklin locomotive was a BR86 from a starter set. This model is known to have problems with power pickup, and sounding like it's grinding up its gears. Part of the issue here is the very low-end MM2 decoder built into these locomotives. Nevertheless, I lived with it for the last 10 years, but the locomotive got less and less use as other, cooler locomotives arrived on the Welztalbahn or were converted from analog. When switching a local freight this afternoon, I got fed up about the noise and crappy driving habits of this locomotive and brought it to the work bench. The axles got some more oil, the gears some grease, and it ran a little bit quieter, but not a lot. Alright, I do have a couple spare LokPilot 3.0 sitting on a shelf. Today's the day! The old MM2 decoder made way for a Lokpilot, I connected power pickup and motor leads to see if this truly makes a difference... and what a difference it makes! The drivetrain no longer aches and croaks, but pur...

When I put Maerklin 37819, engine 051 013-1 on the roller stand yesterday, it wasn't recognized automatically by the Mobile Station. At all. Another locomotive was programmed just fine, so it wasn't the overall setup. Tonight I double-checked connectivity, checked the wires, checked the decoder socket, swapped in another decoder, nothing. I tried the decoder in the BR 50 with cabin tender and it worked there, so it wasn't the decoder (whew!) I slowly took apart 051 013 until I had the naked engine in front of me. I checked the cable connections, double-checked connectivity, put it on the roller stand. ... And it worked just fine. Slowly and carefully I put it back together, and ... it still runs just fine. Maybe user error and I didn't press Stop on the Mobile Station to let it detect the locomotive? But then it should have worked with the decoder from the other BR 50.  I have no idea. At least now I know how to take this engine apart and put it back together. The fine ...

Das Ergebnis von ungeschicktem Anstossen... Die Bedienung brachte mir umgehend ein neues Bier.

Irgendwie muss man ja schauen, ob die Ameisen, die bei uns in der Kueche rumliefen von aussen kamen ...

This was a miserable flight. I don't sleep well on planes, so I usually stay awake, work on the laptop, eat, watch a movie or two, ... but this time it didn't work. I was sleep-deprived, dozed off multiple times, and basically felt like a zombie. I was glad to get off the plane in SFO in one piece. Seeing the Concorde display at CDG was cool, though. It's impressive how small that super-sonic plane was.

Lesson learned: Sheet styrene of 0.05" thickness is too thin. It has almost no step transitioning from my existing street across the gap to the movable station segment, but is not stiff enough to hold its shape with color applied. I need to rethink this transition and move away from the idea of papering over the gap with thin styrene sheet. Instead admit there's a gap and dress it up the best I can.

The sun is shining. I'm on the right side of the tracks. Engine 920 pulling Caltrain 156 is barreling towards me at track speed ... and entered the shadow of a trackside tree just as I took the photo. Groan! This stretch of track will likely change dramatically when HSR gets built to San Jose Diridon station in a couple years.

I almost went into conniptions at the exit of Breuninger Garage in Stuttgart. The madness is spreading. Not surprising, really. The same manufacturer  Scheidt&Bachman makes the payment machines at Stuttgart Hbf. Too bad that a German company doesn't speak proper German.

I landed in Greece yesterday, and went to the blogger.com admin page to update my Blog this morning. While I really don't have a problem with Blogger changing the language of the admin UI to the current locale when I'm in the US, Germany, or France, it becomes though when the UI looks at me in Greek.

A "fun" way to spend a Sunday afternoon is figuring out why our Maytag dish washer has standing water in the tub after a completed cycle and also doesn't quite clean as well as it used to. I cleaned the floater which felt gooey and didn't really float up and down as easily as you would expect. Didn't make a difference. The troubleshooting instructions for "standing water in tub" suggest to check the drain for food remnants. I pulled out the dishwasher from under the counter and checked the drain hose. No apparent blockage, but I noticed that it took 10s of seconds after the pump came on until the water started to flow stronger than a trickle. I figured there must be something blocking water flow inside the dishwasher... There was, and I learned a few things: When your lovely wife says, "The dish washer needs a thorough cleaning", do the cleaning. It'll save you pain like an overflowing dish washer tub later. It is not necessary to pull the ...