Category Archives: technology

June update

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I wrote anything in the weblog. I’ve been staying busy, primarily working on finance-related activities. After 24 years of working at HP, I decided to take an early retirement package and left the company a few weeks ago. I was ready for a break and felt that the offer was good, so now I’m in the middle of moving money around and organizing my finances. Yesterday I computed the basis for HP stock that I had accumulated over a 23 year period that had undergone 3 splits and 2 company spinoffs. I had been dreading that excercize, but in the end, all the numbers added up and it wasn’t too painful. Thankfully, the HP Alumni association had a spreadsheet I used as a starting point that kept track of the price of HP and spin off stocks all the way back to HP’s IPO. I realized that if someone had the foresight to buy $1000 worth of HP stock when it went public in 1959, today it would be worth well over $600,000 in a combination of HP, Agilent, and Verigy stock. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get started that early .

A while ago I experimented with purchasing individual stocks and experienced pretty good gains, even though I had a few of my stocks lose most of their value. Having picked those losers led me to wonder if I had the temperament for purchasing stocks individually. It seemed too much like gambling. In retrospect, even with those losers, my net gains were still over 20% a year, and so I couldn’t complain too much. I decided that if I were ever to try investing in individual stocks again, I’d do a much more thorough job of analyzing the companies. The worst kind of investing is where you buy a stock after hearing a ‘hot tip’ from some dubious source about a company that is ‘about to explode.’ Often times, the company implodes instead. I can see by the amount of ‘pump and dump‘ spam email I get that it must still be popular to speculate in companies with no real earnings. Now the spam messages don’t even make any pretenses about the company having any potential, instead tacitly inviting investors to engage in a game of the greater fool theory.

I’ve heard several horror stories about people who are suckered into handing over control of their money to seemingly trustworthy individuals only to be cheated, sometimes out of their entire life savings. Fortunately, I’ve not had this experience myself with investment counselors, but it’s certainly not for lack of trying on their part. I used to get calls from boiler room operations promising “30, 40, or 50% annual returns” but I never took the bait. I even had a guy tormenting me with voicemails every night at home, eventually resorting to insulting me with comments such as ‘anyone with a modicum of intelligence would be able to tell that this is a great investment’. Yeah, I want to give my money to someone who would talk to potential clients like that… I will never buy an investment from someone trying to sell it to me over the phone. Anyone ‘selling’ you an investment probably does not have your best interests in mind.

Lately I’ve been reading investing books and studying a lot of companies using analytical tools geared toward value investing. I would never have the temperament to be a day trader but I do plan to have a more active role in investing now that I have the time to do it.

Techcon 2007

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Last week I went to a very prestigious HP-sponsored technology conference called Techcon. You have to earn your way there by writing a paper that is judged against more than a thousand other papers written by the best technologists in the company. There are only about 120 papers accepted and so we were very honored to get an invitation to present our paper at the conference. The topic of our paper was related to the new HP MediaSmart Servers recently announced at the CES that are expected to ship this fall. There was a lot of interest in our product because it was something that just about everyone needs at home so it was a pleasure to get to talk about it with other technology enthusiasts.

There were a lot of other interesting papers presented at the conference but it was confidential so I can’t discuss it here. In addition to the authors of the papers, there are a number of other people who attended the conference including HP’s CEO and CTO, HP Fellows, and some who had volunteered to review the papers.

One of the chief benefits of the conference is the chance to meet and network with HP engineers from around the company and to talk with leading experts in a number of important fields. It seemed that every time I turned around, I met someone with an impressive background. Even on the overbooked plane ride to the conference, I had a middle seat, but as a result that I got to meet and chat with experts in both image processing and mobile devices who were sitting on either side of me. On the way back, we were delayed for several hours in the San Antonio airport and as a result of that “misfortune” we had dinner with five HP technologists who we would not have had the chance to meet otherwise.

I like conferences with an “immersive” feel where you get to experience something from early in the morning until late in the evening, and Techncon’s schedule is jam packed with activities. I find Airventure to be that way as well as Entconnect, two other conferences which I regularly attend. Only part of the feeling is a result of the activities and presentations. Most of it comes from interacting with like-minded individuals who are enthusiastic about the subject of the conference.

The HP rx5900 Travel Companion

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I got an HP rx5900 Travel Companion recently as an award for having a paper accepted at a conference. It’s by far the coolest toy I’ve gotten in a very long time, and that’s saying a lot because I’m a bit of a gadget geek. The HP rx5900 Travel Companion was featured on the OCC-HP Bike that I wrote about earlier. I have desperately wanted one of these since they came out because I need a GPS/moving map for all of my vehicles, my motorcycle, car, and airplane and it looks like this is going to work perfectly. It comes with the GPS and TomTom Navigator software built in and the amount of detail it provides for the roads is incredible. The mounting accessories and charging devices are very cleverly designed. All it needs for charging is a USB cable, so anywhere you have an USB socket, you can charge it up. Even the cigarette lighter and wall plug have a USB socket in them, and this is absolutely brilliant.

I had it up and running in no time, and found that not only is it a great navigation device, but it has a full PocketPC capabilities including the ability to sync with my PC so I can access my contact and task list as well as my schedule while I’m away from the PC. I can add changes and then re-sync with the PC when I return.

I was hoping that it would run aviation navigation software called Anywhere Map and so I visited the website and found that not only would it run the software, but the HP Travel Companion is a recommended system. I had tried using Anywhere Map previously, but found that a Blue Tooth GPS which was separate from the PDA was problematic in the aiplane because the PDA would periodically lose track of the GPS unit. It also meant more devices to charge and keep track of, so the built-in GPS is a welcome addition to this device. Best of all, when I get out of the plane and travel by car or motorcycle, I can just launch TomTom and have a world-class street navigation system. With TomTom, I can get maps for virtually anywhere I want to travel.

I am really looking forward to using this device and will report back more about it later after I’ve had a chance to give it a good workout on all my vehicles.

How to replace surface elements on an elecric range

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A few months ago, I repaired the washing machine and wrote about it in a blog posting. Lately, our Whirlpool stove was acting up, not heating up its burners (aka surface elements) until they were ‘wiggled’ a bit. It’s actually been a recurring problem for a while, but was isolated to just one or two elements. Over the past year, it seemed that all of them have been having the same issue at one time or another.

First I took them out and noticed that the contacts were pretty dirty and so I sanded them down, which seemed to help. But then a few of them quickly became intermittent again. I looked at the price of new burners online and found them to be priced quite high, between $30 to $40 *each*. I also realized the receptacles that these coiled burners plug into, which cannot be cleaned, were the the more likely source of poor electrical contact. Those parts weren’t too expensive, about $10 each, so I bought a few of them and spliced them in to replace the ones that were very worn out. This helped quite a bit and we had all 4 elements working reliably for the first time in a long time.

A few months after that I was noticing that a burner wasn’t working, so I attempted to adjust it in the receptacle and when I turned it on, I heard the a very loud pop and saw a very large blue spark jump from the receptacle. I guess that’s what I get for not ‘doing it right the first time’ and just replacing all the receptacles and burners. After that spark, that burner position no longer worked because it evidently took out the switch/temperature controller in the panel. Later, I had an experience where the other small (6″) burner did something similar and this time the spark melted a section of the burner and it came apart near the receptacle. I resigned myself to getting 4 new burners and 2 more new receptacles. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d need two new switch/temperature controllers too.

If you price out a range by the sum of its replaceable parts, you’ll quickly realize that it can get expensive in a hurry. I found that the 4 burners and 2 more receptacles added up to over $160 and with a new stove costing around $500-600, it doesn’t make much sense spend a lot of money to fix one that is 17 years old. However, I found that the entire set of burners and receptacles were available in a kit (shown below) for $72 from the repairclinic.com and that put the cost of the repair within reason again. I wished I had seen that kit in the first place and I would not have tried to fix the range a burner at a time.
electric range surface element repair kit

It’s really not that hard to work on a range because it has a kind of hinge that lets you lift up the front just like a hood on a car. It even has a way to support the top with some wire supports while you work on it. The receptacles were easy to replace and so were the elements. You do have to be remove power because an electric range it has high voltages, so you should know where the circuit breaker is for the range and make sure to turn power off to the range when you’re about to touch anything that is electrical.

After I got the burners and receptacles replaced, I learned that the big blue sparks had damaged two of the switch/temperature controllers because I only measure 40 VAC (instead of 240 VAC) across their output so I had to replace two of those too. These parts were not very attractively priced on-line anywhere I looked, so I picked them up at the local appliance store.

Now the range is virtually new again and the pots actually sit flush on the burners which start up immediately with they are turned on. One of the more gratifying things about working on appliances is that you can become a total geek with your tools and multimeter and in the end, it results in a wife who is happy with the result :-). Very few geek adventures offer that as an incentive.

UPDATE: 2013-01-19 This repair has kept the stove running reliably for more than 5 years, and so I wanted to confirm that the fix saved us the cost of a new range and made it much more convenient to use, because we no longer worry about whether one of the burners was not heating. So if you want a stove that works like new, my recommendations is to just buy the repair kit and replace all of the burners and receptacles at once.