Someone asked me about my blog in the last month and I was surprised to learn that it had been years since I posted something new. That is how life is sometimes I guess, I should probably write up some of the efforts building my shop on Lopez. I am getting to the point where things are actually going to be interesting now.
But the point of this post is to say that I have been awarded yet another patient. It was filed in 2023, but the original application (the part I was involved in, before the lawyers take over) goes back to 2015 I think. It has todo with detecting networking events within the AWS virtual network and mapping it to specific accounts that are impacted. I am happy to say, it is still a real product avaliable today in the AWS console.
It has been months since I was awarded a patient, so I was happy to get the note another was awarded this week. (I say this very tongue in cheek, since I am always surprised) This one goes back about six years ago, when I was building a new way to route Amazon retail website customer requests to the correct backend fleet. I think this was four teams ago in my Amazon timeline, which has gotten pretty long in my 15 year tenure.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -Mark Twain
Posted in Life | Comments Off on Quote that rang true….
Amazon has this thing where when you submit a patient application and it is filed (so all the internal reviews are complete), you get a clear puzzle piece. Then down the road if the patient office accepts and issues the patient, you get a second puzzle piece with the patient number on it and this one is blue.
I finally got my first blue puzzle piece a couple years ago, I just got another one at the end of 2020. Given that I’m still working from home, I didn’t ‘pickup’ the blue puzzle piece until a couple weeks ago. (I had to go into the office to get something from my desk) But I did take a couple minutes to add the new piece to my ‘puzzle wall’. I know people that have so many of these that it fills their office windows.
I also just got e-mail this morning that another one of the batch I submitted several years ago was issued.
Posted in computers, Life, Work | Comments Off on Another piece of the puzzle…
I took the last two weeks of the year off, I only had to spend about 5 hours on Monday generating a report. (sigh)
Tonight I’m making cinnamon rolls for breakfast tomorrow, the only time I get to have them is when I make them myself. (dairy problem) So while waiting for them to bake, I have been cleaning out folders in gmail. I came across this link I sent myself and had to share. Well worth the 5 minutes to read it.
It is odd how the process works, the two patients which were issued back in July 2019 were apart five which were filed at the same time. You tend to file them in batches when they all come out of a new project development. I got notified another from that batch just got issued, 18 months later….
The next time I stop by the office (which I’ve seen twice in the last ten months), I’ll grab a picture of the cool blue puzzle pieces awards you get at Amazon when a patient is award. You get a clear puzzle piece when filing a patient.
Posted in computers, Life, Work | Comments Off on Another Patient Issued, Round 2….
So I started writing this post months ago, for some reason never published it and have since had a second patent issued. What is odd/weird, the second patent was ‘filed’ at least a year before the first. I know a lot of people feel patents are out dated and this is doubly true for software patents, but the 10 year old in me reading books about Thomas Edison still feels it is cool.
Last week a discussion was started among some ham radio friends about replacing the fan on a particular Kenwood mobile radio. While I don’t have that particular radio, I do have the Icom ID-5100, which I like very much except for one annoying thing. The stock fan is REALLY LOUD. So I spent less than five minutes finding a good Google article posted by G6NHU about his efforts replacing the fan on his 5100. He even posted a YouTube video with the before and after impact of the fan change.
I decided to order the fan G6NHU recommended and one of the brand that my friend had recommended from his Kenwood replacement. (The Icom has a slightly different size, but it was easy to find it on Amazon). I ended up trying both and the Noctua was quieter, as in virtually silent. I had to put a flash light directly on the blades to confirm it was working, because I couldn’t hear it. The other fan G6NHU recommend was also much quieter than the stock, but this was a situation where you got what you paid for.
Here are some pictures of the actual surgery. The toughest part for me was getting the fan screws out initially. They were put in with some sort of loctite and I couldn’t budge three of them initially. But 30 seconds under the heat gun and I was able to remove them. Then it was just a matter of cutting the special connector from the stock fan and soldering it on the new fan.
Here is a snap when I got the fan off initially.
Next up is a snap of the inside, it was pretty easy getting the bottom cover off and just un-plugging the stock fan.
Here is the initial test, to make sure everything was working before re-assembling.
Should note the super quiet fan is a three wire type, the yellow wire provides RPM data back to PC motherboards. Since I didn’t need it, I just cut it off when I was sure it was working.
Here is a picture of everything put back together. The fan is a desert dirt brown, which clashes pretty bad with the all black of the ID-5100 case. But the body of the radio lives under my desk and I don’t tend to care to much about colors. (Function over form)
Posted in Ham Radio | Comments Off on Icom ID-5100 Fan Replacement (or Noise Fans Suck)…..
