Power issues

JPS is messing with me. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that food came out of my microwave and it was still cold, my fridge guard was chipping out and the fuses started to blow in my speaker set. I found all this strange until one day I came home to my hot apartment to turn on the fan and it was barely spinning. I ran for my multimeter and it gave me 80 to 90v and it all started to make sense.

Since I am all about going green the term brown out has mostly lost its meaning since the florescent lights are either on or off and they don't get brown under a low voltage supply like I had been receiving. It still left the mystery as to why the 3amp fuses in my speakers where blowing but one day last weekend I plugged in my multimeter and caught jps giving me power at 150v sustained.

As far as I am concerned my supply voltage should be 115v +/-5v and anything else is unacceptable. 80 to 150v a deviation of 35v is enough to destroy anything worth having and that's what JPS has started to do. When the voltage got too low my DSL modem would drop out and I would lose internet service. On the flip side when the power was at 150v the 15v, 1amp, linear power supply primary coil burnt out.

Pretty much anything with an unfused coil facing jps faced certain doom as a second set of speakers in my bedroom died as well. That was the last straw, I took it apart as pictured to the left and cut off the dead transformer and fed the amplifier circuit with a rectified power supply I built 13 years ago(I'm so proud). This one has a significantly larger primary coil so it should withstand any further surges until I can find a suitably rated switched mode power supply for it as I have already done for my DSL modem. FYI if anybody actually read this far I majored in electronics for my undergrad degree.

Tastes like chicken?

What the hell is wrong with these lizards? I have no real problem living with them but they have crossed the line.

Saturday night I stepped into my kitchen and heard no end of commotion somewhere in the room. After some investigation I realized the lizard that normally lives under my fridge was in the garbage bag I placed on the ground pending the arrival of the garbage truck. It was eating my left overs so I quickly identified where it was in the bag and just stepped on it through the bag *splat*.

I thought that was the last of those buggers in my kitchen for now but some night later on this week I stepped into my kitchen to do the dishes and saw a single lone chicken bone in the middle of the counter, someone tried to help themself to a snack before I could clean up. Needless to say the lizard pictured above soon came into view as he tried to make his escape. Look at it, he is still licking his lips. I went for my camera and bug spray and now he is no more. Lizards be warned.

back! but barely here

I think I promised my Mobay friend a picture from the last post.. so here it is! where does the time go? I have some many things to blog about but no time to update it, things have become so bad that I don't even have the time to go through the other blogs I normally read or to reply to my messages and friend requests on facebook.

What have I been up to then? Lets digress, the last time I was on a AA flight their in flight entertainment got me hooked on the big bang theory theory. I sat in the hotel that Monday and watched CBS' entire prime time comedy lineup and found the greatest thing next to sliced bread so when I came back to Jamaica I continued to follow their series. After missing a few episodes I did some googling and found I could download them via public torrents and the rest is history. I now have the full seasons of all the shows I liked but never had the time to watch downloaded. Is this illegal because I could have just watched them on my cable.. which is what is not happening now. Instead of watching the crappy quality How I Met Your Mother on my cable, I just download the episode the next day and watch it commercial free in wide screen format.

Now that I have hours of shows to watch on my computer I still don't have much time to watch them. I still probably just spend 30 minutes per day to watch an episode. So what else have I been doing with my time? I find that if I leave at 7:30am I can beat most of the traffic and reach work before 8 so I have been waking up and leaving early. I have also fought the urge of leaving at 4:30pm and started to stay at work until 6:30pm at which point there is pretty much no traffic on the road to go home. At the same time I come off as being a good employee and so much more work is getting done! What I need to start doing is waking up earlier and energized so I can go walking.. but one step at a time.

Enough chatter for now, I'll leave y'all with an interesting photo from that trip to Montego Bay. This photo was taken on the way back to town as I was passing through Ocho Rios. I am just going to assume that this is not really meant for the pedestrian crossing but for the dolphin park that should be somewhere near by. Yet again as per usual walking through the town all the locals thought I was a tourist and harrased me to no end. How does one look like a Jamaican? It shouldn't be that hard for me.. I born and grow here.