THE EARL OF TV

In 1968, give or take a year or two, I was working in Houston at AMF Tuboscope, a pipe inspection company, developing new technology for inspecting oil field pipe and pipelines.  We had a sister company in Canada, North American Inspection, that specialized in field inspection of transmission pipelines.  In particular, they were radiographers who examined the pipe welds between joints of pipe before the pipe was buried in the ground.  To add to their capability, we took on a project to develop an internal crawler robot that would carry a radioactive source along inside the pipe and deploy it at each girth weld where film had been wrapped around the outside of the weld.  Upon development of the film, the weld quality could be determined and cracks, porosity and other defects identified.  I was project engineer of this project and did the electronic design for the control system.

The crawler was a self-contained, autonomous device powered by an on-board 24 volt battery.  It was driven by a high-torque DC motor connected to a drive wheel.  The control system, consisting of discrete analog and digital IC’s was contained in an aluminum housing about 8-inches on a side.  Control knobs and switches on the top of the housing permitted set-up of the device.  The radioactive source was a cobalt isotope housed in a 200-lb. holder of spent uranium or lead.  When the robot sensed a weld, it stopped and a separate drive motor would drive the isotope from its holder into position to expose the film for a preset exposure time then it would be retracted back into a safe position and the crawler would move to the next weld.

The system was built and checked out in our Houston lab, then taken to a field site in Louisiana where it was used with North American radiographers for training before it was shipped to Canada.  All went well and the system was turned over to the North American company office in Calgary.  Not unexpectedly, we got a call within the next few weeks that there were problems with the control system.  I bagged up some spare parts, a few tools and a couple of test instruments and headed to Calgary.  As I went through customs, the Canadian authorities were interested in my little Sony battery powered oscilloscope and my function generator.  I explained the situation, but they said I could use Canadian instruments and confiscated my gear.  I pled my case to my North American contact, the office manager there, and he said he would see what he could do.  I told him I need some electronic workbench space to trouble shoot the system.

He came back later in the day and said, “I’ve found you a place to work.  It is the repair shop at a TV store.  The Earl of TV would close at 9 PM and I could use his shop all night long.”  OK, maybe this won’t be too bad.  I showed up at The Earl of TV and sure enough he had a work bench.   I had the electronics box from the robot and got ready to do my trouble shooting.  First problem:  The electronics required 24 VDC and the shop had only a 12 volt supply.  I dug around through everything in the shop, but no luck.  He did have some pliers, though, and fifteen minutes later, the 12 volt supply, in series with the battery from my rent car gave me the 24 volts I needed.  I thought surely there must be an audio oscillator or some such generator to produce an AC test signal.  Sorry, no oscillator, but I  did find, in his junk drawer, a filament transformer that let me produce at least a 60 Hz sine wave of a low voltage.  His oscilloscope, I will never forget it, was a Jackson CRO-2.  It did have a display, but no DC coupling.  If you connected the probe to a DC potential, the trace would sail off the screen and slowly drift back as the input capacitor charged up.  I won’t go into the agony of trouble-shooting digital switching circuits with an AC scope, but it was not fun.  To cut to the chase, I did survive the night and got the box working in time to turn it over to the North American crew the next day.  

One final touch:  On the day I was to return to Houston, I decided to pay a courtesy call to the Tuboscope Calgary office.  They were doing oil field inspections completely independent of the North American Inspection Company.  When I drove into the yard at the Tuboscope location, I saw a neat looking van painted in the company colors.  It had a Texas license plate.  I said, “Is someone here from the home office?”  Oh yeah, that’s the Quality Control van.  They are here to check our equipment.  The van had racks of power supplies, scopes, signal sources, etc.   If only I had known.  But then I’d never got to meet the Earl of TV.  Over 20 years later, on another trip to Calgary, I checked a phone book and sure enough The Earl was still listed.  I really doubt that he ever repaired a TV, though.

The Eyes Have It

Here is one of my photos at the India Festival.

I enlarged her left eye and one can see reflections of me and two other customers. I am the one in the dark blue shirt and blue jeans.

They say the eye is the window to the soul.  It is also a mirror to the observer.

Photos of Phaces

The Viewfinder Challenge for March is "Human Faces".  Since I have no local family to photograph (Elaine is camera-shy), I decided to try for faces of strangers.  There was a India Festival at La Villita yesterday so I went there looking for subjects. I had hopes there would be Sikhs in attendance as the ones in turbans and heavy beards make good photo subjects.  None were there while I was there.  I asked a jewelry vendor and a fashion coordinator to take their pictures and they said OK.  The man actually insisted that I take his photo and asked about my Lumix camera.  On the way from La Villita I saw a musician on a porch so I asked him to take his photo and he said OK also.  Photos follow.

Sign and Vine

A few years ago when Reagan High School was overcrowded, students parked on all neighborhood streets, including ours. Traffic could hardly get down the street nor turn around at the cul-de-sacs.  We petitioned the city to restrict parking, which they did with signs limiting parking during certain hours on school days.  The overcrowding was solved, but the signs remain, totally ignored by everyone.  Here is the one in our yard.

My next door neighbor has one in his yard as well.  He has his front yard covered with Asian Jasmine ground cover, a very prolific vine plant.  This plant is growing around the base of the sign post as shown below.

Note that the sign post is square-section steel about 1.5 inches on a side with holes about 3/8" diameter on all four sides about an inch apart vertically.  Now here comes the interesting part.  The vine entered one of those holes and started growing.  I don't know whether it entered by pure chance or had some affinity for the dark hole, but in any case it entered.  Now it had many chances to come back out again, but stayed inside.  Vines like Morning Glory or Kudzu tend to spiral wrap around any vertical object and climb toward the top.  This plant does not do that.  Many plants grow toward light sources.  This one had probably 300 - 400 chances to exit the pole through one of the holes, but did not do that.  It grew upward, inside the pole, until it reached the top and then out the top. Here  is the pole near the sign and the vine exiting the pole.

So it appears the vine was directed only by gravity, preferring the dark inside of the pole to many opportunities to exit to the light. I find this fascinating, though probably not of interest to anyone else.  My neighbor was weeding her yard and saw me taking the photos.  I explained my interest in the vine, and she was underwhelmed. 

All photos made with Lumix Gh2 camera with Olympus 75mm f/1.8 lens.

Alzafar

There was an open category to our Viewfinders challenge for June.  I was out driving around trying to spot something worth entering and decided to turn in at Alzafar Shrine Temple.  I  took a few shots with my 15mm lens with the camera set on exposure burst taking metered exposure plus and minus one stop.  I did an exposure merge with the resulting images and I think it worked out OK.  I was able to keep the sky and the dark area under the overhang on the right. 

Holiday Photo Challenge

The Viewfinder Challenge for December was holiday photos.  I will not be able to attend the meeting due to Elaine's medical situation, but thought I'd try to squeeze in some entries for the challenge anyway.  The first thought was to go to  North Star Mall to see what was happening during the "Pet" day for Santa.  Every year, they allow three hours on Mondays for people to bring their pets to sit on Santa's lap and get their photo made.  I had never been and thought it would be a hoot, especially if someone brought an exotic pet like a snake or fish.  No such luck.  Nothing but dogs.  And plenty of them.  There was a long line waiting and even when I left around 8 PM, they  were still bringing them in from the parking lot.  Here's the most interesting shot I got from my vantage point up on the second floor balcony.  This was with an 85mm f1.4 lens shooting at about 1/30 sec.  I have a caption for this one.  It is, "Please, Santa, tell him he's too young for a BB gun this year."

When leaving the mall, I stopped at the big boots to take a shot of them since they are so easy and meet the holiday criterion.  Shot was with 15mm f1.7 lens at 1/50 sec. and f8.0.

For the third shot I had an idea to  try something in the neighborhood, just around the corner from the house.  The Holy Trinity Catholic Church has a nativity scene they erect each year and I'd been waiting for them to light it.  They finally did, so I set up in front of it at night with camera on a tripod.  Exposure was about the same as for the boots except 1/4 sec instead of 1/50.  I took several shots with myself in front of the camera in different locations, each time holding my 7" Android tablet.  I had photographed the scene with the tablet and just put it on replay when I held it up.  On processing, I pasted two of the positions onto the shot that already had one on it.  So there are three silhouetted figures in all.  The caption for this one is "Three modern wise men go to check out the Baby Jesus"

Comments Welcome as always.

Botanical Gardens

Yesterday my Viewfinders Camera Club held its first annual awards banquet at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens.  And whether you are resident or visitor, if you haven't discovered this place you owe it to yourself to check it out.  It is a photographers' paradise.  Lots of flowers and stuff of course, but some really cool  other structures including a number of large glass enclosures for plants.  I was fascinated by the glass buildings and since HDR is my fun thing of the month, I had to try some triplet shots for HDR merge.  Here is one that I think came out pretty well. Comments welcome.