Real Genius. Great old movie.

"I quote Socrates, when he said... 'I drank what?'"

Well, it looks like "home" in Belize is still there after Dean passing through. We should get more info within the next day or so as to its condition.

EDIT: Looks like the grounds are torn up but the buildings are ok for the most part and the flooding was minimal. Yay.

Do you know yet if you lost much "stuff" to water or wind damage?
I am glad you're OK and I hope your possessions are relatively unscathed as well.

Actually, I haven't moved down there quite yet, I'm still in the states. It'll probably be at least a few more months 'til I get down there due to financial contraints. Which is why I'm trying to figure out things like internet and solar air-conditioning and water heating now.

I'm not too sure about the "stuff" yet. All the buildings except one are on piers. The one that isn't does have a washer and dryer on the ground floor. The only other things I can think of that might be damaged on the ground level are a large diesel generator and some water pumps and an old 15 passenger van. I'm not sure how much surge there was onsite, so I don't know if any of those things were damaged at all. I'll ask my friend who is onsite next time we talk.

I got a laser power meter today, and measured the megapointer. With fresh batteries, 198mW

Even with a couple of hours running it's still ofer 150mW. Not at all bad for an essentially free laser.

pca

Fortunately, I've met you, and know you to be a peace-loving person.

But you know what they say: "Power corrupts, absolute power is kind of neat."

Thanks.

I stripped down a few more dvd drives. Hint: NEC and Panasonic ones are good, Hitachi-LG ones not so much, they have weird diodes in, with way too many pins. Some sort of integrated laser/pattern reader I think.

All the diodes measured at least 250mW @ 3.3V, one of them was over 300mW! I have over a watt worth of laser diodes on the bench at the moment, and I still have 5 drives to ruin Now to figure out the best, or al least prettiest, way to combine all the beams. I'm thinking some sort of sub-miniature death star sort of arrangement, which would look pretty cool in a darkened room with some smoke in...

pca