Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. That's the way Charles Dickens begins his “A Christmas Carol,” one of the most well-known pieces of literature in the modern world. A short story that can be read aloud in a few hours has to start memorably, and this one certainly […]

I had an old-timer tell me that you can never connect two transformers together because they will “fight one another.” If you are anything like me (and heaven help you if you are), a cartoon in your head starts playing whenever someone says something like that. In this case, I imagine two transformers with boxing […]

When I started in the field, I was a 17-year-old helper with one year of tech school under my belt. In other words, I knew nothing. As I've mentioned before, a few experienced techs took me under their wings at different stages, but the most influential was a guy named Dave Barefoot. For whatever reason, […]