Category: Uncategorized

Last year one of the guys on the BLF discussion board bought some stuff called Quantum Tunnelling Composite that he wanted to play around with. He had to buy a bunch of it and I had never even heard of it before and he didn’t have much luck with it. It is some kind of rubber that conducts electricity when compressed, but it doesn’t conduct when it isn’t compressed. In between it can give you varying results. So his idea (which he had seen somewhere else) was to put it in a flashlight and then adjust pressure on the battery and QTC to get variable output by tightening or loosening the head of the flashlight. Because he had a lot of the stuff he ended up giving some of it away to others who wanted to play around with it too and they came up with ways of using it. It works best with a simple on/off flashlight. You turn it to On and then adjust the pressure. Those people had some success and made videos of it in action. Anyway, now the guy is ordering some more and offered to mail it to people at cost, so I asked for a few pieces. I like it just for the cool name, which is explained on Wikipedia as having to do with electrons tunneling through the rubber stuff to get to the metal pieces that are in there. As it is compressed, the metal pieces get closer together and apparently there are some quantum effects going on.

Whatever. If I can make it work in a flashlight that will be cool. I have a kind of half-broken flashlight that uses AA batteries in a really tight fit and it might be perfect for that.

Here’s a post where a guy videotapes a highly modified Mini Maglite that he has fitted with QTC.

When I started fostering the puppy, I realized that I should have kept a daily diary of things he has damaged. Pretty much every day he has damaged something. It could be a cassette tape, a couple of books, pillows, or some parts from a broken scanner. Yesterday he damaged my cornea.

In the morning after the alarm had gone off he came over to see me and pawed at me. He wound up pawing at my face and poked his paw in my eye. It was a pretty good poke, as hard as I’ve been poked in my eye in a long time, maybe ever. I rinsed out my eye, but it kept hurting even after I had gotten to work. I could see out of it just fine, but it was obviously very irritated. I looked up eye injuries and found out that the biggest danger is getting an eye infection and that you should get medical attention. I looked up eye doctors on my insurance company’s website and found an ophthalmologist group nearby. I also called my regular eye doctor who is really an optometrist and not an eye doctor whose office recommended a different place further from the house. But then I noticed that one of the doctors at that place was also assigned to the nearby place, so I called the nearby place and they were able to set up an appointment that afternoon.

They put some fluorescent yellow dye in my eye so they could see any scratches and said that my cornea was definitely scratched. They also put some other kind of drop in there that at least made my eye feel better. Then the eye doctor came in and asked how it got scratched. I said the puppy had poked me in the eye. She said she could see four little lines on my cornea (she may have been kidding). Anyway, she said she could either put a patch over my eye or a clear contact lens, so obviously it would be better to have a contact lens. I asked how long it would take for it to get better and she said it would be fine tomorrow. She also gave me some antibiotic drops. I was surprised it would be better tomorrow, so I asked if I should have even come in and she said yes. She also wanted to see me again to follow up. I feel like I got my money’s worth with the first visit and getting treatment, but the follow up seems pretty pointless. Anyway, it did start feeling better today and I think by tomorrow morning it should be all better.

The other day a friend of mine asked if I had ever heard of a AAAA battery. During the enormous amount of reading about flashlights I have done, I remember someone saying that a 9V battery is really 6 1.5V AAAA batteries bundled into a box. So I told him that not only had I heard of them, I knew where you could get some and explained about 9V batteries. So he wanted to take one apart to see if that was true (because nobody ever believes me when I tell them stuff). Instead I figured it would be on the internet somewhere, and sure enough, all I needed to do was go to rippingthingsapart.com to find the pictures I wanted. Pretty neat:

http://www.rippingthingsapart.com/2007/01/whats_inside_a_.html

A while back I signed up to be come an affiliate with DealExtreme. I had some success with iPod stuff on Amazon and Google AdSense (receiving over $1,000 from each) and was hoping to do something with flashlights. Similar to Amazon’s program, I can use special links to products sold at DealExtreme. Then I earn a point (to the hundredth of a point) for each $10 spent by people using my links. If I collect 100 points, I get $10. So basically people have to spend $1,000 and I get $10, or a 1% commission. Amazon pays at least 4%, but the markup on DX stuff has to be less than at Amazon because everything is so cheap and they have free shipping on every item.

I didn’t earn very many points for a while, but I think a couple of the guys at Budget Light Forums started using my links because I would get bursts where I’d sell a whole lot of stuff. Unlike with Amazon, I don’t know what they are buying, just the price of the items (or orders, I’m not sure).

Anyway, I got to 100 points, but DX makes you wait 60 days after the sale to activate the points in case the person cancels the order or returns the item for a refund. Finally, I got to the 60 days and asked for payment. After a few days they sent me $10 via PayPal. Cool! Of course, it took like nine months to get $10, so it’s kind of crazy, but most of that came pretty quickly with the big buyers at the end. Then it sort of slacked off, but lately picked up again and I had earned another 100 points (still waiting on those points to activate).

Here’s the neat thing: after the second 100 points, I started earning points faster. Now I get 1.5 points for every $10 spent. That’s a really big increase. Here’s the cruel irony of that: back on Feb. 21, before I had been promoted to the new level, someone spent $9.11, so I earned 0.91 points. Every little bit counts. Either that order or the next one put me over the top, because after that I started earning 1.5%. But on March 1, I guess the person must have canceled the order, because an order for -$9.11 showed up. The kicker is that now I am in the 1.5% bracket, so they subtracted 1.37 points. My net was a loss of 0.46 points!

My plan is to raffle the next $10 bonus at BLF, though I’m not sure it will be 100% legal since I would really just be sending someone $10 by PayPal. I guess it’s okay since I’m not getting anything in return. Since most flashlights are more than $10, I might wait until I get to $20, but that could easily take another six months.

On one of the flashlight discussion boards I visit, a guy said he was going to buy some particular flashlight and gift it to a friend of his. Somebody corrected him and said that he should just say he was going to “give” it to his friend. Well, this is a global discussion and not everyone even writes English that well in the first place, so I didn’t see much reason to post a correction, but whatever. It started a discussion about proper English and how people are abusing the language, often by turning nouns into verbs like in this example (though “give” doesn’t always imply a “gift”). Then somebody else, referencing the forum’s ability to post a multiple choice poll, said:

Maybe we should open a new poll: Is it okay to verb nouns?