This is one of my rare (I think) rants.

In case you didn’t know, New England Patriot football star Arron Hernandez was recently arrested for murdering an acquaintance.

On sports radio and in other media outlets around the Boston area, there is steady stream of analysis about what happened and could it have been prevented, or at least did the Patriots knowingly, or should they have known that they hired a thug in order to better their football team.

In my mind, this is an open and shut case – anyone in a major business doing any hiring, besides doing interviews, will be required to do background checks, before the hiring takes place. This should include reference checks with credible individuals familiar with the candidate. I’m sure that in the top ranks of pro and college football, the Patriots, with a little do-diligence could have determined that Arron was not a good person. This should have been enough to steer them away from this thug. In fact, other teams did determine this, and passed on him. That the Patriots have a track record of bringing in problem players such as Corey Dillon, Randy Moss, Albert Haynesworth, should only go to show that their hiring practices are very suspect.

Winning is important in the NFL, so important that hiring decisions are routinely made that would never happen in a “normal” business. Think about it, if you were a Patriot employee, would you want to be around such characters as Corey Dillon, Randy Moss, Albert Haynesworth and Arron Hernandez on a daily basis. The Patriots are not the only ones at fault here, many, if not most teams have hired thugs over the years. One example, being recent Superbowl MVP, Ray Lewis. I personally think the NFL should smarten up and try to hire only people with outstanding character. Sure, they might miss out on some talent, and make some mistakes along the way, but if everyone is doing their best to weed out the bad apples, then it shouldn’t be a big issue. Anyway, if you were running a unbelievably successful business, would you hire a thug, if he potentially might earn you a few more dollars. Or would you do the right thing for the community and your employees, who have to work with this person on a daily basis and stay away?

I’m all for giving people the chances that they merit, but there is no excuse for a top notch organization knowingly and repeatedly hiring bad apples and then acting surprised when something goes wrong.

Background: I purchased a home theater system back in the 90s. The first subwoofer was a Definative Technology unit. It lasted about 18 months before failing. It was repaired under factory warentee. 18 months later, it failed again. It was just out of warentee, but Definative Technology was nice enough to repair it again. Sure enough, 18 months later it failed again. I made a quick attempt to repair, but when I didn’t see any obvious failure, gave up on it, and gave it away.

It was replaced was a slightly larger Outlaw Audio subwoofer, a few years back. A couple of weeks ago, the amp on this replacement failed with a blown fuse. Initially, I replaced the fuse, power came on momentarily, but the fuse soon blew, again. I decided to see what the Amp looked like, to see if there was any obvious component replacement that would fix it. Disassembly was easy, and I found the Amp was made up of three boards. There were no obvious component failures on any of the boards.

Since it was blowing fuses, I guessed that the problem was on the first board, which was a switch mode power supply, with Indigo and Bash logos. All components were through hole, with no custom parts, so I figured it would be repairable. Testing components with a diode tester and ohm meter revealed only possible issues with one of the two power FETs. I decided to order some replacements.

After the new FETs arrived, I replaced the suspect one and put everything back together. To my dismay, but not surprise, the fuse blew again. Clearly some other problem caused the FET to blow. I now devised a primitive ESR tester, and checked the caps, but they all tested as good. Continuing my investigation, I took a control daughterboard off the main board and tested each component, some by pulling, so I could test out of circuit. In particular there is a part type that I never heard of, before. This is a DIAC. I pulled it, found the specs, and devised a test fixture and it also looked good. Finally the lone transistor on the daughter card broke off from it’s leads. This was very strange as the daughter card did not experience any especially rough handling. Could it have been already broken from the stress of operation in the subwoofer environment, and my light handling just finished the job?

Since I could find no other problems, I figured I’d replace it and the two power FETs and see what happened. After replacement and reassembly, so far the subwoofer is performing like new, so I think that the problem was vibration induced failure of the MPSa92 transistor on the power supply daughter card.

Since my experience with subwoofer amps is that they have very poor reliability, I am very happy to have found a way to fix this one, at least this one time.

Now for something completely different. Listen to a six minute radio interview of my Great Grandfather Charles Scharine, and his three sons, Herman, Walter and my Grandfather Albert Scharine. They operated Dairy Farms in southeastern Wisconsin through a good part of the 20th century. My mother thinks that this was recorded in the 1940s.

Great Grandfather Scharine’s Interview

Too close to home. Yesterdays event occurred in a place I know fairly well and at an event that is a unique part of the culture around here.

I hope that the survivors physically heal quickly and find a way to emotionally come to terms with their horrible experience, sooner, rather than later.

Here is a short video of the demo that I mentioned that I had working in an earlier post.

SCELBI blinking lights

Every once in a while I do some general searches to see if any unusual links connect to willegal.net This time, I came up with this…

According to this site (http://webstats-ranks.com/www/willegal.net) willegal.net is worth almost $15,000. Pretty incredible.

According to the same site, ranking in traffic is 779,337. With an estimated 644,275,754 sites in 2012, it seems my site ranks in the top .12% of all web sites.