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[dochlywd]

Gents,

I'd just like to recap Craig's set up day from hell at my house yesterday. He wakes up and starts out at 6am. Traffic in Chi-Town even worse than usual so what should take him 8 minutes to get to the highway, takes him well over an hour. Now, he's got my place to do, my father-in-law's the next morning, and then heading directly out to Memphis that afternoon to continue his tour so his plan was to be done by 5pm at my place which would allow him to get a good night's sleep for the next leg of his trip. So the traffic already has him running behind but hey, he's Craig Frickin' Rounds and can easily make up that time by working my remotes like a hacker works a keyboard! He's installing a Radiane3D, has to do the V-stretch mod, update all firmwares on the OPPO and Lumagen, install Moome board which also means he has to redo grayscale etc. for all three memory blocks.....I think you get the idea. He's cruising along until I get there at around 2pm. I walk in the door and he comes up from the basement to greet me with, "This is not good. I don't know eactly what going on but it's not good." He shows me a pluge pattern that after 30 seconds, the red and green start dropping out and it's ends up blue!!! Damn!!! In trouble shooting, we pull out an HD Fury with breakout cable and hook into the BNCs to bypass the Moome. Everything works fine! Crap it must be a bad Moome or a bad Radiance. After taking all but a fraction of a second, Craig knows it's not the Radiance because this is not a digital issue. It has to be analog. So the only way we have to test the Moome is to take a twenty minute drive to my Father-in-laws house and drop it in his G70. The result, Moome good..............G90 bad! Crap!!! We now know that it's probably the BA board however, Craig doesn't have a scope with him and it's now 4:30pm with a TON of work left to be done. At this point, I've already conceded to the fact that this is not getting done this time around. Craig's exhausted. He's had a HORRIBLE day to this point............but there's still a little life in him and he's not willing to give up just yet......................

On the way back to my house, he had an idea. Don't ask me what the hell it was because my dumb-ass just nodded and said, "Umhmm. Umhmm" as if I knew what he was talking about. Anyway, when we got back to my house, he picks up his Bat-Phone to Mike Parker and within what seemed like seconds, I hear the tone in Craig's voice change from being kicked in the nuts to actually having a little excitement in it!!!!!! Mike told Craig to give him 5 minutes and call him back. During that 300 seconds, we made a make shift soldering station for Craig consisting of his standard soldering iron, a bar table, and a lamp. He calls Mike Parker and then the majic starts to happen!!!! Craig has the phone held to his ear with one shoulder, tweasers in his left hand, and the iron in his right. Mike Parker is calling out numbers and instructions to Craig like some kind of scene from a movie where they are trying to disarm a bomb. I don't really want to..... but I just had to go over and watch Craig for a second or two. He was taking the soldering iron and popping off pieces of electronics that were the size of a small paint chip!!!!!!! It was at this point that I said to myself, "There ain't no f-ing way this is going to work! How the hell does he even know what he just did??"

Literally, and I mean LITERALLY 10 minutes later, the Craig had removed the proper PAINT CHIP sized resistors from several areas, re-installed them in a different area, jumpered this to that to bypass the thingamajigger and PRESTO!!!!! We now had a perfectly stable and fully functional G90!!!

AMAZING!!!!!! SIMPLY AMAZING that these two just re-engineered this board in a matter of 15 minutes!!!!!!!

Craig simply said,"Thanks" to Mike. Mr. Parker responded with, "No problem anytime". They hung up the phone and Craig went immediately back to work without expressing any kind of "victory dance" or "HELL YEAH!". I was like, "Are you kidding me????!!!!???". Craig kind of giggled and said that he remembered the schematics from a while back when Mike and him were working on the BA mods so he knew it would work but needed Mike to confirm and guide him through it since Craig didn't have the schematics with him. Of course, Mike Parker had to add his special little touch. I'm not sure what it was but Mike's version gave the BA board more bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!

End result is that I now have an UNBELIEVABLE 3D set up because Craig ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT STOP, NO MATTER HOW BEAT UP HE IS UNTIL IT IS PERFECT!!!!!! Even if he has to get the "Mad-Scientist" Mr. Parker on the phone to reach that finish line. And the fact the someone as busy as Mike Parker drops EVERYTHING he's doing at the moment to help a colleague in a moment of need, makes a HUGE statement to the kind of people that continue to relentlessly give theirselves to this great hobby of ours!!!!!!!!!!!

What I witnessed yesterday was AMAZING PEOPLE WITH UNMATCHABLE SKILLS working together to make a little punk like me from St. Louis a VERY HAPPY CAMPER!!!!!

The world is good!!!! Thanks so much to both of you!!!

Doc

[AnalogRocks]

Doc, tell me you recorded that scene with a video camera! That sounds awesome!

[AnalogRocks]

Doc, tell me you recorded that scene with a video camera! That sounds awesome!

[draganm]

I consider myself fairly competent, at least with the MArquee, but to be soldering SMD devices while talking on the phone is pretty dam impressive.
Always had good exeprience dealing with Craig, wouldn't hesitate to recomend him to anyone I know.

[macgyver655]

Way to go Mike and Craig..............

Field service at its best.....

[dvh99]

wow, just wow, that is an amazing story and this really made my day.
too bad you do not have a marquee however......... sorry couldn`t resist.

[mc86]

The joy of watching expert craftsmen, tradesmen, technicians, etc. simply DOING...never gets old.

Matt

[overclkr]

SWEET DOC AWESOME!

[Nashou66]

Yep, that sound like the Craig Rounds I know. Hard worker for sure.

keep it up Craig!!! We all Need you more than you know .


PS: So I take it he didn't compare your PR650 to his huh

Athanasios

[dochlywd]

Athy!!!

There was no way in hell that I was going to bring that up!!!!!!!! Believe me, I had it all set out but I think Craig might have actually looked me square in the eyes and told me me to go blankity blank blank!!!! He's got the patience of a saint but that just might have pushed him over the edge. He did record his readings so maybe he tell me what test pattern to put up and I'll take a reading to compare.

[CIR Engineering]

Dang Doc, you make me feel like some kind of super hero... thanks man for the kind words and exciting James Bond style recap

But in all seriousness Mike Parker had a huge role to play in this. Without him I most likely would not have been able to get done what I did within the small time window that I had. I knew that with the G90 mods, Mike had just been working the section of the BA board that was in question on yours. On the mods, Mike had basically removed this section.

I had just talked to Mike Parker the day before on the phone about something similar so I figured there was a really really really good chance Mike would already have a decent idea of what I could do to get your board operational for our purposes... and it turned out that in 10 minutes he had everything figured out including impedance matching and termination. We also found a place to cannibalize parts from your BA that were (cough) no longer needed and I used them to make the changes Those "paint chip sized" parts were six 150 ohm resistors that I used for termination in another section...

craigr

[CIR Engineering]