Occam's Razor Troubleshooting

In My Humble Opinion
1

My “Smart TV”/Monitor 2 started acting up on me the other night. No audio on TV mode, but ok audio as a monitor. Also as a TV it kept repeating the same commercial during ONE commercial break. Which if left unattended would result in infinite repeats of the same commercial and NEVER returning to the program I wanted to watch. So recalling all my Electronics Technical training and experiences I applied what I call “Occam’s Razor Troubleshooting”. There are at this point 3 subs of ORT.

ORT 1. It works better if you plug it in.

.ORT B. It works better if you turn it on.

ORT III. Unplug it, count to 5, apply ORT 1 and then ORT B.

ORT III took care of this incident. I’m hoping for 2 more subs for ORT because I want to work my way up to ORT 0101 because I like 5 in base 2.

2

Hit it with a hammer?

3

ORT ???: If all else fails, read the manual. (shudders)

4

I thought ORT was an airport.

5

You mean “Percussive Maintenance”?

6

Hmmm… ORT 4th. Read the manual. Could be.

7

Naw. The hammer always comes before the manual.

8

The manual is usually the last resort.

9

Right. After the hammer, you don’t need the manual anyhow, one way or another…

10

I miss when the manual could be used as the hammer.

11

The ol’ “high-impedance air gap.”

12
13

Yes, all you get nowadays is a flimsy sheet of paper, translated inaccurately from a foreign language.

The real manual, if it exists, is only online. And you can’t bash something with a .pdf

14

You lack imagination - if the PDF is printed and attached to a sledgehammer - you can bash all you want.

15

Ah. Philosophy with a hammer, to quote Nietzsche….

16

No, first comes the fist, then comes the hammer. Worked perfectly well for olden CRT TVs and monitors.

17

We had 180 KW LORAN transmitters with some overload relays. Sure, we could have taken the relays out, taken some emery paper strips to the contacts, and reinstalled the relays but it was faster to just hit the transmitter in the correct spot. Later when I was an instructor in LORAN A school, we showed that to the students.