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Clothes Washer Broke Part II: Washing Machines are Gross

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I took apart the washing machine last Wednesday, and I've got to say, it's a lot nastier than I thought it would be. When I fixed the dryer, all I found inside was a bunch of lint. The washer was filled with the nastiest stuff I've ever seen in something that's supposed to clean things. I guess the dirt has to go somewhere. The washer had a lot of water in the drum and in the tub. I was going to buy a hand pump, cause I didn't want to spend the money on an electing one, when I found this thing. It's a drill pump. You attach it to and power it with a drill. I wasn't sure how I was going to get the water out of the tub. I unscrewed one of the "fins" from the side of the drum and found a decently sized hole under it through which I could stick the tube. I still couldn't get all the water out of the big black tube, so I just opened it up and let the water spill out. I have a tray under my washer so it caught all the water. It
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Clothes Washer Broke Part I: Time to Bust Out the Drill.

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So my clothes washer broke last night. Took my clothes out and they were soaking. The damn thing never spun up. I fixed my dryer a month or so ago (I'll post something about that later), but this time I'd resigned myself to calling someone to fix it. I had no clue why it wasn't spinning up and washers are super complicated. Plus they're filled with water, and I don't futz with plumbing. I learned that the  hard way. I was taking my clothes out when I noticed the drum was still filled with water. It's a front loader so it wasn't obvious at first. So I had this thought, what if the drain pump is broken. So I broke out the drill and popped the cover off. I've never seen the inside of a washer before. It's kind of cool. The bottom of the drum is in a "tub" that's supported by a "shock" system for when it violently shakes back and forth during spin mode. The drain pump is in the bottom right, attached to a big tube conn
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0xtalk Speaking in Hexadecimal Source: Wikipedia Hexadecimal is such a useful representation. If for no other reason, Hex is awesome because every hex- digit (I can't stand the word nibble) expands into an integer number of bits, allowing it to faithfully represent binary based design decision. This is great when writing code or design docs, but its usefulness ends there. Unfortunately, there is no universally agreed upon way of speaking hex aloud and saying the digits one by one gets obnoxious for more than 4 hex-digits. Even if most of the digits are zeros, attempting to say 0xFF000000 as, "F F and 6 six zeros," could quickly turn into a, " who's on first? " situation. The alternative is to speak the numbers as decimal, but that often sacrifices the reason why a number was chosen in the first place. The number 0xF000 clearly has its upper 4 bits set, that's completely lost when stating the number as 61,440. It doesn't have to be this way.
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