Review: Vevor

I bought the Vevor Manual Winch Stacker Material Lift 72" Max Height ... left the title as only "Vevor" so that more people might find this review.  I figure most of Vevor parts will fall into this catagory of issues.

Vevor doesn't allow reviews on their web site, so I figure people who buy it need to publish the results.

I bought the unit so that I could easily remove/replace the 70 pound "over range" microwave ... at 70, the body is getting a little weaker, so I figure this would help.  Also, the window AC/Heater in the garage is broke, so I need to take it in for service, and again, a little heavy for me.

First time I ordered, for some reason Fed Ex returned it to the shipper ... no explanation ... but Vevor refunded my money within 1 day.  So I re-ordered and it got to me in about a week.

Note ... 'googled' a bit to find "Vevor coupon" and found lots of places with $10 off coupon codes.

The parts inside the box are heavy, and are not secured ... they just bounced around while in transit.  While each part was wrapped in paper-thin foam and very little paint scratching occurred, it destroyed the parts container inside so all the parts were floating around inside the shipping box ... which had holes in it from the heavy parts hitting the sides, so many many many of the nuts and bolts were lost in transit ... I had to dip into my personal inventory to put it together.  Worst of all was the lack of a manual or parts list ... had to use the pictures to figure out how to put it together (even though the web site says it has a "user guide".

Where's my manual !! ??

And NO, the manual is not on their web site.

I think there was a stamped flat wrench in the box "at one time" to put the wheels on, but it was missing ... and you really really need something like that.  Anyway, once I put the wheels on, most pieces go together using the pictures as a guide.  The two other things to note are:

1) the hand crank mechanism "floats" on the rail ... there is no way to lock it in place ... so I'll probably hammer in a wedge to lock it down.  It is possible there is some sort of locking mechanism that got lost, but no way to tell without a manual of some sort).

2) my case came with an extra "A frame" piece that does not show up in any pictures ... just an extra piece of metal to float about and do more damage.  It's about 18" x 24" and heavy, so it's not like I can overlook where it goes from the pictures.

The plywood base and back-drop are pretty flimsy but easy enough to replace ... if I like it, I might go to my sheet metal shop and get some replacements made with "diamond plate".

I've written them on the parts and manual ... we'll see how they respond.

How Stupid Are California's Recall rules ??

 So Gavin Newsome need to get over 50% of the vote, or he is out.  Well, do the math !!

Let's say 10 million people vote, and Gavin only gets 4.9 million of the votes to stay, and 5.1 million vote for him to be kicked out.  Well,  the rules say that the person that got the most of those 5.1 million votes is the winner.

There are 46 people running, so if 45 of them each got 110,000 votes, that leaves Candidate 46 with 150,000 votes ... and WINS ... so 1.5% of the population gets to decide who is Governor ... how crazy is that ??

Getting a Third Covid Shot ...

I was fully vaccinated seven months ago. I walked into a pharmacy this week and got another Pfizer shot. I didn’t tell the pharmacist it was my third; she didn’t ask ... but I did lie in that I said it was my second, so now I have TWO vaccine cards !!  Since the U.S. has no central database of immunization records, the store had no way to know I’d been vaccinated at the local health department.  I did not provide any ID or Medicare numbers (just checked the boxes that said "no insurance"), so I doubt I'm tracible. 

Justification ... Israel’s Health Ministry recently announced that after five months a double dose of the Pfizer vaccine remains 91% effective at preventing severe disease but only 39% effective against infection. Israelis over 60 who received their last shot at least five months ago are eligible for a third dose. Germany said it will offer third shots to the elderly and sick starting next month, and White House officials told reporters they will soon advise Americans who are over 65 or immunocompromised to get them. I’m 69, so why shouldn’t I get one too?

CNN Health reports that a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can “strongly” boost protection against the Delta variant – beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday suggests.

The data posted online suggest that levels of antibodies that can target the Delta variant grow fivefold in people 18 to 55 who get a third dose of the vaccine.  Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels that should protect against Delta grow 11-fold more than following a second dose.

The second dose cause a slight fever, 1 day of body aches, and a really sore arm ... but that's it.  The third dose has caused a mild fever, a little bit of tiredness, and a sore upper arm at the injection site ... small price to pay.

Recently, Bloomberg published this chart about how the immune system reacts to the third shot:

So I took the plot and inserted (in RED) 8 months ... so got mine at the 6th's month.  You can see here (in RED) how I think the antibodies did.

Death of Dick Farrel, a longtime conservative radio host from West Palm Beach, Florida ... planetary IQ just shot up.

Let’s be clear here … I’ve had my dual shots of the vaccine, and the “hard NO” vaccine people have made peace with themselves.  Since break-thru Covid cases are very rare (recent UK numbers put the rates down in the 0.1% range) and the death rates even lower, if you’ve had the vaccine, then the morbidity of Covid is approaching that of the flu.  

When Covid first hit, hospitals were swamped and morgues were over-whelmed, we were all scared thinking “I didn’t sign up for this”.  Then, science came thru and gave us the vaccine.

Now, if a MASS Covid event occurs and hospitals and morgues are again swamped, it’s the “hard NO” group and THEY DID SIGN UP FOR THIS. 

So, why should I care?  I don't.  This is Darwin at it’s finest … the dumb will die (like Farrel who try to convince others to NOT take it) and the smart will live.  The immune compromised will hold onto their social distance behavior and wear face masks because they accept the risk Covid possess, and have come to accept the behavior that keeps them alive.  "It’s not a pandemic of ignorance," quipped the Santa Monica Daily Press in an editorial about Los Angeles County's spike in cases and hospitalizations. "This is a surge of straight stupidity."

The smart will live and the dumb will die … seems about right.  I just wish the hospitals would STOP giving the lung transplants to the un-vaccinated who recover ... they don't deserve them.

EMR Telemetry ... the end

Prologue:

Most of the people involved have passed on, and I’m one of the few remaining that was on the inside to witness the decisions.  While this is my opinion, I will try to be as honest as possible.

Introduction:

During my time at EMR, I met many talented and smart people, who shaped my time there to be something I recall with fond memories.  People like Joe Keller, Jud Strock, Art Kelly, Gary Schumacher, Marvin Edgeworth, Bud Thurmond … the list could go on, but these guys helped me extensively and their memory will live with me always.

I landed my dream job at EMR Telemetry (aka; Fairchild-Weston) in 1983 as a Senior Applications Engineer.  The company, located in Sarasota Florida, employed about 1200 people.  In a town as small as Sarasota was back then, the company was a major force there.  

This article will highlight three times where decisions were made which helped destroy the company, with a fourth one at the end for the “final nail”.  Sure, corporate decisions didn’t help, but the lack of success that these decisions caused forced the stakeholders to make decisions which eventually closed the company.

The Company:

At the company were four Strategic Business Units … mine was telemetry (known as EMR Telemetry from its founding name), and the second borrowed ideas and product from EMR and it was called Signal Processing … they did classified projects for the “three letter agencies”.  The third was the “black box” business for commercial airlines, and the fourth was Data Recorders (which then was mostly the old “reel to reel” magnetic analog units).

EMR had provided equipment to all of the space programs up thru the 1980s, and commanded over 80% of the market … so indeed, going to work for EMR was fantastic … we had money … we had prestige … and we commanded the market.

The EMR Product:

Telemetry systems, were for the most part, a huge bank of “front end” signal capturing equipment, connected to a large “main frame” computer with disk farms, and custom software (the software alone often ran to six figures).  As a result, most systems were in the one million dollar range (sure, today, a system that powerful is a Dell PC and a few plug in cards, but back then, we were in the stone ages).

My First Act:

I had established myself there as someone brash enough to “fight the good fight” and “think outside the box”.  I got that reputation, I think, because when I first joined, about 1 year in I was given the task of “Capture Manager” for a major pair of Request for Proposals (RFPs) from a major aerospace company.  The first thing I did was tell the President, Joe Keller, that he was wrong, and that the Request for Proposals (RFPs) should be ignored … the spec was asking for something we could not do.  In the end, we requested an audience with that company, made our pitch, and got awarded a major contract from them.  I was a hero.

Myopia at its best:

A friend from the Data Recorders unit came to me one day and said “we have this huge RFP that involves recording lots of videos … you think outside the box, so how would you architect a solution?” (back then, video was an analog signal about 5 MHz bandwidth).  So I spent a few hours and sketched out a diagram that showed a box converting the analog signal to bits, and using new high capacity disk drives to store the data.  I told him that using his current analog recorders would result in an expensive solution that was based on aging technology, and that my approach was based on new approaches that were started to be embraced by industry.  Note that neither of these products truly existed then, but today, video encoders, decoders, and digital storage are everywhere.  

Anyway, my friend floats this up the chain of command, and shortly thereafter, our CTO comes into my office to explain to me that I clearly don’t understand video signals.  If he had seen the wisdom in my approach, EMR would be “the name” in video encoding and digital recording.  Now, I could have fought for the idea, but it was not my SBU, was not my project, and not my product line … so I just shrugged and got back to my work.

A House Divided:

At one point in time, Signal Processing had been contracted to write “high end” software for their customer that did data visualization and data storage.  While at the same time, the EMR Telemetry side had their own software … so sure enough, the two products were being pushed simultaneously to the same customer sets.  So Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Customer Support, Training, everyone, was trying to figure out which product to invest time and resources into.

Finally, management called everyone together where the two different development teams got to pitch their product so that a winner could be chosen … so we would have one core product, one marketing vision, one product to train, and sales would know which product to support.

At the end, management decided to keep both … support both … invest in both.  The house was now divided.

Money Dried Up:

In the late 1980’s, PCs were coming of age, and some OEMs were trying to develop low cost telemetry systems to compete with EMR.  Their problem was that the customers had lots of money to buy “good” systems, developed by the professionals at EMR, so they didn’t get much traction.

However, in 1991, the Cold War came to an end, and Congress started using the term “the peace dividend” to justify cutting DoD budgets.  The result was that our customers, who had money before, now had little, and they were being forced to buy PC based systems instead of the huge “main frame” systems of before since they had little money, but a continuing mission.

To address this, I assembled a few engineers, borrowed some software, and took some old signal processing hardware, put it together, and showed management how EMR could be the solution for PC-based telemetry systems … allowing our customers to have “the EMR brand for 5% of the cost of a main frame system”.

I can still hear the words … “Tim, I can’t keep 1200 people employed selling $50K telemetry systems”.  At this point, I knew the end was near, and started looking for a place to move to.  And indeed, it came to pass that they could not keep 1200 people employed while offering million dollar systems either.

Final Act:

One of my last programs I led was a new data multiplexer, running what was, at the time, the incredibly high rate of 50 Mbps.  It was successful, and management decided that they wanted to take that product, modify it for the commercial world, and market it to a new customer set.  Well, in Product Management, we call that the “Launch Risk Matrix” … where basically, new product brought to new customers is the highest risk.  

At about this time, I decided to leave the company because after all the other stupid moves, and figuring this was just not going to work (IMHO), I needed to get away.  They offered me the position of lead on that team, but I knew it was the wrong product to the wrong market, so I politely declined.

Indeed, after I left and they demo’d the new product to the new customer for the first time, it caught fire.

Epilogue:

Today, the SBUs are gone, the buildings are gone, and the only ones left in Sarasota are retirees.