At 12:10 PM 12/15/2003, llile@SALTONUSA.COM wrote: >It's wintertime (at least in the Northern Hemishpere) folks, the humidity >indoors goes as low as the Mojave Desert unless you have a humidifier, and >correspondingly static buildup goes up. Combine that with sweaters, >carpet, and other nasty static sources, and you can zap a PIC quick. The >same conditions in the summer where indoor humidity rarely drops below 60% >produce little or no static. One of the more "interesting" things we got told during an ESD awareness seminar many years back was how ESD took the entire province of Alberta off the telecom network for a day or so: a tech was installing new firmware in the switches that route long distance phone calls in and out of the province. First he powered down the main group of switches - pulled the cards, set them on top of his nice clean winter parka - swapped the eproms . . and so on. After bringing up the main group, he did the same to the backup system. Apparently, he neglected to make sure that the main system was actually operating before killing (literally) the backup. Northern Telecom later determined that the electric field present in the fabric of the parka killed several of the chips on each card. I don't remember just how long it took to get new cards in - less than a day, I recall. But it was a pretty big deal. dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 19 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2003) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body