In December, I designed what I called a "bomb proof" alarm system. I tested it at home, and it worked perfectly. Nothing could go wrong. But when I installed it, it failed, and that failure led to a spectacular breach of security. I checked what was going on, and found that a very simple timer was counting up, instead of counting down. OBSERVATION: Electronics is full of things like this: something that theoretically should never happen, but does. Today I redesigned and rebuilt the alarm. Again it worked perfectly. Then I applied some Bostik Cable glue. The timer began to count down too fast -- and if I had dabbed some glue in another place, it would have counted up. I put a match to the alarm, and burned off the Bostik. Then the alarm worked as designed. My problem, it seems, was glue. I wrote to Bostik: their Cable glue should carry a warning. It conducts.
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