WorldWide Drilling Resource®

West Virginia Water Well Driller’s Association 2020 Spring Conference & Trade Show April 7-8, 2020 Schedule Tuesday 8:00 am - 2:00 pm Classes 12:00 pm Lunch 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Trade Show Preview Wednesday 8:00 am - 5:00 pm Classes 8:00 am - 12:00 pm Trade Show 12:00 pm Lunch 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm Trade Show Flatwoods Days Inn & Suites Sutton, WV Reserve your stay! (866) 700-7284 Code: WV WWDA For more information call: (804) 387-8395 or e-mail: wva.wwda@gmail.com Thi s event has been Rescheduled to June 23-2 4. s e h d e e 23 2 Please check with the association. h o . 8 APRIL 2020 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® Lights On ~ Nobody’s Home by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC During the recent widespread power outages in England, with some of those affected illustrating the quintes- sential British humor, joked: “Why don’t they try turning it off and then back on again?” Sadly, given the current corporate mentality of trying to computerize or otherwise automate almost everything whether it makes sense to or not, turn- ing the system off and then back on again would probably be the best solu- tion. It would most likely be the solution chosen by the system operators as a result of not fully understanding the dynamics of the system they are tasked with operating. Resetting is tantamount to releasing a habitual criminal back into society to continually “re-offend”, and doesn’t fix anything. This turning off and then turning back on again is what is called a “power on” RESET. So what is a “RESET”? All microprocessors (the silicon “brains” operating all computer systems) have what is called a “reset vector”. It means the place chosen to start the program execution. This is critically important. If pro- gram execution happens at the wrong place, it will produce the wrong results every time, and those results could be catastrophic. To address this issue, all microprocessor manufacturers have spent considerable time and money making sure the program execution starts at the reset vector location. This opera- tion is called “fetching the reset vector”. Most of the time this fetching the reset vector is accomplished by simply turning on power to the computer. The microprocessor automatically goes to the proper location on power up and the program instructions start executing from there. In addition, immediately after the reset vector operation, almost always there are what are called initial- ization routines. Initialization involves writing the cor- rect values to the appropriate memory registers to ensure proper operation Storkson cont’d on page 20.