After dicking around for many months trying to find a replacement belt
for my trusty Philips cassette deck, by searching the Web, I did what I
should have done first: went to my local electronics store, after having
seen on a previous visit that they had an assortment of drive belts.

Well, it turns out not only did they have *a* belt which would fit, they
had the *exact replacement*! And not only that, but they had the
foresight to have saved a really old copy of the cross-reference book,
which listed my unit (long out of production: I bought it in new in 1980).

So I'd like to sing the praises of what few remaining local electronics
stores there are. Amazingly, around here (the San Francisco Bay Area),
there are just a handful left, even in the high-tech South Bay (I'm not
counting big places like Jameco here, but talking about old-school
stores where you can walk in off the street and buy a few resistors or
whatever).

And I'd like to give a shameless plug to this particular store, Al
Lasher's Electronics in Berkeley on University Ave. They've been there
forever; they have ton of stuff; they know what the hell they're talking
about, and are not above helping the clueless customer who needs a
replacement thingamajig for their old radio, computer setup, or
whatever, find what they need; I hope they're there for a long time to come.


--
Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo. The German Wehrmacht won World War
II. The United States won in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The Zealots won against the Romans, and Ehud Olmert won the Second
Lebanon War.

- Uri Avnery, Israeli peace activist
(http://counterpunch.org/avnery09022006.html)