I’ve been on a roll fixing up and beautifying the front and back yards here at Casa del Garrett. Among other items, I bought four solar powered Tiki torches for the backyard. They’re pretty simple devices consisting of a solar power cell and two led lights that flicker alternately inside a plastic cup. The effect mimics a lighted torch well enough and I think they add a nice touch to the backyard. The other day one of them failed.
It was always the last one to come on at night and I wondered if the rechargeable batteries in it just needed replacing. So the first thing I did was put some alkalines in it as a test. Nada. I checked its internal wiring. The things were Very inexpensive to buy and inside it showed why. Just a postage stamp sized circuit board, a double-a battery compartment, a nice looking solar power cell and a smaller cell that looked as if it were a CDS light sensor for switching the torch on and off. The parts were simply hot glued into place and the wires connecting everything were a gauge somewhere between hair and paper width. I got out a magnifying glass and looked the connections over with some difficulty as it was hard to see how good they were under the hot glue globs. But nothing seemed obviously broken.
As I said, they were cheap. So I figured I’d go buy two more (they come in pairs) and then I’d have one spare in case one of the others failed. Having bought the last two boxes of these on the shelves at the Lowes in Cockeysville, I figured I’d need to try one of the other stores. So this evening after work I drove to the one in White Marsh so I could swing by Costco for some gasoline. But that Lowes was out of stock on those particular Tiki torches. So I began to wonder if each store only got a couple boxes of those at the start of the season and was I chasing an item that was sold out all over the area by now.
I came back home and considered ordering new ones online. But the ornery techno geek in me nagged at me to look inside the broken torch one more time. It’s a simple device dammit…I ought to be able to fix it… So I brought it in and took it to the art room drafting table and opened it up. I got out the multi-meter (you have one of those…right? Every home should have a multi-meter…) and fairly quickly determined several things.
First, the rechargeable batteries were in perfectly good shape, as I’d expected since replacing them with some stock alkalines didn’t make any difference. Second, the solar power cell in those things, cheap as they are, are Very Nice and were putting out more then enough voltage to keep the batteries charged. After the batteries, my suspicions fell on the other small cell that looked like a light sensor. Here was where I reached way back into my past for knowledge of how camera light meters work. It looked to my eye like your basic CDS cell…Cadmium-Sulfide…a photo-resistor. Unlike the older selenium cell meters, which generate a precise voltage based on the amount of light falling on them, CDS cells change in resistance. Their advantage was they worked better and more precisely in lower light conditions. What was extra nice about them back in the day was if you forgot and left the camera’s light meter on, putting the lens cap on or just putting the camera away in darkness somewhere would protect the battery because a CDS cell goes to maximum resistance when there is no light falling on it, so it’s basically turned the circuit off.
…which is pretty much what makes them useful as light sensors for turning off and on stuff when night falls. They can act like a simple on-off switch. The leads coming off the CDS cell in my Tiki torch were buried under a glob of hot glue so I traced the wires back to the circuit board and took an ohm reading there with a piece of black electricians tape across the cell blocking the light out. It should have read max ohms but it read like a short. So the cell was defective.
I clipped the wires leading to it and the torch lit up. I stripped the ends and touched them together and the torch turned off again. So now I can either put a micro-switch in place of the CDS cell or see if I can find another CDS cell to replace the failed one with. This thing is so cheaply built you just know the concept it represents is throw it in the landfill when it breaks or you get tired of it whichever comes first. Had I found a replacement I’d have probably just scavenged the solar cell and the LEDs and tossed the rest out. The solar cell is a nice one. But fixing it leaves me with a degree of geeky self-satisfaction. In a world of cheap mass-market throw it away goods I am not completely helpless.
[Edited a tad…]
[Update…] I see from their online catalog I can buy little CDS cells in packs of five for a little less then four dollars at Radio Shack. So tonight I’ll check the one in my neighborhood.
So it occurs to me while having to restart both the iPad and iPhone this morning to get them responsive again, that either Murphy’s Law applies to software systems too, ie: software increases in complexity to its level of incompetence, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to software, in a sense: with every upgrade, chaos always increases…
After consulting my iPhone’s weather radar app, I take a quick trip over to a nearby deli to grab some diet ice tea drinks. Figure I can get there and back again before the next wave of drizzle hits. On the way back inside the Institute building, a young woman with her iPhone ear buds plugged into her head, is chatting loudly with…some disembodied somebody. She is oblivious to everyone and everything around her, talking very loudly to the person at the other end of the digital network connection. Did I not know about cell phones I might think her a lost crazy person talking to the voices inside her head. In the lobby I walk quickly past her and to the stairwell down to my office, where I nearly collide with another co-worker whose eyes on fixed on the LCD display of his iPhone.
The trope is all our little computer devices are making us somehow less human, less able to interact with each other as humans beings. And it’s a false one. These devices don’t subtract from our human identity, they are a consequence of it. We made these things, and then took a sudden passionate fondness for them, because we are what we are. As a matter of fact, yes, millions of years of adaptive evolution made us into smart phone consumers. It created us to eventually build the cell phone and text messaging and computer information technologies and online social forums just as surely as it put the color in our eyes.
Robert Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, took note of our species long preoccupation with weapons. How long, he asked, would the first human have survived on the African plains, were they not born with a weapon in their hand? Nothing, he said, in our long history has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of the weapon. We are the species, he said, whose instinct is to kill with a weapon. But we are something else besides, something probably even older then the weapon in our hands, something that had to have played just as critical if not an even more critical roll in our kind’s success on planet Earth, and to this day I’m surprised that a writer of all people didn’t see it too: Language. We are the species that talks. We are a chattering breed. And nothing in the long difficult history of the human kind has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of human communication.
It is the nature of tools to change what they touch. So the plow changed the earth, but also the farmer. The mistake is thinking the plow made the farmer less human. It made him more human. It made him better at being the thing that millions of years of life on Earth created him to be. And we are the species that talks. We communicate with one another. By whatever available means at hand, by whatever way gets it across the best, we will communicate. It’s what we do. It’s why there are libraries and opera and art galleries and weather radar apps. So we refine our tools and so our tools refine us. That inconsiderate moron in the restaurant babbling loudly into his cell phone hasn’t been dehumanized by the digital revolution. Look at him. He is simply obeying a very old and very ancient and powerful urge to communicate it…whatever it is…to someone. Birds sing. Humans babble away. Smile kindly upon him, before you take that cell phone out of his hand and smack him over the head with it.
As with the SLK online owner’s manual we’ve shown you before, Mercedes-Benz has now launched the interactive manuals for the Mercedes-Benz C-Class (w204) compact executive car and the C-Class Estate station wagon (s204). -BenzInsider.com
Mercedes Benzwill equip their executive compact sedan, the Mercedes Benz C-Class 2012, with Nokia Terminal Mode technology. -Ninga Media
The ‘C’ comes in three flavors, only two of which are imported here to the States: the Sport and Luxury versions. So I note that Daimler is pushing the ‘C’ class Luxury now as its “Executive Compact Sedan”, and the first thought that crosses my mind is that little word “Executive” is good for an additional five or six grand on the sticker price.
But this is good. When the W204 first came out people were displeased at the reduced level of wood trim and other small refinements compared to the ‘E’. Initially there were no memory seats and other little things that raise the level of elegance and in their defense people said that the ‘C’ was never meant to be that anyway. But others like myself were thinking Daimler also didn’t want to take customers away from the ‘E’ which is their bread and butter “Executive” sedan. The smaller ‘C’ sold for less and if people could get ‘E’ class elegance in a less expensive car (and…seriously… we’re talking a Mercedes-Benz here…none of them are cheap!) they’d go get a ‘C’ instead.
But you would also want a ‘C’ if you’re like me, single, childless, and not needing a larger car. I’ve looked at the new ‘E’…it is just magnificent. I could afford one (barely). But it’s too much car for me. I just don’t need something that big. And the fuel economy hit is more then I can morally justify in a car that is 99 percent rolling down the road with just me in it. That gasoline is just being wasted and I am still, deep down inside, a waste not want not little Baptist boy. Okay…who drives a Mercedes-Benz. But still.
Small car = cheap basic transportation car is not such a simple calculation anymore. Rising gasoline costs and fleet fuel efficiency mandates require that car companies sell smaller, more fuel efficient cars. And German companies to their credit, are way more interested in being “green” then either American or Japanese car companies. So Daimler needs to aim for at least ‘E’ class elegance in the Mercedes ‘C’. There is no reason why a compact sedan cannot also be a sumptuous one, other then the stereotype of the compact car as inevitably being the basic transportation bare bones economy model. In an age of rising fuel costs, that has to change. The small car can be sumptuous too.
Now then…er…about that “Executive” thing…
Eddie Izzard…darn him. I watched Dressed To Kill and now I just can’t read anything with the word “Executive” in it nowadays without thinking of this bit…
“I’m much more in the executive transvestite area.”
Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite. Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite. Economy compact sedan…Executive compact sedan. Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite… I am really not in the market for trading in the car I have now…I am still thoroughly happy with Traveler…I think it will eventually become one of those quarter to half million mile Mercedes you see every now and then in the pages of enthusiast magazines. Really, that’s how I feel about it. My instinct is to hold on to a car until it simply can’t be driven anymore and that’s one reason why I was attracted to the Mercedes brand back when I was a little teenage geek. Right now I feel like I can just spend the money on servicing and pampering my car and it will last forever. And Daimler will give you a special over quarter million kilometer grill badge when your Mercedes odometer clicks over that much. How many other car companies Want you to be proud you held on to the car that long? But I go to my dealer for routine service and I still wander around the showroom floor while Traveler is back in the shop…and I just know I will have to work at keeping a straight face when the sales agents pitch this executive compact sedan stuff at me. Yes yes, I’m much more in the executive compact sedan area…
Atrios wonders about something I’ve been shaking my head at since chain store and restaurant shopping took over America…
I certainly don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the American consumer, but recession issues aside I’m puzzled by the apparent belief by developers and retail experts that when people travel to tourist locations what they really want to do, most of all, is visit the same shops that they can visit in any high end mall all over the country. Maybe they’re right. What do I know?
They’re right, but here’s what you know: if all you want from travel is what you already have at home, then all you’re doing is spending money, running out the clock on your life, and getting nothing at all out of it.
Back in 2002 in a post of travel notes I wrote, “You didn’t come all this way for another Big Mac.” Apparently a lot of people do however. They’re not just wasting their vacations, they’re wasting their lives. Several years ago some friends of mine took me on my first ever trip outside the country, to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and I will be forever grateful that they decided on staying in the old part of town and not the newer touristy one. Swear to god on the way into town from the airport I saw a Chili’s and my jaw dropped a little. What the hell does Mexico want with one of those??? But of course, it was the Yankee tourists who wanted it there. We ate at the Chili’s in Puerto Vallarta…it felt So Authentic!
Whatever…
Puerto Vallarta was Beautiful…
Just Beautiful…
Very Beautiful…
Er…yes…
Just imagine all the fun I could have had, shopping at all the same stores I can shop in at home, and eating out in all the same restaurants I can eat at in the Towson Town Mall.
There should be an international convention that bars chain restaurants and stores from crossing boarders. I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment banning them from crossing state lines too.
The Joy Of Ink On Paper…My Lousy Handwriting Notwithstanding…
This morning, after weeks of cleaning and re-cleaning, I think my pen finally forgave me.
Mom may have known she was raising a little geek when in 1959 she asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I told her I wanted a fountain pen. I was six, and I’d seen a teacher using one and was fascinated by it. I got my fountain pen, a Sheaffer sized for a child’s hand, and I’ve been writing with them ever since.
Fountain pens are archaic, fussy, finicky things. But the graphic artist in me (I still draw and sketch with the “traditional” tools of pencil, pen and paper) loves their tactile feel. And they have one supreme advantage over all other handwriting implements: they will, over time, break in to your particular way of holding a pen…customizing themselves to your own unique handwriting. The disadvantage though is you cannot then ever loan yours to someone else, particularly if you write with a light touch and they with a heavy one, because the moment they us your pen it will never be right in your hand again. Ever. Ask me how I know.
They have other disadvantages, mostly being that they’re high maintenance things. You are always cleaning and refilling them…a process that becomes a ritual after a while. And they tend to form a fondness for a particular brand of ink, so should that brand become unavailable, or changes its formulation, your pen will complain bitterly in its own way (skip… skip… skip…) for weeks if not months, until you hit on a substitute it finds acceptable. Some weeks ago, having run out of my pen’s preferred brand (Parker, black) and not finding any at the usual places, I let a pen store salesman talk me into a substitute. I won’t name it here, each individual fountain pen is unique enough that what doesn’t work in one can work very well in another regardless of make. The pen that shipped from the factory right beside mine might adore that brand of ink for all I know. But it took me weeks of cleaning and re-cleaning my pen to get it to forgive me. Yes, yes…I promise to feed you the Exact ink you want dear…
It’s a Mont Blanc 149. I bought it in 1979 for a figure I was embarrassed to say to anyone and still am somewhat. It took me months of saving to be able to afford it…at the time I was a mail room clerk for a data processing company…and what is worse, on a scale of 1 to 10 my handwriting is 11 in awfulness. But my hands are finicky about their tools and my drawing/writing hand knew…it knew…the moment it held one at the Fahrney’s on F Street in Washington…that was The One. I go through the technical pens I use for drawing like crazy because they don’t make them to last, and the nibs wear oddly enough that it doesn’t take long for me to feel uncomfortable drawing with one. Wish I could find a good source for nibs for the dip pens I used to use…but don’t get me started…
Some years after I bought the 149 I bought a Parker Duofold that I like very much, and still occasionally use. But…the 149 is My Pen. I checked recently and the thing sells for Many hundreds more now then it did back then so I’m not sure I would buy one now. Like the Mercedes alas, it’s a status symbol. But that is not why I bought it. Materialism is when you want something just to have it…as if the having of it makes you too an object of worship. An enthusiast uses what they buy, takes pleasure in the experience of human excellence. You are not the worshiped, but the worshiper. It’s not commerce, it’s art.
Women who went to university consume more alcohol than their less-highly-educated counterparts, a major study has found.
You don’t say…
I have often wondered about the relationship of intelligence to recreational drug use…and let’s be serious here, alcohol and tobacco are merely legal ones. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine because his mind couldn’t stand being without a problem to solve. I’ll go down to my household bar and humidor whenever Mr. Logical…
…this guy, if you’ve been reading A Coming Out Story, becomes too much to deal with.
The only cocktail I know how to reliably mix is the “Blue Glow-tini” I first had at the Disney World Hollywood Studios 50s Prime Time Cafe’. I loved it so much I googled the recipe the instant I got home. On thing I love about watching Rachel Maddow is her occasional Cocktail spot. One of these days it’s going to motivate me into fixing up the art room bar a little nicer. Add a bar sink and under the bar fridge and ice machine. The disadvantage of having a brain is the world makes you want to drink, but at least having a brain lets you do it decently.
For nearly all of my life I’ve been an apartment dweller. I grew up, and grew into young adulthood with neighbors above me, neighbors below me, neighbors to my right and left. The daily rustlings and occasional arguments heard through the walls were part of my normal experience. Mind you, we lived in reasonably nice apartments. You didn’t hear every little thing. The walls were solid and the floors firm. But you always knew you had neighbors living all around you. You heard the sound of water moving through the building pipes when they turned on the tap water, heard their toilets flushing through the sewer drains. Sometimes, you heard a door slam, or something drop. I suppose my friends who grew up in their family’s own homes would think they had ghosts.
One routine of my apartment life was scouting the building washing machine room on the morning of laundry day to see if there was anything free. If the machines were all in use I would try to judge from the cycle how much longer before one was free. But this was an iffy prospect because some neighbors wouldn’t go fetch their laundry from the washer for hours, which would make me furious. To this day I have a built-in mental self timer for how long it takes a wash load to run. Also, on my dresser, a box which I put my spare change into every night: a habit born of necessity where you were always needing coins for the weekend laundry. When people ask me what I like best about home ownership, or what motivated me to take the leap and buy a house of my own, I tell them instantly: my own washer and dryer.
It wasn’t until I moved to Baltimore that I discovered that some apartment complexes offer washers and dryers right in the apartment. In Cockeysville, the Baltimore suburb I moved to from Rockville, my first apartment (my First apartment!) had the usual communal laundry room. But my second, the the best apartment complexes I ever lived in, had full size washers and dryers right there in the apartment. I thought I had reached the very pinnacle of luxury.
When I got the job at Space Telescope, and decided to relocate to within walking distance of the office, I had one absolutely firm no-compromise specification for my new apartment: it had to have its own laundry closet. Alas none of them within walking distance did. Also, being so close to the campus, their rents were a tad outrageous anyway. A good fifty percent more then the rent I was paying then in Cockeysville, for apartments nearly half as big.
And so, with great trepidation since I knew nothing of how to go about buying a home, I started looking at the little rowhouses clustered around the campus. I’d actually given it some thought a few years previously, when I discovered how affordable homes were in the Baltimore area, compared to Rockville and the Washington suburbs. But knowing nothing at all about buying a home, and getting tied up with seller’s agent instead of a buyer’s agent, I quickly gave it up. It just seemed out of my reach. But at Space Telescope some co-workers put me in touch with a reliable buyer’s agent and after one false start, I got the hang of it and…well…now I am a home owner.
With my very own washer and dryer! Conveyed. They Conveyed! I got to add a new sense of the word ‘conveyed’ to my vocabulary. Also, Service Contract…
So I had a Service Contract on the furnace and hot water heater, but not the washer and dryer because I reckoned the ones that Conveyed were old enough that I’d want to replace them anyway when they started going bad. The dryer is a pretty simple machine and all it has needed over the years I’ve been here was one repair to replace the igniter element. The washer though, started having transmission problems last year. The repairman I called in gave me a quote of about 4-500 dollars to repair it. Well…that’s the cost of a new one just about, so I decided to just keep that one running until it failed.
Failure came a week ago Friday. Well…not so much failed, as became not at all well. It still washes, but to get the spin dry cycle going I have to open the lid, defeat the interlock, reach in and yank the tub around to get it going. When it stops after the cycle is over, I can hear the bearings grinding.
So I get my trusty back issues of Consumer Reports out, and the annual Buyer’s Guide, and start investigating. I wanted a nice front loader, since those are more water and energy efficient, and it’s a proven design. I got my tape measure out and jotted down not only the dimensions of the space around the washer I had, but the doorways and stairwells the old and new machine would have to navigate on the way down to the basement utility room. Then I started looking around the net for complaints. Well…I got an eyeful.
It was the same problem I ran into when I needed to replace the old fridge. Every make out there, even the ones Consumer Reports said were less likely to need repairs then the others, had problems. Reading over the complaints, you get a sense of which ones were outliers, and which were endemic. Mold was a persistent issue with the front loaders…all of them. Some had vibration problems and would try to walk all over the laundry rooms whenever the spin cycle started. Some had persistent problems with gasket tearing and leaking. The new electronic control boards were a constant source of problems for all models. When they weren’t failing altogether, they were causing problems with correct water amounts and temperatures. An appalling number of people were saying to stay away from anything with an electronic control board. Just get a cheap all-mechanical one instead, was the advice.
It was going around to the stores and looking over the models first-hand that I discovered the problem that forced me to give up a front loader. I have two possible paths of entry into the basement…the front door or the back kitchen door and then down the basement stairs, and through the door to the utility room in the back of the basement…OR…through the back basement door and right into the utility room. The catch is: 1) the door to the utility room has only 25-1/2 inches of width, and while the back basement door has 27 inches there is a deck the previous owner built over the back basement doorway and I only have a three foot crawlspace there for someone to carefully wheel something into or out of the basement.
I know that can be done…Casa del Garrett once had two full-size fridges (they Conveyed!): the second one being located in the utility room where it was used by the previous owner for storing ice and cold drinks for the club room he’d made of the front of the basement, and which I am now using as an art room. I gave the second fridge away and some friends wheeled it carefully out the back basement door on a hand truck, tipped it on its side and slid it out under the deck. But that path only has 27 inches at it’s narrow point, which is the back basement doorway. And the deck only gives you three feet of clearance to wheel something out from under it. You had to figure in the size of a hand truck, plus the size of the washer.
So as it turned out, the only front loaders I could get into my house were the smallest of the small ones…something you’d buy for a condo with a tiny laundry closet maybe. It would only be able to do small loads of clothes but not large towels or the sheets and mattress cover on my queen size bed. For those I’d either be back to doing the communal laundry room thing again or just dropping them off at the cleaners. I figured if I was paying several hundred bucks for a washing machine the only time I should need to take anything to the cleaners was if I needed something dry cleaned.
So with regret I started looking at the top loaders. Even the largest of those could get down the basement steps and through the utility room door. Once again I saw the same complaints about machines that were mainly controlled by electronic motherboards. I also saw a number of complaints that the new high efficiency top-loaders didn’t actually get clothes clean. I suspect those were mostly from folks who were shocked to see how little water is used by the new machines, and don’t understand how detergents work. I looked over some YouTubes of these machines in action and…yeah…they don’t look like they’re using nearly enough water. But no washing machine is a scrubbing machine. Really bad dirt always requires attention by hand scrubbing and cleaning it first. It’s the same with dishes and dish washers.
I settled on a GE High Efficiency model that Consumer Reports recommended. It’s supposedly going to be delivered tomorrow. In the meantime I had a whole ‘nother gallon of Costco liquid laundry detergent I hadn’t even opened yet that I gave to a neighbor, because the new machine requires the new High Efficiency detergents. I noted when I went to Costco for some, that the regular Kirkland brand liquid detergent isn’t even being sold anymore…just the High Efficiency stuff now. I guess that’s where it’s all going now. But if it cuts down on the amount of detergent going down the drains every day that’s for the better.
I have to say I’ve never seen a top loader with nothing but a little impeller device at the bottom of the tub. It makes the tub seem huge. Supposedly the machine will determine the correct amount of water itself, and before it goes into spin cycle, do a little self-balancing act. I am told though, that once I fill it with clothes and turn it on, opening the the lid and adding something I missed like a stray sock is problematic because it confuses auto water level system. I can theoretically override the auto water level, but I would need to do that before I start it up. I’m also told to expect it will be substantially quieter then the old machine, so I can’t just listen to it from upstairs to get a sense of what it’s up to. I’ll likely have to reprogram my internal sense of how long a wash load takes because these machines take a bit longer on the wash. That may take some doing as my mental model of the laundry room work flow is about fifty years old.
A story is posted on Fark.Com, about the Somalian pirates that drowned when their speed boat capsized while carrying three million dollars in ransom money back to the lair. The comment thread turns into an argument about whether Ninjas or Vikings could take on Pirates. Stoners have nothing on geeks, I’m here to tell you.
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