Category: Rants

If I have a problem with something, here it will be.

Categories
General Rants

The Tao of Spare Change

After procrastinating far too long, I took in a bundle of change to the local Safeway and used one of those change counting machines to convert it back into useful currency. On the way in to the store I probably lost $2 or so, plus another $1+ from the house to the car. Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity (in reality only a few minutes) of noisy shaking and clanking, the machine spit out a receipt that read like this:

Change counted: $242.58. Counting fee: 8.27% Redeemable Value: $222.39

Now I’ll admit that it isn’t fun to take change and make it into dollars, but is a $20 fee on that conversion really necessary? I suppose I’ll never get the satisfaction of asking that question, since no one at Safeway has anything to do with that machine. I do get the satisfaction of knowing that I filled up the coin conversion machine so completely that it warned the next customer that it was full and could not take their change.

In the meantime it looks like I have some walking around money again.

Categories
Rants Site News

New Look for a New Year

I didn’t know if it was going to happen there for a bit, but I’ve managed to pull together a cleaner, faster loading look for the site without too many personal headaches. You should find everything running quite a bit faster now as I eliminated a large chunk of the graphic files that had to be loaded each time the pages were built.

The downside of all of this is that the new layout is even less IE friendly than the one before it. IE just seems to suck at dealing with standards, and this site is using more and more of the CSS and XML layout goodness so that I can continue to support it over the long haul. That means if you are viewing this site with IE it will probably (no, definitely) not look right. I recommend you go get Firefox and try it. It is far faster and more standards compliant (not to mention newer) than IE.

Categories
General Rants

Home, Rainy Home

I’ve just gotten home from the joy that is holiday air travel. As is typical for me, it was freezing cold weather for most of the OK stay, and upon returning to “always sunny” San Jose it is raining. On the upside, that should mean some awesome new snow up in Tahoe, so I’m hoping for some really good powder to ski on soon.

Categories
General Rants Site News

Dearth of Newsletters

I am having a hard time writing a newsletter to send out. What I have discovered is that after 3 years of using LCD monitors at work and on laptops I simply cannot stand to stare at a blurry screen for more than an hour or two.

This means that I either must crank the resolution way, way down or hijack someone else’s laptop to get a newsletter written. I could also get a new job, as that, presumably, would also have access to LCD displays again.

In the mean time I’ll spend a little time in front of the CRT and a lot of time away from it.

Categories
Rants Technology

3 Drives Enter, One Drive Leaves

It was too good to be true. I had two drives that appeared to die so I pulled them out of where they were and added them to a new system. Everything seemed great, and they worked for 3 or 4 days. Yay for me.

The problem is that this morning I woke up, came down to work on the PC and found a “click of death” sound coming from my PC. It could only be one thing: a dead IBM hard drive, the Deskstar (affectionately know as the Death Star). Now I shouldn’t complain too much, as this drive is 4 years old. But is sucks that I just spent the better part of a week making it work the way I wanted (it was my new PC’s boot drive).

So while I didn’t lose any data I did just lose a ton of setup time. Time to order up some new drives, it appears.

Categories
House Rants

Shocking Discoveries

In an incredible turn of events, two relatively new hard disks have died on the same day — today. What is more incredible is that both were in different machines, on different interfaces, from different manufacturers. Both were protected via my APC UPS, so power was not to blame. Worse, one is a RAID backup drive for my documents, so I have to replace it soon. It just makes no sense that this would happen all at once.

On to the saga that is replacing light switches: I managed to give myself enough of a shock today that I had to sit down and take stock of what was going on. It seems that in my desire to hurry up the re-install of each of the light sockets, I left on an adjoining breaker that shares the wall box with one of the switches. As I was putting the new switch into place I got a significant jolt, saw a spark, then heard the breaker snap off.

When I regained my composure I discovered my newly “fused” wiring on the side of the old light switch. It took me some time to figure out that I had the ground hit the side of the other switch’s neutral wire, giving me the jolt and blowing the breaker. Needless to say, after that incident, almost all the breakers on the first floor went off so I wouldn’t do that again. The install is all done for the switches so I think I’ll take a break from AC wiring for a while.

Categories
General Rants

Another Ski Trip in the Can

I just got back from a ski trip to Heavenly and although its good to hit the snow this trip was a bit of a let down for a couple of reasons.

  • Not enough snow
  • Temperature was too high (48 F)
  • Rocks on the trails
  • Too many folks in lift lines

Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful to be up in Tahoe hitting the snow. But I just wish it were good, functional snow. 4 hours each way for crappy snow just isn’t much fun when you think about the time spent. Maybe next time will be better.

Categories
House Photos Rants

The Pit and Despair

I have just completed the first phase of the X-10 light switch install. After two days I’ve swapped out 8 switches and now have all the stairway lights properly wired. It was pretty touch and go there for a while: when things don’t work and patience wears out you can do some pretty dumb things, a bad idea when playing with 110 volts.

In any case, even though it isn’t pretty, things are working. Now the huge task of mess cleanup comes next. I have boxes, wire cuttings, wall remains, and a whole lot of dust and muck to clean up after. I can’t ask myself if its worth it because I know it will be… it’s just the pile of crud that awaits removal that makes me think otherwise.

Categories
Rants Review Technology

Roku Update

After about 12 hours of grinding away, my server finally finished its scan of all my music and made itself ready for streaming. For about 5 hours yesterday I had everything working great, searching and streaming songs, playlists, and the like. Great, this is just what I was looking for.

Then I noticed that my laptop couldn’t go to any web sites. And my router appeared to be dead. Hmm, that’s not right.

I discovered that at least twice an hour, for some reason, my router, a Linksys, goes all wonky and stops responding to anyone but the server and Roku client. No one can be pinged, tracerouted, or communicated to. Cycling power on the router brings it back to life, or I can sit around for 5 minutes or so until it clears itself.

It is truly baffling why this happens, but the music still runs. I suppose more diagnosis is in order, but I find that UPnP is neither truly universal nor plug-and-play. Figures.

Categories
General Rants

Holiday Online Ordering

I spent a good part of today doing some online shopping for Christmas gifts. Much to my surprise, after doing research this past week, capturing prices and URLs, I go back and find that most of the prices change quite dramatically. A combination of local taxes (thanks California!) shipping costs that aren’t known, and just plain bait-and-switch tactics by the web sites have conspired to raise just about every price.

So when you do your shopping and you see a price that is just too good to be true, be sure you verify it by going down the purchase path until the tax, shipping, and availability questions get answered. And watch out for those restocking fees… they’ve gone up to nearly 20% on some items this year.