Month: January 2002

Low Level Hum

Here is today’s: The old Sear’s chain drive garage door opener was jerking and spasming while opening and closing the door. It was almost 8 years old and considering it is the main way in and out of the house it gets used at least 4 or 5 times a day it was time for a new one. Replaced it with one of the Genie screw drive ones. Works faster and a lot quieter, but when it is not in use it generates a low level hum. Not loud, not annoying, just a sound that used to not be there when in the garage.

Why does my new $159 thing make a noise? Is it normal? Is it about to explode, showering the car below with shards of white hot metal bits?

My Kingdom For A Screw

The only time I ventured out today, was this morning, for a trip to Home Depot. Cloudy and cool, but not cool enough to put the top up. 🙂

The wrought iron railing on the front porch was loose. The screw on one side of the post was loose and the other was almost tight, but frozen in place. Under the semi-tight one I wedged a piece of metal under it. The loose one needed a new plastic anchor. The hole was just a little too big for the #10 screw in an anchor to keep it tight. Like most guys I have a place in garage with all kinds of nuts, bolts, washers, screws, nails, etc. I have hundreds of screws, but the only #12 screw I had was about a 1/2 inch too long, so off to the store…..

That Hosting Company

This is really yesterday’s rant. ThatHostingCompany that webhosts the Miata Club website I do, disappeared from the face of the internet for about 5 hours last night. Even their site was unreachable! Did somebody kick out the plug on the server? Was the custodian dusting and accidentally flipped the switch to off?

No big deal, you say, well this seems to happen with alarming frequency. And on their about page they claimed 100% up time in 2001 – HA – they were off the air for almost a whole weekend in October.

They are the genesis for this little blog, I wanted some way to remember all the outages. They don’t go down everyday, just seems like it, so I will have other things to rant about here. Trust me, I am of an age where I am on the cusp of cramudgeondom and lots of things p!ss me off.

My 15 Seconds Of Fame

I am now famous. I was mentioned in Randy Nieland’s Tech Specialist’s Email Newsletter yesterday. It raised my stature a notch or two with the couple of other geeks I know that I turned into Gnomies. 🙂 We had a little email conversation about whether or not he should start to blog and what might be the theme for it. He is not sure if he wants to go there though.

More exciting than when I got the Master’s Miata Club a mention in Chris Pirillo’s Windows Daily Email Newsletter.

Up, But Really Down

The folks that host the Miata Club site and the images on this blog That Hosting Company, Inc. have had some spotty, to say the least, connectivity recently. They have this blurb on their about page, “In addition, our connectivity uptime is above the industry standard goal. For the year 2001 we have a 100% uptime rating, and we use a third party company to monitor our connectivity as well. (www.internetseer.com)…” You can go to that site and get a free monitoring tool that will let you know if your site is down. So I did just that after THC last downtime episode. Tonite ThatHostingCompany went down for about 5 hours. Did I get an alert from Internet Seer? Nope. No wonder THC uses it to monitor its up-time, it thinks they are up when they ain’t.

Look At Me

Now I am more famous. I submitted another photo to The Mirror Project today. Winter Event joins Hard Drive Clock in what used to be Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror. Going to have to get one with me and the Miata to add as well.

Nearly 70 degrees for the ride home. Dropped the top of course. The only remnants of the snow of a week ago is the sandy spots on the overpasses.

Yearly Planning Meeting

Master’s Miata Club meeting tonight. Long one, we tried to plan our whole year’s worth of events on one night, nice try. We a had a big turn out and everyone had good ideas, but no one had any dates. Just a lot of vague recollections of a festival in a certain month (maybe.) We did nail down a few things and if all the ideas pan out we should have an exciting year.

Almost 70 degrees at 4 o’clock, so we had top down motoring for the trip home and then half way to Augusta later that evening. Got cold real quick after the sun went down 🙁 so for the interstate leg of the trip we buttoned up the bonnet.