Year: 2011

Boards

The typical southern afternoon thunderstorms have kept me from finishing the staining touch up on the deck, but I did make a little progress after work today without opening a can or handling a brush. I borrowed a friend and his pickup truck to make a trip to BBHIW to buy the required boards I needed to replace the top boards of the railing.

Even though I have tried to stay ahead of the curve with staining, a few of the top boards of the railing do need replacing because of warping and cracking. Rather than replace just the couple of bad boards, I decided to replace them all with some of that newfangled recycled 2-liter soda bottle stuff. The composite decking is expensive, $20 for an 8′ piece, but it does come with a 20 year warranty.

There were 8 separate boards that need to be changed and it would have taken seven 8\’ sticks because the next two smallest boards I have after one 2′-9″ piece, are 4′-6″ and then there is another one that is 4-8″. I did manage to save a few bucks by buying 12′ boards because I could combine it down to 4 pieces.

We might have been able to deal with the 8′ pieces in the Miata, but 12′ would have been a little dicey, so we called for help.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1043

Rutting Netflix

We have been two at a time Netflixers since way back when. A couple years ago they threw in streaming from the cloud for FREE. At first they limited the amount of time you were allotted by how many DVDs your plan allowed, then they bumped it to unlimited streaming (still FREE.)

Today I received an email from the fine folks at Netflix:

Dear Brian,

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your current $14.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 2 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $11.99 a month

From $15 to $20 on September 1 for the same thing, that is a 33% increase. The folks that were in it at 1 DVD and unlimited streaming got zapped for even more, they are going from $10 to $16 or 60%.

Our 2 DVDs were separated into 1 for TV shows and 1 for movies. But we are running out of TV shows we want to watch, Law & Order (The Mother Ship) is the last one and while we are only on Season 8 of 20, #8 is the last one available on DVD. The rest are tied up with exclusive rerun deals with cable TV. So today I went ahead and changed our plan from 2 to 1 DVD at a time and kept the streaming portion. Even with the downgrade in service it will still cost us a buck more when the price goes up in September.

I’m going to see just how much we stream per month, which is mostly me on the laptop watching stuff that wouldn’t appeal to Donna. Maybe we will just drop the streaming altogether and go back to getting 2 DVDs at a time for the $12.

I think if they eased up the price, in what I call The How To Boil Frog Method, it wouldn’t have been too bad and maybe not have inflamed users like me into doing something rash. After all, how much does it cost per month for HBO? $20?

Eco Mode?

The Sonata has an ECO button on the dash and when it is pressed in does something magic, I think (because it isn’t covered in the owners manual that I downloaded from Hyundai), to the throttle response and shift points to increase the car’s fuel mileage. To let you now that the system is armed and working there is a green ECO displayed in the middle of the dash. I find the light annoying so I keep the ECO switch off.

We filled up with gas tonight for the first time since we tested the lower limits of the gas tank and we had been 477.6 miles of mostly just to and from work commuting. The Purple Whale drank 15.26 gallon of regular fuel, so we averaged 31.3 MPG for this tank.

I wonder what would happen if I left that switch on?

On Deck

OK, so the last few days have been spent refinishing the deck. I pressure washed half of it one day last week and finished yesterday. Because of the diminished chance of rain today and tomorrow I did some staining tonight. The last time I did this I used a sprayer and it took a while, so this time I did it with a roller and it was a lot quicker. But it was not accurate (I’m not sure that is the right word) so that I need to go back tomorrow and do some touching up around the edges. Detail work.

It is a pain in the butt to have to do it every few years, but if you want it to last and the money you spent on the thing not to go to waste, you got to do it. The above photo was taken during construction 10 years and 11 months ago.

Black Gum Pond

We went for a walk in Hitchcock Woods this morning. I can’t tell you how far we walked because for some reason the GPSr stopped creating a track part way. It was still on when we got home, but the green line only went about a 1/4 of what I perceived we walked. Weird.

After the walk I headed out back to finish pressure washing the deck. I had done about 1/3 of the job on Thursday night and I got another 1/3 done today before the brass nozzle in the end of the plastic wand was spat out and disappeared onto the lawn. I made a short search of where I thought it might have gone before giving up looking. The last time this thing broke it was at the handle and the local Big Box Home Improvement Warehouse had not repair parts, so had to buy the handle, hose and wand assembly online. I had little hope of getting the pressure washer fixed today, but I was pleasantly surprised that the first BBHIW I tried not only had a universal replacement wand for $20, had I needed it they also had hose & handle replacements on the shelf too.

Anticipation

I have a question for all you vending machine designers out there. Why the long wait for change?

You feed 2 bucks into the bill acceptor and punch in the letter C and the number 4 for the 20oz Diet Dr. Pepper. You watch as the as a little bucket on an arm moves smoothly up and over until it stops under the appropriate slot. The row of bottles is pushed forward, forcing the front one off the ledge where it drops the 6″ into the bucket. The arm then glides over to the left and then (in this case) drops down until top edge of the bucket catches on the ledge above the dispensing chute. This allows the Diet Dr. Pepper to slide down into holding area and then rests for a second until the round plexiglass door rotates 180° until the drink is exposed and you can pick it out. With your selected drink now in your hand, the round door rotates back sealing off the dispensing area. A few seconds later 75¢ in change plops down one quarter at a time. Elapsed time between picking a selection and receiving the change is probably 30 seconds.

The only thing I can think of for making you wait is so that your attention is not diverted from watching the nifty dispensing dance.

3 Things

Today at the Valve Store(tm) while heating up my lunch a co-worker asked, “Its been a couple months, have you been surprised by any negatives on the Sonata?” “Things that don’t show up during a short test drive.” Neither Donna nor I could come up with anything. The car is as comfortable after 6 hours and a couple hundred mile trip as it was after the 6 minute, couple mile initial exposure.

It got me thinking, if I could change any of the things I didn’t like about the Sonata, what would they be. I could come up with only three.

1) Chrome Door Handles. The base Sonata GLS has body colored handles, while our SE has chrome. I understand why they are there, most people equate chrome with luxury, but to me the chrome makes them stand out in a bad way. They look mis-aligned because they follow along the curved character line that runs from the wrap around tail lamp to the middle of the front wheel well. So not only are they not parallel to the road, they are not parallel to themselves.

2) Chrome Oval Tail Pipes. They are the right size and shape for the back end of this car and the look still stands up even when you look at them closely and notice that in fact the 3″ x 5″ oval is just an enhancement for the 2-1/4″ round exhaust pipe. Where it does fall apart is in the side view. The length of the enhancement stops slightly short, so that from certain angles it is quite obvious that it is just tacked on.

3) Steering Feel. While the SE feel is much improved over the GLS, it still leaves a bit to be desired when compared to the weight and feedback of the Mazda 6 or the Ki Optima.