Rants

Non-Christmas Lights Fun

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I installed a red LED strip between the tail lights and the very next day I dopped the car off to have it wrapped. When I got it back, a Brake Light Malfunction warning showed in the left-hand dial on the dash. Hitting the INFO button dismissed the warning. Trouble is now at every start up; I have hit that INFO button.

Step one in troubleshooting was to back up to some shop windows to see if both tail and brake lights were working properly. They were, so what’s wrong? This led me to that red LED strip. I had purchased it from CravenSpeed. They are local to me, so I drove to their shop in Tigard which is southeast of Portland to save on shipping. All in all, the cost of gas used might have been more than shipping, but a Miata drive is a Miata drive.

CravenSpeed doesn’t make that kit it is produced by someone called MX5Things. So, I used the contact us link on the website wondering if the product still worked well in the 2024 models because that is model year that went full CAN Bus. Turns out it is a one man show and Sergey has the same 2024 GT soft top as mine. He said first check to make sure I had the correct wiring jumper harness. I did, so he said if the LED strip lights up, the only thing left is the harness. He suggested I return to CravenSpeed and try a new harness. When there we swapped the jumper harness and that didn’t fix it.

When I got home there was one thing I hadn’t yet tried yet, unhook the jumper and take the LED strip out of the circuit entirely. Unfortunately, the brake light malfunction warning was still there. It was time to punt. I went to the dealer last Friday to see if they could fix this issue. They wanted to keep the car for 2 to 3 days to troubleshoot it because if it wasn’t a simple fix they would have to do a deep dive. I said, “I’ll let you know.” When I got home, I put the LED strip jumper back in. I’d just keep hitting the INFO button on the steering wheel to dismiss the warning.

I knew they took the tail lights out to wrap the car and I’ve got the LED strip jumper plugged in on the driver’s side, but I’ve never messed with the passenger side tail light connection, so I unplugged and replugged in that tail light to see if that might be it. That wasn’t it, but doing this caused a tail light malfunction warning in addition to the brake light warning. Crap. So now I’d have to hit the INFO button 2 times to clear the warnings.

Using a long broom stick to depress the brake pedal, I checked the tail lights again and everything appears to work normally, even the blinkers. I called the dealer and set up an appointment to take it in and Monday I took it in. They asked if I wanted a ride home? I said, “I was just going to call an Uber.” The Service Rep’s reply was, “We’ll get you a Lyft. They’ll pick you up out front.”

The car was in their possession for about 24 hours. They cleared some codes, then started and shut off a car a couple times to check and the light warning did not reappear. The next morning, they did the start-stop thing a couple more times and called it fixed. They did have one code that couldn’t be cleared, the one for a missing satellite antenna. That’s because I removed the antenna and vinyled over the hole on the trunk lid. At least that particular error code is silent and does not cover over any of the dash displays.

Cost all of $100 for the tech’s time. But I recouped a 1/3 of it back when they replaced both windshield wipers, even though they aren’t a warrantied part, when I mentioned there were several fine streaks left after each swipe from day one.

Whatever they are paying that Service Rep is not enough. The simple offer of those wipers caused me to do something I absolutely hate to do; I filled out a ‘how was my service’ survey. Not only that, I give a 5 star review and actually left a really nice comment.

Sketchers Slip-Ins

I’m a big fan of working smarter, not harder, so I’m a big fan of no tie shoes. I’ve had several versions of the slip on casual shoe and it was time to replace my gray Sketchers. I’ve seen several commercials touting, “never have to handle your shoes ever again.”

I headed over to the Sketchers website and eyeballed all the Slip-ins. I found a winner in the Summits – Key Pace There is no local Sketchers store, but they are carried by Famous Footwear and there is a store over in Gresham. I made a run over on Monday to see if they had any of my choice and they did. I tried on my usual size 11 and my foot was swimming. Next, I tried on a 10 and that was a lot better. Paid my money and took my new shoes home.

I put them in and walked around the house a bit and while the length was right, they still felt too big. That’s when I noticed the sticker on the box that read, “WIDE.” So rather than drive over and hope for the correct medium width shoe I bought a pair from Amazon with next day delivery. It was more expensive than at the store but it was worth the extra penny at $75. At the store they were $74.99.

When the Amazon delivery showed up, I tried on my new 11 medium and sure enough the shoe was too tight. the width was right but it was too short and crowded my toes. So, I packed them right back up and did the Kohl’s drop off return. After leaving Kohl’s I drove over the Famous Footwear to return the 11 wide shoes. In that style of shoe all they had were wide widths, so I ordered a pair of 11 mediums to be delivered to me at home. They’ll probably be here early next week.

Fingers crossed that the 11 mediums fit or I’m going to have return them and try a 11.5 medium…

Really?

Made a run to Goodwill today to donate a few things that have been stacked on the futon for a couple months. There were a couple pair of half worn down sneakers, a pair of old towels, two bathmats and several other random things.

When I tried to put the gray cloth bathmat in the women’s bin she shook her head no, so I tossed it back in the car. The very next item I tried to put in the bin was the other bathmat. I figured I get waved off again because this one was a dingy looking rubber one that goes in the tub. But, nope, she let me donate it.

I thought for sure the fabric, because it could be thrown in a washing machine, would have been okay and rubber with suction cups on the bottom would have been rejected.

I’m Disappointed

I’m a little disappointed in the Red Sox. They lost 5 of 6 games on the west coast road trip and 2 of 3 games against the pretty weak Colorado Rockies. Maybe it was the altitude? But the FRS can redeem themselves this weekend by beating the New York Yankees at Fenway Park.

I’m a little disappointed in Bad Sisters. The show itself was great, humor, pathos, an extremely unlikeable villain, a great twist at the end with the perfect ending. So why am I disappointed? They have greenlit a second season and what the heck could it possibly be about.

I’m a little disappointed in Fred Meyer, why the heck is the jarred applesauce on a different aisle than where the applesauce single-serve snack cups are.

I am a lot disappointed in Peacock‘s Tour de France coverage. In the past we had 2 options for viewing the bike race, one was with the announcers Bob Roll & Phil Liggett and geared for the American audience and the second one had Ant McCrossan and was geared for the rest of the English speaking world. We always chose that second option because it was commercial free and Mr. McCrossan knew the riders and was always calling the action of the race in front of him. But this year the only option available was the Roll and Liggett version where they misidentified riders and were always chatting about old races or past riders. What made this even worse was the annoying ESPN style constant scroll on the bottom of the picture, plus there were commercials even though we had paid for Peacock Premium and the commercial free add-on.

Uncontrolled Quality?

A couple weeks ago the dryer started to let out a little squeal on start up randomly. So I ignored it. a week ago the randomness stopped and it became routine. I started shopping around for deals on laundry pairs. Last Friday the little squeal became a constant loud scream of ear splitting high pitched noise.

We were now stuck with a load of soaking wet clothes. I called our neighbor across the street to ask if I could dry a load of clothes because our dryer was making a loud squeal (I’m almost surprised she didn’t hear it.) She said, “You can of course use my dryer. But, we do have a small laundry room in the community and it is free.” “Oh,” I said, “I’ll try the on-site laundry first. Thanks.”

It was just two washers and 2 dryers and when I got there a woman was in one set, so I popped are wet clothes in and opened the Lowes app to see what I could get in a hurry (there was actually a filter for that criteria.) I could get a set of stackable Whirlpool units delivered the very next day, Saturday.

I selected the haul away service because broken laundry machinery won’t fit in the back of the Mini. They won’t let you check out until you have added the water supply hoses, the dryer power cord, plus the dryer ducting and the clamps, even though what I had on the old machines would work. Oh, and $55 for the stacking kit of 4 plastic feet, 2 metal plates and 4 screws.

The delivery, the assembly, stacking and hauling away, went great. It took them maybe 45 minutes total and we were ready to do a load. Washing was fine, but when the wet clothes went into the dryer it sounded like something didn’t get screwed down inside the machine. I put pressure on the dryer sides, then the top, I even lifted the front of the machine and the noise was diminished some, but not to an acceptable level. Checked to see if the machine was off level, it wasn’t.

I went online and registered the machines and their serial number with the manufacturer. Right after I got the registration conformation email I entered a request for warranty service. Because everything is online and artificially intelligent these days, even though it was Saturday, I had a Monday morning appointment for some service.

It took the fellow who came maybe 5 minutes to diagnose the issue of a faulty blower wheel. His comment was, “We’ve been seeing a lot of this lately.”

Does the manufacturer know that they have this problem?

Time (and PHP) Marchs On

I received an email from my webhost the other day that said, HostGator is excited to announce that we will be upgrading our servers to PHP 8.2.” They were going to start rolling it out on or about the 20th of February, but I figured why not go ahead and do it myself in my cPanel. Several clicks later my website was running the new version instead of PHP 7.3.

The only trouble was, WordPress was not happy with the change. Life of Brian was just displaying an error page. As usual, I made the leap of upgrading PHP, just like I do with every WordPress update, without backing up the database or deactivating any plugins. This time it bit me in the ass.

Step one was back into cPanel to rename my plugin directory to /plugin.old see if plain old WordPress would come up. And, phew, it did. So, the database wasn’t the problem. One of the plugins must not be compatible with the new PHP. Next step was to create a new /plugin directory and add my 25 plugins back one by one and wait for the crash. It didn’t take long.

The very first one I tried caused the blog to disappear and an error page to show. And unfortunately it was one of my favorites and alphabetically first, A Year Before.If you clicked that last link and can’t read German, let me ‘splain it to you. On the date you are looking at the blog, this widget would show a couple links that are the title of a post I created on that same particular date in the past.

The only other plugin that was problematic was one that allowed me to put widgets in columns on the sidebar. It didn’t crash the site, but it did screw up the nice way I had the ‘best of’ and ‘rest of’ displayed in the sidebar. I did make a work around, but it isn’t nearly as elegant looking as before.

Harrowing Experience

I don’t know how I found the show Harrow on Hulu, maybe it was a recommendation, but it was a mystery of the week type show from Australia about a pathologist. The first episode opens with someone in a boat in the dark of night. They have a body in a tarp which they cover with some kind of powder before tossing into the deep. After the intro montage we get into the show and we get our autopsy case of the week going, but it is a cold case that has nothing to do with the show’s opening.

Early on we get a shot of where he calls home and it is a sailboat parked on the waterfront with a great view of downtown Brisbane. Wait a minute, coroner lives on a boat, where have I seen that before? I had to go back and look because I wasn’t sure, Jack Klugman in a nearly 50 year old TV show called Quincy, a rule bending coroner solving murders weekly who also lives on a sailboat. And while there are similarities, the TV landscape has changed in the intervening years, so that we now have almost always a thread that runs through all the shows in a season and there is always more ancillary, family & co-workers, characters that also get their own story arcs too. Oh, and we get a complicated love interest for the leading man.

Halfway through episode one Harrow is called to the scene of a body found in the water that was incased in cement, aah, the show’s opening. But for some reason our hero seems to be a bit worried about this concrete encased case. At the end of the episode we find out why – the man dumping the body is non other than our leading man, Doctor Daniel Harrow. After dodging what seemed like a thousand near misses in being caught for murdering his ex-wife’s husband and dumping his concrete encrusted body, by season ender he is totally in the clear. As Harrow celebrates with a glass of wine on the deck of his boat he is shot through the gut.

Episode one of season two he gets out of the hospital, a new girlfriend (who later turns out to be his new co-worker) and the gist of the second season’s over arcing story line. The fellow who shot him has a grudge against him because Harrow solved the case that sent him to prison. The kicker is that everyone in Harrow’s world, except him, believes that our villain died in a prison fire.

So, in between solving the case of the week Harrow tries to prove the man is alive all the while being tormented as the bad guy screws with his emotions by harassing and setting up his family members for arrests. In episode two our pathologist is hung off the side of a skyscraper, in the forth he has to swim in a dangerous crocodile infested river to get a body, in the sixth he gets locked in a refrigerated shipping container and in #8 he is buried alive by our “dead” villain. Of course at the very end of the season ender episodes he proves the bad guy is alive and he saves his daughter’s life from his nemesis. At the very end he hands this bad guy a rose that has some sort of poison on the thorns which kills the guy and we fade to black.

I was unsure if I was going to watch the 3rd and final season, but thought I’ll watch the first show and see how it goes. After about 10 minutes in and they are doing an autopsy on the case of the week Harrow wants to know why no one has done any lab work on the deceased. This triggered me to wonder why there was no mention of an autopsy or blood work on last season’s bad guy’s death. Surely if a just caught police prisoner dies after being loaded into a paddy wagon alive there would have been an investigation.

Season 3 of Harrow remains unwatched.