Rants

4000 Picofarads

The Sonata passed the 4,000 mile mark on the way to a friend’s house this evening.

A week ago I received a piece of mail from Amazon informing me that they had made it easier to use my accumulated reward points right at the check out page and that I had a whopping $27.61 points available. Donna was feeling expansive, so she said go ahead and spend them. And because I have been such a good boy I could have an extra ten bucks to cover shipping. I really didn’t need anything in that price range and briefly considered a stuffed purple whale for the back deck of the Purple Whale, but instead opted to upgrade my cheapo computer speakers to some slightly more expensive ones – Cyber Acoustics 3 pc Subwoofer/Satellite System.

Last night I installed the speakers. First up was to remove the old set and if your PC setup is anything like mine, it required a trip under the desk to the land of the Dust Bunnies who live under the mountains of Power Strips and Voltage Converters. I sorted through the hanging wires rounding up the ones associated with the old speakers, unplugging here and there until I had the two small satellite speakers, the 3″ cube that passed for a subwoofer and the power plug/converter in a pile in the bottom of the trash can. The new setup went together with little issue and sounds leaps and bounds better than the one it replaced.

This afternoon I needed to recharge some AA batteries so I placed them inside the charger that rests on the right side of my computer desk. I leave the little sucker unplugged because the manual for it said that doing so would increase its lifespan. When I plugged the the connector into the back of it, nothing happened. Hmmm, usually the display fires up so you can monitor the charging process. Thinking I might have dislodged its power converter plug when installing the speakers I returned to the Land of the Dust Bunnies. I followed the wire down to the power strip and, nope, it was plugged in. I unplugged it and looked at the back of it. It read Altec. Uh oh, that was the brand name of the speakers I just took off. So I rooted around in the trash to retrieve the power plug that I had mistakenly thrown away. Hooked up the correct power thingy to the charger and the display was still blank. Dang.

The photo above shows what happens to capacitors* when 9V AC is applied to where 3V DC is supposed to go. So not only am I hard on batteries, their chargers are none to safe around me either.

*I have no clue if these are 4,000 picofarads or not, but when I looked up farad on wikipedia this phrase caught my eye, When speaking of capacitor values a picofarad is sometimes referred to as a “puff” or “pic”, as in “a ten puff capacitor”. Kind of apt as the capacitors in this charger sure went up in a puff of smoke…

Lawnmower?

After work today I decided to take the Emperor down to the local Advance Auto and have them read the battery. I hopped in the Miata and as I have been want to do lately, had to reach back into my front pocket and take out the key after I couldn’t locate the push-to-start button on the dash. As I turned the key to start all I got back was rrrr_RRRRR_rr r  r    r_click. Good thing we bought that other car a few months back.

I disconnected the Miata battery, took it out of the Miata trunk and put it in the Sonata trunk. On our way to grocery shopping tonight, we stopped in to the aforementioned Advanced Auto. When I hefted it up on to the counter and asked if they would put my car battery on the tester, the fellow behind the counter, Will, said, “Car? Looks like a lawnmower battery.”

He hooked it up to the magic box and because there was no indication of what the battery’s cold cranking amp rating was, he used the number off their replacement battery, 370. He said, “That really is only a little more than a riding mower’s 340.” “Your battery is bad, the voltage is a little low at 12.4v, but the cold cranking amps reads 90.” I thought to myself, kinda figured it would be low, cause there wasn’t much cranking going on in the garage a little while ago.

He said, “We have two of these batteries in stock.” I thanked him as said I’d let him know. You see there is this sticker on the top of the battery that says ‘Limited Warranty’ and under that are the numbers ’36/60′ and I wonder if that means 36 month replacement and up to 60 months prorated discount. Going to call the Mazda dealer’s parts department tomorrow to find out what the deal is.

Another Reason Why I’ll Never Own A Hybrid

We had some unseasonable cool weather on Monday, so we drove the Miata to work. It was cool enough in the morning for me to almost want a light jacket. It was sort of cloudy at quitting time, so we even made the return trip home with top down.

Both times I started the car it seemed to turn over a little slowly before catching. Battery going dead? The original battery lasted 5-1/2 years and this one is only a touch over 2 years old. Maybe there is a small amount of dark current that drains the battery, but it was never noticed because the car was a daily driver and the constant charging kept it going. I may duck into an AutoZone or similar and have then analyze it later this week.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1044

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?

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.

Oops I Did It Again

In my quest to prevent door dings by parking way out or way to one side of the parking lot has its downside, like the sacrificial anodes used to protect deep sea oil rigs from corroding away, the poor wheels of the Sonata forfeit their beauty. I curbed a wheel parking yesterday. Not just any old wheel either, but the same one I scraped the day after we bought the car. Was I lucky enough to hit the wheel in the same spot? No, of course not, I blemished a different 3 to 4 inches of the edge.

I guess the only thing left to do now to even things out is to keep hitting that same wheel until I have scraped the entire circumference of the rim.

If when you read the title of this post, the first thing you thought of was Britney Spears, shame on you, Louie Armstrong did it first way back in 1932 – Oops I Did It Again!.