Whatever

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…

True Grits

Yesterday was breakfast with the MMC and while some folks did, neither Donna nor I had grits.

We also watched the Jeff Bridges play Rooster Cogburn. About three months ago we rented the 1969 John Wayne movie and didn’t make it past Glen Campbell in the boardinghouse. This newer version of True Grit we watched all the way through and enjoyed. I can give this analogy for our preference, the 1968 Mustang GT is a classic automobile and was an awesome car for its time, but given the choice, we would opt for the 2011 model.

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

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

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.

Super Heroes

I can’t be the only one who sees irony in Captain America. To do battle with Hitler’s Aryan pure-bred super soldiers we had to create our own special super soldier?

It looks like Mazda has a special promotional tie-in to the Green Lantern movie by launching the Karai special edition in Germany.

Happy 4th

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1042

Not Fair

Last Friday when I posted about the stove, the last line “Inau?gural meal pre?pared on our new range ? pizza.” was going to have a link to the Home Depot page of the range. But when I went to the page for it I came away shocked, we had bought the stove on Sunday the 19th and on Tuesday the 21st it went on sale for $101 less.

Donna called the store and spoke to someone in appliances who told her that all we had to do was bring in the receipt within 30 days and they would refund the difference. Saturday morning we headed into HD with our paperwork and a print out of the web page showing the new price. The first person we spoke to at the service desk was unsure of what to do, but a person who seemed to be in charge or at least more knowledgeable arrived, heard our story, said so & so will take care of you and disappeared into the office. So & so got part way through the process and then stopped stumped. She hailed over person number 4. This person said, “Oh we aren’t supposed to do that.” We planted our heels and Donna said, “Well, the person I spoke to in the Appliance Department last night said we could.” “Who?”, she asked. “Didn’t get a name,” Donna countered.

She chewed her cheek for a while with her fingers hovering above the keyboard, before saying, “Follow me.” We went over to the Returns Desk where she refunded us the cost of what we paid, then sold us the stove again at the sale price and gave us the difference back on a store gift card (a different one from what we used to buy the thing, so now we have two.)

If we had been turned down for getting the sale price, we were going to borrow a pickup from a friend and return the darn thing, telling them it didn’t work or something. Then take the money and go buy a new one at the sales price, even if we would have to wait another week for the 2nd stove to be delivered.