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.

I’m Going To Miss It When It Is Gone

But not enough to actually pay for it.

I got my second letter in the mail from SiriusXM today. My 3 month trial subscription expires on July 26th. This offer is for a special $4.99 a month for 6 months. Of course there is an asterisk attached to the price and the fine print on the bottom says: Other fees and taxes will apply. The yearly rate is 7.92 a month before those fees and taxes. I’ve read on the Sonata Forum that if you call (or answer their phone calls, which I’m not doing) they will offer a yearly $77 price ($6.42 a month before those pesky fees and taxes.)

Sometimes it seems worth a few bucks a month and then other times not so much. Just going to go back to recording songs off the net and dumping them on a USB stick.

Also on a musical note (get it? musical, note?) I signed up for a subscription to Spotify, that cloud music service that all the kids are on about these days, and got my email invite yesterday. I haven’t activated it yet. From what I’ve read, it is, unlike Pandora, hard to discover new music, unless you do the social media thing. So I guess I’ll give it a try, but I think it will be less missed than XM when I give up on Spotify after a few days.

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

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

Spam or Marketing Tool?

This email made it through the first line of Spam Defense at work, Postini, but got caught in the second line, Outlook’s Spam Filter.

From: Marianne Gardner [mailto:Marianne.Gardner@lateforbreakfast.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 3:24 PM
To: A Cast Of Thousands (including me)
Subject: Re: Re: Job

Hello,
I am glad to inform you about available vacancy C16882 in advertising business.

Position name: Supply manager.
Branch: Supply
Positioning: All States USA
Salary: $75000
Reports to: Senior Supply manager
Duties : Coordinate supply projects.
Manages the creation and maintenance of Equipment Bill of Materials. Reviews purchase orders to ensure adherence to quality and procedures. Control activities for all phases of supply projects

Requirements:
- Citizenship: US
- Bachelors degree
- Credit rating more then 700
- 3 years of work experience
- Strong computer skills
- High level of communication skills
- organizational skills

If you are ready to move forward please send your response with resume.

ronald.hrdepartment@gmail.com

At first I instantly classified it as spam because it contained a random and unconnected group of ASCO & Emerson employees and the different email addresses of the sender and the one they wanted a reply to. But then the sender’s email address URL caught my eye, lateforbreakfast.com, it intrigued me. So I opened a browser and entered the URL into the address line and hit enter. What could happen?

Turns out Late for Breakfast is the name of an Australian Pop/Jazz group and their web page is quirky enough to make me read the whole thing and even listen to a couple of their tunes. The music is not bad actually, kind of reminded me of Steely Dan.

So, what do you think?
Spam – just something to get me to reply to the gmail address to verify that mine was a valid address or some sort of monetary scam.
Marketing ploy – knowing the type of person who would be curious about the URL would aslo be the type that would enjoy that style of music.

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