No dice on listening to Radio Paradise at work. I bet they have all that bandwidth hogging music listening stuff locked down. Oh well, Plan B, is to record 12 hours of music using Streamripper and burn it to a CDRW and take it to work, lather, rinse and repeat.
To listen to the free stream with Windows Media Player you need a plugin called Abacast. Tried installing it here at home and for whatever reason it doesn’t work. The low band (mono) mp3 stream is still there, but I can’t listen to mp3 at work because it uses an IP address and the network weasels have blocked access to anything with just an IP. In searching for a replacement I found something really close, Radio Paradise, and there stream is stereo. They are also listener supported and if I can get the stream at work I will consider donating something to the cause.
I removed the flasher from the third brake light today. I’m a test mule for a device that a friend is going to make. It addresses the big complaint that everyone over on Miata.net has with the flashing 3rd light, incessant blinking. This thing has a small circuit board with a couple of components on it, so that it flashes real quick for 5 times and then burns steady. It takes a minute to reset to flashing, so if you are in stop and go traffic it always burns steady after the initial 5 flashes (unless you sit for more than a minute without applying the brakes.)
While I was at it I took off the instrument hood and drove around the block a couple of times. There is a squeak in the dash on bumpy roads that goes away when you press on the hood. My hood is only held on by the 2 screws and only one of the three snaps so I thought maybe a replacement hood would fix the problem. As with any squeak, it’s not that easy, even without the hood it is still there. Got to be somewhere deeper in and when I press it stops a lot more than the instrument hood from vibrating. More trouble shooting is required.
Purchased Today: nothing
Money spent since 03/03/03: $96.63
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 54
Our cordless phone/answering machine went weird on us about a week ago. You would pick it up and it would just beep three times when trying to use the handset. I checked the owner’s manual and all that was mentioned was two beeps and that meant you were too far away from the base, which wasn’t the case, unless 2 inches is too far away. One thing the owner’s manual said was if it wasn’t working at all was to reinitialize the handset to the base. This procedure involved unplugging the battery in the handset and unplugging the power supply to the base for 5 minutes. That worked once – the very first time I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Hung up and tried again right away and three beeps were it. Bought a new battery for the handset and charged it overnight. It too worked once and then beeps. While in Target this afternoon we figured we should go ahead and replace the phone, the answering machine portion still worked, but we really use the cordless phone too.
Picked up this snazzy looking 2.4Ghz phone for only $55. Got it home took it out of the box and plugged it all up. Broke out the manual for it to see how to set up the answering machine portion and couldn’t find any mention of it in the papers. Read them again slower, still nothing about answering machine. That’s when I looked over the box and it didn’t say anything about an answerer. The picture sure looked like it would be an answering machine, but looks can be deceiving, it was a speaker phone, That is why it had a speaker in the base. Doh! Boxed it back up as best I could and back to Target we went. This time I made sure it said Answering Machine on all 6 sides of the box. Different company and different looks, but $5 cheaper. Got to find a neat recording to put on there, guess I’ll go Googling for a wav file.
I’d like to call my wife to the stand. She swears that the signs were not in place at 4:20 when I made the left into my subdivision yesterday. Also the yellow diamond shaped signs warning of a stop sign ahead weren’t there either. When we left the neighborhood this morning there were 2 city cop cars out making up for the cost of the signs by catching unsuspecting drivers as they motored through the new signs. One had somebody pulled over and the other was just lurking on our street far enough back not to be seen from Two Notch Road.
At the end of our street in this subdivision there is a stop sign. The road you come to, Two Notch Road, is a through street. It is 1/4 mile away and parallel to a big thoroughfare so sometime we get a lot of traffic traveling on this cross street. And because it is considered a “shortcut” when the bigger road gets busy, speed limits don’t apply, it is posted at 30 mph, but please don’t let that slow you down. In the past 2 years 2 motorcyclists have been killed right near our intersection (1 t-boned a car turning left in front of him and the other just lost control) because they were traveling at a high rate of speed. For the past 10 days or so we have had one of those radar things the cops use that flashes your speed at you on Two Notch near our intersection. We use that road to go to and from work every day so it has been fun to see how accurate it thinks my speedometer is.
Today on the way home the radar thingie was reading the usual 34 (I routinely travel at +5 and the Miata’s speedo was right on 35,) but right before it was a sign proclaiming “One Lane Road Ahead.” As I approached the intersection I noticed to the right a SCDOT truck and there were broad white stripes in my lane and another on the other side of the intersection in the other lane. As I made the left into the subdivision my wife and I speculated on what was coming, a light? Or a 4 Way Stop?
Forty-five minutes later as I went for my evening rollerblade I purposely went in that direction to check out the intersection. As I rolled up I noticed under the usual stop sign there was a little addition that said “4 Way.” Sure enough there were stop signs up on Two Notch Road. That didn’t take long to put those up. Or did it? With the new sign, new stripes and the Department of Transportation truck to distract me at a very familiar intersection, were they already up and I missed them? Was I the first to these new stop signs?
It was another beautiful day today. At our 10:00 PM walk around the parking lot, we decided to go for a drive at lunch. So we ate our lunches at our respective desks at 11:30 so at noon promptly, we walked out to the car and after removing the cockpit cover just drove around the back roads of Aiken County for 40 minutes burning precious petrochemicals wantonly.
Purchased Today: still nothing
Money spent since 03/03/03: $81.38
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 54