Rants

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.

The Definition Of Insanity

It’s often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This has been most commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, but the quote is much more contemporary. Some research done by Michael Becker, an editor at the Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle, discovered that it is really from the 80’s.

Neither Klamath Falls or Medford had a Popeye’s, but in our new hometown of Fairview, there are couple of them within 3 miles of us. In spite of our checkered past with the franchise we do remember their food fondly.

A couple weeks ago we headed over to Gresham to restock our cannabis supply and what was right next door, but a Popeye’s. It was a little past 11:00 AM, but we opted to head over and get our lunch to take home. Donna ordered a couple of chicken strips with a side of red beans and rice while I went for the chicken sandwich combo. Most of our troubles in the past with these guys was order related, but the drive-thru experience wasn’t too bad. Trouble came when we got home. While her chosen meal was good, but mine no so much, the chicken was obviously left over from the day before and dropped back in the fryer. The breading was very dark and the meat tough and chewy.

Today we decided to try the one that is actually 1/2 mile closer to our front door even though it was not a stand alone store, but inside a truck stop off I-84. We took it as a good sign when there were 3 people in line ahead of us and no one in line at the Subway it shared a spot inside with. The line moved fairly quickly and it didn’t take long to get our food. This was a dine in meal and we ordered a combo meal of popcorn shrimp (for me) with 2 tenders (for her), a side red beans & rice (for her) and a biscuit (for me.) The shoe was on the other foot today, my shrimp were hot and fresh while her tenders, not as dark as my sandwich from before, was either double fried or cooked several hours ago and bathed by a heat lamp for hours as the breading was rock hard and the meat tough.

Call us crazy, but in a couple weeks we’ll probably try the Gresham location again at lunch time and see what happens.

Pot Calling The Kettle Black

Way back in the early aught’s when Donna’s mom was living with us,both Donna and I were still working so she was our chief cook and bottle washer. If Donna had a hankering for a certain dish and the ingredients weren’t in the house Mom would head over during the day to the grocery store to pick up what was needed. Or if Mom saw something in a magazine or on TV that she thought sounded good for dinner, it would be off to Kroger for whatever was needed.

Back then as a courtesy (and to ease Donna’s mind), I would balance Mom’s checkbook every month. Invariably there were quite a few checks to Kroger each month. Sometimes it was 4 or 5 times a week and I would kid Mom about the frequency of Kroger trips. Well right now the shoe is on the other foot.

We have been living in Fairview for a month now and there is a Fred Meyer (a Kroger company) just under 2 miles from home. In these past 31 days we have shopped there 20 of them. There were actually 25 visits all told. One was just for gas and one was a pharmacy pickup trip.

Some of the first few were basically house setup, like groceries that we couldn’t pack in the move and stuff that was nearly used up so intentionally left behind. And I will have to admit that a quite few of the trips were to buy organizing supplies and home decor that might have been better bought elsewhere, but hey fuel points are a strong draw.

For reference, last year during the same time frame (10/10 to 11/9) we visited the Fred Meyer in Klamath Falls, a trip of just over 2 miles, just 10 times. I’m sure that pretty soon we will have settled down into that smaller visit rate.

Maybe That Is Why It Was On Sale

When we packed up our stuff in Klamath Falls for our move to Fairview we left behind a bunch of stuff we didn’t think we’d need anymore. We also left several items that, while still serviceable, we wanted to buy new to get something newer or better.

One item we left behind was our Dyson Upright Ball Vacuum. It was one of the first things we bought when we moved into the house in Klamath Falls. It had served us well for nearly 4 years, but recently it had started to sound like a fighter’s jet engine on shutdown when we turned it off.

This time when it came to buying a new vacuum, I wanted to stick in the Dyson camp, but get a smaller one without a cord. After doing a little online searching I found a V8 Origin at Target that was on sale for about $100 compared to its regular price of little over $400.

After about a week of using it, the fancy Motorbar cleaner head would randomly not spin. It got progressively worse so that it would only work a tenth of the time, so I Googled “dyson v8 power head not working” and got several YouTube solutions to the problem. The trouble was that none of those actually applied to my particular model or my generation.

Most of the solutions recommend cleaning the contacts that run from the motor section down to the brush head. I looked at them and they don’t look dirty at all. Maybe I should get some electrical contact cleaner and spray it liberally at all the places along the way…

Tay-Tray

Not only is the NFL cashing in on the most talked about famous people romance since Ben-ifer (Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez.) Amazon Prime Video is trying to capitalize…

Here is a screen grab I snagged while looking for something to watch yesterday: