Rants

For Those Of You Keeping Track

In a near repeat of what occurred last October the water heater in the laundry room is dripping from the drain valve on the bottom. It started while we were away last week and when we got home the floor and throw rug was partially wet.

Yesterday I drained the water heater and unscrewed the plastic “valve” hoping a simple o-ring would fix it. Nope. It was some sort of molded in seal that was not broken, but it did seem worn. With no plumbing supply places open on Sunday I put it all back together and left a bucket under the drain. This morning it was still dripping, but at a greatly reduced rate.

Stopped at a place on the way home and asked for a new drain valve and the fellow handed me a plain old hose connection type valve. He said just use this. So, wouldn’t you know it, when I got home, just like in November of last year, it had stopped leaking on it’s own. FM.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 123

That’s Sneaky!

On today’s trip to the airport to retrieve Donna’s aunt I stopped into the book/magazine store and browsed around. I checked out all the car magazines, but I had seen most of them and the others I will see thanks to friendly co-workers. But there on the bottom shelf was was one called MPH, I hadn’t ever seen it before. Intrigued, I picked it up, that there was a photo of the new Miata didn’t hurt. I read the table of contents and bought it. On page 36 is an article called GPS Explained and they had this tag line to entice you to read it: How does it know where you are when you have no clue? They seem to be shooting for all irreverent humor, all the time. Maybe you kids love that, but I find a little goes along way. Not that I’m offended by some of the non-PC humor, I like it, but I think it might wear thin over time. When Maxim magazine first came out I subscribed and looked forward to every issue for the first nine months, then not so much. I let my subscription lapse.

Speaking of subscriptions, my copy of the magazine had 6 blow-ins begging you to subscribe to MPH. 10 issues, each only $10.00* Right below that they tell you it is $9.97* for a 10 issue year. So they rounded a little. There’s that asterisk again. If you look to the bottom of the card and the other asterisk you find that it says *Plus $2 shipping and handling. That’s sneaky. I think that is the first time I’ve seen them add a S&H charge to a magazine subscription (at least for US residents for US magazines.)

Check out a sample of their style at www.mphmagazineonline.com, might be right up your alley.

Squelch A Little High

I’m in my second season of listening to the Red Sox baseball game on the Internet. Something changed this year, the WEEI broadcast I get from MLB.com has got annoying sound gaps. Spots of silence between the calls from the announcers. When they are speaking, you hear them and the murmur of the crowd in the background, when they stop, nothing. It is very disconcerting. I wrote to the radio station via their contacts page:
As a transplanted New Englander and lifelong Red Sox fan imagine how overjoyed I was to realize I could listen to the Sox on the radio via the Internet. I listened to practically every game last year once I discovered Gameday Audio at MLB.com.

I signed up again this year too. But what the heck is wrong with your broadcast on MLB.com this year. It sounds like it is breaking up. The abrupt silences are annoying. Did you go to voice activated mikes or something? It is not my connection (I have cable Internet) as I can listen to any other game and their broadcasts are fine. I have taken to listening to the Red Sox games using the visiting clubs radio stations.

Try and imagine the pain, as tonight I an listening to WCBS…

Their response came quickly:
You’ll have to deal with MLB on that. We provide them with a clean feed. What they do with it, to be honest, we have no idea.

I think there is an email address on their website to contact them with regards to problems like this.

I appreciate your interest and am sorry you haven’t gotten the quality you’re looking for.

So to play the game, I wrote to MLB.com via their contact page. I quoted both the above emails and added more descriptions of my attempts to test and solve this on my own. When I hit submit, the screen flashed and I was right back on the contacts page with all the entry boxes blank. I wonder if they got my missive? I didn’t get directed to a conformation page…I’ll keep you posted.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 95

Recent Is A Relative Term

If you look to the right, just under Sturgeon’s Law, you will see a new addition – a list of Radio Paradise‘s Recently Played Songs. Some helpful soul over on the RP forums created a file that scrapes the recently played page and turns it into a feed. Now all that was needed was a way to display that info on my page.

First I tried the RSSFeed plugin. After a bit wrestling I got it to work, with one bugaboo, the only time it updated (read the feed) was when I rebuilt the index page. Not refreshed, rebuilt, as in posting an entry. This meant if you checked my blog in the afternoon, the songs listed as recently played would have been heard about 20 hours before. I guess if you are a rock, that is real recent, but in human terms that is like so yesterday. And in Internet terms, with recent meaning milliseconds, that is unacceptable.

The second attempt is using another plugin, GETXML that looked promising. It took a little more monkeying that the previous plugin to get going, but I persevered. Unfortunately it exhibits the same behavior as RSSFeed.

Some Movable Type forum searching turned up another plugin that might help either of the first by forcing a rebuild of the index file at predetermined intervals. That would keep the file list updated and recent. But I can’t seem to find it listed in the Plugins Directory and quite frankly, I’m getting tired of messing with this thing that probably has no redeeming value to anyone.*

Put The Lime In The Coke, You Nut

About 2 weeks ago I got a really sharp pain when eating some pop corn. The next day I called the dentist to set up an appointment to have him look at it. The appointment was for the next week, but before it came around I got a hacking cough that would have made dental work nigh impossible, so I put it off for another week. Besides it only hurt a little if I chewed on that side.

The appointment was for this coming Thursday. Apparently the big pain was me cracking a tooth, as yesterday while munching on some peanut M&M’s (the Jedi mix) I completed the destruction and cracked off about 1/4 of ol’ #3. I thought that bite was kind of crunchy.

Although once the tooth is broke the pain goes away and I told them I could wait until my original Thursday appointment, they had a cancellation this afternoon, so in I went. The temporary is in place and I had to swear on a stack of bibles that there would not be a repeat of last August before they would let me out the door.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 87

Watch Where You Point That Thing

This morning Donna and I went to Columbia, SC to watch some friend’s kid play in a baseball tournament. He plays on an 11 & under “traveling” team that seems to play in these tournaments every other weekend all over the state.

Gotta run into bucks. They have two different complete uniforms, there is an entrance fee for the team to get in, meals and if it is more than 100 miles away there are hotel rooms. The place we went to today charged $5 a head to get in. The players get in for free (if you don’t count the entrance fee,) but parents and sibling have to pay to watch. Priced an aluminum bat recently, the $20 bat from Wal-Mart won’t cut it, the bat they want costs about a hundred and a half. Most of them have their own custom air brushed batting helmets.

I don’t know if the team picked up the tab for it, or a parent bought it, but both teams seemed to have a small radar gun that they used to track the opposing team’s pitcher’s speed. I’m sure the level of microwave energy coming from these things is low, but if my kid was a pitcher, he’d have a metal lined cup for his jockstrap. Wouldn’t want to take any chances with his still developing family jewels. 🙂

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 87

Impressive Junk Mail

This happened yesterday morning and then when blogging time rolled around in the evening I had forgot all about it (why I remembered tonight is a mystery.)

Donna was in the kitchen when a UPS truck pulled into our driveway. Sarcastically she said, “Go ahead Mr. UPS Truck, feel free to use our driveway to turn around.” Whenever they delivery stuff to us they just park in the street and traipse across the front lawn. She then said to me, “Go to the door he is brining something to us. Are we expecting anything?” As I headed to the door I replied, “Who knows?” At any given time there is a pretty good chance we expecting something and it turns out we are, just not what he had for us this morning.

As I opened the door he handed me a large envelope and promptly spun around back to his truck. As I walked back towards the kitchen Donna asked, “Well, what is it?” “An envelope and it is from CitiMortgage,” I answered. Our mortgage had changed hands to Citi several months back so we both wondered what this might be about, they were selling our note again, they decided to call in the note, we were late on a payment, what?

Well inside that UPS delivered envelope was a come-on to refinance our mortgage with them! They were offering 6.05 vs. our current 6.5%. As an incentive they were also offering $500 off our closing costs. They were promising about a hundred buck a month saving, before figuring in the closing costs remaining after they chipped in their portion. Thanks, but no thanks. Gotta give it to them, sure was impressive to have it UPS delivered.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 85