Feb 14, 2009 | General
When we were in Scotland for several months we bought a cheap car for the duration and sold it before we left for home. Much cheaper than renting. Our wee Volvo (360 GLE, I think – if not, I’ll hear about it) took us all over the Highlands. We’d get in the car and just drive, taking small, mostly one-track roads to wherever they went, which was often right back where we started, sometimes hours later, and almost always a surprise. And every one of them was paved, no matter how narrow or how far out in the middle of seemingly nowhere they were. It’s a travel technique I highly recommend if one has the time. Just remember which side of the road you’re supposed to be on.
On one of our journeys I realized how often I looked at the speedometer when I noticed that the needle was resting on 0, and then noticed that I kept involuntarily looking at the speedometer for the rest of the trip. When we got back to our rented old gate lodge, C1 determined that the speedometer cable had broken. We needed that speedometer because we would have had a hard time selling the car without a working speedometer (MOT and all that), but I wasn’t willing to order and buy a new cable, especially since we were going to be leaving in less than a month. Instead, we searched for a junk yard.
We found one in Inverness (about 15 minutes from where we lived), where for the first time I saw cars stacked on top of each other. The stacks were four cars tall, and the cars were not crushed. Not knowing junk-yard etiquette in Scotland or if they’d object to having a young child wandering amid their stacks of cars and through their puddles of every manner and combination of automotive fluid, Captain OCD stayed in the car with C2 while C1 and I tried to determine where the office might be. There was a beat-up old trailer, maybe about 100 square feet, and a concrete (obviously fresh) pad or patio project that looked as if there’d been the threat of a domino-like crash of junk cars and the crew had been forced to abandon the job and run for their lives. Some of the formed-up squares had been surface finished, but others were only partially filled with concrete. Scattered about were buckets of drying concrete and concrete-encrusted tools. We saw no people in the yard.
There were a few small half-framed structures that suggested future walls, but we couldn’t find a door to the trailer. There was, however, a section of siding missing that exposed a narrow opening between two studs, so we squeezed through that into what looked to be an office of sorts. We asked the woman sitting there, who didn’t seem surprised to see two Americans squeeze through an opening in her wall, about looking in the yard and were told we could do so, but no one would help us because they were in the back having their tea. “In the back” was about five feet away, where we could just barely see, through the thick cloud of cigarette smoke, several very dirty guys – the kind of dirt one can acquire only when one doesn’t bathe or wash clothes for days at a time – sitting at a table. The space was so small that there was no room for cucumber sandwiches, scones, and Earl Grey for all the cigarettes and pint bottles. I’ve not found any examples of this type of tea in Tea with Jane Austen, but maybe it’s a Scottish thing.
They had abandoned their concrete job for their tea break. If you’ve never worked with concrete, that’s a little like pouring half the batter in a cake pan when the tea-break whistle blows and putting the half-full pan in the oven with the intention of taking it out and pouring the rest of the batter in the pan after your break is over. Except that you can’t because the batter left in the bowl has solidified into, you know, concrete.
We found our donor car, the second in a stack of four, which made it easy to work under the car, but a bit dodgy to get inside to open the hood and work at the speedometer-end of the cable. But that’s what 14 year olds are for. My job was to stand there and will the car to not fall off or have the cars on top of it collapse. And to tell him to hurry. Tools would have been nice, but C1 found a bar with which to whack parts apart, so we made do. Because the lack of tools precluded any delicate wrenching, he removed more than the cable, but the one guy we finally noticed in the big shed, where all the tools were, didn’t seem to mind, or to pay us any attention whatsoever.
When we got back to our gate lodge C1 installed the cable and we sold the car for not much less than what we’d paid for it. In the process, I, a big fan of junk yards that give customers the run of the place, gained one of my favorite memories of our time in the Scottish Highlands.
Feb 5, 2009 | General
I took this during the last eclipse (I’m too lazy to look up when that was). This is at about 1:30 AM, with no outside light source: no street lights, no house lights. It’s a 10-second exposure on a pretty basic camera at pretty basic settings and I haven’t edited the photo other than for size. It really was this bright outside.
Feb 2, 2009 | General
You’ve heard of a unicorn chaser? Here’s a penguin chaser because I’ve found it physically impossible to not at least smile while watching penguins waddle. We don’t often see photos or videos of penguins in the absence of snow or ice, outside of zoos. It looks like they’ve walked through the fence before. C2 took this in Patagonia and you can hear how windy it was.
Feb 1, 2009 | Whinging
When interacting with people who hold in their corporate policies, subject to their whims, the ability to fix your broken technology and perhaps stretch the constraints of your extended warranty (which has paid for itself several times over), it helps to make it apparent (subtlety works best here) that you know at least a little bit about the problem at hand. Especially with those staffing the Genius Bar at an Apple Store. Some of them are nice, helpful, and not condescending, but that’s a hat trick not found in most of them. And who can blame them, what with Genius Bar in huge letters on the wall above their heads and a crowd of supplicants milling about the store, waiting like brain-washed Steve Jobs acolytes for a few minutes in the exalted presence of a designated Genius? I’d have a hard time reining it in if I were referred to as a genius all day: “A Genius will be with you in about two hours. [And we know full well that you will wait, without complaining.]” “Sorry, we’re just waiting for an available Genius.” “Hold on, let me find a Genius and ask her.”
I can usually figure out software and firmware fixes, but there are a number of physical problems with C2’s MacBook. We asked a few questions; the Genius smiled and said a bunch of words that resembled answers but weren’t. I began mentally formulating a plan to get what we wanted by demonstrated that I’m not a complete rookie, so don’t think you’re going to get away with telling me that there is hair and dirt sandwiched in front of the screen but too bad for me because you can’t fix it because it’s one piece and the stuff is in there, inaccessible to the user, because that’s the way the computers were made because Apple couldn’t very well glue down the bezel because there are a bunch of tabs and clips and that’s why the new MacBooks don’t have bezels but are one piece out to the edge and the only way to keep it from happening is to clean the outside of your screen often. Yes, he said that, albeit with more punctuation. First, how stupid do you think I am that I might believe that it’s possible for dust and hair to get between a computer screen and its protective cover if it’s one piece? Has Apple been experimenting with osmosis, too? Second, the construction details of the new MacBook are entirely irrelevant here, and you’ve just admitted that it’s a problem that was fixed in the new models. Third, I’m not an idiot and didn’t suggest that Apple should have glued down the bezels, you can see that my screen is nice and clean, and, in fact, frequent cleaning of the screen is more likely to push debris under the bezel and in my field of vision, you self-important prick. Fourth, you don’t have any bezels in stock because you have to replace them so often under warranty, which I know because your store has had to replace mine once before for just this reason.
I’m at a disadvantage at an Apple Store because, while I know something about PCs, I know next to nothing abut Macs. We wanted to know about backup utilities, but all I know about backup utilities for Macs is what I’ve Googled. I like to supplement information searches with personal endorsements, so we asked the Genius what the best way to back up a Mac was. He said he used Time Machine in Leopard. He’d been looking at the computer, so I shouldn’t have needed to tell him that the computer doesn’t have Leopard on it. Instead, I told him, it has “Safari.”
This morning I woke up in very nearly a cold sweat: Safari? That’s like asking a bartender for his opinion on the best way to make a margarita and he says he prefers a blender. To which you answer, “That won’t work for me because I don’t have a blender. I have a curling iron.” Scratch the above: You’ll find me at the Idiot Bar.
Jan 29, 2009 | General
This is not the cat’s bed:
Jan 29, 2009 | Captain OCD
This one’s for you, Stacey.
This morning Captain OCD had some time on his hands before he went to work, so he made each of us some breakfast. Mine was scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, and cleverly arranged mandarin orange segments, all waiting for me when I got up, after he’d left for work. Sweet, I know. I have asked him several times if he would like me to get up in the morning when he does and his answer is always a revealingly hasty and slightly panicked “No! That’s okay, you sleep.” I am not offended because I know I’d get in the way and he’s done just fine so far without my help in pointing out possible shortcomings in his lunch-making techniques.
His breakfast was more along the lines of a Spanish omelet, which probably would not be sanctioned by our former Spanish exchange student because it typically consists of everything in the refrigerator plus hot sauce. He had to decide how many eggs to use and I can eat about half an egg in the morning before it makes me queasy, but scrambling half an egg isn’t feasible. That, however, was not the conundrum: He had some serious egg-carton balancing issues to wrestle with. I buy eggs at Costco, two dozen per carton. Lucky for him, we happened to have an extra full carton in the refrigerator, which provided him with more options, but presented somewhat more of a cognitive burden. He had to take an inventory of both egg cartons combined, then determine the number of eggs to scramble, without wasting too much, given my wimpy egg-eating ability, so that he was left with a number that would allow an equitable and balanced distribution of eggs across both cartons. He might have wanted a four-egg omelet, but spatial considerations limited him to a three-egg omelet.
I did not ask how long this process took, but he was eager to show me his solution when he got home. One can only imagine what the reaction on his face would have been if he’d opened the egg cartons to discover that I’d used some eggs during the day, not realizing the effort he’d put into balancing both cartons at once. Now I can cross “worrying about egg-carton symmetry” right off my list.
