Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Sloganeering

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“Women’s health issues” is not a specific organism; it is a marketing slogan.

“Women’s health issues” is Beltway new-speak for abortion rights because liberals are afraid they might offend their three anti-choice voters.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that every liberal Congress Critter is anti-choice and every conservative Congress Critter is pro-choice. The trouble is, the only choice We the OverTaxed people get is the choice the Congress Critters say we can have.)

Last week “Clean Energy” (new-speak for “we-have-to-burn-coal-in-our-Prius-even-if-we-don’t-mean-it”) was the buzzword. Clean energy is not a specific means to generate power; it is the marketing slogan for those who would harness the political might of the “acceptable” kind of taxation.

Week before, “Climate Chaos” (new-new-speak for “global warming”) was the buzzword. Climate chaos is not a specific science; it is the marketing slogan for those who would harness the political might of the carbocalypse.

Rather than having real discussions about the cost of government, energy and energy policy, or actual science, politicians give us slogan after slogan after slogan.

“With the right slogans I could even sell the ShamWOW™,” pitchman Billy Mays might have said. And politicians.

Nero’s cohort in Congress blinked on Friday. Every last one of them. Their behavior this year had already shown us they have no brains. Now we know they also have no balls.

Down around South Puffin, everybody’s chewing on Key Colony Beach Mayor Ron Sutton. He didn’t blink, see.

Key Colony Beach is a tiny city (population 744) and the heart of the Florida Keys. It is not smallest city in the Florida Keys or the nation; the first honor belongs to Layton with its total population of 186. Lost Springs, a town found in Converse County, Wyoming, had a population of one as of 2000 but the City of Greenhorn, Oregon, population 0, has real trouble financing a bucket truck. According to factfinder.census.gov, the population count for Greenhorn City, Oregon, is currently unavailable.

About 50 miles from Key West and twice that from the United States, Key Colony Beach is one of the few spots where the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean shake hands right outside your door.

Back on April Fool’s Day (my anniversary, in case anyone forgot) the KCB commissioners decided to replace the city bucket truck. They budgeted, as municipalities often do, “up to $24,400.” (The city has equipment reserves of $24,482 for trucks plus $9,685 for road equipment).

Mayor Sutton went to an auction in Riviera Beach, found a great truck, and bought it for $30,800 including the 10% buyer’s fee.

I priced a new Ford Ranger as a Key limes to lemons comparison. The base price was $18,050 but as shown, a wee bit more at $26,780. Most of the “as shown” items were fairly necessary. At least I usually consider seats and an engine necessary. And it didn’t have a bucket. Bucket seats don’t count.

Mayor Sutton decided this truck was a better buy for the city than a new Ranger. If the commission did not approve, he said, he would make up the extra expense out of his own pocket.

That’s putting your money where your mouth is. No slogans required.

That truck seems to have cost each resident $41.39. Sounds like a deal to me.

Say, Ron? Can I borrow the truck tomorrow? I need to get up on my roof to hoist this sculpture in the direction of Washington…

ObamaMathematics NGC 3372
sculpture prototypes

Speaking of expenditures, my son bought a “new TV and a six-pack of Sam” over the weekend.

He bought Sam Adams beer? That seems pretty extravagant.

Heck of a job, Brownie!

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If I lived in Gaza, I’d surely be peeved.

Long ago in the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick there hatched a plot to tap the unbelievable nation-building largesse the United States grants to pretty much anyone whom we bomb into the stone age.

The Palestinians, knowing this story, have been lobbing bombs and rocks and bullets as far as they could fling them (Israel) for 63 years or so and all that happens is that Israel spanks them.

Along come some rabble rousers in Libya (we don’t know who they are). About 63 minutes later, we send in the Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop (for a war that isn’t a war). Haliburton should be on the ground there with concrete trucks and “advisors” in six weeks.

We’re making a big mistake in Gaza as well as the North African nations now undergoing civil war. We ought not send in private contractors. We should show the entire region how the United States of America really builds nations.

It’s time to send in the big guns.

It’s time to send in FEMA.




Broke

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Don got me thinking about fixing or tossing stuff (we call it “repair or replace” now, because that’s how we roll). I grabbed a long-favorite 10-year old shirt this morning and noticed the cuffs are fraying. I suppose racer tape will keep that from being too too noticeable but I need to find my roll with the pale red, blue, green and white stripes to keep peeps from remarking on the tape.

Anyway, I never bought a netbook but I do have a Palm Tungsten T and a pellet stove.

Both broke.

Even if I hadn’t lived in Vermont (motto: Bet ya can’t name two of our towns) for more years than anywhere else in my life, so far, I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. My loft is living proof. When we moved here, I brought 30,000 pounds in two moving vans and still had to tow the race car behind my truck. When my parents and grandfather moved out of the family home, I got the rest of the family history.

New Vermont motto: If Harper can’t find it in the attic, you don’t need it.

When I “upgraded” to Windows 7, it immediately orphaned my Palm PDA. The Palm still works perfectly well but the Palm HotSync™ app won’t load and my calendar and address book sync doesn’t.

Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, really really used to believe in fixing things.

I have tried to “fix” the Palm. I still have some hope but it is on the shelf for now. Meanwhile, it got cold in here.

The pellet stove has been difficult all this heating season. It all started when Anne noticed the fire was “doming” in the firepot. The dome threatened to pus fire back into the pellet poop chute. Not a good thing. Pellet stoves put out very little ash and what ash this one did make seemed to form a dome instead of flying out of the firepot like good ash should. I was down to South Puffin at the time and couldn’t tell if our new pellet supplier caused the problem or that the forced combustion air system wasn’t forcing enough (or any) air. The combustion fan ran but Anne couldn’t detect any air going through the firebox. Trouble was, we had no way of knowing if that meant there wasn’t any air going through the firebox or just that Anne couldn’t detect any air moving.

I have tinkered with it, cleaned it, and even invented new parts for it for most of the past couple of months. The fire kept doming. On Friday, the automatic pellet feeder stopped feeding pellets. And I’ve washed my hands entirely too many times, although not of the stove.

Wood ash gets into everything. I should have remembered that.

I thought I was doing a good job cleaning the stove but I took it apart this weekend. Something was blocking the air flow and by golly I was going to find it. I found hideyholes I didn’t even know existed. And to find them, I disassembled things I wasn’t sure actually came apart. I even had to RTM.

That’s why I had to keep washing my hands. Wood ash and soot gets into everything.

The right “brick” — it’s actually cast iron — in the firebox hides a passage to the flue. The brick should come out by pulling it up and then towards the front of the stove. The peeps who designed this thing and wrote the manual obviously never worked on a stove after it had been in operation.

Got the brick out. Lots of dust and soot and ash buildup clogging everything. Lots.

I took a bucket load of the dust and soot and ash out of the stove, learned a bit more about how it works, and discovered that it goes back together a whole lot better when clean than it came apart when clogged.

On to the feed auger which was what started this entire exercise.

I cleaned out the feeder tube and the auger still didn’t turn. When I say “cleaned out the feeder tube” I ain’t whistling Dixie. Our vacuum cleaner apparently has an Express Mode on the hose operation which sucked a magnet off the refrigerator at 50 paces. It made short work of the pellets in the tube. Pretty simple operation that. Suck, let some fall past the screw, suck more. A quick look with a mirror showed shiny metal everywhere so I pushed the start button. Ignition and combustion air but no pellet feed. I could hear and feel the feed motor running.

Turns out I looked too quickly.

A better look with a mirror showed some pellets still hiding up in the northeast corner, sort of jammed between the screw and the square corner (square corner???) of the tube. Wiggling the screw didn’t move them and the gear motor made it impossible to turn the screw. I couldn’t even bend a tool up to them, including the ubiquitous coat hanger.

Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, are ingenious about finding solutions. I called Anne.

Anne fixed it.

I had given her bad instructions for disassembling the auger assembly back when we were trying to clear jams over the phone but she made ’em work anyway. I asked her to show me what she had done to clear the feed tube jams. She wasn’t able to pull the motor-and-brackets-and-auger out of the tube but she unbolted it and could turn it through almost a full rotation and that cleared it.

We have fire thanks to our own ingenuity.

But I AM™ ashamed to admit I replaced the Palm with an iPod Touch.

Teed Off

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Which may be little different than “peed on.” AT&T said it will buy T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom. The $39 billion cash-and-stock deal would make T the largest cellphone company in the U.S.

I don’t much care. I went back to the dark side last month.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do hold AT&T and Verizon Wireless stock, some of which I inherited and some I bought myself.

Despite that, I was a semi-loyal T-Mobiley customer ever since the lovely Layla sold me a RAZR with a promise of a $50 rebate at a home show a couple-three years ago. See, AT&T had no presence in Vermont (or many, many, many other places) and I had had bad experiences with Verizon.

Of course, I’ve had bad experiences with T-Mobiley, too, starting with the fact that they charged me twice for the RAZR and ending with them trying to charge me twice for my last month of service.

That hasn’t been the only issue.

Both AT&T and T-Mobile use “GSM” to broadcast your conversation. That’s good for the merger. So does Canada’s Rogers Wireless. That’s not. In fact, the Global System for Mobile Communications is the world’s most popular standard for mobile telephone systems with about 80% of the global market. Subscribers on GSM-based networks can use their phones pretty much anywhere in the world, including Canada. For a slight additional roaming fee.

Up here next to the longest unprotected border in the world, T-Mobiley and AT&T users routinely find themselves roaming onto Rogers. That Canadian service often overruns the weaker T-Mobile or Cell-One signal in North Puffin. I often did the cellphone dance in the driveway here because one can’t make cell calls on that service from inside the house. And the dance was sometimes with an alien.

The first time that happened, T-Mobile charged me International fees. I protested. They showed me how to set the phone to select only the specific local carrier and gave me a refund.

The second time it happened, T-Mobile charged me International fees. I protested. I told them I had already set the phone to select only the specific local carrier. They shrugged.

The third time it happened, I knew not to make a call. I still dope-slapped them. I told them I had already set the phone to select only the specific local carrier. They shrugged.

After that, I stopped trying to make calls from my driveway.

T-Mobile recently started getting smart when it detected my RAZR was saying “eh?” to the Canadian towers. They sent me text messages (on the International roaming rates) to tell me I might incur extra charges.

Uh huh. Verizon uses CDMA, a different standard for mobile telephone systems. I haven’t seen the Rogers towers on my cell display since I switched. And I can make calls from inside the house now.

“AT&T is already a giant in the wireless marketplace, where customers routinely complain about hidden charges and other anticonsumer practices,” Parul P. Desai, policy counsel for Consumers Union, told the NY Times. “From a consumer’s perspective, it’s difficult to come up with any justification or benefits from letting AT&T swallow up one of its few major competitors.”

For the record, T-Mobile and AT&T aren’t the only ones with what we’ll call “billing issues.” Regular readers may recall that I needed a phone timer to record my Verizon landline calls because their local usage bills never once came within 10% of the total shown in the log. Not once. My previous experience with Verizon Wireless was exactly the same.

From this consumer’s perspective, I don’t expect to see much change. Prices will go up. Customer service will go down. But hey! You T-Mobiley folks will get the iPhone!

ICE

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Not U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Not the Internet Communications Engine.

Not criminally beautiful jewelry.

Not rocks.

Diamonds are forever but frozen water may last only until the Summer sun comes up.

Ice is simply water frozen into a solid state. Simple.

Except it is one of our more complex phenomena. It can be strong enough to drive a truck across and fragile enough to break under the weight of a twig. It is the only non-metallic liquid that expands when it freezes. It is slippery when wet. And it can be wet at most winter temps.

Ice is slippery because the surface ice molecules can’t bond properly with the molecules of the rest of the ice so they act just like liquid water. The lubrication they offer is nearly as effective as the 5W-30 in your car engine.

People all over these United States have complained about the ice this year. Here in Vermont, we’re in the middle of the third snowiest winter on record, thanks to the third largest snowfall that fell just last week. Here in North Puffin we added about 20 inches to our base; Jay Peak added feet. Snow is just puffy ice and when it hunkers down, that ice has stalled plow trucks and utility crews and made walking to the University Mall a trial. My own feet went out from under me once a few years ago as I carried a load of firewood in.

  • Black ice is nearly invisible on macadam roads.
  • Harbor ice crushes boats and stops commerce.
  • Ice can change aircraft wings and control surfaces and puncture the fuel tanks of rockets.
  • Ice can slow or stop a jet engines.
  • Icebergs didn’t actually sink the Titanic (hubris did) but we know now a little frozen water can pry the bottom off a surface ship and the top off a submarine.
  • Icing blocks the supply of air to a carbureted or fuel injected engine and cause it to fail.

My great-grandfather cut ice on Westtown Lake. He stored it through the summer in sawdust and ashes in a ten-sided ice house he built of cedar planks on a terrace above our home. That is the same technology Persian engineers used in 400 BC in the middle of the desert summer. Refrigeration made the cooling tunnel he built to store and separate milk — and ice collection and delivery — obsolete.

People around the world love ice, and not just to cool drinks or cool home made ice cream makers.

  • Ice as a fire starter: carve it into a lens to focus sunlight on kindling.
  • Ice as a musical instrument: ice drums are all over youtube; don’t lick your lips before blowing an ice horn though.
  • Ice in medicine: it will decrease blood flow which reduces swelling and pain.
  • Ice as a road: frozen rivers and lakes were once the easiest form of transportation; now they can be the only way to move supplies in the Arctic.

North Puffin sits directly on the shores of the no-longer-Great-but-still-pretty-darned-good-Lake-Champlain. Hard water out there, still. Ice is crucial to Vermont. Visitors come from around the world for our ice skating, ice hockey, ice fishing, ice climbing, curling, broomball and bobsled, luge, and skeleton racing. Not to mention skiing and boarding. And sugar on snow.

Burlington Harbor was still iced in as of Saturday evening but I saw open water in the Missisquoi River (upstream of the ice jams, of course) over the weekend. The plowed driveway here is largely clear and the only plowed lawn path that still has ice is the one at the bottom of the dooryard hill alongside the porch. It may not melt down in this cycle since melt water collects there and will freeze again and again and again.

Arguably the most famous ice in Vermont is the ice that isn’t. Joe’s Pond is still frozen today in West Danville but it will melt sometime in the next month or two.

Jules Chatot started the Joe’s Pond Ice-Out Contest as a cabin fever palliative in the 1980s. Mr. Chatot’s family and friends would “use his camp there as deer camp in the dead of winter, or spring break in deep snow with howling winds and muddy roads.” Sooner or later anyone there would start betting on when the ice will go out? at Hastings Store. Mr. Chatot kept track of the guesses in “a little notebook he kept in his pocket.”

A few hundred people bought tickets the first year. A couple of years later, a database replaced Mr. Chatot’s little notebook. The game has grown steadily; more than 12,000 people all around the world bought tickets last year. Ed Bird from West Danville won the first year (April 26 at 12:31 p.m.). April 16 has been the earliest and May 6, 1992, the latest. The Ice-Out Contest underwrites the free Independence Day Fireworks display.

That said, I’ll just be glad when I don’t have to warm my underwear in front of the fire before I put it on.