Two Ells » Miscellaneous

Target

Daryl L. L. Houston — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 01:47:30 +0000

On a connection in Seattle on the way home from Victoria, I dropped by the restroom for a quick pit stop, and I noticed on the wall of the urinal something that looked like a little sticker, sort of a crudely drawn spiral shape roughly the size of a quarter in diameter. It struck me after my initial puzzlement that this was a target designed for gentlemen to aim at, probably in hopes of keeping them from peeing all over the floor (which is really bad for floor finish over time). I’ve read of this trick before, though I think the example I had been exposed to in print was a fly.

Although I was conscious of the intention and had a contrarian urge to break with expectations and pee anywhere but on the target, I found myself unable to resist the temptation. Even while considering things like the possibility that I was part of some filmic sociological experiment the privacy ramifications of which would be hairy to say the least, I trained my stream almost proudly on the little spiral, striving never to miss the mark (quite literally).

Needless to say, the trick was effective and my aim impeccable.

When I visited the urinal in Chicago, I found myself a little disappointed to have no particular target to aim for.

Fixing your Whirlpool dryer timer

Daryl L. L. Houston — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:12:04 +0000

For probably close to a year now, our dryer has failed to shut off on its own. We discovered this one night in the wee hours when laundry that had been started before bedtime was still going hours later. Ever since then, we’ve just been very careful about shutting the dryer off manually. This has no doubt cost us lots of energy, as if you forget for an hour to turn it off, you continue to consume gas that winds up adding up to a $350 January power bill. Finally, prompted by my friend Dave’s repair of his washing machine, I googled around a bit and diagnosed the problem as a bad timer. If you start a timed drying cycle and the timer dial doesn’t ever move, chances are that your timer is busted.

My dryer is a Whirlpool model LER5620KQ1, and I was able to find schematics and an online distributor whom i ultimately didn’t patronize because I wasn’t confident the transaction would be secure. When I called the number listed on the site, I got the wholesaler that drop ships parts to the distributor, and I wound up buying from them. I placed the order yesterday morning, and the part arrived (with standard shipping) today shortly after lunch (I think they shipped from Alabama, and I gather there must be a direct route from some UPS hub there to one in Knoxville). This evening, I installed the part, and I now have a dryer that stops when it’s supposed to.

The install was easy but would have been much easier with a hex nut screwdriver. First, you take six or sevens small hex screws out of a panel on the back of the dryer (not terribly efficient when you have to use a pair of pliers to do it because you don’t have a wrench small enough) and remove the panel. Then you pull the timer knob off the front and remove a screw that anchors the timer in from the front. Next you remove two screws anchoring the timer in from behind. Then you look at the seven or eight colored wires and start to go look for some paper to draw a diagram on when you notice that conveniently taped to the horizontal surface inside the back of the washer is a little sheet of schematics that includes a diagram of how the timer wires should connect. I had a little trouble pulling the wires off of the timer because I was afraid I’d break them with brute force, but ultimately I just had to be a little less ginger with the connectors. Once I got the wires off, it was a quick matter of attaching them to the new timer and reversing the disassembly process. It took me 20 – 30 minutes start to finish but would have taken five minutes had I had the hex screwdriver and not been afraid to give the wires a good firm pull to disconnect.

The part costs around $60 (plus shipping) and would have cost about the same (minus shipping but plus 9.25% sales tax) from a local shop that was out of my way and would have required me to miss work to drive to during their business hours.

It’s been a Mr. Fixit kind of week for me, as last weekend I installed a new faucet in our half bath, replaced air filters throughout the house, replaced the water filter in our fridge, and purchased materials to insulate our hot water heater in a continuing battle against the high cost of not living a miserable cold existence. I now hear a smoke detector chirping at me as if to remind me that if I don’t divert some attention its way, my existence may wind up very warm indeed.

Which milk?

Daryl L. L. Houston — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:56:55 +0000

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Beerfest

Daryl L. L. Houston — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:24:05 +0000

This year, I went to the Knoxville Brewer’s Jam for the first time in my nearly nine years in Knoxville (this was its 13th year). I can’t help calling it the beerfest, thanks to that movie I didn’t have an adequate pain threshold to watch. I’m usually too cheap to spring $25 to go drink beer, my general philosophy being that I could get a lot more beer to drink in the comfort of my own home for $25 than I’d get milling about like a cow with a bunch of other drunken cows for the same price. And all in all, I think my instinct has been more or less right, except that you can find beers at this event that you won’t find on a daily basis, and I’m less likely to see a guy in lederhosen in my house unless I’ve drunk really entirely too much beer and chased it with some hallucinogens.

I was on a mission today to try stout beers, and I was really disappointed that there weren’t more. I’ve been turned on lately to the Highland Brewery’s oatmeal porter, which I can get at my local Kroger, and I had high hopes for their stout, but they didn’t bring any. I had their Gaelic ale instead, and it was good but was no stout. I was delighted to find that Rogue Ales had a booth, and I had two glasses of their Shakespeare Stout (which I had previously had and really liked at Barley’s here in Knoxville), but I was disappointed that they didn’t have any of their Chocolate Stout, which would have been a new one to me. Probably my most memorable beer of the day was the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery’s milk stout, which is brewed with highly toasted hops and lactose, which gives the beer a slightly milky smell (unless my olfactory sense was tricked by my reading the blurb) and a very slight sweetness that balances the toasted hops very nicely (that’s how Dave put it, at least, and it sounded about right to me). I liked this one enough that I wrote the brewer a quick note when I got home.

I tried a number of pale ales and IPAs and one ESB, and I was generally pretty cold to them. Some were decent, but a number of them had a flatness to them that just made them not very interesting to me.

Even with pre-purchased tickets, we had to wait in a 45-minute line to get into the event, and though I didn’t have to wait in line for my first beer, lines got harder to manage as more people arrived and especially as brewers started running out of beer and the choices narrowed. After about three hours, it became unpleasant to weave through the crowd and stand in line with increasingly glazed-eyed people jockeying for positions in the decreasingly available queues. I’m glad I went, and I enjoyed it (in spite of a near-altercation in the porta-potty line the end result of which was my basically sprinting to get to the john before a guy in what can properly be called nothing other than a non-event-sanctioned stealth line got there, enough to his chagrin that I emerged from the potty prepared thankfully in vain both to receive and administer a punch, my alternative after negotiating the 20-minute bathroom line being to stand there a grown man and piss my corduroy pants, which dire straits made running to the potty no small feat, let me tell you). Chances are good that I’ll go again. But honestly, I’d probably rather spend $25 on micro-brews and invite a few friends to bring $25 worth of microbrews apiece over and sit in the comfort of my own home to try them out.

Tags: beer

The first beast

Daryl L. L. Houston — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:31:30 +0000

For the past few weeks, I’ve been carrying my camera with me everywhere I’ve gone in hopes of snapping a photo of this guy. I saw him a couple of times on a corner on my route to and from the gym, and I was curious about what he was peddling. I have to say that displaying a big sign like this on a busy corner isn’t the best way to get your message out. I was never able to read it. Of course, he also has a little microphone setup, but I was never able to hear him (thanks, Doppler). He also has, um, a dummy whose mouth he moves as he talks. It’s all very intriguing.

The other day, I saw him and was able to read something about Noah’s having received a revelation and using his ark as the instrument for its fulfillment. The sign also said something about his (street corner guy) dummy being the instrument for his revelation’s fulfillment. Or something like that.

Mleeka recently got a few pictures of him, and in one of them, you can get the gist of one side of his sign. Here’s my transcription (all obvious things sic):

God reveal to me the first beast over 23 years ago Revel.13 18 Ronald Wilsom Reagon 666. Also one of his seven heads or members was wounded unto death an was healed Revel.13.1,3 Now the second beast is out their an he is coming from this nation. Also he might be in power Now is know time for you to be living in sin. My friend turn unto the lord Jesus now people and he will save your soul. Jesus is the only way.

So, there you have it.

Fair and Balanced

Daryl L. L. Houston — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 10:07:51 +0000

I’m a busy guy and, while I’m interested in news and politics and would like to keep up with them, I’ve got other priorities. Accordingly, I’m always in danger of being over-credulous of what I do hear on the news (my primary news source being, ahem, The Daily Show). My mom and I have hashed this out before, and not (I think) without hurt feelings. Because I latched onto whatever liberal propaganda seemed probably at the time to be right, she accused me of not thinking critically. And because she bought whatever the Bush propaganda bureau spat out and smirked openly at any other input as part of the liberal media’s nefarious plot to turn the world into a bunch of Jesus-hating abortionists, I thought her view was a little narrow as well. (It’s vaguely possible that my recollection of her approach has been colored somewhat by a bruised ego at having my critical thinking skills questioned, whether or not I had, in this particular instance, showed myself to be in possession of an abundance of such skills.)

There is a difference, after all, between monitoring news sources oriented toward the opposite political spectrum than your own for the sake of being able to find a middle-ground approaching the truth and doing so for the sake of sneering at the sources and rejecting out of hand anything they have to say because there happens to be a Bush propaganda bureau come-back posted on the Freepers board. Maybe it’s not fair of me to suggest that anybody actually does this, or at any rate intends to do this.

Lucky for those of us short on time and patience, a purportedly non-partisan watchdog organization has emerged to call both parties to the carpet for their disinformation campaigns this year. Spinsanity today has featured such headlines as the following:

Cheney’s not-so-Freudian slips
From technically true to blatantly false
The myth of Kerry knowingly volunteering for dangerous duty lives on
The phony attack on Bush’s stem cell research “ban”

The first two items note some pretty blatant propaganda efforts on behalf of the Bush administration. The last two describe ways in which the Kerry campaign is at best equivocating and at worst exploiting a misunderstanding about Kerry’s war record. Everybody’s guilty, and nobody’s spared. This seems an ideal way of keeping track of who’s playing what tricks during this year’s campaign. It’s a way of getting (apparently) non-partisan information without having to stay tuned in to six networks with varying political affiliations in order to filter out the noise and have a halfway decent chance at evaluating the candidates based on their merits rather than on what lies the other side happens to be telling about them.

I rather doubt anything I read at Spinsanity is going to change my mind about whom I’m voting for. It’d take a pretty big piece of dug-up dirt to do that. But reading the headlines does make me feel a little better about my level of credulity, as if I’m doing at least a little diligence rather than voting for one guy (who may or may not be a douchebag) because I happen to think based on the Jesus-hating, abortionist-cultivating liberal media’s spin that the other guy is a clod and a menace to polite civilization.

New Blog Software

Daryl L. L. Houston — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 10:56:52 +0000

Iâ€™ve been wanting to try WordPress as my blog software. I had been using the b2evolution system, which at some point was merged into WordPress. My new interface certainly has some familiar components, but itâ€™s much more full-featured. In fact, the only thing that seems to be missing is built-in stats, and plugins can be downloaded to handle that. I didnâ€™t try to port my skin over, and to be honest, I was a little tired of it anyway. Might as well have something simple and more legible that doesnâ€™t do weird breaky things in some versions of Mozilla. Maybe Iâ€™ll add a snazzier skin at some point, but for now, Iâ€™ll just stick with the current clean look.

More Fun With Spam

Daryl L. L. Houston — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 06:52:33 +0000

Steven Frank brings spam to life by drawing little pictures based on the subject lines. In related news, spam poetry is becoming a bit of a fad. Check out a few examples at Finite Monkeys.

Of Geese

Daryl L. L. Houston — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 05:26:13 +0000

Possibly the best text in a spam message yet:

But a goose, as is well known to every one who has any knowledge of science, cannot be inscribed in the baptismal register; for a goose is not a man but a fowl; which, likewise, is sufficiently well known even to persons who have not been to college.

Bread and Circuses

Daryl L. L. Houston — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 08:26:55 +0000

I’ve been party recently to a discussion touching on politics and public taste and the media. The title of the email thread is “Bread and Circuses,” after a famous declaration by the Roman poet Juvenal that “the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses” (source). What Juvenal lamented, an implication of the discussion goes, politicians and media moguls today revel in, with their weapons of mass distraction and their aircraft carrier landings and their American Idols and their bizarrely-prioritized newscasts.

Keep the people fed and entertained and they won’t question authority.

I think the discussion has brought out some valid points, but I won’t concede that there’s any sort of vast media/political conspiracy to keep the people down by distractions so that they’ll