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I got a few inches of snow last night and this morning it was covered with a sheet of sleet. Katie does not like this because when she takes a step her foot breaks through the thin layer of sleet and into the snow below that. She walks through it very carefully.

Outside my kitchen window is a tree (maybe a big shrub) with green leaves and bunches of red berries. There were hundreds of birds checking it out today. These birds were really pretty with black masks, bright yellow trim on their tails, and bright red spots on their wings. I’m pretty sure they are cedar waxwings after looking them up in my bird guide. You can see in the picture why they are called waxwings: it looks like their tails and wings are dipped in melted crayons. I’m not so sure about the tree, but I’m thinking it could be a cotoneaster. There was also one robin trying to keep all of the waxwings away from his tree, but he didn’t seem to be eating very fast. Better just to eat.

Here is another one a couple of years later:

My shower has dripped since it was originally installed. I should have had it fixed back then, but now I have waited too late. In the meantime, the pressure was never that great and it seems like it has gotten really miserable lately. I know that new fixtures are low flow, but this is well below anything like that. I screwed the showerhead off to see if there was anything blocking that. There was some little pieces of rust or grit that you might typically find, but removing that didn’t do anything to improve the situation. Even with the showerhead off, there wasn’t much water coming out of the pipe.

The diverter in the main bathroom tub (switches between tub and shower) had failed and I wound up getting a new part from American Standard that fixed it. So I was thinking maybe I needed new parts for the shower as well and wanted to take apart the handles to see if I could figure out the problem. I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do anything that would make me get into the wall because I don’t have an access panel for the shower. But if solder was blocking the pipes or grout had gotten in there, that might be the only way to fix it. So first I needed to turn the water off and the easiest way to do that for me is at the street. Once it was off I wanted to drain the water out of the shower so it wouldn’t get on me when I took the handles apart, so I opened up an outside spigot that is lower than the shower fixture (a bunch of water came out because the expansion tank pushes water out as the system pressure is relieved) and then went inside and turned the shower on. This allowed water to drain out of the outside spigot and suck in air through the shower.

Continue reading “Plumbing”

This afternoon I met Nicole and Seda at CNN Center for lunch and then we went to the World of Coca Cola. I hadn’t gotten to talk to Seda at New Year’s, so I was glad to get to know her a little before she flew off to California. She and Nicole kept looking for Armenian Coke stuff in the museum, but never really found anything. I pointed out they usually make a big deal about Thailand because they have a different alphabet that Coke can use to show how international it is. And we did see a few things, plus the tasting room had several drinks from Thailand. No such luck with Armenia, but they thought maybe they found one poster from Georgia (the Georgia near Armenia), but couldn’t make out all the letters.

After we went through the exhibits (mostly about Coke advertising, but they have a working bottling plant that makes bottles of coke that they give you at the end; I think they have the bottling machine on its slowest setting), the 4D theater (about what makes Coke so wonderful), and then 2 short movies about Coke advertising, Seda observed that she had paid money to have Coca Cola advertise to her for a couple of hours. And we hadn’t even gotten to the gift shop yet! At the gift shop, I said now they will sell you things that you will wear or put in your house that will advertise Coke to everyone you know. She seemed to think this was an American phenomenon.

But I bought some Coke glasses made of iconic green glass. They weren’t the traditional soda glass shape, but a flared or trumpet shape that I thought was pretty neat. When I got outside they had a statue of Dr. John Pemberton, Coke’s inventor (he died only two years after inventing it, but not before selling the recipe; I told Nicole that maybe the Coke owners had him killed before he could sell the recipe to anyone else), serving Coke in the same kind of glass I had just bought (only his were bronze, because he was bronze).

For Christmas, one of the things I received was a new set of headphones for my iPod. They are Klipsch S4 headphones which Consumer Reports had rated highly and reviews on Amazon seemed pretty favorable as well. There was nothing really wrong with my Sennheiser CX300 headphones I’ve had for a few years, but I felt like maybe I could do better.

Some of the reviews on Amazon said that these headphones required a “burn in” period to sound good. I had heard about that with some types of headphones, so I did some research. It’s one of those things that people don’t seem to agree on or whether it is even real. It seems like it would be pretty easy to measure the performance of headphones if you had the right equipment, but I guess a lot of headphones now actually conform to the shape of the ear and use a tight fit to produce part of the sound. So maybe it is harder than I think. Anyway, I think it is really funny that even though there isn’t much proof about burn in and what is effective, that there is a long page of instructions telling you how to do the best possible burn in of your headphones. It is posted at head-fi.org and referenced by a lot of different websites. You can actually get MP3’s with sounds recorded that are supposed to maximize burn in.

When I got the headphones, I tried them out and they didn’t sound all that great. So I left them plugged in while a playlist of normal music played at a little higher volume than I would typically listen to, but not as high as it would go. Some people recommend 40 hours of burn in, but I thought they were sounding better after only 15 minutes. I left them plugged in and would check back every now and then and over the next few hours it really did seem like the sound quality was improving. I let them run all night and then listened to them and they did sound very good, though not quite as much bass as I’m used to with the Sennheisers.

They are also very comfortable, almost like they aren’t even there. One thing is they have a Y cord instead of the asymetric cord of the Sennheisers which I had learned to like because it lets you unplug the earbuds and hang them from around your neck if you need to just take them out for a second to listen to someone or something.

Last night I was have a refreshing drink of grape juice, grapefruit juice, and water when Mom called. I was on the sofa with my drink at my side and my remote control on my lap and dogs on either side of me. So I reached in my right pocket to get the phone and the remote slides to the left and went right into my refreshing drink. There was only about an inch of juice left, but I guess that was enough because the remote didn’t work anymore. That’s bad. I got this remote to replace my previous universal remote in March 2008 and they have since stopped making them. Well, they at least they don’t make them the same way and then new ones won’t allow me to use the cable I bought to hook the remote up to my computer (I wrote about this in JP1 still kicking).

So grape juice is dripping out of the bottom of the remote and I’m trying to help Mom with her wireless network so Kelly and Gabriele can get on the internet while they are spending the night at her house. I take the batteries out in case there is some kind of short and try to continue to coax out any juice into the bathtub rather than drip purple juice on to anything else. It just keeps leaking so I figure the only thing to do is try to take it apart and get all the juice wiped up. There were a couple of screws to take out and then I used my plastic pry tools I got when I replaced the battery in my old iPod. Those things work great for unsnapping plastic devices like this. Then I had to remove 4 more little screws and the whole thing came apart into 5 pieces: the front face, the rubber mat of buttons (fortunately each button is not an individual part), a plastic board with holes where each button goes, the circuit board, and the back cover. The rubber mat of buttons was pretty dirty, so I cleaned that off and then wiped down the other parts to get all of the grape juice off. The front face is hard to clean because the buttons stick out, but without the buttons it was easy to get all the grime of the last couple of years off of it. I put it all back together, put the batteries back in (which I had charging in case they had discharged due to a short) and I got nothing. There probably aren’t too many liquids that conduct electricity better than juice. Oh well, I still have my old remote with some buttons that don’t work, so I put the batteries in it and it worked okay except I had to fast forward through commercials instead of skip ahead 30 seconds since that button doesn’t work anymore. I thought maybe if I cleaned that remote off the buttons would work again, so I took it apart the same way and cleaned it out, but those buttons still didn’t work (or didn’t seem to anyway).

At some point I decided to go back to the juiced remote, tested it, took it apart again, put it back together, tested it again, and Hey! it works! The new one is better because it has backlighting and all the buttons work, so I’m glad to have it back. And now it’s even nice and clean.

Continue reading “Remote Control Close Call”