Things That Just Work, First Time

At work, when I had a job, we often took our cell phones into the wiring closets -- to document illegal wiring somebody had added, or to take a picture of the back side of a rack when the friggin' rack was so close to the wall that nobody could get behind the rack. Gawd, I don't miss those days!

Shampoo.

I use the cheapest shampoo I can find -- usually Suave Coconut, large bottle, $1.98 -- I was told once by a hairdresser that all shampoos are essentially equivalent, all the super expensive salon brands with exotic additions like ginkgo biloba, ferret semen, extract of virgin joey, magic youth serum -- are bogus.  My hair gets clean, it smells good for a while,  and I don't have to spend a ton of money.

My first wife, god rest her soul, was convinced the $30 shampoo was magic.  I used it for a couple weeks and found the greasy sticky residue it left behind was objectionable.  I went back to my cheap shit and washed all of her magic ferret semen out of my hair.

Fig Newtons.

They still taste exactly the way I remember them from my youth, and I still love them. Some people don't care for Fig Newtons, but at least they've never messed with the formula in over fifty years (how many other products can say that?) Oh, they have a bunch of other fruit flavors now (which are all nowhere near as good as fig) but at least the originals are still available, and as good as ever.

Actually, they have been around for about 120 years or so.
They are not made in Newton, Mass., but in Cambridge, Mass. What's wrong with "Fig Cambridges"?
And they are now sold as Newtons, not Fig Newtons.

But they are tasty little morsels. Yum.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Shampoo.

Is it better to wash your hair with sham poo or real poo?

Paul Newman makes a version called "Fig Newmans" which are pretty good, but there's nothing like the original.

_Howard wrote:

Is it better to wash your hair with sham poo or real poo?

Why not run some tests and get back to us on this.

As stated, I was asking about your hair, not my hair.
My hair is hardly worth mentioning, much less washing.

Then why do you care about which poo you use? Just scrub your scalp with Boraxo and be done with it.

iTunes.

A.  In my neverending drive to get CDs of most of the old LPs I used to love*, I've been collecting (among others) old Pharoah Sanders albums.  I found Thembi and Karma and Jewels of Thought and Tauhid (a testament to the power of Amazon, those) but I had been totally unable to locate Summun  Bukmun Umyun.  Been out of print for years, apparently, and rarer than hen's teeth.

Well it occurred to me a month or so ago suddenly out of the blue because I'm not very bright that it might be available online on iTunes for download -- which it was -- since it had once been released.  Along with another very similar album from two years later called Black Unity.  So I downloaded both and burned my own 80-minute CD-R, sounding as good as any CD with a hell of a lot less fuss.  I can vividly remember, as a callow youth, spending MONTHS sometimes YEARS tracking down particular albums by going to record stores all over the Pacific Northwest (and elsewhere when I traveled) and "thumbing the racks" (as we say).  

In some ways the future is better, mos' def.

B. I've been a huge fan of Brian Eno's quartet of non-ambient "song albums" he did 1973-77: Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green Word and Before & After Science.  It's a shame he never continued this direction because they're very memorable.  Oh, he's done vocal albums since then (My Squelchy Life, Another Day On Earth, Someday World and The Ship) but they just don't capture the heady adventurousness of that first four.

So anyway a couple months ago I was lamenting the lack of any new Song Eno and it occurred to me suddenly out of the blue because I'm not very bright that I could search SONG TITLES on iTunes and possibly recreate those first four albums with cover versions by other artists.  This is something you could never do pre-internet, or it would have been incredibly difficult anyway.  I found almost all of HCTWJ and enough from TTM(BS), AGW & B&AS to make another very full CD-R.  Because of the labels and licensing involved it's very unlikely that a record company could duplicate my efforts.  But I love my comps, they're surprisingly balmy for the Eno itch.






* - A definition that keeps changing day-to-day

Things That DON'T Work, First Time

UPS My Choice®
I have a Rolls Royce coming to me via UPS, thought maybe I could update the delivery address (since I have the tracking number) to the new house so I don't have to worry about it being stolen from the old house when I'm not there.

There's an option for this, but first you must register as a UPS My Choice® Member.

Did that.

But the website is a loop -- tells you to log in first, when you log in it takes you back to the opening screen where it tells you to log in first.

Stupid stupid website.

Well it's not just the website. I called UPS customer service today, and after negotiating 25 menus to try to get to a real live person, I finally reached one. He checked on my two packages and neither of them can be re-routed, even though both are only "in-transit" and not "out-for-delivery" yet.

Seems incredibly bone-headed to me.

A couple weeks ago I ordered a pallet of landscaping bricks from Home Depot, not realizing they'd be shipped from Ohio and take three weeks. When I found that out, I cancelled the order, and contacted the shipping company. They were fine with canceling the delivery and returning the pallet to Ohio. As it should be.

Can you have UPS hold the packages for pickup?

Maybe I could. That would be out of my way though.

As it is, the timing is just awkward.

Home Depot Truck Rental

Picked up the materials for my deck today -- bunch of 12-foot and 10-foot boards, 46 pieces of 12' Trex decking, some 4x4s... Wayyyyy too much for my little Forester.

I thought, "Hey, Home Depot has flatbeds for rent, why not try that" so I did and for $20 I got all the stuff home safely in one load. The trucks have a 3,000 pound limit. When I got into the truck after loading it, an alarm started going off. Got out, alarm went silent. I asked the truck rental guy. He said that's the "over limit" alarm - but since I was so close he said "Just go ahead."

I think I need to go on a diet.

Gate Latch Cable

'Tis a small thing perhaps, but 'tis a thing o' beauty.  I saw a display in the hardware store of this spring-return you can put on your gates, and it looked slick.  We are always concerned about our dogs getting out (after Betsy) and the existing gate latches don't always latch when you slam them shut after you.  I had a piece of string and a ring to pull, so you could open the gate from the outside, but I know from experience these hang up and get twisted and don't always work.

Decided to try the fancy-pants latch cable on my new gates.  Five-minute installation, 100% success.  Excellent product design!

Not quite sure what you call this -- "mirror wind chime" I suppose but it doesn't actually make any noise -- what it does is reflect sunlight into tiny dancing lights flitting all over your yard, like a mirror ball on steroids. I always wanted one (no idea why). Now that my deck's finished, and I have a place to hang it in the sun, I'm constantly amazed at the flurry of activity all around it. It's cool !!

No really, it is.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Home Depot Truck Rental

Last week I rented a Home Depot $20 truck to go pick up a pallet of landscaping bricks from Lowe's.

Nobody seemed to mind. It worked swell.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Things That DON'T Work, First Time

Comcast websites. Fucking Comcast!

For the past 3 weeks we've been getting calls from what is probably a fax machine on our new (unwanted) Comcast landline -- the line just beeps if you pick it up. The first call comes in at about 6:30 every morning, and continues about every half hour all throughout the day. We have learned to let them go to VM, then delete the 10-12 messages at dinnertime.

The caller ID say the calling number is 000-000-0000.

Because of this, Comcast customer service says they cannot block it. There is an option to block all incoming calls that do not display a calling number (so-called "anonymous" calls where the calling number is masked by the sender) but because this one is not technically masked, Comcast can't (or won't) do anything about it.

So I've been poking around on their websites, looking for ANY other option. It's a convoluted web of options, many of them dead ends, many of them looping back to places you've already been, most of them leading (eventually) to sales information you don't want, and all of them unhelpful.

Fucking Comcast. I've wasted HOURS on this bullshit now.

I'm going to ask if I can get my old phoneline back.

Short answer = no.

After 20 minutes of back-and-forth the rep gave me a list of 5 numbers I could choose.  Four of them had history listed when I Googled them.

Incidentally, our existing number turns up on a Russian website.

Since we just changed our address & phone number on about 30 different accounts, I'm not anxious to start over.  With another unknown, unvetted number.

Fucking Comcast.

Turnabout is fair play.

This morning I logged into Comcast's "Connect" website -- had to use Safari because Firefox isn't recognized -- and it gave me the option to block anonymous callers, it gave me a list of recent calls (from which I chose five spammers and blocked them**), it gave me the option to receive an e-mail alert when somebody leaves me voicemail, and it gave me the option to set up Nomorobo* which (supposedly) forwards robo-callers to an intercept message.

All good stuff.

So, we shall see if any of this cleans up the spate of spam that came with my new unwanted number.






* - This must be parsed as "No More Robo" rather than how I read it, "No More Oboe."
** - Of course (000) 000-0000 was not among them, and could not be manually added

Snap Guidelights

A clever nightlight that doesn't use up a socket.  It's actually built into a normal-size socket cover, with two little electrical tabs that ride up against either side of the socket where the electrical connections are.  Has three LEDs on the bottom and a light sensor on the the bottom left corner, so it only comes on in the dark.

NoCoPilot wrote:

So, we shall see if any of this cleans up the spate of spam that came with my new unwanted number.

Markedly better. Still not totally clean, but not bad.

I replaced all eleven porch and deck lights on the house, and bought fixtures that were only rated at sixty watts. That's not enough light (and it's had to find 100 watt incandescent bulbs). I have used CFL bulbs and hard bad luck with them so I went with LED bulbs. One of the problems with CFL bulbs is the mount of heat generated by the components in the base. Some got really hot and heated the socket in the fixture. So why not heat sinks?



Here's the bulb I went with. It's 1600 lumens, which is the replacement for the standard 100 watt bulb. It is nice and bright. I have one outside light that I leave on all night to keep the bats away from a spot they like. Before leaving the light on all night, I turned it on during the day for several hours, keeping an eye on it for overheating. The fins on the bulb actually are heat sinks; they got very warm. But the base of the bulb stayed at ambient temperature. No fixture socket overheating problems with this LED.

Now if they will just last long enough to justify the cost.

When we moved in I bought two LED outdoor flood$ for our garage (big dollar$).

One of them burned out already.

In what, three months?  I replaced both with normal incandescent floods but only they're about 60% of the brightness of the old LEDs.  Ideal solution has yet to present itself.