backfire

July 13th, 2010 Troy

Here’s a phrase I bet you’ve never said: “I hit myself in the face with a crowbar while opening my sunroof.” I, however, have. While trying to leverage my sunroof open as mentioned in my last post, the crowbar itself staged a coup and turned on me, swinging around and striking a swift blow right in my mouth. It drew blood, and I was stunned. Up until this point, I had assumed the crowbar was on my side of this little battle. Me and ol’ Crowey vs. the sunroof. It seems clear at this point that it is unhappy with work conditions or pay rate or something, but we’ll find out for sure in the upcoming labor negotiations.

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Tales From the Carypt

July 9th, 2010 Troy

I’ve blogged before about the love/hate relationship I have with the 97 Saturn I drive. But I think I reached a new plateau today.

The ol’ Saturn came from the factory just 14 short years ago equipped with an electric sunroof. Somewhere between then and when it came into my possession, the sunroof was the victim of some type of catastrophic event that resulted in a twisted, screeching, scraping sound being emitted whenever you push the open button. It was really quite horrifying the first time I pushed it, almost like a Bengal tiger had descended onto my car and was attempting to peel back the roof like a can opener.

For the first few years, I just accepted that the sunroof was broken and wouldn’t open. But the cover that normally slides forward to hide the glass part was also broken, and stuck in the rearward position. So I always had the sun shining in on my head. One day I decided I would try to fix it. Three minutes of tinkering, then pushing, then pounding and I was through trying to fix it and just wanted to see if I could manually force it open.

I was somewhat successful, in that it opens now, but not without some sort of prying device. Luckily I keep a crowbar in my trunk, so this summer I promoted my crowbar to the passenger seat for quick access on hot days. It’s common now to see me in the parking lot after work prying at the sunroof of my car just like in Grand Theft: Auto. Except one look at the car and everyone knows I’m not stealing it.

Yesterday, I had driven to work with the windows down and sunroof open (because the A/C quit working and I can’t justify spending any money on it, it would be like resealing your driveway when your house is on fire). It seemed sunny enough, so I went into work without thinking twice. About 5 minutes into a 1pm conference call, it was brought to my attention that it was now raining. Hard. Like rivers in the parking lot hard (too soon to The Nashville Flood of 2010?) I ran outside, closed everything up, got drenched, and looked forward to getting home with a large wet spot on the back of my pants that evening.

So today, when I got to work, I played it smart and left only the passenger window open so that I could continue to air out the car from the internal hose-down of the previous day, but minimize the damage should another storm pop up.

And another storm did pop up. But this time, as I weighed my options, the prospect of running out into the rain to save only the passenger side of my car seemed less automatic than in the past. A thought occurred, “What if I leave it?” Passenger seat and floor get soaked. Not the first time that’s happened, probably more like the 15th (seriously). I am in no more discomfort than normal on my drive to and from work for the next few weeks before it drys out.

So I remained seated at my safe, dry cubicle while water poured into my car. Meh.

Note: I have zero intention of ever reselling this car to anyone, or else I might care more. My conscience couldn’t take it. Between the broken parking break, the leaky window seals, and the disintegrating interior, I’ve decided that it’s my moral obligation to ensure that the only part of this car that will ever be reused anywhere is the engine, since it seems like it will never. ever. die.

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Microwave

July 8th, 2010 Troy

Somewhere along the way, the product engineers at Emerson’s microwave division lost their way. I say this as the unfortunate victim of the user interface of one of their home microwaves.

In recent years, I’ve seen the addition of a neat little feature on microwaves: the “Quick Start” buttons, which can start your food heating for a minute with the push of a single button. Nice, although if you would have told me that I would have a device in my home that can shoot deadly radiation at the push of a single button, I would have hoped for a ray gun of some sort.

Well that neat feature has now taken over the entire interface of my microwave. Instead of having separate 1, 2, or 3 minute “Quick Start” buttons like I used to see, now they’ve combined the function of the standard 1-6 numeric buttons with the quick start functionality. Now, I fancy myself a tech savvy guy, so I figured, “Fine, so if I want to cook something for 20 seconds, I’ll just have to push the Time Cook button first… somewhere here….. must be missing it, check again……….. There’s no time cook button.”

I proceeded to pound on the buttons randomly like a monkey, and finally achieved my goal. So let’s recap:

Old process for cooking something 1 minute:

1. Press 1
2. Press 0
3. Press 0
4. Press Start

New process for cooking something 1 minute:

1. Press 1

Verdict = Win

Old process for cooking something 20 seconds:

1. Press 2
2. Press 0
3. Press Start

New process for cooking something 20 seconds:

1. Press 2
2. Swear because microwave starts up at 2 minutes
3. Press cancel
4. Search for Time Cook button
5. Press random buttons with varying degrees of failure
6. Swear again
7. Realize 5 year old son is standing behind you
8. Convince son not to tell Mommy where he learned that word
9. Stumble upon Power Level button which displays current power level
10. Accidentally bump 2 button and discover that it has switched to taking a time input now
11. Press 0
12. Press Start

Verdict = Fail

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nashville flooding

May 6th, 2010 Troy

This past weekend, the Nashville/middle TN area had record rains and record flooding. Rivers overflowed, houses were destroyed, damage estimated in the billions occurred. All this you can get from the news. But something gets lost when you are viewing the mass devastation on TV. Something that I was only able to start to comprehend by getting down in it and seeing what it has done to one specific family.

A lady I work with and her husband had the first floor of their home underwater this weekend. I was able to go and help with some of the cleanup yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I’ve never seen flood damage first hand.

As we drove up to their street, I was wondering if we were in the right place. All the houses on the adjoining streets were fine. I saw a guy getting home from work, getting his newspaper and going inside. As we turned onto the flood damaged street it was like entering another world. The yards were full of debris: construction trash, ruined furniture, destroyed possessions, limbs, fences. It felt like driving through a tornado ravaged neighborhood, I didn’t notice that all the structures were in tact because of all the carnage in the front yards.

By the time we got there, all the furniture had been removed from the first floor, as it was all completely destroyed. Our friends had ripped down the wet drywall and insulation, so we hauled it out of the house. We ripped out the kitchen cabinets and tore up the flooring. Most of their privacy fence had been ripped right out of the ground by the force of the flood waters, cement post footers and all, so we cleaned up as much of that as we could find along with their destroyed patio furniture and debris that had settled in their back yard.

Being in one of the actual homes damaged by this flood with the homeowners brought the devastation to a level of reality for me that I didn’t understand before. Looking around, the place barely even resembled a house anymore. Walls were kicked out, exposing the framing. Everything was wet and smelly. And our friends had to look at it and be reminded of how nice things were just a few days earlier. I know if it were me, I’d have a lot of “why” questions, and would just want to turn the clock back and wish it had never happened. It would be very hard to be motivated to work on it.

I was tired after the back-breaking work, and looked forward to going home to shower and relax. These folks were undoubtedly far more tired than I was, but didn’t have the luxury of leaving it behind them and going home (a coworker of mine put them up in a rental house they had available, but it’s not home).

The good part is that my company has really rallied around them to try to take care of them in every way possible. The Nashville community has shown why Tennessee is called the Volunteer state, and I’m seeing this for the first time as a relatively recent Nashville transplant. That said, I don’t want to be one of those people who uses the positive stories of help and good deeds to make myself feel better, then goes on happily with my life while the flood victims still have to get up tomorrow to the reality that their lives have been drastically changed. The struggle will be ongoing for them, and the effects of this disaster are going to be felt for a long time. The course of many lives have been permanently altered because of it.

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armed

April 15th, 2010 Troy

This week, I purchased my first firearm. This didn’t happen without a lengthy discussion with my wife about the benefits and risks of having a gun in the house where we raise our child. Both of our parents had guns in the house as we were growing up, and it was tremendously clear to us as children that they were not toys, and we had no trouble staying away from them. It makes sense for my wife, she has a natural aversion to them, but for a house full of boys as was the case for me, it was probably a little more difficult to impress upon us.

My dad would give us a safe opportunity to look at any new gun he brought into the house and let us shoot it (though I was too young to shoot his shotguns, although I do remember him letting me shoot his Colt 45, the kick scared the crap out of me). It took the mystery out of it, they weren’t like the forbidden fruit anymore, but even with that, I knew that touching any of his guns outside of those opportunities meant bad, bad things for me. Of course, he kept them unloaded and the ammunition was kept somewhere that I wasn’t aware of.

So then came the question of why we need a gun in our house. It wasn’t all that many years ago when American citizens needed to arm themselves to defend their nation from an invading army. And if that still seems too unlikely for you, look at what happened in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina. If chaos breaks out due to natural disaster, I’m not going to put the safety of my family at risk because of my trust in the inherent good nature of my fellow man. So between that and the rumor of the current administration’s gun control plans (taxing them to oblivion, making it impractical for me to purchase one), we decided that now was as good a time as any to buy a home defense firearm.

So with all that out of the way, I needed to decide on the type of firearm that would serve us best. A handgun is small and would be easily fireable by my petite wife, but I wanted something that would have a higher intimidation and recognition factor. The best home defense gun is the one that never has to be fired.

So I decided on a pump action shotgun. It takes an elite, rare level of crazy to come after someone holding an easily recognizable 12-gauge boomstick. And the sound of the loading mechanism lining up the next shell for launch could be enough to scare off an intruder all by itself.

I considered a few variations of the Mossberg 590, then came across a 2006 Remington 870 Express Magnum that a coworker was selling. It has a short barrel (18.5″), pistol grip and side-folding stock for easier maneuvering in tight quarters. A magazine extension allows for an extra 3 rounds (total of 7) before needing to be reloaded.

I like the idea of a shotgun just in case my wife would ever need to use it because when shooting buckshot, aim is less important.

Here it is, in all it’s glory:

And of course, being a geek, the first thing I did when I got it was take it apart to see how it worked:

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