I wish my scribbles this week were fiction, but it's all horribly, depressingly true.
Most folks in the United States use things. Our lives are facilitated by things. A lot of the time, our lives are ruled by things. Whether it's the Hummer H2 UVM (Ultra Vanity Mobile), the DW735 Heavy-Duty 13" Three Knife, Two Speed Thickness Planer from DeWalt, Doom III, or another rock of crack, many of us are driven to get things.
We usually go after these things because we hope they'll be fun or useful or make other people think we have a truly impressive penis. The folks who manufacture and peddle these things tend to play to these hopes: "If you drive the new BMW 7-series, everyone will know that you are the biggest prick."
Sometimes things live up to their promise. My table saw purchase not only lived up to the company's ad copy, it surpassed all my expectations. Less than 0.001" of runout at the arbor is pretty good. Somehow I got a machine with less than that much runout at the edge of a 10" calibration disk. This is cool.
All too often, things fall far short of expectations and sometimes make things worse.
Here's a list of the few things that have disappointed/annoyed me.
In theory, this sounds like a Very Good Idea. If you're going to have to put something in a Ziploc bag after you open it, why not make the packaging itself resealable?
In practice, it's largely hit-or-miss.
Sometimes we'll buy small bits of cheese, which is ridiculously expensive per pound, but if you're only going to eat a small amount and let the rest rot in the fridge, where's the savings in paying twice as much for four times the product? Anyway, these small packages usually have actual Ziploc branded bags. They are sturdy, easy to use, and they work.
A staple in our household is the big bag o' frozen chicken boobs from Costco. They're remarkably convenient and they offer a lot of medium quality chicken at a low price. Their biggest fault is their resealable packaging.
The little zip strip is so small and floppy, and the bag is so large that it's difficult to get the two sides of the seal to line up and do their job. Too often you'll run your fingers along the bag and find big gaps that allow rock-hard chicken boobs to fall out onto your toe, inflicting a petty sort of avian revenge from beyond the dead.
Also, once you get the damned thing sealed, it's really tenacious. Normally, this would be good, but the flaps that you use to pull open the bag are usually slippery from post-freezer condensation. If you do somehow manage to get enough purchase on the flaps to give them a good yank, they're so flimsy that you're more likely to rip the bag apart than to open it.
I could do without the annoyance.
These should be banished from existence.
It's nearly impossible to start such a screw without much fumbling, dropping, and cursing. You're more likely to strip the head of a slotted screw before developing enough torque to do anything useful. You can't drive these screws safely with a powered driver or drill without using fancy gadgets.
The good news is that folks recognized these deficiencies many years ago. The bad news is that these folks have spent those many years devising a hojillion different head/driver combinations to confound you. Still, I can usually get by with driver sets of Phillips, hex, square drive, and Torx. I do drool a bit when I see the list of driver bits at www.lara.com:
Triangle recess
Cats eat grass. Who know's why?
Indoor cats like ours don't have grass available, so every time we take them out for a walk, the first few minutes are spent watching them graze. When we saw little pots of "cat grass" at a pet supply store, we thought it might be fun. We also hoped it would curb their outdoor grazing habits.
In the end, we learned that plant matter is an effective cat emetic. So unless cleaning up cat puke is something you consider fun, don't buy grass for your cats.
This has got to be one of the biggest boondoggles in recent years.
We've been promised "digital quality forever." Instead, we're stuck with:
Most people don't think much about the wiring in their house. It just sits there, quietly shunting electrons around.
When you buy a house full of aluminum wiring, you're more likely to think about wiring. Aluminum wiring tends to burn down houses and kill people: "The [Consumer Product Safety Commission] has also had research conducted that shows that homes wired with aluminum wire manufactured before 1972 ('old technology' aluminum wire) are 55 times more likely to have one or more connections reach 'Fire Hazard Conditions' than is a home wired with copper."
We live in a house built in 1969 with aluminum wire in the walls. I've spent the last few years retrofitting all our fixtures using a special flux/solder combination specifically formulated for joining various aluminum alloys to other metals like copper. This is not a method approved by the CPSC. In fact, the CPSC doesn't even mention this as an option. They recommend rewiring your home with copper. This is the best method "if you can afford the cost". The other method is a proprietary crimping/cold-welding process that also is insanely expensive. To add insult to injury, finding an electrician who can do this repair is nearly impossible.
Some might call me a dangerous idiot for using my solder solution, but I have more faith in myself and my solder than I do for the morons who originally wired the house or the knuckledraggers who subsequently installed copper pigtails with ordinary wire nuts.
The tiniest speck of faith in the original electricians was recently burned away, literally.
The lights of our house used to flicker a little once in a while. I just attributed this to the crappy aluminum wiring, a problem I was rectifying, and left it at that.
Then, one night early last week, I was playing with my son in our bonus room and the lights went out. Power failures are not uncommon in our neighborhood. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Ecuador instead of Silicon Valley. But other lights were on in the house and I didn't hear a howl of indignation from our computer room where my wife was working, so my first thought was "breaker."
Sometimes breakers pop when a circuit is overloaded. Your daughter is blow-drying her hair, your son is running a space heater to cut the chill, and you turn on the vacuum cleaner. Pop!
But no one turned anything on and the circuit affected was just the lights. In other words, there was no exceptional load to stress the breaker. In other words, this was bad.
My second thought was that the folks who installed our air conditioning screwed something up when they installed the extra circuit for the compressor.
Armed with a flashlight, a damned blade screwdriver, and some leather gloves, I went into the garage to investigate.
The breaker was still on. Corrosion in the breaker? I switched the breaker on and off several times with no effect. This was very, very bad.
Taking the cover off of our breaker box, I looked through the mess of aluminum and eventually found a charred, slagged neutral wire in the bank of lugs on the bus bar. This had to be the culprit. The lug over it was a little higher that all the other lugs. Maybe years of heating and cooling had backed it out? The insulation had been burned off for about four inches and the exposed wire looked like graphite. Little silvery bits of slag sparkled directly underneath. "Damned aluminum wire," I thought.
But then I remembered that the lighting circuit is the one original circuit in the house that was run with copper. How could this aluminum wire have anything do to with that?
Sure enough, the hot wire attached to the light circuit breaker was copper. The neutral wire was lost in the tangle, but there was a copper wire on the bus bar that satisfied my curiosity.
This was all very troubling. Where was the problem? What circuit was this charred aluminum wire part of? Maybe an old, failed circuit that was abandoned when it had charred itself?
Just then, the blackened wire arced and buzzed at me.
I was beginning to feel a bit overmatched. Time to call in an electrician.
Despite the wacky situation, I decided that an electrician could wait until morning. I went about my business that night, calling in to a teleconference for work at around 8:30.
When I was finally released from teleconference hell at around 9:30, I resolved to have a look in the attic to see if I could do some troubleshooting before paying someone else $80+ an hour to dick around in our attic.
I ducked into the bathroom in preparation and it took me a couple beats to realize that the lights turned on when I flicked the switch. Sure, they were flickering like crazy, but they were on.
I turned the bathroom lights off and hurried into the garage. There I turned the garage light on and got a really impressive light show. The charred wire glowed bright orange in time with the dimming lights. With a final spectacular blue arc, the show was over.
Aluminum or no, this bastard wire was the problem.
A quick call to my dad (an incredibly talented and experienced electronic technician) confirmed my suspicions, conclusions, and plans.
The next morning, instead of jumping in the car and gritting my teeth in traffic, I threw the main breaker on the house and went to work.
I gathered all my aluminum soldering goodies, loosened the lug over the charred bastard wire, and pulled it out with pliers.
All the graphite crust broke away and I saw the blue-green of copper oxide.
The buggering wire was copper.
A bit more investigation and I was able to piece together the whole story.
Many years ago, as our house was being built, a circus monkey ran the wiring for the lights. When the monkey installed the neutral wire on the bus bar, he pushed it into a retaining clip that kept the wire in place so that he would be able to tighten the lug. Now the lug was pretty hard to turn, even in its fully backed-out position. As the monkey turned the lug, he thought about how hard the tight lug was to turn, which reminded him of how his neighbor's goat had such a tight anus for his tiny, hard erection. Thus distracted, when the lug got a little more difficult to turn, the monkey thought "Job done! Whoohoo! Time for goat anus!"
Unfortunately, the monkey had only brought the lug to bear against the retaining clip. Thus the lug that stuck out a little farther than all the others. Since the copper wire is a smaller gauge than all the aluminum wires, it should've been lower than the other lugs.
So for 34 years, that wire has been hanging there with all its electrons trying to flow through the barest knife edge of the retaining clip. For all intents and purposes, the monkey had installed a heating element in our breaker box.
The one positive here was that the wire, being copper, would make a trivial soldering job.
I stowed all the aluminum soldering goodies, pulled out all my regular soldering stuff, cut away the bad wire, soldered on an extension, covered the join with heat shrink tubing, and installed the wire into the bus bar. I also checked all the other connections in the box.
So now our lights don't flicker and our house is a little less likely to burn down.
Now that particular circuit works the way it should. dammit.
Pakeha