[sic]

Brief backstory: I have an Alphasmart 3000, a somewhat goofy PlaySkool-looking AA battery-operated, bare bones portable word-processor that I bought prior to our Africa honeymoon trip in 2005 because I wanted something rugged and durable and cheap ($200) that, given our locations in the Rwandan countyside, the Serengeti (pictured at right tapping away on it into the dark of the night within our tented camp) and other various outposts with uncertain access to electric power, wasn’t in need of recharging. The device performed flawlessly throughout the more than two weeks abroad. I wrote this journal of that trip on it.

I barely used the thing since. In fact, the only time was in the summer of the following year when I brought it with us on our 4,500-mile roadtrip through California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. I’d also brought our old Apple laptop with us as well and so I hadn’t much use for the Alphasmart.

Which brings us to today when I turned it on for the first time in practically two years and found the 1,421 forgotten words I’d written still stored in its memory, recounting a bit about our travels across the famed Beartooth Highway on to and through Yellowstone.

About 356 words from the end there’s a break where I’ve apparently stopped writing about Yellowstone and several days later picked the thing up to type a few emotional words after we discovered the four abandoned pups on the side of the highway in Monument Valley — and that ends abruptly, too.

For wont of a real blog post today, after the jump it’s all copied and pasted (with a couple links to pics) in full unedited glory.

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The satellite radio scene got bumped to a bigger blip on the radar in large part because of the announcement this week that the Justice Department’s anti-trust busters have given the proposed $4.6-billion merger of Sirius and XM corporations a hearty thumbs-up.

Chances are this doesn’t mean much to most people who receive their radiowaves terrestrially, but as a long-time Sirius subscriber I’m paying it some attention, primarily because of the rumors I’ve heard that should the merger be approved by the FCC, my current Sirius equipment might become obsolete in that I would still receive Sirius programming, but not whatever former-XM channels get ported over. In order to do that I would of course need to “upgrade” my hardware at a cha-ching of a several hundies.

Coincidentally this morning I got a call from a Sirius telemarketer looking to send me a new free radio with a 45% discounted additional subscription ($irius is $et up in $uch a way that one can’t get a new radio added to a current $ub$cription; each box need$ to have it$ own… but that’$ another topic entirely and all right I’ll stop it with the dollar signs).

I expressed my concern to the telemarketer as to buying equipment now that might be programming impaired post-merger and the representative put me on with her supervisor who assured me that would not happen, and when I asked him to provide me with something in writing, he instead directed me to siriusmerger.com where he told me the writing I sought was there in black and white.

Sort of.

Here’s what Sirius has posted:

“If our merger is approved, the combined company will offer consumers the best of each service on your current radio - at a price well below the cost of the two services today.”

Sounds good, right? On the surface yeah, but my skepticality looks at “best of each service on your current radio” and sees a position that craftily reinforces the separation of the two entities. Notice the use of “each” and the singular “service” instead of “both” and “services.” Big difference.

But wait, there’s more at the bottom of that page:

“We guarantee no radio will become obsolete. Your current radio will continue to provide you with the programming you enjoy, whether you keep your current service or change to a new subscription plan. “

Again at first glance this looks solid. But on second pass it’s basically a thinly veiled statement of the obvious that tells me Sirius radios will continue to receive Sirius programming and XM radios will continue to receive XM programming.

As a result of that cagy language and at Sirius’ invitation I utilized a form letter page on their website to send the following email to my elected officials in Washington, DC, and the FCC, with the subject line: Concerns About Hardware Obsolesence Following Sirius/XM Merger.

Honorable Senators, Representative, and the FCC:

In the guarantee posted to the Sirius website, it states:

“…that that no Sirius radio will become obsolete as a result of the merger. The two companies have millions of radios in the market, including many that are factory-installed in automobiles. After the merger, you will not need another radio to continue to receive the programming you now enjoy.”

This statement is ambiguous and frankly disingenuous in that it does not specifically address new programming. While I understand that my current Sirius hardware will continue to receive the Sirius programming I presently access, what remains unaddressed and vague is whether or not that hardware will allow me to access any new programming brought over from the former XM.

I am a long-time and mostly satisfied Sirius subscriber but since the buyout was announced  I have abstained and will continue to abstain from purchasing new hardware in this pre-merger interim. I am satisfied that existing Sirius programming will be available to me with my old radio, but I’m not going to upgrade my equipment if there’s even the slightest doubt that it will not support any new programming should the merger be completed.

Unless this is specifically addressed by Sirius I will wait out the merger before buying rather than buy now only to be forced buy again to enjoy any combined programming — which would not happen because I would cancel my subscription rather than allow myself to suffer such bait-and-switch tactics.

Sincerely,
William Campbell

I have one of those  Swiss Army knives, the kind that has I don’t know how many blades and tools and such. Among it all there’s a pair of scissors, tweezers… even a little magnifying glass for starting fires should you require such functionality.  As a result of attempting to use it (not to start a fire) my left index finger’s tip is wrapped in a big bandage (that’s making it hard to type).

Sometimes the knife travels with me in a pocket or pack and sometimes it gets left somewhere… home, office, car. Of late it’s been in my office where I put it to occasional and successful use slicing up apples. Today I was not so successful slicing up a persimmon, one from a giant bag that a coworker had brought in and left in the lunchroom for any who wanted one. Or 12.

I suppose my injury could be so worse, but I couldn’t have failed in the simple act of cutting a piece of fruit more self-loathingly.

After opening up the longest of the knife’s blades without incident I placed the tip at the spot on the persimmon where I wanted to begin the cut. As it was a moderately ripe persimmon I didn’t have to apply much pressure to facilitate the downward slicing action.

Suddenly encountering unexpected resistance I “leaned into it” just enough to drive the blade all the way through and quickly to the table, where it came to an abrupt rest and right after so did my left index finger on what should have been the harmless back of the blade.

Should have been.

But no, see, what I had unwittingly and carelessly opted to do was for some head-shakingly unfathomable and painfully laughable lack of reason was invert the entire knife so the business side was up and the useless side was the one being employed to slash… thus the surprise increased resistance I met.

And speaking of surprise, what became immediately and unmistakably apparent to me in the form of a wicked cold-burning stinging sensation emanating from my left index finger was that its tip did not come to a stop against the back of the blade. Oh no. Instead it hit the sharp edge of the blade for that initial cut and then kept on going… or should I say the stainless steel blade kept going into my finger until I’d butterflied it but good.

Being that I was at work I was forced to cancel the parade of invective that immediately lined up to march out of my mouth. Besides, I had more important things to do than spew foul language in full reproach. Like bleed. A lot. I swear the only thing that bleeds as much as a head when wounded is a finger. I wish I didn’t know this first hand — ha: hand, get it?

Anyway, my injured digit and I adjourned to the sink in the lunch room where I ran cold water over and in and through the wound, hissing when it hurt, which it did. After some isopropyl alcohol spray, first aid ointment and a large fingertip bandage, all that was left was a cartoonish throbbing that served as punctuating proof of my stoopidity, and the uneaten persimmon — which I finished slicing without further injury but then threw out after one achingly astrigent bite.

It’s certainly not every day that I need 34 CR2032 3V lithium cell batteries, and staring at the stacks of packages in front of me on my desk that I ordered Monday and that arrived last night, I don’t really need that many. At least not all at once. But eventually I will, given that I have a whole bunch of LED blinky lights for my bike that are starting to go dim and that use that specific power source. Two batteries each, in fact.

But still, why 34? Because I found batterybob.com, a website that made me an offer I couldn’t refuse:

In short I got 34 batteries for $33, free shipping — and no sales tax.

As a comparison, let’s take a looksee at the online version of Radio Shack (my previous battery supplier of choice) and see how they stack up:

At that per-unit price, I’d be looking at $169.66, and though the dollar amount would have qualified me for free shipping, I’d certainly be looking at sales tax, bringing my grand total to about $184.

Gawd bless you Battery Bob!

While I was in Orlando last week, I was provided with a company laptop to use. It was a Hell Dell Latitude, which more appropriately or subliminally should be called L’attitude –French for “the attitude” — because one crucial and malignant aspect of it was continually and predominately a freakin’ pain in the ass and enough to keep me from ever purchasing anything but an Apple machine in the future regardless of the price difference.

Here’s the deal. The Dell comes equipped with your standard standard trackpad with two buttons beneath it, and that’s fine. But then for some reason the makers opted to put an additional two buttons above the trackpad and below the spacebar, I’m guessing not for any other reason than except either 1) there was space available between those two components so why the fuck not hell yeah, or 2) 0.0000021 percent of the population prefers the buttons to be above the trackpad.

What’s really righteous is that the apparent undefaultable default for these two unnecessary buttons jammed up right below the spacebar is that if you double tap them even with the lightest and slightest brush of a touch they do this wonderful thing: they’ll automagically relocate the cursor to wherever the pointer is located. So say you’re in Word or in an email program and you’re typing away and making obligatory use of the spacebar to provide that necessary separation between words — you’re screwed. Because inevitably instead of or in addition to the spacebar you’re going to accidentally brush those blasted buttons enough to send the cursor screaming up or down or sideways away from the text you’re currently inputing to be inserted at a point unknown to you until you finally glance up at the screen and instead of seeing something like this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

You’re gonna see something like this:

The qpedoverthelazydog.uick brown fox jum

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Earlier in the week I posted about the third cheapass decanter for our three-month-old coffeemaker to break while in the simple act of cleaning it, and how entirely fed up I decided to write and demand the fine folks at Mr. Coffee send me a free replacement or lose me as a consumer forever.

Surprise: they wrote back in empathy (or in plausibly deniable recognition that the quality of those specific decanters is sub-par) and are actually going to send me one on the house… which should arrive in two to three weeks.

Such a slow shipping time is laughably ridiculous, but as a show of goodwill in their willingness to make good, I went to a local big box retailer and bought a new one. If nothing else when this one breaks — and it will break (I should start a deadpool) — I’ll have a back up. And when that one breaks — and it will also — then I’ll just chuck the coffeemaker and go get one with a decent thermal carafe that can withstand the obvious rigors I inflict on it in the kitchen sink.

Argh! I bought a Mr. Coffee FT Series coffeemaker in July at Costco after our Gevalia maker finally kicked the basket after three long years. In that quarter year with Mr. Coffee, I have gone through three decanters… the third one breaking this morning while cleaning it. With a sponge. Crrrrrack! Fuck!!

Of course in full Hulk Mad mode I lifted the coffeemaker over my head to smash it into 24 pieces glorious on the floor and then the lightbulb went off and I carefully put the unit down in its proper upright position and whipped off an ultimatum letter to Mr. Coffee’s customer service:

In the three short months since purchasing your FT Series coffeemaker, I have broken three decanters. I admit to breaking them. I’m not going to lie and say they just shattered on their own. But I am not a violent man, nor am I inordinately clumsy. I’m basically just a guy who likes a clean coffeepot. And so it’s been that as a result of these cleanings with either a sponge or a scrub brush while exerting no undue force or stress, I have ultimately had to discard the shattered remains of three of your decidedly fragile decanters.

The first one cracked within the first week of ownership. The second one several weeks later. The third – and most longest lasting – disintegrated this morning. At this point I have spent more on cheap glass for your coffeemaker than I did for the coffeemaker. Is this right? No, it’s not. In comparison, prior to purchasing your product this summer I had a Gevalia coffeemaker for about three years – with the same sturdy glass decanter. Go figure.

So here’s the deal: You’re either going to send me a replacement decanter free of charge or I’m going to take a hammer to my useless FT Series coffeemaker, pitch it into the trash and then go to the nearest retailer and buy a competing coffeemaker and I’ll never ever ever purcahse anything made by Mr. Coffee ever again.

I’ll be surprised to hear from them, much less get a new decanter (which would undoubtedly break almost immediately). But I’ll let you know if anything develops.

I guess I owe Sirius Satellite Radio an apology. It wasn’t them that sucked supreme so much as it was the do-the-least-amount-of-work installers at Circuit Shitty who put the unit into my truck way back after my baybee got it for me for Christmas 2004.

I first wrote about them some three months after that in a spittle-laced rant against the never-ending “Antenna not detected” error message that showed up on the display and that long-archived post still draws the occasional Google hit and commiseration and advice from fellow Sirius frustroids. I last wrote about it in December 2005:

Without going into too much detail, I gave up on listening to it on the road because the signal was weak and whatever music was playing too often skipped into prolonged periods of silence like a bad CD. I even called Sirius up and told them to cancel my subscription at the end of the quarter I’d paid for, but they just kept right on billing me after the agreed upon time — I know, that’s major bullshit on Sirius’ part. But I didn’t raise a stink because I found that I’d fire up the boombox on occasion and the reception was significantly better than in my vehicle. Still not perfect, but much better…

Sirius still blew major class-action chunks for not processing my cancel order, but as I wrote with that boom box I bought shortly after the truck install (which is still working fine and which we’ll be taking with us to Death Valley in November) I didn’t fret such an oversight much.

Eventually the portable got a nice coat of dust on it from lack of use (not even Howard Stern’s celebrated move into space radio could engage me), but I still didn’t cancel my subscription because first it was like $8 a month and second, in the back of my mind I figured one day I’d get either make a WTF? call on Shirkus Shitty or just try to solve the problem myself. And if either or neither of those options worked, then I’d get serious on Sirius.

Well I opted for the latter option last month. And all I basically did was rerun and remount the antenna from atop the dash inside the truck (pretty much the worst place the fragged folks at Circuit Shitty could have put it, second only to under the frickin’ hood or maybe a wheel well) to outside on the roof. Of course, to do that I had to thread it under the carpet and up an interior side panel to the rear of the cab before painstakingly lacing it through the sliding glass portion of the rear window. Then I had enough leftover wire to string it under the rubber seal around the outside of the rear window, beneath the upper brake light where it now proudly sits magnetized to the rooftop sucking in a pretty much sunspotless signal whenever I’m on the road (tunnels, bridges and heavily treed areas begrudgingly excepted).

It took me and my unskilled installer’s ass about 20 minutes to do that. Why the lowest common denominator lazy ass bastard at Circus Shitty couldn’t or wouldn’t do that practically three years ago is effing beyond me. Not really. “Above and Beyond the call” is not their motto.

Anyway, to say I’m overjoyed to bring the dogstar network out of the doghouse is an understatement. But it’s more than just music to my ears. On the way this weekend to my mom’s to take her out to dinner for her birthday I found the Alabama/Georgia game on one of the available sports stations (Roll Tide!!!) and on the way home I snapped this photo while listening to the first few minutes of Monday Night Football:

Not really visible in the lower left of the display is the glorious three-bar signal strength as I motored down Jefferson on my way home. A sight for sore eyes and a sound for sore ears.

So the DSL modem went into what turned out to be its death throes last night, its panel of three LEDs raging in a blinky fluttering show of red and orange and green desperation.

I unplugged the thing and let it sit a bit before reconnecting it, but that didn’t help things. Then I pulled out all the ethernet and phone cables and let it sit some more but it seemed the hardware had come to its end at the sad young age of 2.

Too soon. Waaaaaay too soon.

This morning. Nothing. Not even the faintest blip of light emitting diode flashed and so I called AT&T’s tech support and after getting connected to “Jeff” in Banganila and dutifully redoing the steps I’d already done he declared the 2Wire 1701HG Gateway deceased, and without even so much as giving me a chance to grieve over its corpse offered to send me a new and improved 2Wire 2701HG “free” if I upgraded my account… which meant a price bump of about five bucks a month.

No thanks, bastards.

I’m pretty sure they killed it with some sort of self-destruct code sent from an underground bunker in Bangor. Or maybe Bangalore. Damn them.

But I’m not getting suckered into their scheme. Instead I hauled out the old lapper and plugged in a phone line and did the old dial-up thing, the 56K-speed connection screech brrrrp sound bringing back memories of the early ’90s. Then I promptly (meaning “glacially” in terms of surfing speed) found a bigbox store nearby that has the new 2Wire 2701HG unit and I’ll be picking that up today on my way back from a job fair down in Anaheim.

UPDATED (9:33 a.m.): Wow, I actually resurrected the 6-year-old Apple Airport base station that’s apparently too old and obsolete to be effected by AT&T’s Biennial Gateway Decimatrix Pulse. I’m still cruising the internuts at 56K, but at least the lapper ain’t tethered to a phone cord.

UPDATED (3:58 p.m.): New wireless router/modem installed. Ahhhh. Much better.

UPDATED (7:00 p.m.): Might I add that my term “Biennial Gateway Decimatrix Pulse” is my new favorite invention ever. I might even get it put on a shirt.

I don’t know how I failed to see this when I first extracted this lock from the bedroom door some months ago to successfully fix it so the door would actually latch for as long as Susan had owned the house, but when she notified me that the lock began not latching again last night I made a note to haul it back out of the door again today and have another look-see, which I did just a few minutes ago, diagnosing the problem as a slipped spring.

Look, see?

click to triplify

Pretty old school, eh? I had no idea.

In my moderate Mr- Fixitness I realigned the spring as I had done the first time around, but this time in an attempt to prevent it from slipping in the future I applied a small piece of electrical tape to the coil’s base where it seats against the back of the lock’s box.

I can never say “lock” and “box” together without thinking of Al Gore.

Not that the tape will definitively keep the spring from slipping again, but it can’t hurt. And soon afterward I was replacing the panel I had removed to gain access to the mechanism’s guts, Flipping it over to the other side about to put it back in the door, that’s when I found this stamp (photographed through an 8x lupe on macro in really bad light so sorry for the crap quality):

Don’t know how I missed it the first time around, but what it says is:

RUSSELL & ERWIN
MFG. CO.
NEW BRITAIN
CONN. U.S.A.
PAT. JAN, 29, 89.
JUNE, 11, 89.

No, not 18 years ago. Subtract another century to the same year that Vincent Van Gogh painted “Landscape with Cypress Tree” and a guy by the name of Eiffel designed a tower for Paris and Mark Twain published “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and Adolph Hitler was born and that sucks so let me mention that astronomer E.P. Hubble was born too.

And so was this lock on June 11. 1889.