Ness’ Outpost

Tonight I forgot my skates at home for my hockey game in Burlington. After discovering that at the rink I started to drive home Eastbound on the 403/QEW just before the Kerr Pontiac dealership. I noticed a ball of light with a tail falling out of the sky down to the earth directly in front of me some time before 8:57pm – according to my vehicles clock.

It wasn’t very big — distance would have been a factor in estimating size and speed — but the tail was pretty long and it extinguished itself about 10 to 20 seconds before I estimated it should have impacted the ground. I was able to stare slack jawed at it for about 5 seconds after noticing it out my wind shield until it went out.

I have no idea what it could have been, but the trajectory was definitely downwards towards the earth but it wasn’t directly down, it had a really large smooth arc towards the north side of the highway. I’m guessing it could have been a firework, some debris from space. I have no idea. And I also don’t know where to report something like this. Maybe I imagined the whole thing.

Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.

For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?

The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.

As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.

Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.

We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.

I was able to get out on Lake Scugog and do a bit of bass hunting.

This was my first experience with baitcasters on a boat. I had prepared by doing some practice casting on shore but the backlashes were still quite legendary when a smaller jig went on. I just can’t seem to find the right settings for controlling the spool on the cast – and I can’t get the same distance either quite yet. Just need some more training.

We spent most of the day drifting around docks and through the weeds looking for lillypads and other cover and holes that would hold bass in the heat of the day. I was the only one on the boat to take a bass with a top water lure – a frog coloured hula popper. You can’t really cast into the lillypads with this lure as it has two treble hooks on the bottom and they snag up easily on the vegetation. Land it just off to the side with a path of clear water to retrieve it through.

It’s awesome to see the fish take the lure off the surface in a frenzied strike or bulged humpback take. Now I can see why so many fly fishermen are in love with dry flies.

That was my first bass on the new baitcaster. Looking forward to plenty more.

Reddit is fighting back (bad words are used by some people in this community – be warned) against the telemarketers that call your house – usually at dinner – and tell you that “this is the second warning that your autos warranty is about to expire”. Where you promptly sigh and then hang up the phone.

The online community at reddit has discovered and published their phone numbers, addresses and instructions on how to fill their phone mailboxes with messages. All this because they are annoyed.

There is definitely a higher percentage of technically able people on reddit that can do all this and more with automation and by using toll free numbers of the business they are driving up the costs.

The telemarketers can change their number, maybe even their address – and they probably will. But they have to have an incoming phone number, their job is to work over the phone selling extended warranties on vehicles (which may or may not be actually backed). So it is easy to predict that will be discovered and this will all repeat itself eventually.

Mob justice isn’t really the answer, but it’s nice to see a company get a taste of its own medicine now and then.

I took our Ariens mower out of the shed last week to give her some love. We inherited the mower from Laurens Dad when we bought the house. It had sat in his garage for at least 3 years as their backup mower.

I took the blade off, sharpened it, cleaned the spark plug and air filter and put them back in. Then after a lot of pulls on the recoil starter it finally sprung to life with a sputter and didn’t sound right at all. After a few minutes it cut out for some unknown reason. I of course didn’t do the proper maintenance to put the mower to bed for the winter so I was hoping this wouldn’t happen.

Every time I tried to mow the back lawn when I got to the corner and turned the mower it sputtered and died. If I tilted the mower forward a bit it sometimes saved the stall and ran but that is no way to mow a lawn. I figured it was bad gas from sitting all winter but I had topped up the tank with fresh gas so who knew. At this point I had the oil hot enough to do an oil change so I did that too but I knew it wouldn’t help the problem. Oil won’t make the mower stall unless it’s way too full which the machine wasn’t.

Some internet reading suggested I clean and inspect the carburetor (where gas and air mix before being combusted) and possibly rebuild it. I didn’t even know where the carburetor was so I had to download a bunch of manuals. I started with the Ariens manual for my mower serial number 911014. But mowers can have multiple engines installed on them so I had to go get the engine serial number to look that manual up too. It was a Tecumseh TVS120.
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We had in a contractor to install the outdoor BBQ natural gas lines needed to fire up the new BBQ. I had assembled the BBQ two weeks ago — yes, I got excited. Lauren tells everyone I’ve been sneaking out of bed at night to give it hugs and kisses. I cannot confirm or deny that accusation.

When we first tried to start the new BBQ I had some problems getting the BBQ to ignite with the electric starter so I used a match and she gave a big poof and we were cooking in no time. A quick half hour on high to burn in the new burners and grill was all she got last night. It’s also a good idea to heat everything up to sterilize the firebox and to allow the oil I put on the cast iron grills and smoker box to impregnate the metals and burn off the excess.

Tonight after refereeing the first meat hits the grill. I’m thinking something with lots of grease like hot Italian sausages is a good “seasoning” meat to get the flavorizers and grills up to speed quickly. The smoker box needs another coating in oil as it is raw cast iron unlike the grills which are porcelain coated.

I’m excited. This weekend I’m going to try out the rotisserie.

Kevin and I got all geared up to change the front pads and rotors on my Cavalier this weekend. Since I was jacking the car up and I was close to my 135K oil change we did that as well.

Things went really well for a bunch of novices. Labour took probably 4 times as long as a brake shop, but it’s fun to get in there with a wrench and have a go. We’ll only get better. The big problem of the day was when we were missing the 3/4″ hex socket to get the caliper pins off so a quick trip to Canadian Tire was in order.

What wasn’t very good to see was that my pads wearing unevenly. Which means the caliper pins were seized – they were pretty hard to turn through the bushings but they moved. I cleaned and lubed them up and along with the bushings in the caliper itself and hopefully these new ceramic pads will wear better.

I decided to replace the rotors instead of machining the OEM ones again. They’ve been machined 3 times now and warp every pad change (40-50K km). But I think they warped even more this time because of the uneven pad pressure, just the piston was pushing outward on the rotor with a single pad instead of both pads grabbing the rotor.

The next front brake job I’ll have to replace the calipers since it’s about the same cost as rebuilding them on the Cavalier.

But up next in the home mechanic maintenance is trying to figure out the rear shoes and drums, then doing a brake fluid flush.

Jay put me onto this website called monoprice.com for all my cabling needs. With a new home theatre system I can upgrade my Wii’s output cable to the Enhanced Definition which will give me 480p instead of 480i (which is the standard cable) on my LCD HDTV.

I also have signed up for a free trial on Zip.ca which sends me DVD’s and bluray discs that I have on an online list when they are available. The problem is that I got a BSG season 3 disc 1 DVD that wouldn’t play properly in my Samsung BD-P1500 blu-ray player. I don’t know what was going on, so I returned the disc as damaged – wouldn’t play. I upgraded the firmware on the player through the USB port and when a new disc arrived (that looked like it had the same watermarked damage as the original disc) it still wouldn’t play. It wasn’t until I put it in my laptop and it played that I started to suspect the up converting blu-ray player.

It’s not a big deal, I can watch the older format DVD on my laptop, but Lauren likes BSG too so I’d prefer it to be on the big screen. Our new TV has a VGA connection that laptops can hook into all I needed was a cable.

To make the long story short, I got a 15′ SVGA cable with audio plugs for $6USD and the Wii cable for $3. Shipping was more than the cables at $10. The cables run here at tigerdirect for about $30 each so I’m saving money and I don’t have to go to the store to pick it up. If you need cables, check out monoprice.com before you go forking over too much money to a big box store.

Last night was a windy night. Gusts of up to 100km/h and 25mm of rain were forecast and yet still people put out their trash and recycling bins the night before.

When improperly packed – perhaps haphazardly as is the case in our house – the empty cans, paper and junk fly around the neighborhood. Even some unstable garbage bins were flipped if they were placed out in the open where the wind can lick at them all night long. Since our house is located at the end of the street we have a huge fence line that collects this stuff if the wind is blowing out of the East.

If you have to put out your refuse the night before, stack your blue boxes so only the top one has items exposed to the wind. Put a sturdy cardboard box upright against the windward side of the box blocking the wind and forcing it up and over the cans, paper and everything else inside the box. Better yet, invest in a large clear garbage bag or two and use it if your recycling bins are overflowing. These ideas may not work in hurricanes, but it’s better than nothing.

At least compost is too heavy to be blowing around.

The hot water tank that came with the house was a rental. It’s > 15 years old so we had it replaced today.

Scale and other nasty stuff can build up in those tanks depending on the hardness of your water. After 15 years it was time to swap it out. By keeping the rental contract Direct Energy replaced it for “free”. That’s part of what the rental cost pays for over time.

We looked at the on demand instant water tanks but the venting would have cost a fortune. The location the tank is plumbed in for gas and water access is on our shared wall of the semi-attached. There wasn’t a good place to punch through for venting on one of our outside walls.

The new tank was moved slightly to allow better access to the furnace burners which meant a change in the venting. Now we have a better slope of the horizontal pipe to help make sure we don’t have a carbon monoxide event. The old vent had the horizontal run to the chimney almost parallel to the floor which came up in the home inspection.

Now I need to insulate the hot water pipes in the house. The run to the bathroom isn’t too bad, but the run to the kitchen is easily 30 or 40 feet and it takes a while to vacate all that pipe to get some fresh hot water flowing.

Hot showers for all!