Category Archives: About Me - Page 12

Losing For Winning

Posted by on November 1, 2019 No comments

There are some people who are professional sweepstakes players, believe it or not.  They spend an unnatural amount of time researching and entering sweepstakes.  And they can actually make money at this, too.  Or at least get a lot of stuff.  You might wonder how you can actually “win” at this.  It would just seem to be a numbers game where you enter as many sweepstakes as you can and eventually you’re bound to win something.  But there’s actually a somewhat unknown rule that the pros use to get an advantage. (one weird trick!)

Most sweepstakes have some sort of condition for getting an entry.  Buy a bottle of this, visit such and such place, every order you place on this website, etc.  But, in all sweepstakes, there is a way to get an entry without making a purchase or performing some action – it’s legally required.  If you read the rules, they will tell you how to get a free entry.  Always read the rules.  In most cases, you have to send a 3×5 card with your name and address printed on it and they will return you an “entry”.  Some sweepstakes limit the number of entries an individual may make, most don’t.

I’ve attempted this technique once a few years ago.  A local charity was selling tickets for your choice of two cars.  The tickets were expensive, like $150, and the total number of entries was limited – a rare situation and very valuable because you knew your maximum odds of winning.  And like all sweepstakes, you could get free entries if you read and followed the rules.

I bought two tickets, to keep up appearances, but I then deluged them with something like 100 requests for entry tickets.  They did fulfill my requests, sending thick bundles of tickets in the mail with their drawing receipts torn off.  In the end, I estimated I had a 20-25% chance of winning.  Does that sound bad?  Does it sound better than a 1:2000 chance? (these numbers are all estimated, BTW, don’t try to math them out)

Well, I didn’t win, even with my extraordinary chances.  Whatever, it was kind of a fun exercise.  The local charity has never tried a car sweepstakes since, so I think I really pissed them off.

So anyway, I got a flyer for another car raffle.  $20 tickets, and the rules do say no purchase necessary (as they must), however, they don’t specify how to get those entries.  You have to mail the administrator for information.  This sounds pretty good, too, because that extra step might turn off casual players.  But when I look at the effort vs reward, I’m going to pass on it.  Would you pass on a elevated chance to win a $60k truck?

So, first of all, it’s a truck.  It’s a stupid, jacked-up, fully customized pickup truck.  Not my style, at all.  So what!  Sell it!  Ok, let’s consider that.  First, winning the prize is a taxable event.  The IRS is going to want their share of your $60k windfall.  Let’s generalize at a 30% bracket.  So that’s $18k out of pocket right away.  You need to have that to claim the truck.  Then there’s tax and title.  That’s about another $5k.  Probably you need to insure it for at least a month until you can sell it.  Maybe that’s $100 at most.  So in order to get the $60k truck, you need to spend $23k. 

So then, your new $60k truck rolls off the dealer lot and immediately becomes a used truck.  And it’s worthwhile to note that this is a 2019 model and the drawing is in 2020, making it last year’s model.  Everyone knows a vehicle loses an immediate percentage of its value when it leaves the dealer lot.  Considering this is also last year’s model, shall we say 25%?  Now your truck is worth $45k and you’ve spent $23k to acquire it.

Your truck is worth $45k, but that is not exactly what it would sell for.  You’re in a hurry to sell this so you don’t have to keep paying for insurance on it.  Will it sell for $40k?  Let’s say yes, so we can wrap this up.  So you’ve now made a $17k profit on a $60k vehicle.  That’s quite a discrepancy.

“You suck.  I’d be more than happy with an extra $17k!”  Maybe you would.  But you also need to consider that you added $60k to your gross income this year with that win.  That might push you into a higher tax bracket.  That means the money you earn this year is going to be taxed at a higher rate, more than it would have been had you not won.  17k worth of higher taxes?  Probably not, but your withholding from your paycheck is probably not going to compensate for that extra, so you better save some of that $17k to cover your tax bill next year.

There’s something to be said for thinking things fully through.  In the case of the first drawing for the car, I would have kept and driven that car (not a $60k car, either) and could have absorbed the taxes easily.  This $60k truck has a lot of BS accessories on it that are inflating the value that would never make back their cost if it were to be sold.  It’s a bad deal all around.

I See Dead People

Posted by on October 28, 2019 No comments

There are some weird things that happen to me while I sleep.  Those that believe would instantly identify it as clairvoyance, and I’m inclined to agree.  However, when people think of being clairvoyant, they think it’s some superpower and you can simply teleport wherever you want and do whatever you want.  In my experience, it’s nothing like that.  You’re not really in control, it’s just like life; you aren’t aware that you are somewhere else or somebody else.  I have three memorable instances, one of which is personal, but the other two are not.  And those two, in true October fashion, are spooky.

The first one (which is actually the second time this happened to me) was a dream where I was walking in the woods.  I can still see the scene in my mind.  I know just how the terrain was.  if I visited the area, I would recognize it.  I was alone and was walking along a very slight hill.  Then, further down the hill, I saw a bear.  Naturally, I was freaked out, but I knew that I had to remain calm because if I suddenly bolted and ran, the bear would give chase.

Unfortunately for me, the bear had noticed me too.  I started walking calmly in a diagonal direction away from the bear, not backwards.  I did not turn my back to the bear because I knew that would be deadly.  To my horror, the bear started walking in a line that would intercept my path.  I couldn’t turn and run; I couldn’t really change course.  It was obvious what the end result was going to be.  And soon, the dream ended.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of days later I saw a news article about a hiker killed in a bear mauling at a park.  And it happened on the same day as my dream.  Pretty coincidental, right?  The article stressed how rare and uncommon bear maulings were.  Makes it seem a little too coincidental.

The other night, I had another “dream” while falling asleep.  No idea why this came into my head, but I was thinking about going overboard on a cruise ship.  One memory was that I slipped on the deck and slid through the railing and over the side.  Another memory was that I was yelling “overboard” and wondering if I should yell “man overboard” if a woman had gone over.  I recall throwing a safety ring and wondering if doing that was even useful because the ring had a rope attached, so it would just be dragged along with the ship, away from the victim.  My last thought was throwing some life jackets from the storage bins on the deck.  Then I started wondering how I could give a report of this incident.  I wasn’t sure if “Port side” was the left or the right of the ship.  And then the dream ended.

And the next morning, I saw a news article that someone had gone overboard on a cruise out of Texas overnight.  What another coincidence.  Unlike my bear dream, where I read about it a couple of days later, this was just the previous night.  Sure, people fall off ships all the time.  And speaking of time, the emergency call to the Coast Guard was at 8:45 at night.  I normally go to bed around 9:00 or so and usually flop around a lot before settling down enough to sleep.  So that would suggest my dream wasn’t real-time and would actually be a recollection.  However, that’s 8:45 Central Time in Texas, and in my time zone, it would be 9:45, just about the time I would be falling asleep.  Was I the guy sliding off the deck?  Was I the person calling for help and throwing things off the ship?  Was I there while this was happening?

So what if this is a real ability?  Is it useful?  Is it enviable?  Not that I can see.  First, it’s not controllable; it’s totally random.  Second, there’s no context of anything.  I wouldn’t be able to call a park ranger and say, “Someone was killed in your park yesterday by a bear.”  What park?  Where?  How do I even know it was real?  It’s only useful in hindsight, when you can’t have any impact on the situation.

You Get What You Pay For

Posted by on October 25, 2019 No comments

In posts leading up to this one, I’ve been talking about my garage and new cars.  Well, I finally got the new car and got in it the garage, only barely.

IMG_20191023_185500 IMG_20191023_185442

And I mean barely.  And with that car in the garage, there is no room for the other car.  I’m supposed to have a 2-car garage, and even so, I would classify the MX5 as a half-car, but still, there’s not enough room.  So that’s that.

Now, all about this new car.  As you see, it is a station wagon.  There’s only a handful of wagon models you can buy new in the US right now, and this particular one, a Buick Regal TourX, gets zero marketing and has zero recognition.  I saw this car once on display in a mall back in 2018, and have never seen one since.  So suffice to say, this is a rare vehicle.

The TourX is rare because it’s really low production volume.  There’s aren’t many buyers for wagons, so dealerships don’t order many and so no one ever buys them and the cycle feeds on itself.  When I decided on a car to buy – a wagon – I looked at my available options and this one was the most economical.  Well, it was economical for reasons relating to its unpopularity.  Dealers wanted to sell these things and not so they could order more; they just wanted rid of them.  In my own research, I saw that the 2020 model is coming soon and there are still 2018 models being sold new.

I haven’t purchased a car in nine years.  This time around, I utilized a car buyer service – a person who would search for my car, negotiate a good price, manage all the paperwork with the dealer and basically make the process as easy as possible for me.  When I first got started, I laid out all my criteria and within an hour, he had found me a car.  When he ran the numbers, I was pretty underwhelmed.

The TourX can run up to $40k with all available options, and that is what this particular car had.  So, $40k MSRP and with all discounts and haggling, I could get it for $35k.  After all the taxes and fees were added in, I would pay $38k.  I don’t know… I understand taxes and stuff, but a final price only $2k less than MSRP didn’t do it for me.  And it was about $6k more than I was willing to finance anyway.  So I turned it down.

The buyer went back to work and found another car with fewer options (but all the ones I wanted).  The MSRP was $38k, sale price of $31k, final price of $34k.  That was doable, so I agreed to the offer and we went through the complete sale process, which wasn’t all that bad.  The car was transferred from one dealership to another where I would actually make the purchase.  I gave it a brief test drive and no red flags were raised, mechanically.  The car did have roof racks, which I didn’t want, but I determined I could just uninstall them.  And after two hours at the dealership, I went home with a new car.

It’s been a couple days now, and some of the reality is hitting me.  The first weird thing I experienced was a warning popping up on my dash: washer fluid low.  Ok, whatever,  I can buy a $3 jug of fluid and top it off.  I would have assumed the dealer would have checked all that stuff during the “dealer prep” or whatever that BS service is.

When I popped the hood to fill the washer fluid, I was left aghast.  There were leaves all jammed up under the cowl.  Not just a few leaves, literal handfuls of leaves.  And the plastic shrouds throughout the engine bay were not just dusty, but had a layer of dirt on them.  This hood had not been raised in many, many months.  Yes, the exterior of the car had been washed and the tires glossed up, but there was no detailing of this car in any sense of the word.

As I was pouring the washer fluid in, my astonishment grew.  It just kept taking it.  I poured the entire gallon.  All of the washer fluid in the reservoir had evaporated in the time this car was sitting on the lot.  And the mass of leaves reaffirmed just how long the car was sitting idle and suggested it was not even stored on the primary lot, but in a grass lot back by a tree line.  I found out where the original dealer was located and did some quick math on the mileage for transportation and my test drive. I then determined this car had never been driven once.  It left that original dealer on its way to me with probably about 10 miles on the odometer.

This poor car.  It came to the dealer and was completely neglected for its entire life.  Yeah, yeah, of course cars don’t have feelings, but everything deserves a small level of care.  And a dealer should care for each and every vehicle in their possession.  These are going to be in someone’s family soon (or not soon in cases like this), and they deserve to be treated well until that time comes.

Now, I feel a little conflicted.  I mean, I got a great deal on a car – $7k off sticker price – and I didn’t have to deal with salespeople or haggling.  It was a very low-effort transaction and I can recognize it was probably a low-profit transaction for the dealer.  But at the same time, I still would expect one of the two dealers involved would have opened the hood and at least noticed the mess, or checked the fluid levels.  The bottom line is that I feel like I purchased a car from auction and not from a dealership.  Was I expecting to build a relationship with that dealer?  No way; they are 40 minutes away from my house.  I have dealerships closer to my home and my workplace I would utilize first.  Did I still expect to be wowed by the “new car purchase experience”, where I can show the car off to everyone?  Sure.  I mean, doesn’t everyone pop the hood and show off how clean and new everything is (instead of dirt, leaves, and a post-it note that says “do not turn off”)?  Show off every feature of the car like the power liftgate (which would reveal dusty and dirty rubber seals)?

But, I got a good deal, right?  Now I just need to spend some personal capital on a detailed cleaning of every inch of the vehicle.  Then the TourX will be mine and it won’t need to dwell on its miserable early life alone in a back lot.

Opening The Worm Can

Posted by on October 18, 2019 No comments

You know what’s really weird?  There’s a shitload of people in the world and yet, every business fights tooth and nail and scrambles over each other to get you as a customer.  You’d think there would be enough for everyone, but when you slow down and consider it, there really is never enough money for some.

So, here we go.  I’m opening myself up to attack.  I’m going to purchase a new car.  You can visualize a million people leaping to their feet with offers and pleas and vague promises.  Hold on, guys.  I know exactly which car I want already.  Now there’s about 2/3 of the people standing, even more excited that they made the first cut.  And as I work further in the process, the number of potential winners decreases and their manic attitude intensifies.

Some of the people clamoring for attention right from the start have never sat down at all.  Those people are the money people.  Buying a new car in cash is a rare occurrence, for those with excellent foresight and planning.  The majority of people are going to finance a car at varying levels of, shall we say, danger.  The more dangerous the loan, the more money for those that get and keep your attention.  So, the money people are relentless right from the start.

I’m currently at the point that I have a car chosen and secured and now it’s time to begin the finance dance.  I consider myself in pretty good shape financially, on many fronts.  I have a top-tier credit score and I keep all my credit reports frozen.  But now I have to unfreeze my accounts – let down the drawbridge – in order to get approval for this new loan.

When I froze my accounts, I had to pay to do so.  Now all of that is free.  So unfreezing the accounts was surprisingly easy and quick.  Maybe it wouldn’t have been if I wasn’t such a stickler on data and didn’t have my unfreeze PINs immediately handy.  Or maybe if I moved around a lot and had different verification data points.  But in the end, I have my accounts unfrozen for a few days now.  Come at me, bro.

Since this is like a solar eclipse-type of moment for me, I decided to take advantage of it.  I went to Credit Karma and checked out what sort of auto loans I could be eligible for.  I was pitched Capital One and Bank Of America – both of which I already had credit cards with.  The broker that was assisting me with the car purchase said the best I could get a loan for was 3.5%.  Credit Karma told me BoA could get me a loan for 3.29%.  Ok, let’s try it.  So I went to Bank of America’s site (affiliate linked from Credit Karma, so they get a spiff) and filled out the application.  It was pretty easy since they pulled a lot of my info from my existing account.  And sure enough, I was now pre-approved for a loan at 3.29%.

Well, that was easy.  Addictingly easy.  I tried the Capital One offer from Credit Karma and was highly disappointed.  CapOne said, yeah, sure, you’re approved for a loan up to $60k (WTF!), but there was no mention of rate or term.  That’s absolutely useless to me.

While still in eclipse mode, I made the poor decision to try out LendingTree.  You’d figure that a company with so much name recognition would be fully on the up-and-up.  Well, no.  I did their “quick and easy” application, which asked enough questions to be a full credit application.  And let me tell you.  It was BULLSHIT that they structured the questions in a way that made it look like it would be a non-intrusive questionnaire, but as it went on, it got more and more personal and you’re like, “I’ve already gone this far, this should be the last question.  It can’t get more invasive that this.”  But, you see it to the end and you’ve essentially given them everything to fill in a complete credit app.

So LendingTree then sends that information to their partners and gives you results.  I got something like three offers with rates of 5-7%, which was infuriating and insulting.  Then, below the firm offers, were a few that said, “we need more information – click to complete the application”  And being pissed about the shitty offers I initially got, I wanted to see if this shittiness was universal.  So I clicked one named Autobytel.

To be honest, I don’t remember the results of that, and since I don’t remember, it couldn’t have been anything worthy of mention.  But here’s what is worth mentioning.  I’m now in spam hell.  I’m getting emails and texts from lenders and dealers.  They still think I’m car shopping, so they all have people ready to help me find my next car.  All of you – fuck off!  If there is a positive to any of this, at least all of the places LendingTree sold me out to all use the same unique email address I provided in my application, so I can shut them all down at my mail server in one go.  The text messages and (probably soon coming) phone calls, I will just have to block as they come in.

So now, what did that whole exercise get me?  Well, on the plus side, I do have a competitive loan rate that I can use to bargain with the dealership.  On the negative side, I have a bunch of new email and phone buddies I’m not thrilled about.  And a little later, I can see what kind of change to my credit score all this experimentation caused.  I am curious about that because supposedly multiple inquiries of a certain type (auto loan in this case) shouldn’t have the same effect as if they were multiple inquiries of multiple types.

That Time I Could Have Died

Posted by on October 7, 2019 No comments

Here’s a story from my past.  It’s the time I left my home town for a job in a new city.  I had secured an apartment and moved all my belongings there, now I was there for good and unpacking and assembling things.  I had the weekend to get as much accomplished as possible before starting my new job.

I had my cat, Mess, to keep me company.  He was a pretty chill cat and the change of environment didn’t really faze him.  He settled in quickly while I kept doing my work.  But something was really weird about the whole process.  I couldn’t tell if I was just tired from the move or just overwhelmed with it, but I was constantly wiped out.  I could work for a hour or so, but then I would have to rest.  That’s not the way I was in my 20’s.

Regardless, I pressed on, taking short breaks to rest up while I kept unpacking.  In one of the boxes, I found my CO detector.  Living up north with gas heaters, it was a fairly normal practice to have one or more of these, especially where I grew up – so many old houses.  Without thinking much about it, I plugged the detector in and kept right on going.

You can probably tell where this story is going already.  And sure enough, in probably about five minutes, the alarm started blaring.  I’d never had the detector go off before, so I was confused.  Before I yanked it out of the wall, I saw the digital display said 150, which is the parts-per-million of CO detected.  I thought the detector went bad somehow from the move (decreased mental function, right?) so I plugged it back in.  As a normally-functioning person would expect, the alarm went off again.  So I grabbed an extension cord and ran the detector outside.  The display read zero.  Well, now.

I called the apartment office and explained the situation.  They told me that was normal because I was in a corner apartment next to the parking lot and car exhaust fumes would collect there.  I pushed back and said I didn’t think these numbers were normal.  Even if that was normal, WTF?  With resignation, they said they could have the gas company come out the next day and test it.  That’s about as good as I was going to get, so I went to bed in my oxygen-deprived apartment.

The next day, the office manager came over and we waited for the gas company.  When the worker showed up and knocked on the door, he had his testing device in his hand and he was pissed – legitimately angry.  “Do you see these levels I’m getting on my reader?”  I didn’t, but I took his word for it.  He came into the apartment and tested the different rooms and declared the apartment unsafe.  The apartment manager was highly embarrassed and immediately set me up with a furnished apartment until they could resolve the issue.

It turned out that the hot water tank in the apartment above me had a leaky flue, which was sending CO into my apartment.  So, problem solved and life went on.  But I always felt terrible for Mess.  I was able to leave the apartment for meals and whatnot, but he was in that CO environment 24 hours a day.  Cats sleep most all day anyway, so how could I tell the difference?  I guess he was probably lucky to even survive that incident, but he probably lost a lot of brain cells.

I live in an all-electric environment now and have always retained a slight distrust of gas-powered devices, despite the benefits they might offer like being cheaper or more efficient.  I also have a slight paranoia about CO.  This story came to mind because I recently just got my garage back at my house, so I can park my car in it, but I’m finding I’m (probably excessively and irrationally) spooked about the exhaust fumes from the car.  Maybe it’s time to buy another CO detector.

The Second System

Posted by on September 28, 2019 No comments

Last month, I upgraded my primary computer and one thing that sort of disappointed me about that event was that the old computer was still quite serviceable.  Aside from the need to support larger hard drives, it was perfectly fine.  After I finished the new built, I boxed up the old parts and left them stored for some unknown future day.

While I am still in my personal rebuilding phase, I’m playing around with a lot of ideas.  Most of those ideas are things from my past.  One specific one is music – playing, recording, etc.  So as I mulled this over, I considered the setup plan.  One thing I wanted was to not use my primary computer for the audio recording, as I had always done in the past.  While all computers are powerful enough to multitask like that now, I just didn’t want the clutter.  And that’s when I remembered I had a whole other quite serviceable computer sitting in a box.  All it needed was a new case.  That makes the idea much more reasonable from a cost perspective.

I got to work shopping for a new computer case, which was easy and not easy at the same time.  I wanted a desktop case (horizontal orientation), but it seems they just don’t make those anymore.  Too old fashioned, I guess.  So I shopped for the smallest tower case I could find.  And since this was a secondary system that would be limited in purpose, I bought the cheapest thing available.  And I bought a cheap power supply to install in it, too.  Maybe a total spend of $60.  Everything else I already had ready to go – monitor, cables, drives, RAM.

The case arrived the other day and I wanted to get a jump on things by installing the motherboard in right away.  Upon opening the box, I saw that all the front panels for the drive bays had popped off.  Then I noted the front panel was also popped off.  This gave me a bad feeling.  After extracting the case from the packing material, I was left with a collection of plastic tabs all over the table.  It appears the box was dropped or mangled in some way to basically shear the front panel straight off.  Every plastic tab that held the front panel to the case was broken off.  Not a single one was spared.

I’m not going to go through a bunch of RMA bullshit for a $30 case, but I’m also not going to just pitch it or give up on it.  I went to the garage and got my big box of miscellaneous screws and permanently attached the plastic panel back to the case with sheet metal screws.  That’ll show ‘em.  And without further incident, I installed the motherboard, video card, and hard drives in the case.  Now I just had to await the arrival of the power supply, which would come the next day.

This computer would be one of those unheard of systems that runs off-network.  No updates ever; first install-last install.  File transfer and backup would be via USB drives to my primary computer.  Ah, the good old days.  Time will tell if Windows 10 can even survive in this environment.  If not, well I suppose I could drop back to Windows 7.  Windows 7 is near end-of-life with security updates being phased out in January 2020, but on an unnetworked computer, what’s security?

Next up, software.

My Car’s Second Life

Posted by on September 20, 2019 No comments

A while ago, I posted about my car’s 300k mile milestone.  Since then, a few things have been in play that have some relation and interaction.  The first is my scheduled garage re-conversion.  This will give me a safe place to store my car and work on it out of the elements.  The other thing is a more or less finalized decision to get a second car, one made for hauling and touring.  That will give my primary car a chance to rest, so its mileage won’t be climbing as quickly – although honestly, it will probably still be my daily driver.  With these two changes, it almost feels like my car is getting a second chance at life, even though it’s at 300k+.  To support this idea, I’ve been planning and working to rejuvenate my car for its second trip around.

When I first got the MX5, back in 2010, I made a series of customizations to make the car my own.  I changed out the upholstery to a custom leather, I changed the antenna, and finally, updated the stereo.  Time has really worn on these changes.  The antenna, once black aluminum, is more or less silver aluminum now.  The leather seats have worn through.  The stereo doesn’t seem to be playing any sound from the left speaker.  And on top of those bits of wear, the leather on my steering wheel has been worn out and torn off for many years now.  I’ve had the thought of rewrapping it, but never quite got around to it, because the stitching is something I don’t feel I could do adequately.

So I’ve got a plan.  First up is the steering wheel.  A new leather wrap is about $120, plus whatever time it takes to stitch it.  They say to budget 12 hours.  Yeah, no.  So what if I took it to an upholstery shop?  The place that sells the wraps will do it for $140 and has a two day turnaround time.  Well, maybe I should wait until I get the second car.  Or, I could buy a junk wheel and have them wrap that one, so my car isn’t unavailable.  Hmmm.

I do a quick search on Ebay and find a replacement factory wheel for $95 shipped.  And the leather on it is perfect.  So, why don’t I just buy that and swap wheels?  It’s far cheaper.  And that’s what I did.  The wheel is on its way.  Soon, I’m going to have a brand new wheel with new leather on it.  And this time, I will preserve it by wearing my driving gloves, so my skin oils don’t destroy the leather again.

Now, the seats.  This one is easy, because I never got rid of the original leather.  It took me a weekend to swap the leather the last time, so I can budget the same this time.  And just like that, the car will look brand new with fresh leather on the seats and wheel.  That leaves the shift knob.  Damn, these are expensive.  $200?  Well, maybe that part will have to wait.  And the antenna?  I’ll just return it to stock; I never got rid of the original, either.

And then the stereo.  Originally, I installed a low-profile subwoofer under the passenger seat, but the sub actually interfered with the airbag sensor, because it was too tall, so I took it back out.  The amplifier was always mounted in the trunk.  Well, after all this time, now the amp is just sitting on the floor of the trunk flopping around loose.  I can now relocate the amp to under the passenger seat and regain my full trunk space, which also means putting back my emergency kit (flat tire and hard-top failure repair).  More returning to stock.

After all this is done, and I have a garage and I have my car’s interior sorted out, the next thing is to get the MX5 repainted.  The fiberglass panels on the car have suffered considerably and the paint is completely ruined on them.  Getting a fresh coat of paint on the whole car, getting the marks and etching of lovebug carcasses off the front bumper, having a garage to keep the car out of the elements, replacing the worn leather parts of the interior,  it does seem like a complete rebirth of the vehicle.  A deserving one for a car that has served me so well and has been through so much with me.

Making The Good Even Better

Posted by on September 18, 2019 No comments

I hate my kitchen sink.  I have hated it for a very long time.  The thing I hate the most about it is that the sides are so curved, you can barely put anything in the basins.  Any glass I put in there topples over.  It is infuriating to me.

So finally, I made the commitment to get a new sink.  Not only that, but I was going to get a hot water dispenser, a filtered water dispenser, a new garbage disposal, and a new, fancy, pre-rinse spray faucet.  I began my search online and was immediately overwhelmed by the potential options.  I mean, there are a LOT of sink options out there.  Eventually, I settled on a 50/50 split sink.  In the process, I learned a bunch about sinks.  One thing I learned was the gauge of the steel.  You can get anything for 16 to 22 gauge thickness.  16 is probably overkill and you don’t really want more than 20, so 18 is a great target point. 

Also, the thicker steel will reduce some of the tinniness when banging items around in the basins, but that can also be mitigated by sound deadening material.  I looked at my existing sink and it had something like a spray-on sound deadener all over the bottom.  When I bought my new sink, it said it had sound absorption as well.

When I got the sink and unpacked it, I saw the deadener on the sink.  It was a 4” square pad on the bottom of the basins.  What good is that going to do?  I knocked on the sides of the basins and the gong was obnoxious.  Sigh.  This is fine.  I can fix it.  The fix idea isn’t mine or even a new idea at all, you can see plenty of examples of the technique online.

When I was installing my stereo in my car, I used a material called Dynamat, which is essentially the same deadening material that is stuck on the bottom of my sink (although much thicker).  When people deaden their cars for improved audio quality, they usually go overboard and cover every exposed bit of metal.  But the key is that you really only have to cover the areas that resonate.  Corners?  No.  Large flat panels?  Yes.  Cover them entirely?  No.  Cover about 50% of the area?  Yes.

So I made a small purchase of Dynamat online, about $18, and applied it to the edges of the sink.  Each of the flat walls got a treatment.  I made a short video of the before and after effects of the treatment.

Refusing To Be A Victim

Posted by on August 30, 2019 No comments

I’ve made a couple of posts about my Plex server and recently how I’ve been trying to clean up the files and metadata, specifically, the album art.  Using a self-written utility to audit the artwork dimensions and a downloading utility to find better versions, plus the effort of scanning and cleaning artwork that has no high quality option, I’ve done pretty well.

The next step was to clean up – actually add – the artwork for artists.  It’s a smaller effort, only 600-some items instead of 1600 items.  However, I wanted to get through it easily.  This process requires a bit of explanation on how Plex handles things.  Some of this I learned painfully as I went.

Plex gets a lot of its data from Last.fm, which is really cool and pretty effective.  However, when you don’t want to use that data, you have to disable that “agent” for your library.  Because I was manually managing the artwork on my library, because I wanted hi-res art, and I also wanted the specific original cover instead of the cover on the latest remaster of the album, because of all this, I set everything in plex to manual.  No last.fm anywhere.  That was good.

However, that also meant I had no artist images or bios.  Since I had cleaned up my album art, I wanted to now download artists from last.fm.  I wasn’t going to be picky about images there.  So I re-enabled the last.fm agent and stumbled around trying to figure out how to get plex to refresh the artist data from last.fm.  It’s important to know that the command to use in the artist menu is “Match”.  That will allow you to pick an artist from Last.fm for which to get metadata.

It’s also somewhat important to not use the command, “refresh all metadata”, because that caused Plex to utilize the newly-enabled last.fm agent and download all the data for my albums again.  That wiped out over half of my 1000px covers with 300×300 images.  When I saw this, I was devastated.  The worst part is that even if I used my auditing utility and worked my way through those hundreds of albums, the image picker in Plex gives no indication of which image is small and which is large.  It shows them equally at 150×150.  It would literally be a blind guess between 2 and 4 different images for 900 albums.  It’s not reasonable to accomplish.

I resolved to rebuild my Plex database from scratch.  That would wipe out all the effort I made on the artist artwork, but at least I could preserve my work on album artwork.  I would also lose hours I spent building my playlists.  And I figured if I was going to wipe out the database, I would try some more aggressive actions against it.

My auditing utility has only ever done database reads.  It doesn’t do any updates.  But I spent some time restructuring the code and adding a new feature, which I descriptively named, “replace art with largest version.”  See, Plex never gets rid of things, it just accumulates.  My data folder used to have 44k files in it, but after the last.fm influx, it now had 124k files.  All of my old artwork was there, too.  I just needed to scan and compare sizes, which is what I built my utility to do.

And within a day, I ran my new code and updated all the records to use the large artwork I had added previously.  It worked just as planned.  So now, I have my large artwork back, my playlists are still in place, and the artists artwork is still there.  It seems that anger is an excellent motivator for progress.

It Seems To Be Working

Posted by on August 28, 2019 No comments

Last July, I had a major update to my HVAC system, getting a whole new unit and a sparkly new thermostat.  I was sort of excited about the thermostat because it was programmable.  However, at the time, my ex and I were working opposite shifts and so I never had the opportunity to exploit the scheduling features.

Well, as circumstances changed a while ago, I only recently decided to revisit these scheduled temperature changes.  I actually wouldn’t have thought much about it if it wasn’t for the cats.  The cats were enjoying hanging out on the patio in the middle of the day and it’s like 90 degrees outside.  While I watched them bake, I was reminded that cats internal body temperature is higher than humans and how an average house temperature is actually really cold for them.  That’s why they’re always looking to curl up in warm places, like sunbeams and beds and laps.

I thought, I guess I could raise the house temp a little for them, and realized, I can do it every day while I’m not around.  That’s why I have this programmable device.  And while I thought the idea was novel, I also questioned whether it would really work.  To me, it didn’t seem like anyone would really be fooled by this scheme.  Sure, you let you house temp rise all day and save the money with the AC not running, but them you have to cool it all back down, so your AC runs hard to bring it back down.  Shouldn’t it be cheaper to maintain than to binge and purge?

I set my thermostat to let the house warm to 79 degrees while I was at work and return it to 74 for the time I would be at home, which includes all day Saturday and Sunday.  After a full month of this, I was able to use my electric company’s data tools to actually see if this was a noticeable improvement.  This is how last month looked.

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The significance of the rising and falling isn’t anything, but the peaks are.  Every peak happens on a weekend, when the AC is keeping the house at 74 all day.  The only other major contributor to my energy usage would be laundry day, which actually varies, so it’s not really identifiable in the graph.

While that seems interesting for a month’s timeframe, if we zoom out to 14 month’s worth of data, you can see some other things of note.

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Here, you can definitely see when I replaced my HVAC unit.  The electrical usage dropped right away.  Of course we get into fall and winter, so things are light at that time.  But you can see last month, I had a decent amount of tier 3 usage (which costs more).  This month, in the first graph, I haven’t hit tier 3 yet, so I’m definitely ahead of the game.

Since the cats actually seem to like the warmer house, I think I may bump the day temp to maybe 84.  The only issue that causes is that my office and my master closet stay hot for quite a while, since there’s no AC vents there.  But, I can manage to deal with that if I’m saving a lot of electricity.  I keep a budget of $350/mo for electric, because that’s actually what it used to be in the summer.  But this year, I’m averaging about half that.  That’s how to promote conservation, make it pay.