Category: Explanation

Posted on

I’ll be writing more in a week or two

If you’ve been reading this blog from my web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick, you may have noticed that I’ve been reorganizing things over there. I have been consolidating links to all of the articles there onto a single page, which is available from the “Archive” link on my web page or from the “Archive” link in the “All Things Mick” section on the left side of this page. When I’ve finished putting all the links on the Archive page, the web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick will cease to exist.

I’m doing this because everything I write these days is on my blog and I write very few, if any, website pages any more. I want to keep the old stuff around and I think a single page archive linking to all the old articles is a good way to keep it available without having to maintain the labyrinthian structure of the website as I envisioned it back when I first started it in 1996.

So what does this all mean for you, the reader? You now have a couple of options for viewing my blog:

  1. Replace your www.rynosoft.com/mick bookmark(s) with a bookmark to www.rynosoft.com/blog in your web browser. If you want to view old articles, use the Search field (for blog content) or the Archive link on the left (for older content).
  2. Subscribe to an RSS feed to this blog with your favorite aggregator. I use a dedicated reader called NetNewsWire but Safari, which is free and available for Windows and Mac, also has a fine built-in reader. If neither of those options is appealing, Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in reader (or so says Wikipedia) and I hear that Google Reader is an excellent web-based solution. If you’d like to do your own research, you can start with Wikipedia’s fairly comprehensive list of aggregator clients. WordPress, the wonderful software that powers this blog, supports atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and RSS 0.92 feeds. You can also click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the page to subscribe to this blog.
If the second option sounds totally technical and incomprehensible, I apologize. However, you should be using RSS even if my blog is the only blog you read. RSS makes web browsing faster and easier by doing all of the mundane work for you. You can expect a future article here explaining all about RSS: what it can do for you and how to use it. If you don’t want to wait, check out some of the links above.
Posted on

A junk yard fool with eyes of gloom

When things break, I am always compelled to take them apart in an effort to find out what is wrong. Most of the time, I remove the top cover/back panel/what-have-you, glance inside and conclude that I am simply out of my league. I can see nothing wrong or even recognize anything that I am looking at. On a few occasions I have been able to identify potential problems but did not have the expertise or knowledge to confirm and fix the problem. Last night I was able to make that final step: identify the problem and find a solution.

Sunday was the first anniversary of the new heating element we had to get for our dryer last year. At that time the dryer was less than a year old but surprisingly out of warranty. Although a certain amount of blame lies with us for failing to check the warranty terms (90 days) at purchase time, I mostly blame Sears for selling such shoddy products that they can’t warranty them for a year or three. I suspect they have done this in order to push their extended warranty programs, or “maintenance agreements“, as they prefer to call them. As you might imagine, we were angry over the warranty issue and even angrier when we had to pay the Sears repair man over $200 to fix something we considered to be “new”.

So how did our heating element celebrate the end of it’s first year in service? It quit. It totally stopped heating the dryer and Tina had to take our weekend laundry to the nearest laundromat to dry it. Once again we were angry, but there was no way we were going to call Sears this time. After mulling the situation for a day, I consulted howstuffworks.com for any advice they might have about fixing dryers. Their article on clothes dryers was informative, but did not contain any advice for fixing broken dryers. They did, however, point to a link at RepairClinic.com which eventually led me to a section entitled “There’s no heat.” That article lays out a basic inspection plan for determining which electrical component has failed. With this knowledge and my multimeter in hand, I unplugged our dryer and removed the back with only a little hope of actually accomplishing anything.

What lay behind the cover was much simpler than I had counted upon. After testing the thermal sensors (as prescribed by the RepairClinic article) it wasn’t long before I narrowed the problem to a little box near the bottom. After removing two screws, the little box came off easily and revealed that it had a matrix of coiled wires attached to it. I had discovered the heating element! A quick continuity test confirmed that this was the faulty component and I even found the broken coil after a quick inspection. An online search for the model number yielded an average price of about $40 for the replacement part.

I can’t tell you how good I felt at this moment. Not only was I victorious in finding the problem, disassembly had been so quick and easy that I have full confidence in being able to install the new element. It is also reassuring to know that if the element breaks again, I can replace it myself relatively cheaply. And we won’t have to call the damn Sears repair man ever again.

 

Update 4/17: I found a little additional information about Kenmore appliances on Wikipedia. Most large appliances are manufactured for Sears by Whirlpool, who also manufactures under the brand names Maytag, Amana, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air and many others. In addition to Sears’ OEM business, Whirlpool also makes products for Best Buy, Home Depot and IKEA. Iowa residents might note that in 2007 Whirlpool shut down the Amana manufacturing plant in Newton as well as plants in Illinois and Arkansas. I’m guessing those jobs probably went to China and Mexico where Whirlpool does much of it’s manufacturing.

Posted on

Tools for Twitterers

The popularity of Twitter has led to the creation of some great services that work with the “social networking” website. Because Twitter has a public API and makes the “tweets” (Twitter-speak for a message posted on Twitter) available to anyone, it’s easy for web developers to tap into this resource. Here are a few that I’ve found useful:

  • Twitterholic ranks twitter users according to the number of followers each user has. I follow several people on that list include Barack Obama, John Gruber, Wil Wheaton and Warren Ellis. You can also use Twitterholic to view your own history of people following you. Here’s mine.
  • TwitterLocal lets you find Twitter users in your geographical area. You can view the list of local users on the Twitterlocal website or you can subscribe to an RSS feed. They also track the top 30 locations for Twitter users in the world. Portland is currently ranked 15th only 6 spots below “Right here.”
  • TweetClouds processes all the tweets for a given user and then creates a tag cloud for that user. If you’ve tweeted for as long as I have, it takes awhile for TweetClouds to process all your tweets, but they provide you with a static link that you can pass around to people afterwards that allows for delay-free viewing of your tweeting psyche. Here’s one I generated as I wrote this. I am evidently obsessed with “time” and “watching”.
  • Quotably provides context for Twitter conversations by showing them as threaded discussions. If you glance at the Quotably page for my tweets, you’ll see people who reply to me as well as anybody to whom I might have replied. I use this when I see people I follow replying to people whom I don’t follow.
  • Twitter itself provides a range of “badges” that let you display your tweets on your web page, Facebook account, Myspace account and others. If you look on the left of this page, you’ll see that mine displays my three most recent tweets.
That’s just a few of the tools that are available. Googling “twitter tools” reveals that there are many, many more out there. This article has a pretty good list.
Posted on

Beating GrowCube

A couple of weeks ago, Graham recommended a few game sites to me. It didn’t take long to get tired of Beeboxing, but solving GrowCube, the first game on EyesMaze, took much longer than I would have thought. After a few minutes of clicking the pieces in various orders, it became clear that there was a specific set of rules involved with each piece and one only had to had to figure out the rules. Since there were a finite (although large) number of playing combinations, I set about recording the results for several games:

Obsessive notes
Click to enlarge

As you can tell from my copious notes, I designated the pieces on left (top to bottom) as “bone”, “water”, “ball”, “bowl” and “seeds”. The pieces on the right I called “pot” (and sometimes “bucket”), “tube”, “spring”, “people” and “fire”. I tried the pieces in different orders and recorded the actions that occurred after each play. With these results, I was able to generate a set of rules that I could test. These were the initial rules that I noted:

  • People have 6 tasks
  • People cannot do more than 1 task per turn
  • Canal must follow well
  • Steps must follow canal
  • Steps/bridge must follow steps
  • Cave must follow steps/bridge
  • Lighting cave must follow cave
  • Seeds will not grow without water
  • Tube must be placed after seeds
  • Fire will level up 4 turns after placement
  • Fire cannot level up before pot is moved

At this point it became obvious that a long set of rules would not provide all of the information about relationships and dependencies that I needed, especially when it came to describing the changes that each object went through with each turn. So I decided to document these changes for some of the objects and try to establish rules based on those changes. I started with the most complicated objects (those requiring the most changes to reach “MAX”):

Pot life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Embiggen
  3. Embiggen (next turn)
  4. Moved (after fire played, 2 people)
  5. Plant added
  6. Fruit added
  7. ??
 Seeds life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Grow (one turn after canal is dug)
  3. Grow (next turn)
  4. Grow (next turn)
  5. Grow (next turn)
  6. Grow (next turn)
  7. Seeds (next turn)
  8. Fruit (next turn) MAX
Tube life-cycle:                 

  1. Place on seeds
  2. 180 turn (next turn)
  3. Extend to back (next turn)
    • pot hole must be available
    • seeds must be level 6
  4. Around corner (next turn)
  5. Through and up
  6. ??
 Bowl life-cycle:                  

  1. Place
  2. Tower (next turn)
  3. Plants (next turn)
  4. Bubbles (next turn) MAX

Bone life-cycle:

  1. Place
  2. Skull
  3. Horns
  4. ??
Water life-cycle:                   

  1. Place
  2. Lake (dug by people)
  3. Canal (dug by people)
  4. Down steps (dug by people)
  5. ??
 People life-cycle:

In addition, I also observed that the pieces activated during each turn in this order:

  1. seeds
  2. tube
  3. bone
  4. bowl
  5. pot
  6. people (activate water, fire, spring, ball)

Given all that, I established the following as my base play order:

  1. people
  2. water
  3. seeds
  4. tube
  5. pot
  6. fire
  7. bone
  8. bowl
  9. spring
  10. ball

After a little experimentation, I finally figured it out today (spoiler follows):
Continue reading “Beating GrowCube”

Posted on

Remember mix tapes?

Before CD burners became inexpensive and ubiquitous, sharing music with friends and family meant making a mixed tape. Now you can share music with friends online with muxtape.com. The interface for adding songs is dead simple and it’s easy to check out the different mixes people have put up. My first mix features all live acoustic tracks. Just click on the song you want to hear and enjoy! If you make your own muxtape, be sure to email me the address.

Posted on

Join Twitter

The term social networking gets bandied about a bit too often these days. Most internet veterans probably cringe at the mention of websites like FaceBook or MySpace, two of the pioneers of the genre. Although it’s likely that those sites are so disregarded amongst the professional class of internet users simply because they consider such sites to be “beneath them,” most of these users simply cannot find a legitimate use for social networking.

Personally, I belong to MySpace and FaceBook purely because my friends and family have chosen those sites as their point of contact to keep me (and others) apprised of what is going on in their lives. Since I’ve long used this website (rynosoft.com) for updating everyone on what goes on in my life, I obviously don’t need any other website to do so. Consequently, social networking websites have always been a strictly one-way affair for me. Until Rob introduced me to Twitter last year.

It’s difficult to describe what Twitter does because it lacks a close analog in the “real” world. And so there was a period of time after I signed up that I really didn’t “get” what it was all about. I pestered Rob via instant message asking, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?” Do what it says: answer the question “What are you doing?”

Previous to Twitter, I was prone to changing my AIM status to reflect what I might be doing at work or perhaps to make a private joke to those that had me in their buddy list. Twitter provides a better outlet for that instinct and has been described by many as “micro-blogging”. Although that’s a fair description, I think it may discourage those who are not interested in or are intimidated by the prospect of blogging. Most bloggers have a theme or specific subject matter that they tend to write about, but the only theme for most Twitterers is the triviality of day-to-day life.

Don’t let that description deceive you, though. Life is mostly made up of a series of trivial events which, when taken together, provide a bigger picture. When you have access to occasional blow-by-blow descriptions, you become more involved in someone’s life in a very immediate way. Sometimes I’ll just passively digest these tidbits as they pass by while other times my curiosity will be piqued and I’ll seek more information via email and/or instant message. The end result is that Twitter brings people closer together even though physical distance may separate you.

You may have noticed the addition of a Twitter status on the right side of this blog several months ago. Twitter provides the web code necessary to display your most recent “tweet” (Twitter’s term for a single entry), so it’s very easy to share your Twitter status on web pages and blogs. Twitter also has SMS (i.e. text message) and instant message features which let you tweet even when you don’t have a web browser in front of you. For example, if you’re at a concert you might like to share that your favorite song had just been performed. Since I don’t have a mobile phone, that’s not a feature that I use.

More information on Twitter:

Posted on

Getting Old Sucks

Yesterday morning I injured my right wrist in the shower. You might think that there was some sort of freak accident which involved slipping or falling or maybe both, but it was not nearly that dramatic. The sad truth is that I was simply washing my hair when it happened. The act of rubbing shampoo onto my scalp with my hand caused the injury to my wrist. I wasn’t rubbing particularly vigorously or pressing very hard. It just started hurting and has hurt since.

Since I turned 40 I have been noticing more and more that my body has become much more fragile. Injuries that used to take a day or two to heal now takes weeks or even months. Last year, on a trip to the coast, I made the mistake of hefting too many laptops in my shoulder bag. Result: a popping sensation in my left shoulder that has only recently gone away.

It wasn’t like this when I was 20 or even 30. When I was in college, I used to do crazy things so people would think I was crazy. One of the crazy things I did was to jump out of a second story window once when I was drunk. Because I came away from that experience completely uninjured, I concluded that I would never be injured jumping out that window and demonstrated my theory a few days later. Even though I “rolled” with the impact, I injured my right ankle enough that I rolled around on the ground in pain for several minutes before limping off for a beer.

It probably took only a week for that injury to heal, but it has come back numerous times to haunt me in recent years. In the last year especially, that ankle has gone from normal to painful in a matter of minutes. And the transition doesn’t even have to involve movement. I can be sitting with my feet off the ground for a long period of time but when I stand I’m suddenly in excruciating pain. The extreme pain fades but a dull pain lingers for days after. I plan to speak with my doctor about it next time I see him.

Sometime between jumping out that window and now my body decided it could no longer put up with my shit anymore. Or perhaps it was no longer able to put up with my shit. Whatever the correct shit-putting-up-with verb, my actions now have consequences on my fragile body. That fragility has not only created a greater awareness of physical consquences but has also led to increased caution and hesitancy. Straining to move that bookshelf a few inches further while the body is twisted awkwardly is no longer an option. Greater planning and frequent plan re-evaluations are the order of the decade now.

And when the body says, “Pain!” – it’s time to finally listen.