The Occasional Stevie

I Have A Target (dot com) Painted On Me

2012-02-07T14:48:00.007-05:00

I bought some parts for a model helicopter just after Christmas.

Mrs Stevie had bought one of those tiny electric helicopters for me as a present, but she got bait-and-switched with a cheap knock-off that would not fly at all and was, as a result, very sad.

So I pulled it apart and replaced the works with some from a more reliable brand and she was thrilled that the little thing flew. Almost as thrilled as me, but I digress.

Since that purchase, I have been plagued in my web-browsing by peripheral ads featuring helicopters to the point I'm sick to the back bleeding teeth with sub-miniature rotary wing aircraft of any sort. Well done that vendor for "enabling" the "web community" to "enhance" my web "experience". Left alone I would have probably graduated to larger, more expensive models over time, as I got caught up in the fad. Spurred by my enhanced web experience I shall probably never buy another electric helicopter as long as I live since I now associate them with boring, uninspiring repetition.

However, it has given me an idea.

I plan on purchasing a number of items of feminine undergarmenture. No, I haven't decided to explore my feminine side¹. Within hours my web-browsing experience will be enhanced by a variety of scantily clad models oozing from the sides and top of my browser in a desperate bid to enhance me into another buying spree.

If I'm going to be targeted, I'm damn-well going to be targeted by something worth looking at.

at least, not when there are witnesses around - that sort of thing should be done in private with only a webcam for company↑

Google Knows Where I Live

2012-02-01T23:28:00.008-05:00

So, apparently Google has been collecting data on me since nitrogen formed in the atmosphere and plans to use it to properly tailor my web experience.

I'm not sanguine about this for two reasons:

a) I have been refusing Google Chrome since the nagware for it debuted and they haven't yet figured out that my tailored web experience is a Chrome-free one

2) Job one upon loading Google's splash page is to turn off the ridiculously nasty one-character-at-a-time attempt to jump the gun and pre-guess what I'm trying to search for while shielding my eyes from the psychedelic cascade of gibberish happening on my computer screen. If Google were the data interpretation geniuses they believe themselves to be they would have figured out long ago that this is not so much "enhancing" my web experience as "annoying the living piss out of me" and they would have stopped delivering the search page with the settings set to "stupid".

þ) Amazon's attempts to enhance my purchasing experience by tailoring it according to what they know about me is laughably off-the-mark, leading me to believe that the clever young things in charge of the web are still under the daft impression that data is information. Accordingly, I have been widening my browsing habits in order to add as much entropy to the process as I can.

Each evening I spread my search terms to land me on monster trucks, clerical garb, pony play accessories, roller derby games in Brooklyn, flower arranging supplies, hammers, male enhancement supplements, Google (for a dash of recursion), egg and spoon racing, cross dresser footwear retailers, plywood, solar power, global warming denial sites, extruded aluminum wholesalers, air bottle recharging specialists, telescope and binocular suppliers and erotic piercing forums. It's exhausting. I imagine the Google database on me must resemble this picture.

Sadly this has backfired somewhat in that when I'm signed on I can only search sites in Bellarus dedicated to nun-heavy industrial dungeon pron.

Or that is what I'm telling Mrs Stevie.

Science You Can Do At Home!

2012-01-09T10:04:00.009-05:00

I discovered a new effect this Christmas I am calling the Stevie-Electric Effect.

In order to repeat the experiment in your home, you will need to buy these delicious chocs and eat them. No science can be done until all the chocs are consumed, and the Stevie-Electric Effect has not yet been demonstrated effectively using cheaper packages of said chocs, nor with inferior choccy comestibles so don't waste your time and funding on economy lash-ups.

Carefully remove the now-empty inner tray from the plastic box, along with the stiff glossy paper insert that lies under it. You may notice the paper sticks to the tray with a noticeable static charge.

Rub the tray against the paper using a flat hand to support the paper and gripping the tray in the middle with pinched fingers. You will notice a slight build up of static.

Now prepare yourself for the experience of the mighty Stevie-Electric Effect, which I already called bagsies and dibs on so don't try re-labeling it in the way scientists so often do to steal other people's hard work and insight.

Aligning the paper and tray so there is no overlap, gently move the tray back and forth by no more than a half inch. You should notice a rapid build-up of a ferocious static charge, far in excess of any that can be obtained by rubbing the tray on the paper over a wider path. Eventually the tray will stick so firmly to the paper that sliding the tray will become very difficult.

You have now demonstrated the Stevie-Electric Effect and should be in awe of my science powers and like that.

Harpy No Yeast!

2012-01-02T18:58:00.006-05:00

I'm posing thistle missile bite means of my newt Kindle Fight.

A newt ear in blotting is at hound, moored sightly by the automobile spooling collection I hive nit fatigued how to tan often.

Expectorate mope of thus sight of thing as Tim goes on; one mist move whist the tomes, I almost sat.

As I Walked Out This Winter's Day

2011-12-22T23:41:00.003-05:00

The Christmas Tree Guy
Is gone leaving just the smell
Of pine on the air

New Look

2011-12-20T23:42:00.005-05:00

Gah!

Last week I was at a loose end, got curious, clicked something I shouldn't have and trashed my bailing-wire and chewing gum blog markup template, replacing it with a new one supplied by Blogger that has drag'n'drop gadgets, some of which actually work.

Shame I never got round to saving the original template.

I think I've gotten most of the value-added styles back in place, or rather, I've improvised several workarounds that sort of do the same thing the old styles did.

Anyway.

The new look: good or bad? Please let me know.

The Horrible Nastiness of Unpleasantness (aka Life)

2011-12-20T21:14:00.006-05:00

So, since I last posted life has been crashing over me like cool, wild, blue surf contaminated with sharp scrap metal, nuclear reactor linings and toxic waste.

The LIRR has periodically broken down, never so spectacularly as the evening of hell when a signal outage on the lightning-prone Babylon branch was converted into a system-wide debacle by "a techie who pushed the wrong button", but once so badly I was obliged to take a train so late that I was greeted by my boss with an unironic "Good Afternoon".

Truly these people deserve some sort of Award for Dedication to Lack of Service. I'm not blaming the crews. They generally at least are in it with the rest of us and strongly motivated to Get Things Moving. I blame the middle- and upper-management who it seems cannot find their collective backsides with both hands and a map. Disasters happen, but why do the same disasters continue to cripple the service year after year?

I finally screwed up the courage to visit the skin doctor, who hacked off some of that newly mutinying organ and sent it off for tests. Specifically a skin tag that was growing under my left eye and entering my field of vision¹ and a wart on my thumb that reacted to my attempts to freeze it off cryogenically by regrowing, and the attempt at excision by the application of corrosive chemicals by springing a number of freely bleeding wounds which got infected.

There was nerve tissue in there too, as I found when I attempted a home surgery with a razor blade and a small rubber ball, which I bit in half but managed not to swallow as I hopped screaming around the bathroom/operating theater, crashing into things and begging for death's sweet embrace. One in the win column there. And the nerves turned out to be the type that don't become numb when the skin is frozen with the old cryogenic kit as a second impromptu surgery attempt proved.

Doc Hacksaw grabbed my head and, knocking my glasses to the floor with a skillful sweep of his scalpel hand whipped off the offending growth, missing the eyeball by several thicknesses of the blade. I had to admire his technique, especially when he managed to switch out the knife for a small electric branding iron and rammed it into the wound he had inflicted, all without receiving any wounds of his own from my frantically clawing hands and thrashing legs (though I did manage to bite his nurse as she applied the dressing, which mollified me a little).

Deciding that the wart called for Heroic Measures, Doc Hacksaw first anethetized me with a hypo fitted with a blunt needle, stabbing me in many places, some of them close to the area he planned to work on. I cooperated by showing him some of my very best Words of Power and attempting to grasp him by the windpipe. Then, brandishing his scalpel, so sharp the edge gave off blue radiation as it snipped the very photons of light in half when it moved, utilizing what I call a "Jack the Ripper" grip, he began to stab and slash with gusto. Naturally this produced a very deep wound in my thumb, which bled freely.

"Nurse!" screamed the crazed dermatoligist. "The cauterizer! No, the big one!"

I encouraged his efforts with manly falsetto screams as oily red steam rose from my (formerly) good hand and the delicious smell of burning meat filled the room. Then he gave me some cream to put on it and it was all over.

The Stevieling managed to infest her computer with Chechnyasoft and was plagued with pop-ups telling her she needed to buy her anti-virus software. This helpful message highlighted the fact that the still-under-subscription McAffee software she has was turned off, again.

This makes twice in about 8 months.

I was livid, so much so that Mrs Stevie told me to stop shouting at the Stevieling but became less involved when I explained that:
      a) even an administrator has to manually escalate their permissions in order to make registry changes (which had clearly happened here) so she had quite obviously clicked "yes" on a window without reading the message in the box
     2) The last time this had happened I had taken a day off work and it still hadn't been enough time to get the machine working again
     þ) I could take no time off this week and therefore the computer repairs would take time needed to put up the decorative Arch O' Festivity and get the Pre-Lit Yule Bush down from its perch in the garage² and
     ♥) That although the Stevieling had sworn to me that she was scanning her computer for infections when I asked each week, I could find no logs to prove it, and the only log I could find was he one from the scan I ran right after I fixed the damned machine eight months before.

It was five nights of pure hell getting the basted thing free of the grip of former soviet cyberthuggery. I thought I could do it in two, but the infection poved immune to the two day fix (either that or that wretched kid re-infected the machine within minutes).

So, life as usual, really.

I don't have enough to spare these days to allow it to be blocked by stupid growths↑
That more than anything served to get Mrs Stevie in the proper frame of mind re: needlessly virused computers↑

More Incompetence and Annoyance

2011-11-08T23:48:00.004-05:00

Even though it was election day today, and many government offices were closed, we had a mail delivery.

I was impressed until I looked at the mail.

Most was for the house ten digits higher than Chateau Stevie. Some was for a house ten digits higher than that. Not a single piece was for us.

My guess is that Mr Singh got all our mail.

Pool Annoyance Rant

2011-11-08T13:13:00.000-05:00

All the air pillows I so laboriously cleaned and inflated developed leaks and sank, so I had to buy another and deploy it on Sunday.

The hurricane had also peeled back the cover and dumped leaves in the water I so laboriously cleaned four weeks ago. I did my best to rectify this state of affairs but was so demoralized by this foul turn of events it was a sloppy job at best. There's four hours of my life I won't get back.

While lifting the pool cover, it became apparent that it was dotted with numerous holes which will let filthy rainwater in anyway. This also explains why the water level was very low - when I siphoned off the water on the pool cover I also siphoned off half the water in the pool through the holes in the cover.

So that's all right then.

Another Day, Another Annoyance

2011-11-08T13:12:00.001-05:00

I find I have time on my hands to post to The Occasional Stevie, a now-rare occurrence up there with lottery wins, because once again I find myself sitting on a premium-priced peak period LIRR train, waiting for an off-peak train to clear the chicane caused by a rail failure.

I stand corrected: Two trains.

It's not the failures that I mind, though they seem to be occurring more and more frequently of late, it's the witless way these disruptive events are dealt with by the clueless wuckfits who are "in charge" of the bloody Long Island Rail Road. Holding priority traffic for low-priority traffic is mindless.

Yes, I know they have to get the trains back up the other end of the line somehow, but these could be deadheaded back in the relatively slow period from 10 am onward. I am sick to the back teeth of sitting in an expensively-priced peak train waiting because some dimwit dispatcher doesn't have a clue how to run a railway network.

As I just said to the conductor - this bunch couldn't get me drunk in a bewery.

More Expensive, Time-Wasting Idiocy

2011-10-20T22:29:00.003-04:00

I arrived home tonight to find I had been served.

I read the summons with mounting rage. Name or defendant (identified by idiot lawyer as me): Wrong. Address: Spelled wrong. The complaint claims I have not acted to compensate someone I've never heard of who was injured some time ago in a vehicle I don't own that was part of a business I have never been involved with in a place I've never been to as far as I know.

Mrs Stevie, who is part of the well oiled machine that is the New York Legal System (and that is the only explanation I can come up with as to why someone would get so many of the details of a summons wrong) said I should calm down and she would deal with it in the morning.

So I'll let her tell the idiot, lazy lawyer he isn't worth whatever the plaintiff is paying him.

Careers I Would Have Liked To Try

2011-10-13T10:00:00.004-04:00

Apache Dancer.

Flinging some slim French bird around the place, having her clutch me tightly and get paid for it? C'est une consummation devoutment etre wished.

Sadly, a love of Mars bars™ and food in general, a genetic predisposition toward bisinistrate-rhythmoperambulation and a complete inability to gain even rudimentary fluency in French doomed me to the path more traveled than that one.

Plus: I cannot smoulder convincingly¹.

Merde!

Unless we count the experiments detailed here ↑

Internet Rant

2011-10-03T21:22:00.001-04:00

Those who know me know I have some issues with the current festering pile of leperous vileness infesting the World Wide Web.

Chief among these is anything that slows down the delivery of the webpage I'm wanting to look at, and it goes infinity times more for anything that is simply going to be a signpost to where I really want to be.

I sometimes (rarely) use my laptop to connect to the web while on the train, where my Wi-Fi service is spotty at best and passing between different access points as I ride. It is therefore paramount that pages load quickly, especially if they are just being loaded to grab the next waypoint on my (usually unwanted) voyage of discovery.

It should therefore come as no surprise that today I am enraged that I sat waiting for a bleeping secondary site to answer the bleeping phone in order that Google could start showing me the link for the site I actually wanted to see (one of the ad-service sites) and then the bleeping site I wanted wouldn't load because it was waiting for Google analytics to answer the bleeping phone. Naturally, by the time I had the site I wanted up and began the process of untangling the resource I needed to see from the visual chaos that passes for design, the Wi-Fi connection had been lost.

I see many angry young things arguing that as soon as more memory becomes available for a PC, Microsoft fills it with cruft. I see just about no-one complaining of the incomprehensible dash to fill bleeding-edge bandwidth with digital vomit, forcing those of us who bought our machines before last Tuesday to endure design assumptions at the web-server end that are not true at the client end. Amazon is a case in point. Get a slow connection and you might as well not bother to load their site as it wallows, trying to pre-load rollovers and banners and Azathoth-knows what else, none of which is central to the business of locating the new Larry Niven novel and buying it.

For years I had to explain to people that the rest of the world was not built around free local telephone service and that V90 dial-up was not a world standard. My father once had to face paying a three hour long-distance telephone charge in order to download an update. Does anyone here begin to see another reason other than stupidity for not applying the latest patches to Windows? I never saw a business so intent of marginalizing its consumer base.

And don't get me started on the Javascript stupidity, in which the quest for shiny website bling has opened up everyone to insidious hijacks that have one's credit card in Chechnya faster than one can say "point, click and ship".

Gah!

Hurricanes: Ban Them Now!

2011-09-14T12:33:00.003-04:00

Well, that was fun. Oh wait, no it wasn't.

Regular reader¹ will probably be aware that Hurricane Irene blew into Long Island a couple of weeks ago. Given the fact that it was actually dying down to category 1 by the time it made landfall, I expected it would be no real inconvenience, and thus rested my head in confidence on Saturday night.

At about 2:30 am the next morning the power went out on the side street that runs along one edge of our property because a small branch snapped off the dead tree the guy across the road is cultivating and fell on the cooper-clad thread of cotton that the Long Island Power Authority deems suitable for urban power distribution and strings for miles on rotten poles inadequately bedded in the sand that serves for soil hereabouts. The irony here is that the main road that runs along the front of the property, and which is referenced in our address, suffered no such interruption of power.

"Irony?" I here you sneer, digging out your Alanis Morrisette collection. "How is that irony?"

It is irony because after a warping power pole had tugged the cleat anchoring our power lines to the house off the wall twice in six months we insisted the IQ brigade at LIPA "do something to permanently address the problem" and they switched out power line to the side street's transformer².

And so, as the hurricane swept over Long Island in the early morning, we awoke to no power and a flood in the basement.

Mrs Stevie got busy with towels and something called a "sham-wow", soaking up the water and transferring it to buckets which were dumped into the septic system so it could seep back into the waterlogged ground and thence back into the basement in a few hours. I declined to join in since I knew the power would be back on in a few hours. After all, not even LIPA could be caught so badly out of crease as to not have contingency plans well in hand.

It was pointed out to me that stuff was getting ruined by the water, but I replied that all my stuff had been systematically ruined in previous floods so there was nothing I cared about, and all their stuff had been put up on shelves after the last time surely? This was greeted with harsh words but I remained resolute in my refusal to join the basement bailing fun.

In order to assuage Mrs Stevie's deteriorating temper I offered to drive them out for breakfast at a diner. The wind was howling and rain was falling, but it had stopped falling crosswise which I took to be a good sign, so we ignored the witless idiots on the radio saying "stay home", mostly because when we were home we had no electricity for the radio and so couldn't heed their advice until we had ignored it and fired up the Steviemobile, and drove to a nearby diner.

On the way I began to get intimations that the situation might be a tad worse than I had apprehended. Bits of tree were scattered everywhere. That much I did expect. What I had not expected to see was trees ripped out of the ground by their roots and dropped wherever gravity and the prevailing wind felt was appropriate. One fallen tree had a root system that was over ten feet across. The owner probably wished that it had gone down a bit further than it did. It looked like what happens when a very young child is let loose on a scale model railway. There were trees down everywhere. Trees big enough to block whole streets, and over a quarter of the town was blacked out.

The diner was in good repair and had power (and had a backup generator, I was informed) and staff, who all looked like they would rather be at home bailing out their own basements³. That diner was to do record business that day and most of the following week. As it was, we had breakfast with coffee (my main reason for suggesting the trip), and we left to see if Mrs Stevie's parents were okay.

They were in darkness, but un-flooded, so I drove the famikly home and returned with one of our Coleman electric lanterns after replacing the batteries so they would at least have enough light to get about the place.

I took Monday off and, after taking a box of coffee to the in-laws⁴ the Stevieling and I went out for a drive out east along the Long Island Expressway. She drove because she needs the practice, it was time she had freeway experience and this day at this time traffic would be very light. I just sat biting my arm and screaming when it was appropriate, while offering advice such as "You're drifting to the right, honey. You're drifting into the shoulder sweetheart! Daughter! You're about to drive into a stream of traffic on your right! TURN THE STEERING WHEEL TO THE LEFT AT ONCE! ARGHARGHLEFT!" and "You see those red lights on the car up ahead? Those mean the driver in front of you is braking. So slow down a little. Slow down! SLOW! STOP THIS VEHICLE IMMEDIATELY! ARGHARGHSTOPTHECAR!"

As we negotiated roads blocked by police insisting we turn right when we wanted to turn left (because all the traffic lights were out) we could see miles of power lines lying on the ground because the poles had fallen over. I started to get a very bad feeling about the whole reliance on LIPA to get the job done quickly theory and decided to formulate a new philosophy straightway - one involving Long Island being in the electrical dark ages for the foreseeable future - while keeping up a brave face and a positive attitude in front of the women of La Famile Stevie.

Mrs Stevie had scored some dry ice to keep the fridge cold which turned out to be the last dry ice in New York, and it worked quite well, but we had no electricity so we had no stove to cook with. The fact that I get home around the time it is starting to get dark was also getting old. I was reduced to walking around with one of those strap-to-your-head LED lamps so I could see anything. It worked well, but it was so damned depressing to only be able to see things right in front of me and only see those in shades of actinic blue-white. On Tuesday the performance of the Long Island Rail Road was the icing on the cake and I came home only to leave again in the ostensibly hopeless search for a generator.

As it happened my first stop was Home Despot where it transpired they had just taken delivery of a load of generators. By the time I found where they were there were only two left, and one of those was gone by the time I had finished checking the price one of those was gone. I grabbed the last one and called Mrs Stevie to bring her wagon to collect me as it was far too big to fit in my car. Then it was a simple matter of paying for it, spending twenty minutes sobbing, clawing at my face, tearing my clothes, pouring dirt on my head and yelling "Why me?" and then it was back home for several hours of generator assembly by flashlight.

Once it was bolted together it was a sort of wheelbarrow affair, a wheeled frame containing the engine/alternator, fuel tank and breaker panel with electric sockets with two folding handles so I could move it with only moderate back strain. I filled the sump with oil and put some gas in the tank, then read the starting instructions and my heart fell. The instructions said to choke the engine then pull the starter cord until the engine compression came up, then to heave on the cord to start it. My chainsaw has the same start sequence and it is no picnic getting that bastard to fire up. I was quite despondent when I contemplated the size of the generator's engine, but it actually fired while I was doing the pull-to-prime thing - the easiest pull-start I've ever personally experienced.

It was also the loudest motorized thing I've ever started with the possible exception of Troll⁵. Standing next to it, the sound of Mrs Stevie's voice was totally drowned out unless she shrieked at such volumes her nose bled. Unlooked-for bonus there. The noise was magnified by the narrowness of the area between the fence that separates us from Crazy Joe and our kitchen, and the dimensions of the enclosure meant that Mr Singh, the neighbor we are on good terms with, was getting the full benefit of the sound. I shut it down and moved it behind the swimming pool, figuring the body of water would act to muffle the sound. It did, a bit, but it still sounded like a Mr Softee van was serving delicious cone-mounted treats in our garden. Oh well.

The generator has five power taps: one 240 volt, 25 amp supply and four 120 volt, 20 amp supplies, and will supply five and a half kilowatts, but it was getting late so I decided that only emergency power would be plumbed this night. This equated to the fridge and a light. Fridge compressors suck an awful lot of power, but I happened to know ours is under 20 amps at peak (when it starts) so it was just a matter of avoiding voltage drop by using a short enough extension cord, something I didn't have in the thickness of wire required for the current draw, so I used the cord I power the swimming pool pump with, which is as thick as my little finger and weighs a ton. This and another, regular outdoor extension cord were thrown through the open kitchen window and plugged into the fridge and a lamp and all was happiness in the home. I, however, went out to buy gasoline, which because I had only a small can involved two round trips to the gas station to fill the tank.

Now I have a five gallon can somewhere in the garage, but it had been silted over with crap the women put in there then moved about to find other stuff they put in there and now, with no lights, I wasn’t ever going to find it. Mrs Stevie said she’d pick one up while she was out, but wouldn’t ya know it, there were none to be had fer luvner money so she bought a Kerosene can instead. A kerosene can is exactly the same as a gas can, and a day later that same can was available as a gas can, but a kerosene can is blue and it is illegal to fill a can that is not metal or plastic and colored red at a public gas station in New York. I explained this quandary to Mrs Stevie but she announced that she didn’t care because it was my job to fill the thing each morning. It would be my problem. A frank exchange of views was held in which I lost badly, but which fortunately the neighbors were not party to on account of the racket from the generator.

And so to bed.

The next day Mrs Stevie and I had a spirited disagreement on whether we should run the generator all day while we were at work. I felt we shouldn't, mostly because of the cost (24 hours running would be around $70-80) but also because my feeling was that the thing wasn't intended for such a heavy duty cycle (the box had a list of envisioned uses and some had "standby" featured prominently in the wording and specific instructions on how to shut the thing down including a five-minute, no-load running period so that the alternator could cool down before the engine - and the cooling fan - stopped). Not only that, but there were strongly worded contra-indications on the subject of the thing failing under load and my experience has been that tools with moving parts must be watched like a hawk because those parts have a tendency to stop moving in dangerously creative and expensive ways as soon as you take your eyes off 'em. Mrs Stevie felt that if the generator was not running flat out the fridge would slag down in a pool of water and rotting food within minutes.

The discussion ranged over a number of subjects, most of them to my detriment, and then we had another frank exchange of views and I gassed up the generator and left for work, its ear-splitting "blat" announcing to one and all that our (empty) house had power not of LIPA's doing.

As my home-bound train approached Wyandanch (Perl of the East) I got a call from Mrs Stevie to inform me she and The Stevieling were going out. She later claimed that she added the fact that since the generator was still running she wasn't going to do as we had agreed at breakfast and put more gasoline in it, but if she did she said it to empty air and static. Needless to say when I got home the damned thing was silent.

Silent and red hot.

It had clearly shut down while the fridge motor was running and was now in a state engineers call "heat soak" which is a fancy way of saying that the heat built-up in the engine and alternator casing was not blown away by the fan and so was hanging around while the formerly moving parts added more and more heat to the business. The generator was actually getting hotter as it sat there doing zero.

I waited a bit, refueled it and attempted to start it, but it refused to countenance the idea. My guess now is that some sensor had shut off the electrics.

By the time Mrs Stevie got back I had hurt my shoulder trying to get the bastard to turn over so I gave her the benefit of my feelings on the matter of owning a $750 paperweight, my opinion of the headache and nausea I had suffered all day as a result of being splashed by gasoline first thing in the morning, and the exact depth of my despair at the thought of yet another night by flashlight, and then I departed in the Steviemobile for an hour's drive to cool off and revel in the air conditioning, the wide field of illumination of the headlamps on the blacktop and the soft, powerful purr of the engine as we ate up the miles going nowhere useful. I returned home to find Mrs Stevie attempting to start the machine so I went to bed.

Early the next morning I managed to get it started again and put my foot down. I explained that the fridge was capable of sustaining its temperature if it wasn't opened for the eight hours we wouldn't be there if we froze cool packs overnight and moved them into the fridge when we left for work, and that if anyone wanted TV, Internet and a washing machine this side of Christmas they had better get in line with my "only when we're in" plan for running the generator because I was absolutely not doing any more improvised electrical work in the dark by the light of an LED flashlight. Mrs Stevie argued until I mentioned the sheer cost of electrifying an empty house, and she finally agreed⁶.

That night I ran more extension cords and by 10 pm we had all the aforementioned facilities up and glowing while the neighbors gnashed heir teeth in the dark or listened to their own generators. By Wednesday most of that side street were running similar lash-ups.

One funny incident occurred just as I was leaving. I saw Mrs Crazy Joe come out and glare at the fence between us, from where the sound of our generator was making itself known to the area. This was rich. On Monday they had deployed a generator of their own and placed it about five feet from my house. Payback is a birchbark canoe as the Algonquin Wise-men say.

Of course this running of extension cords necessitated the purchase of a new, thick and hence trés expensiv one because of the previously raised concern about voltage drop over the length of the cord, since the washing machine is another amp-hog. By now I was becoming inured to the hand-over-fist costs of the blackout and so the customers of Home Despot were treated only to quiet sobbing and some pounding of my head against the robot-checkout machine as it printed my receipt.

And so we had light, TV, Internet, cold soda and clean underwear despite the Long Island Power Authority. Huzzah!

On Friday night, around 7:30 pm, I arrived home to find Mrs Stevie feeding coffee and donuts to some LIPA guys who had arrived in theater thirty minutes before and were not feeling the love on account of a crowd of onlookers whose attitude could best be described as "disgruntled" that was letting the workforce know how much they valued the chance to live for a week as their original colonist ancestors had. Galvanized by sugary foods and delicious beverages they had the power back on in a trice and gradually the neighborhood fell silent as, house by house, the generators began to shut down.

Ours was last.

TOS Circulation now in double digits if you count me and in binary↑
We had naively expected them to simply allow another foot of cable from the looped reserve at the pole, but they were feeling mischievous and decided to reward our temerity by making our back garden resemble one from Queens by gittishly draping sixty feet of power line over it↑
I recently got into a discussion with some non-Americans over tipping, in which some of the tightest people I've ever communed with decried the process and claimed to "not understand how to do it". Tipping 101: If the person serving you braved a hurricane so that they could have the single pleasure of serving you eggs and coffee, they bloody well deserve a tip, and a big one, and a verbal thank-you for doing so with a smile↑
Yes, a box. Google "Box Of Joe"↑
The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness↑
There’s some Scots blood in her from her mother’s side of the family that I can sometimes appeal to↑

The Great Quake Of '11

2011-08-23T14:24:00.005-04:00

And right after I posted that the building started bouncing like unto a boat on a choppy sea.

Our emergency director (yes, we have someone who directs such things) came on the PA to say he thought it might have been an earthquake and that we should stay inside because there was no danger but if we went outside we shouldn't congregate near the buildings because stuff might fall off them onto us.

I am not making that up. We were safe in the buildings - that might at any point disintegrate and fall onto the revelers outside.

I logged onto Google to see how long it would take to get something to show - about three minutes. The main event was in Virginia about nineteen minutes before. Odd, I always thought shock waves would be faster than that. Nineteen minutes from Virginia to here? That's one laggardly aftershock, but typical of the "just so good and no further" thinking that permeates everything these days. Bah, etc.

I signed onto the USGS website and they asked me to report my observations, so I did. They explained that the observations they were looking for were those about the Earthquake, not on the deplorable slipping standards and lack of backbone in today's youth, so I gave them a gripping tale of one Englishman's struggle to find sanity and relevance as his world bounced up and down around him, a metaphor for the current state of the world made manifest as unthinkable disaster was upon him. The poignancy of his wind-up robot toppling helplessly into the chasm formed between the Ultrasparc Workstation and a pile of unread manuals was of particular note, throwing the whole insane business into harsh relief and causing him to cry out against the forces of nature assembled against his very life in a World Gone Mad.

It took forever for the site to finish uploading my report because the servers were swamped by panicked idiots writing "What I Saw In the Quake" minutiae.

But now I join the ranks of frontline journalists, those who brave the vicissitudes of nature to get the story out to the public safe in their homes. I too, have stood on the abyss as disaster not of man's making loomed large.

You heard it here first.

The Still, Small Voice Inside My Head

2011-08-23T12:43:00.003-04:00

Deep inside my head there's a notion stirring, something very, very scary.

I don't know when it started, but it seems that it's been with me a while now. Maybe it started with the birth of my daughter. I don't know. That's just conjecture, a bit of pop psychology, back-of-the-cereal-packet stuff. Truth is, I don't know.

I'd guess it was also born from the observation that the vast majority of people in the western world now seem resigned to the steady degrading of Standards of Anything. The rest of the world always seemed to think that the current Standard of Everything in the west was a bad idea and the sooner we got back to the stone age the better, but the current crop of Clever Young Things seems to have accepted that Things Will Get Worse and that the correct response is to just sit back, watch the TV and accept it, and the Venal Old Things with the power are only too happy to play along.

The voice in my head is whispering that I may be living in what unimaginably far future generations will regard as the Golden Age of Everything, the apex of What Was.

How utterly [Terrifying | Depressing].

Delete as appropriate.

Up Yours, Bob

2011-07-27T22:24:00.002-04:00

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by.
Then my blasted GPS quit.
It took hours to find my way back to the other road
Where there was a chance I could hitch a ride
Out of this sodding wood.

Top O' The World, Ma!

2011-07-27T22:02:00.008-04:00

So, The Stevieling graduated high school.

Not sure what happened. One minute she was walking around the house in bib-jeans with a pink and white cloth baseball-style cap turned backwards on her head and a stick pretzel clutched in one hand for all the world like a munchkin Oscar Madison, the next she was filing into a too-warm hall to spend an interminable time listening to people give incomprehensible speeches (Life Lesson kids; when the metaphor takes longer to convey than the plain language message it seeks to obscure, consider just saying what you mean and getting the hell off stage¹).

As she walked up to take her diploma (frame²), I couldn't help wondering why my four year old was wearing that oversized gown and standing in that line. I had to stop myself from getting up to go and fetch her out of the Big Kid line and found I was rehearsing reasons a four year old might understand as to why she couldn't take part yet.

And so a party was planned.

Mrs Stevie decided that the Church Gym would, once again, serve handily as a great place for a post-school knees-up, and the parents of one of The Stevieling's friends, upon finding out we had a hall, asked if they could wed their celebration to ours. Turns out The Friend's dad is a chef and he offered to provide the food for the evening. We considered this for about a second and a half before taking his arm off at the elbow.

And thus, a joint party was planned.

On the Wednesday before the party I had to take a day off work³ to deal with a green card issue. I was to be biometricized it seems. For all my other green card pix I was ensuited, but being as how I was within four weeks of advancing geezerhood I decided to wear a nice Hawaiian shirt. I did, however, make a concession to propriety and had a haircut, after which I wandered into Al Sands Toy Soldiers & Whatnot.

Now I used to buy my hobby supplies from Al, but he gradually reduced his stock of stuff I care about by the expedient of arguing bitterly with the suppliers over this or that. I try and give him a little of my money on occasion, because he is a local business and I, for reasons I cannot work out, have a sort of thing about supporting such institutions when I can⁴.

Anyway, Al leapt up at my appearance and yelled "I have a new line - Airsoft Guns!" His smile was alligator-like and his eyes bugged out alarmingly in his zeal.

"Wossa Nairsoft Gun?" I responded, ruining his moment of triumph.

"BB gun that looks like the real thing! Just look at this Glock!" He waved the safely bubble-wrapped weapon of individual destruction at me.

"Glocks look like that? I thought they were black. That thing is transparent. And I don't remember any gun that has a big orange ring around the shooty-end" I said, dubiously.

"Well, if they didn't do that you could get shot by a cop under the mistaken but understandable impression you were waving a Glock around" he responded, peering into the works of the weapon, which were clearly visible through the transparent casing.

"Nice exposition" I counter-responded. "Naw, I'm not interested in that sort of thing."

"I've got a French assault rifle" he wheedled.

I sucked my teeth and said "Nope. Not interested"

Al played his trump card: "I've got a Thompson over there, in the back of the shop.'

"Ooh, where? Lessee" I masterfully evaded. "How much?"

"Hunnert bux, give or take." He had come up behind me and was not where I expected him to be, but hovering about six inches from my back in vulture-like anticipation.

"Argh! Don't do that! No, not interested. It's got the straight mag. Plus, you know, it's see-through" I said as I attempted to regain control of my heart-rate.

"I have that model with a drum magazine for the same price" he purred.

"You bastard! No. Nonono. If I bring a machine gun home the missus'll kill me and jump on my body until it comes to bits. I haven't got time for your nonsense anyway. I have to get biometricized." And with that I vaulted over Al as he made to low-tackle me and ran for the door.

And I got biometricized, which meant I had my fingerprints taken again and my photo taken again. The only difference between the biometric nonsense and the non-biometric nonsense was that they no longer needed the picture to show my right ear⁵ but insisted I take off my glasses because it seems the computers that will form the first line of defense vs the terrorist masses and which are the underpinning of this bio-nonsense cannot work out what my face looks like with them on⁶.

So that's all right then.

On the day of the party I drove out to collect my dry-cleaning and stopped off at Al Sands House O' Odd-Looking Gunz and bought the damn Thompson c/w Drum Mag. Yes it was see-through with a bright orange muzzle. Yes it cost two limbs. Yes it was a 1941 model rather than a 1920s one (no forward pistol-grip, other stuff too nerdy to mention). No, I have no idea what made me do it. To this day I cannot explain the urge, which was irresistible. I mean, I've never owned a BB gun, and never wanted to.

I drove home, assembled it, put the battery on charge and had a think. One thing was obvious: this must be kept from the knowledge of Mrs Stevie at all costs, at least until I had a decent story worked out as to why we needed a Transparent Fake Machine Gun C/W Orange Muzzle. I decided the perfect place to hide it was in the middle of the bed in the front bedroom.

Then it was off to help set up, disguise the gym as a not-gym and so on.

When I got there the decorating was in full swing, with big poster-sized displays of photographs of The Stevieling and her friend, one display per ex-student. I found Mrs Stevie fretting.

"What's up?" I asked

"They have baby pictures. We don't have any baby pictures!" she wailed.

"We have hundreds of baby pictures" I said, 'just not here. So go home and get some." I was feeling in manly pro-active mode, what with now owning a fake weapon of mass-inconvenience. Amazing what a little faux fire-power does for the old juices.

Decorating went on until we were all fed up to the back teeth with it. The friend put up a collection of his oil paintings, using duct tape to stick them to the walls. This meant that unless an adult went around periodically pushing hard on the frames, a cascade of art would happen about three times an hour. Tables had balloons. The food was unbelievably magnificent in both quality and quantity, and the kids whole family showed up to act as kitchen staff. I thought I was going to be washing up, but they had it covered. The guests would be eating off plates that looked like real china with real cutlery (thanks to Mrs Stevie) and one of the friend's neighbors made a huge cake as a gift for the graduates.

I went home to get changed just before things got started, and discovered a crimp in my brilliant hide-the-machine-gun plan: The baby pictures were stored in the front bedroom and Mrs Stevie had clearly been in there and seen everything!

I did The Bonehead Dance and used some class three Words of Power, then went and took the battery off charge, loaded the gun and had a few test shots in the garden, which proved a calming thing to do. Returning to the hall I found the party just beginning and everyone seemed in good spirits.

Around 8 pm or so, our best man, Jeff the Kung-Fu Accountant, accosted me and I told him about how I'd bought the machine gun, hidden it in a foolproof place only to have fate intervene and urinate down my back.

Jeff commiserated, all the while pretending to roar with laughter, then informed me that things were about to get orders of magnitude worse and pointed over my shoulder, his face almost bright red and wringing wet from the tears he was crying (obviously in sympathy of my future fate at the hands of the Vile Harridan who was bearing down on us).

I needed a brilliant plan. My mind whirled, a cascade of psychedelic creativity as a thousand options were individually selected, run in simulation to conclusion and rejected on the grounds that death by strangulation was not an option here. Only one plan would offer a chance, a mere chance of survival. It was a long shot, but I was out of options. Turning to face her I adopted my best contrite expression.

"Sorry about the machine gun" I said.

Mrs Stevie screwed up her face. "What machine gun?" she demanded.

Jeff tried to distract her by collapsing to the floor in fits of simulated hysterical laughter while I showed the world The Bonehead Dance again. That daft woman had not even seen the thing! She'd walked right by it and it hadn't registered in her brain! On the one hand, I had pulled off a brilliant camouflage in plain sight ploy. On the other I had ruined it with premature and unnecessary confession! Damn and blast!

It was about then that the Pastor of the church hove into view and spotted the balloons. These were a problem he said. We shouldn't have them in this hall he said. Every time people have balloons in here, they break loose and get caught in the ceiling fans and it costs a fortune to get them untangled, he said.

Mrs Stevie assured him that the balloons were nailed down good, and somehow got him to stop obsessing about them getting into the fans, and the party continued with the kids performing some sort of group epileptic fit on the dance floor to music that sounded like a recording of a Mardi-Gras parade played backwards and the adults alternately eating and complaining that there was no alcohol (Church, remember?) or that their hearing aids had been blown out by the fiendish Sonic Cannon being fired at them from across the dance floor. Fortunately my eardrums quit around 9 pm so I didn't have to hear any of it.

And a good time was had by all.

It was during the post-party clean-up that disaster struck. Around 1 am I was getting punchy and a balloon got away from me, floating up to the ceiling. It was dead noticeable.

Mrs Stevie stamped her foot in rage. "Now what are we going to do, idiot! Pastor can not come in here and see that tomorrow!" She went on in this vein for some time, and when she paused for breath I spoke.

"I think I can get that down" I said, peering at it speculatively.

"How?" she demanded, 4/5ths anger the rest suspicion.

"Well, I have a machine gun" I said.

"Gogeddit!" she snarled, so I did.

Carefully assessing the target with my experienced marksman eyes, I selected single-shot mode and removed the safety catch. With a quick check to see what would get hit by ricochets, I put two shots into the balloon, only to hear them rattle to the floor.

"I don't think this will work after all. The BBs are bouncing off the mylar" I said, with regret.

"Keep shooting, idiot!" she snarled.

Rarely do I get such carte-blanche permission once Mrs Stevie has assessed whatever it is I plan on doing. A few, a very few occasions in which reasonable actions got out of hand and, for example, burned the finish off her grandfather's table in a sheet of flame⁷, or dropped a tree on her new car⁸, or killed a vast swath of the front lawn⁹, have over-sensitized her to the possibility of sub-optimal outcomes and thus most times a blanket ban on such activity is pronounced "before anything bad happens".

Thus it was I needed no further goading to action. My manly juices started flowing in earnest as I selected Full Auto mode and with the traditional cry of "Top O' The World, Ma!" I put about two hundred rounds into that blasted helium-filled terrorist. A large flap tore in the face of the balloon but it still stayed buoyant. I poured on more lead¹⁰ and eventually it began to descend, slowly.

It was then that The Stevieling came in. "Dad! What are you doing?" she cried.

"I'm firing a machine gun in church. What does it look like I'm doing?" I said, pausing to give the drum spring a few cranks¹¹.

"You can't do that! Mom'll kill you" she said. It's remarkable how like their mothers girl children can sound post-puberty.

"Relax! Mom said I had to do this. Would you like a turn?" I answered, and was gratified to see her face light up. My genes are not completely recessive, then.

And so it was that that balloon was machine-gunned until it no longer looked like a balloon. A check showed it had trapped about two hundred BBs inside it. Truth be told I think The Stevieling was right when she opined it was the weight of them that finally brought the thing down.

Best party ever.

And for Azathoth's sake try and understand that listening to Robert Frost get lost in a wood is only interesting and pithy the first time you hear it↑
For some arcane reason the actual diploma was sent through the mail weeks later. All she got that day was a book-like mount for the thing↑
Which again, was a tortuous decision that consumed about half a jiffy↑
I am regarded variously as an eccentric or an idiot by the younger people whom I meet as a by-product of my hobby. I try to point out that saving four bux by buying something from Amazindeal Dot Com just moves the owner of the hobby store we are standing in that much closer to shutting up shop, but they don't understand. They cannot process the chain of cause and effect, and are incapable of acting in their own long-term interests. The Internet Generation. We has one↑
A bizarre requirement of Green Card pix of Yore↑
It is a mark of my growing maturity that I didn't "innocently" ponder out loud what would happen if I shaved my beard, or carved it into a new shape. I wish politicians wouldn't use Star Trek episodes as the basis of their yardstick on how great technology will be in a given situation. What a dangerous waste of money this whole biometrics scam is. Now a well-educated terrorist can steal your passport or whatever from a distance without ever seeing the damned thing because it will blurt out its innermost secrets (like your fingerprints, photo and bio-history) to any properly formatted radio request. And lest you think this is American Nonsense At Its Best, I was biometricized for my British passport years ago.↑
The Mamod Live-Steam Traction Engine Fiasco↑
The Foolproof Maple Pruning Method Debacle↑
The Maladjusted Lawn Fertilizer Spreader Screw-Up↑
i.e. Plastic. This thing fires 6mm plastic BBs rather than .45 caliber bullets like the original↑
The magazine on the original Thompson was spring-fed, and the firer needed to wind it up before spraying lead everywhere. The BB version requires the key be turned to keep the supply of BBs in the vertical feed constant. You get about thirty shots before you run dry↑

Idle Thought

2011-06-09T12:34:00.002-04:00

The Space Shuttle has been declared officially obsolete, 30 years after the design was first used to get people into (low) Earth orbit.

Not before time. We don't want our brave Astronauts zooming around in antiquated 7-seater spacecraft designs.

No, what is needed is a (hypothetical) new (as yet undesigned) replacement (as yet unfunded). Until then, our International Space Station-bound Astronauts will take advantage of the generous (and costly) help of our Russian friends to ferry them to and from the floating junkpile of science in the well-tested 3-seater Soyuz spacecraft.

A forty-five year-old design.

Pooled Resources

2011-05-31T22:35:00.003-04:00

Oooooooh

De skimmer gate's connected to the - leaky hose

De leaky hose's connected to the - debris exclusion colander thingy

De debris exclusion colander thingy's connected to the - pump rotor

De pump rotor's connected to the - short hose

De short hose's connected to the - base of the cylindrical tower of fossilized diatoms

Or is it the top?

No, it is the bottom

De top connector of the cyl - or is it the top?

De instructions were around here - somewhere

Where de hell did I put those damned - instructions?

I'll figure it out from - first principles

Gah!

Oh wait, De instructions are written on a sticker on the - cylinder of fossilized diatoms

De top of the cylinder of fossilized diatoms's connected to the - long hose

Ha I knew I had it right - all along

De long hose's connected to the - pool water return gate

De power cord's connected to the - timer

De timer's connected to the - pump motor

Argh! De top of the debris exclusion colander thingy chamber has - blown off!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De valves! Close them before the pool floods the - neighborhood!

Bugerbuggerbuggersod - bleepingsonuvvableep!

De liquor is kept in the - left kitchen cabinet.

Another day in paradise

Another Perfect Commute

2011-05-24T23:47:00.000-04:00

Just when you think things are as bad as they can get, they prove your imagination is not up to the task.

I'm writing this from my morning commute. At Farmingdale a couple of young men got on the train. The very large one sat next to me and almost crushed my laptop bag. The one with the jailhouse tattoos sat opposite me and has been steadily picking his nose all trip.

I've managed to keep my gorge down so far, but he just wedged a wad of chawing tabackee in his mouth and so I will now be treated to him spitting the juice into a coffee cup when he can spare a hand from digging out nose excreta.

I can't wait to see what awaits me when I change trains at Jamaica.

Enraptured

2011-05-22T11:53:00.001-04:00

Thank Azathoth for The Rapture

I finally get some much-needed elbow-room and no longer have to share breathing air with those smug beggars with their turning the other cheek¹ and all that nonsense about living forever in my father's kingdom. Take one look at what people have done with the kingdom they had to start with and take a wild guess at what a past few thousand years² of their occupying The Afterlife will have done to the place.

Odd thing: It sounded for all the world like Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were stamping around this morning in their usual pre-church opening barrage. It is unthinkable that they would get "left behind" since Mrs Stevie holds a black-belt in Lutheranism and The Stevieling is perhaps the only truly good person left on the face of the planet (as of pre-rapture yesterday). A bit too spacey, but that won't hurt her if Lutheran views on How It All Works are right. I must have been experiencing waking dreams.

I'll miss the kid.

As long as it's your cheek↑
The numbers will vary depending on whether you regard the Word of God as literal or clever allusion³↑
Or as I have it, "mostly bleep"↑

What's Up? Doc?

2011-05-19T20:48:00.003-04:00

So, last month I took some advice I've been offered many times over the years by friends, acquaintances, total strangers and family and got my head examined.

It wasn't my idea I hasten to add, but I had reported to Doc Rubberglove complaining that the cough I hadn't shaken since Thanksgiving was leaving me with day-old headaches and in one case almost made me pass out.

I've been serially sick since mid-November and spent every holiday in bed begging for an end to it all. every time I was starting to feel well some twillup would come into work hacking like a Dickensian consumptive and it would start all over again¹.

The coughing would cause violent headaches which would, as I say, last all day. I would also get disoriented, at one point having to sit down for a few minutes while the world stopped spinning.

"It could be an aneurysm just waiting to blow!" screamed the doctor, driven mad by the thought of a procedure that he wouldn't be able to perform himself (and therefore bill for). "You need a head MRA."

"Wossat?" I asked, highly suspicious and still sporting bruises from the last round of "tests".

"It's like an MRI, but with an 'A' in it where the 'I' should be. It detects aneurysms. Mostly".

And so, after An Interlude With Insurance Paperwork it came to pass.

On the appointed evening I presented myself and announced that I was there to get my head examined. I was made to fill out some paperwork, which by some miracle of twentieth century technology had finally been mostly done from the extensive computer records that get sent everywhere except to the clipboard with the ballpoint pen, usually, giving the patient something to do in the four hours before they actually see a doctor. This paperwork was mostly a survey of the metal I might have in my body. Then I was told to lie down on a platform, a plastic gridwork mask was fastened over my face and I was slid into the magnet for the most boring ten minutes I've had since the last time I was in a Magnetic Resonance Scanner.

These machines are basically a huge magnet with a radio source and some really smashing computers hooked up to them. They put you in the magnet, which is really strong, and all the rotation axes of the hydrogen atoms in the water in your body line up along the lines of magnetic force like a bunch of bar magnets. Then they shine "white" radio noise through you and all those atoms suck in exactly one photon of a given frequency of radio "light" and flip over to point the other way. The frequency that each atom likes to suck on depends on the local geography, who it's neighbors are and stuff like that. Then they switch off the radio waves so that - and this is the clever bit - the atoms can flip back. When they do that they take their own sweet time, again depending on local factors, and they spit out an identical photon to the one they swallowed. See, it's hard to sort photons out from the sort of radio sources we can make cheaply, so you catch and detect them on the way back. Clever, like I said.

Where was I?

Oh right. You do this over and over, varying all sorts of stuff I left out, and then you let the computer have at it using Fourier Transform techniques, which is a hard sums way of taking a gazillion goes at the same thing and averaging them out so they make a lot of sense. Then more computers and clever software use that data to draw the pictures.

A true miracle of engineering and science. An object lesson in what the human race can achieve when its cleverest minds get cracking, given enough time and money³.

While I was lying in the noise and boredom I suddenly felt my wedding ring and the silver ring I wear on the matching finger on the other hand begin to jiggle around. I would have taken off these items of jewelry⁴ but they shrank a few years after I put them on and now they won't come off. I alerted the technician to the situation by falsetto shrieking, thrashing around and other restrained and manly methods of indicating All Was Not Well, but he told me to calm down and not to worry.

Easy for him to say. I didn't mind having the rings melt under the influence of Extreme Applied Science⁵ but there were two reasonably good fingers inside them that I use, off and on, on a daily basis.

Still, it wouldn't do to not be seen to have confidence in the man behind the big desk o' knobs and dials - I was British and in danger of letting the side down in front of an American who deserved to see the legendary British Stiff Upper Lip in the Face of Adversity at work, so I relaxed and let the test proceed with only an understandable amount of minor whimpering and the odd bladder leak any time the machine went "clonk" too loudly.

Eventually it was over and I was about to leave when the technician asked me if I wanted the pictures.

"Doesn't my doctor get those?" I asked, my face contorting as I attempted to parse any hidden meaning from the technician's question.

"Of course" he answered, "but you get a copy too if you want it."

This was a first. Normally getting a look at the pictures medical technicians take of your insides is marginally more difficult than getting a look inside Fort Knox without an invitation. Of course I said I wanted the pictures, and so I had to hang around another half hour or so while they were burned to CD-ROM along with the viewer to properly display them.

This was boffo on many levels. I would get to take a look at pictures of yet another of my organs, always a joy unless it's the skin - I've grown a little tired of that one to be honest⁶ - I would get to see any problem with the pipes and conduits before Doc Rubberglove could sell me on any bogus "brain transplant" procedures that were not needed and it would prove to that vile harridan Mrs Stevie that contrary to her Theory of Me I emphatically do have a brain in my head.

I rushed home, booted my laptop and inserted the CD-ROM. Then I figured out the viewer software and it was all aboard for a quick journey through the hippocampus with stops in the medulla oblongata and visual cortex.

The first thing I noticed was the old brain was less wrinkly than in pictures I saw in school textbooks. "This not look good" I thought, then realized that I was thinking it with the brain in question. The recursion of that had me crossing my eyes while I tried to figure out if I was on safe ground, rationalization-wise here. I had no desire to blow out part of the damned thing in a stupid accident because of inadequate warnings on the CD-ROM or "everyone knows" precautions I was unaware of due to not having been to medical school and having an education that didn't include MRAs because they hadn't been invented yet then.

I eventually sorted it out and went on to find the part where the arteries show up. They looked OK to me, but as I said I have no formal medical training, just what I picked up from watching "E.R." on the TV, and most of that made me feel unwell.

This was the point when Mrs Stevie came home and in-theater.

"Excellent timing, wife!" I said. "Come and see the pictures of my brain." Boy was she in for a come-uppance.

"It's see-through!" She said. "That doesn't look right. Where everyone else has brain cells all you have is what looks like two lengths of cable TV wire hovering in the middle there. I'd get that looked at if I were you"

"What? No you daft woman! That's just the way that picture came out! Those "wires" are the major blood vessels! Look, here's a picture of the outside"

"Looks a bit smooth to me. I've seen one on the internet. It's supposed to look a bit like a big pile of sausages, all wrinkly. That looks like an odd-shaped balloon"

"What?" I screamed incredulously. "The only time a brain looks like sausages is if you make one out of sausages! You can't use the fake brain from that How to Haunt Your House at Halloween website as a baseline to assess brain wrinkliness! These pictures show a brain, a real brain mind you, in the very pink of health! The only surprising thing is that nowhere are there old pan-shaped scars on it or bruises that spell genuine copper bottom! That brain is in excellent condition and will go for years yet!"

"Pfft! You'd be better off with the sausages if you ask me." And with that she went out to do whatever she does when she isn't harassing me.

The whole thing gave me the worst headache I'd had in months.

I was close to murdering one of our consultants who refused to leave his post no matter how much phlegm he vented into the office biosphere and who kept the circle of adult→child→rest of kindergarten→child (again)→adult+world going relentlessly the entire time²↑
This stratagem has backfired somewhat inasmuch as the budget has expired and all consultants are now being furloughed for 10-20 pay-free days.↑
Of course, most of the money belongs to one kind of person and most of the vision lives in the minds of another sort, but that is just another symptom of The Human Condition↑
Especially the gold one. I can't tell you how many times that has ruined a blooming romance over the years↑
Especially that gold one. See comments above↑
It's too big for one thing, gets too red in summer and has little tags sticking out of some of it that I have to get taken off sometimes↑

Who Knows Where It Goes?

2011-04-29T11:24:00.002-04:00

The underside of my right forearm feels like there's a small amount of weight, a shade over 7 pounds, lying on it much of the time, a phantom from the day the new-born Stevieling was placed there, her head in my cupped hand.

This day, at about 20 past one in the afternoon local DST, On the fifth (or was it the sixth) floor of Good Samaritan Hospital, 18 years ago.

I Have Seen The Lights

2011-02-22T22:05:00.003-05:00

Since it is nearly the end of February we (i.e. Mrs Stevie) decided it was time to take down the Christmas Tree.

Years ago we had invested in a very nice artificial tree with pre-installed lights. You take it out of the box, you unfold the branches and arrange them "realistically" and you plug it in. There's an optional "festoon with as much crap as the legs will stand without collapsing" phase which Mrs Stevie is a great fan of, but essentially that is it. No driving all over Christendom trying to find a tree without great big holes in the foliage, no mucking about trying to find a way to prop it up, no sticky pine goo everywhere and most importantly, no waking up the next day to the sight of a propped-up tree skeleton surrounded by a sea of fragrant and impossible-to-vacuum-out-of-the-carpet needles.

I mentioned last year how I had replaced a very large number of lamps in one section of the tree, and how over the Christmas period I was witness to chain-blowing lamp syndrome as the short-when-blown mechanism of each lamp functioned as intended, possibly for the first time in the history of the lamp design. This happens because as each lamp shorts out there is a little more voltage applied to the rest of the string, which shortens the life of the remaining bulbs. Each blown lamp makes matters worse.

Usually this isn't much of a problem because the mechanism is notoriously unreliable, and given to the well-known "one goes out, they all go out" effect. I'm currently working on a theory that this is due to the extremes of temperature the lights undergo when hung outside. However, this theory fails to take into account the fact that everyone has experienced the effect in self-strung lamps that have never been outside the house after the seal on the box they came in was broken. Turning off an entire string of lamps saves the rest of the bulbs at the cost of removing years of life from whoever it is that gets delegated to get the bloody things working again.

I had insisted that before the tree get crammed back in its box¹ that I would replace all the bebuggeréd lamps, and Monday being a holiday in New York and me getting the day off, I decided that that would be the ideal time. Next time I'll just go an lie down on the railway tracks² and save myself the angst.

I had done some post Xmas snooping for el-cheapo light strings which could be raided for spare lamps³ but there were none to be had because the world is currently in the process of stampeding into the era of LED Xmas lights. I therefore was reduced to ferreting around in my Olde Lyte Collection and found four strings of colored lights I'd forgotten I had, that dated from before we owned this house. Dirty, yes, but a quick test showed that twentymumble years on they were still in perfect condition, light-production-wise so they were fit for purpose. They also gave me pause because since microprocessors became dirt-cheap light strings have featured a control box that delivers 20-odd patterns of flashing, none of them ideal and most of them annoying. Thank Azathoth only the neighbors have to see the things. These lights, however, had a control box with a knob on it that adjusted the speed and nothing else. The light would "march" along the string at varying speeds or stay lit and that was it. Perfect for twinkling effects.

So perfect I didn't want to junk them any more.

I had an inner argument with myself for a few minutes and decided to compromise. I would strip out the lights as planned, but keep the wiring harness so I could use it for driving twinkling netlights later on.

In no time at all I had removed and washed the bulbs and classified them by color, and so it was that I had 75-ish lamps for tree-lamp replacements yesterday.

First job was to pull the tree apart so I could work on each section. During this I knocked over a side-table with the remains of The Stevieling's lunch on it and got yelled at. I was forced to endure an harangue on a trumped-up charge of clumsiness before I could start work, but I tuned most of it out so I can't recall the details. Then I began changing the blown bulbs for good ones.

This involves the usual process of finding a good string and removing one bulb (which for maximum enjoyment should then be lost so you can waste hours searching for the bulb and, more importantly, the unique fitting it is mounted in and without which the whole tree is so much junk). This will be the test instrument. Then you remove each dead bulb, testing it by plugging it into the good string to confirm it is blown. Assuming it is dead, you pull the bulb from the fitting, insert a replacement bulb⁴, trim the wires to length and bend them over the base of the fitting, test the result to confirm it is still a working bulb and plug it back into the place the blown bulb came from.

Eventually the string I was working on would burst into magnificent radiance as I finally found the one bulb that had failed to short itself properly, which would speed the process by not requiring me to test each bulb from that point on. This was important because I ended up replacing well over 50 bulbs⁵, most of them in that one string that was so troublesome over Christmas. It turned out that, as I suspected, there were clusters of bulbs hidden deep in the tree which had blown and which I couldn't see to replace and therefore my intra-Xmas repairs were already overloaded from the get-go.

I eventually finished up and we loaded the thing into its box and then the three of us paraded out to the garage to attempt putting it back in the storage loft. This involved me steering it into the proper place some seven feet above ground while the womenfolk pushed and heaved. It used to be that Mrs Stevie steered while I pushed, but I figured out who was getting the better half of that job a couple of years ago and suggested we swap so she wouldn't be hurt if the box fell from the shelf during loading.

The threat is real enough; it's just that after watching my savings evaporate in the financial crisis, my house disintegrate at each puff of wind and my health depart for a better deal in some teenager's body, I no longer view death by archived Xmas Tree as a particularly bad thing.

And for some reason we can never remember how we got the bally thing in the box the year before and have to go through lengthy trial fits that erode everyone's post-holiday joie de vivre and induce the usual Tax Return Season Rage↑
I'm told death by hypothermia is not that unpleasant, and the steel rails will conduct the cold nicely. The danger of being run over by a train is minimal these days↑
For reasons that escape me it is often cheaper to purchase a string of 150 lights, strip them out and junk the wiring harness than to buy loose bulbs. This, to me, indicates an economy wildly out of contact with the real world, but I'm told I am stupid by just about everyone I raise the issue with, and you can't argue with facts like that.↑
Getting the wires into the holes in the base of the fitting is a lengthy process worth a posting on its own, but I'll omit it for brevity, just remarking that it depleted the reservoir of Class Two Words of Power considerably over the course of the afternoon↑
Lest you doubt this, I still have the swollen fingers to prove it↑

The Smiting Continues Apace

2011-02-21T09:40:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, Sunday, I rose at the crack of dawn, donned gloves¹ and went outside to clear the debris field that was now taking up the concrete patio that runs alongside our garage.

Mostly made up of twisted, bent Aluminum siding of a bilious yellow color I've never cared for but cannot afford to replace, there were veins of silver-coated expanded polystyrene sheets, often snapped into interesting shapes by the wind that ripped it from the wall after ridding the house of the Siding That Should Not Be and that blew sheets of it all over the neighborhood. It would have been an interesting sight had it only happened next door. Oh well.

Moaning a dirge of hopelessness to keep my spirits up I began to clear the yard, transporting the siding to a sheltered area of the lawn by the fence (there was the forecast of more foul weather to come and I've had the experience of trying to excavate this siding from a frozen snowbank before when the patch at the opposite corner was torn off a couple of years ago almost to the day - it was a Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend job excavating it, thawing it and putting it back on the house). It was not one I hope to repeat in this life. Nor would trying to clear the promised snow from the rear of the house be simple if there was a field of razor-sharp Aluminum embedded in it.

I soon had a pile of siding on the lawn, a pile of expanded polystyrene weighed-down with a bucket full of pool chemicals in one corner of the concrete patio and a field of nails all over the concrete patio. It seems the wind had shaken the pile of crap for some time after it had landed, allowing about a pound of nails to dribble down to ground level. What a wonderful example of mixed-particle sorting under turbulent conditions! What a complete pain in the fundament to clean up.

So I didn't, telling myself the musical jingling that accompanied a walk across he patio as nails embedded temporarily in the soles of my boots then dropped free was a pleasant change to the "wocka-wocka" sounds of siding only partially uninstalled from the wall of the house alerting me to the sudden gusts of wind that were buzzing around me trying to claim credit for the mighty work I was witness to.

Then I went round to the East Lawn to survey the damage there.

It was fortunate that I had been sobbing helplessly from the debacle on the patio and was thus unable to summon more than a groan at the sight of my once magnificent fence, now missing a panel. From the way some of the others were flapping it was obvious I was about to witness a complete and catastrophic failure of the infrastructure, fence-wise unless something was done soon. Action was called for.

There followed the usual nonsense at Home Despot as I attempted to find six pressure-treated two-by-fours that were a) straight, 2) unbowed, þ) not corkscrewed and ♥) not dinged-up to the point of unusability by the forklift used to load the banded bundles of wood onto the racks. It took forever.

Then I removed and replaced the lower rail on the fallen panel, added rails to the corner panel that was about to rip free in the light breeze that was blowing when I returned to Chateau Stevie, did the same to a couple of other panels that were looking very sad, and lastly, installed the fallen panel.

I should explain. The reason so much damage had occurred was that the fence rails, the long lengths of wood to which the fence pickets are actually fastened, were not made of cedar as I had assumed when I bought them, nor were they made of pressure treated wood. They were, in fact, just untreated spruce, what the termites and carpenter ants that infest these parts call "breakfast". The insects work from the rear of the wood, the bit that is sandwiched between the cedar pickets and the rail itself, so everything looks good until it suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrates and the fence becomes a pile of loose pickets on the sidewalk.

There are two ways of repairing such damage. The Proper Way, in which the old rail is removed in a tedious and time-consuming process and replaced with a more durable length of wood, and the I Haven't Got Time For this Crap Method in which the more durable piece of wood is laid on top of the rotting rail and secured top the fence posts, then the fence pickets are either nailed or screwed to it, which saves time at the expense of looking really horrible as the old rail falls apart and leaves dangling nails as a lingering Tetanus threat when it falls apart. I used the latter method this day as I was sore wounded and down-at-heart and just wanted the day to end.

Replacing the panel was a job and a half too. First, these panels weigh quite a bit and are a challenge for two people to work with in a tight spot. Next, replacing this panel meant I had to walk around the entire property any time I needed to get to the other side, which I did, a lot. Third, frost heave had raised the ground so much the bloody thing wouldn't fit back in the hole it came out of and I had to hack at the frozen ground for quite some time to prepare the way and still had to sit on the (freezing) sidewalk and lever the damned thing into place with the mighty Stevieplates before I could drive the screws.

The neighbors had already been given much entertainment and were pleased with the performance that entailed me sitting on the ground, kicking the fence into position and thrusting with all my might to keep it there while I drilled new pilot holes, switched bits, dipped each screw in a mysterious fluid (liquid soap, old fencebuilder's trick to prevent the screws jamming half in) and then drove it home with a battery-powered drill and rage-powered Words of Power.

It was all very trying indeed.

Mrs Stevie hoved into theater as this was going on and demanded to know whether the fence was fixed or not. I informed her, over the course of the next three minutes, that it wasn't and made enquiries as to what mental processes were at work that could infer such would be the case given the extent of the destruction and the size of the workforce deployed to deal with things. She responded in kind, visiting such much-explored territory as my genetic heritage and quality of my gonads (though what that has to do with fence reconstruction is beyond me). After that, the conversation deteriorated somewhat and harsh words passed between us, until finally she playfully punched me in the head and went inside so I could continue working.

The Stevieling swept up all those nails, which was nice of her.

I woke this morning to see it was snowing and had been doing so long enough to leave three inches of white inconvenience all over the shop.

I call the right glove "Juan" and the left glove "Quixote" so that each time I wear them I Don ...↑

Another Day In Paradise

2011-02-19T21:28:00.005-05:00

Spent today, Saturday, goofing off, watching other people play Warhammer Fantasy Battle (a colorful tabletop game involving dozens of painted plastic and lead miniatures that eats time and cash like they're going out of fashion).

On the drive home I got caught behind a cop car which was busting chops by driving slower and slower as it proceeded up a virtually empty Deer Park Avenue, obviously trying to provoke someone into passing so they could be stopped and ticketed for some petty thing, so at the first opportunity I took a right and drove the back way back to Chateau Stevie. Thus it was that I was privileged to see a panel of my 15 year-old cedar fence lying face down on the sidewalk.

I parked the fabulous Steviemobile¹ and ran inside and told Mrs Stevie.

"Well, I was trying to call you but you weren't answering your phone. The wind went crazy about half an hour ago and blew the fence down" she sniffed. "It also pulled the siding off the side of the garage'"

"WHAT?" I screamed. "All of it?"

"Damn near."

I ran outside took one look at the scene, clutched my head and moaned. The siding had peeled off the side of the house from the roof line to about seven feet from the ground and had dumped itself as a collection of twisted metal all over the yard. Then the insulating panels, made of expanded polystyrene, had blown off, revealing the tatty asbestos shingles that the house was equipped with by the original builder².

I plan on running the costs of this disaster through the house insurance because those bastards canceled my policy abruptly after twenty years of premiums. Not because of anything I had done, but because some actuarial gimp had calculated that Long Island was now a hurricane-prone area³ and recomputed the cost/risk ratio.

This unannounced move effed up my mortgage payments for the first time since I owned the house and took a while to sort out because it triggered default notices on my account.

Oh yeah. These gits are charging me for hurricanes that haven't happened, so they can bloody well pony up for the siding-wrecking gale that did. But the costs may be high on account of those Azathoth-damned shingles, which are now classed as a hazardous material and will cost much to get rid of.

The wind, which has been gusting strongly for the last 24 hours has now died down.

Its work is done.

now suffering a suspected hole in the exhaust after dinging it up in snowbanks around Boxing Day↑
A Mr Gak Eisenberg, who knapped flint arrowheads and hunted Mammoth and Giant Sloth in his spare time↑
because the climatologists say we are "overdue" for a big hurricane - I wonder if these people are solidly behind the anthropomorphic cause of Global Warming since the same climatologists are saying so↑

Health,Wealth and a Working Dryer

2011-02-17T19:23:00.009-05:00

Well, one out of three ain't bad.

The regular reader ¹ will know that I was sick over Thanksgiving, sick again over Christmas and sick in the early New Year. All respiratory infections, and thus all made me short of breath.

Once the illnesses were finally over, imagine my surprise to find I was still feeling short of breath. Not "gotta suck air as fast as I can" short of breath, but in the middle of my chest there was the feeling you get at the same time you are sucking air trying to make it go away after a really long run. The same feeling, sans pounding, that you get when someone really cute announces they aren't entirely averse to the idea of removing their clothes in your presence and will let you touch them afterwards.

I had a long think, interrupted by memories of some of the young women that actually enacted that scenario in my presence², and remembered that in my case this feeling had once been my body's way of saying "Hey, guess what? Your pancreas's capillaries are all blocked with that stuff that looks like toffee again. Prepare for unspeakable agony!" and the clarion call to start ingesting nothing but clear liquids until I was capable of straightening up and not screaming every 30 seconds as I was wracked by spasms of sensation of the sort that alter one's perceptions to the point one can see God.

It generally took a few days.

Accordingly, I switched from solid food to Ginger Ale, and in no time at all I felt like I'd been kicked in the kidneys and was peeing clear, odorless fluid that all-but fizzed. Amazingly no pancreatitis occurred and so I started eating again. The feeling came back, faded away, came back stronger and finally moved in permanently. Then my legs started hurting really badly

Time to see Doc Rubberglove.

The doctor's staff was obviously in need of some entertainment because they got me an appointment the next day, so reluctantly I announced I was taking a sick day in order to deal with the chest discomfort and the slipped disc I suffered when I leapt into the air and clicked my heels upon being told I would have to take Tuesday off. Anything is better than the Tuesday meeting.

That night I celebrated by laundering some clothes and popping them in the dryer.

The next day, around noon I departed for Doc Rubberglove's House O' Humiliation, noting in passing that The Stevieling must have loaded the dryer with clothing before she left for school as it was tumbling away to itself.

The Doctor's staff weighed me with their special scale that adds 50 lbs to your true weight and stuffed instruments in my ears and up my nose, though they couldn't actually muster enough energy to even pretend they were looking into said cavities. I don't blame them; I've seen what's in there myself and there are limits. Then a med student tapped me in various places, fondled a few limbs and declared the doctor would be with me "soon".

A mere half hour later Doc Rubberglove breezed in and prescribed an EKG³ which involved sticking electrodes to my (hairy) chest, running some sort of inkjet printer for five seconds, then ripping off the electrodes and writing down the ones that caused the loudest screams of pain. Then, while the staff went out to watch re-runs of it all on the surveillance system I was allowed five minutes on Doc Rubberglove's Patent Electric Fog Bong, which didn't cure the problem but made me care slightly less.

Eventually the Doc stopped prevaricating around the bush and scheduled me for some tests, effectively using up the rest of my day in medical froofaraw. It was all very trying.

First there was the Chest X-Ray, for which I had to drive to the other end of the island so some young woman could irradiate me with enough monster-creating hard X-Rays⁴ it made my ribs glow in the dark.

While I was there, another young woman ultrasound-scanned my legs in case I had a thrombosis or phlebitis or whatever a blood clot in the leg is called. The gel used to make the ultrasonic gubbins work properly got soaked up in my leg-hair and thus when I made my way to Good Samaritan Hospital for blood work I had shiny legs that shone with a sheen that would have looked not out of place on the head of someone around 1985.

It felt nasty too. which was, I believe, the point. Naturally, when I showered that evening it turned to glue, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

I drove to the hospital, having no idea whatsoever where the outpatient lab was. Never mind, I would drive past the Emergency Room drop-off on the left side of the hospital looking for signs saying "Lab", and park at the back if I didn't see any sign and check in at the information desk at the Baxter Pavilion in the rear of the hospital. It's actually more of an annex than a pavilion, but that was a conundrum for another day.

There was no sign for the lab

So I parked and walked to the Baxter Pavilion doors. Once inside I noted with a class three Word of Power that there was no-one at the information desk, and from appearances hadn't been since the desk was installed. Another plan foundered on the rocks of reality then. No matter, the hospital is really one big building linked together by zigzaggy corridors; I would simply walk them until I discovered a sign for the Lab.

A sad mistake.

I managed to walk to the front of the hospital in only about 15 minutes, where a young woman barely out of the Zygote stage laughed at my English pronunciation of "Laboratory"⁵ before directing me to the right side of the hospital. I then traced a zigzaggy path in which a straight-line distance of what could have been no more than 300 yards became about a half-mile of staggering and moaning. I hadn't eaten since the previous night because I knew that any blood work Doc Rubberglove would order would require an 8 hour plus fast, and since it was now around 4 pm I was getting a bit spacey.

Finally I found the lab and had the blood drawn, two tubes of it.

"Is that it?" I asked dubiously.

"Yep" answered the technician.

"How come? I have these tests done every three months and they always take four tubes full".

"Nah. We can do most of the tests with just this one". He held up a single test tube of blood with an anti-clotting agent added to it.

I knew it. I knew it was not necessary to suck out pints of blood for those damn tests. Those bastards at Gouge Laboratories (my usual blood thieves of someone-elses-choice) were clearly inflating the bill and bleeding me dry into the bargain. Gits.

I asked the girl manning the desk which would be the quickest way back to my car (I had no wish to repeat the epic journey I made on my way in) and was told that if I went out of the door and walked about three hundred feet I would be in the carpark.

And so I returned home in high dugeon, and went downstairs to unload the kid's stuff from the dryer.

When I opened the dryer the awful truth became apparent. I was greeted by no outrush of warm, moist air, and the clothing in there was mine. The damned machine, instructed to dry until the heat sensor indicated the clothes were done, had broken down in such a way that the clothes had tumbled for about 36 hours.

Again.

I unloaded my dry and very, very soft clothes and one towel. Then I sighed and pulled the lint filter, and removed the mattress of downy lint that had been sucked off the towel as it was pounded into submission for a day and a half.

Fortunately, Doc Rubberglove had decided to hedge his bets (and mine) by scheduling a Stress Test for the next day, so I had another day off in which I might scavenge a few hours in which to effect dryer repairs.

And so to bed and the sweet oblivion of Lethe.

Wednesday dawned and, once the women had decamped, I got up and removed the dryer faceplate and drum. I jumpered the door switch circuit⁶ and started the dryer so I could observe the gas jet in action.

Or not, as it turned out. The igniter didn't even glow⁷ so with a sigh I pulled the entire machine (what was left of it) out from its niche and removed the rear panel.

As usual, this was accompanied by the sudden deformation of the razor-sharp pressed steel panel and the consequent infliction of a couple of dozen minor wounds to hands, face, upper arms and anything else not covered by clothing.

I spent some small time bleeding, crying out in pain and so forth, the stuff that Mrs Stevie categorizes as "wasting time", and got back to work.

A quick poke around with the multimeter showed a suspicious open circuit on one of the components.

Aha! Or, after a bit of thought, perhaps not.

Some of those components are supposed to be open circuit until something happens ⁸ so I had to pore over the circuit diagram for a bit to confirm my diagnosis, then jumper the component and check that the dryer lit when the circuit was closed, which it did.

Okay, so I would get a replacement from Sid's Appliance and Taxidermy Store on my way back from the cardiologist, who apparently was not planning a stress test, just an initial examination according to the human I finally was able to speak with after a battle with the phonebot- no need for towels, shorts and a change of shirt then, and most of the day not wasted in gasping for air in the quest for health.

I excised the mutinous part and put it...somewhere. I remember it was on a small table at one point and I remember distinctly picking it up, but that would turn out to be the last I ever saw of that particular piece of junk. Then I drove to the cardiologist, who took one look and said that he wanted me to have an echocardiogram and a stress test. Right now.

And so I had my chest hair dry-shaved in patches, then the bare spots scrubbed with a scouring pad because "we need the skin to be more sensitive". It worked, too, and much kudos to the scouring pad-wielding nurse who gave her eardrums in the cause.

After that I was hooked up to another EKG machine with industrial strength sticky pads and was made to walk very fast on a treadmill until my vision became tunneled and I was begging for mercy and/or death with every ragged breath.

There was a Big Red Button for turning off this Torquemadaesque Machine, but it had been placed cruelly out of reach of anyone likely to need it.

I was allowed to dangle from the handlebar of the treadmill for a few minutes while my lungs sucked in volumes of life-giving air, then it was time for the ripping off of the sticky pads which revived me by the expedient of exposing the stuff that grows underneath my skin to the air.

Next, I was conducted to a room where an attractive young woman attempted to stick more pads to me but failed on account of the wringing wet condition of my body (which now resembled that of a mange-riddled Gorilla that had been fished out of the East River) squirted yet more gel all over me and began to use ultrasound to show a student my heart (and presumably gather important health-related data) but got discombobulated when I asked if I could have a look.

She made up some excuse for having me lie on my left side (the machine was on my right) and I acquiesced rather than provoke her into some inventive "test", but I felt - and still feel - that if anyone is going to look at a person's organs using technology that person's insurance is paying for, then top of the list of gawkers should be the person who is lying on a hard couch covered in gel with holes shaved randomly in his chest hair.

She spent the rest of the exam driving the probe into my chest so hard I have bruises.

Well, too bad for her. I've been married to Mrs Stevie for 22 ambush-filled years now. Her attempts were pitiful compared to the ministrations that vile harridan has visited upon me at the drop of a hat.

Mistress Ultrasound wanted the student to practice on me and I agreed to let him do so on me provided part of the process was him showing me my heart.

"You really want to look at it?" she asked.

"Damn straight. It's my heart, I wanna see it too" I snarled.

I was somewhat short tempered by then on account of the bruises and the gel which was doing for my patchy chest hair what the other woman had done for my legs 24 hours before, and the fact that once again I hadn't eaten all day.

It was eventually over, and I was conducted to the certificate- and bookshelf-lined office the cardiologist lived in when he wasn't actually examining anyone.⁹ He waved me to a chair and told me that according to the tests he had done he couldn't say why I was short of breath. He said he'd be happier if he could've run a test with radioactive dye, but my insurance company wouldn't agree to pay for it. Once again I was confronted with direct evidence that the American Health Care System is dysfunctional¹⁰. Oh well.

So I left the doctor and prepared to talk to Sid, or perhaps Sid. Which was when I got my first inkling that all was not well with my foolproof "component replacement" plan.

I emptied my pockets and searched the contents. I searched my car. I drove home and searched the house. I searched my car again. All to no avail.

There was nothing for it but to do without. I did the Bonehead Dance, then drove down to Sid's place where Sid and Sid were in residence, and described the part using mime and interpretive dance. I did okay too, against all expectation, and in a surprisingly screw-up free session with my socket set I had the dryer reassembled and working.

True, I did manage to crush a connector into a wad of useless brass with my Leatherman pliers, and I got a teensy shock when my finger brushed up against that connector's mate because I'd forgotten to unplug the dryer but all-in-all a fiasco-free repair, mostly, if we ignore the losing of the part debacle, the squished connector screw-up and the amps up the knuckle joint of my little finger inattention to detail.

If only the Doctors could pull off the same trick with my body.

there is one, but I've forgotten where he lives↑
Alright, all three of them↑
Why is an electrocardiogram an EKG and not an ECG? First order obfuscation so the plebs don't pierce the miasma of jargon the medical community throws around to avoid telling you what exactly is wrong with you↑
Has no-one but me seen The Quatermass Experiment for Azathoth's sake?↑
I was exhausted and starving and couldn't be bothered to concentrate on accommodating Americans and their crazy pronunciation and slipped up by saying "la BOH ra tory" instead of "LAB rote ury"↑
The dryer is designed to cut off power to the motor and shut down the gas jet when the door is opened as a safety measure. Part of the process of removing the front panel involves prying apart a connector that hooks the door sensor into the machines electric circuitry. It goes without saying that the designers viewed the practice of firing up the dryer while it was in bits as dangerous and had designed the circuit so that with the door sensor disconnected nothing would work. However, they then undid all of that careful handyman protection-from-self work by including a circuit diagram (taped inside the control console so it wouldn't be found by just any incompetent fool, only by those with access to tools) from which it was possible, with the aid of a multimeter, to figure out how to run a bypass with a u-shaped bit of wire. We handymen laugh at such concepts as danger and culpable liability. Actually, we usually don't spot them in time but it amounts to the same thing↑
Plunging me into new territory. A glowing igniter but no flame is a problem I've fixed twice before↑
usually something getting hot given that a dryer only does two things other than sit in a room: it gets hot and it spins one component, slowly↑
I'm absolutely certain that there is a company somewhere that supplies doctors with appropriate bookshelf fillers. There's always a large selection of books with the name of the specialist's target organ(s) on the spine - there was actually one called "The Heart" front and center of the case directly behind this one - and a selection of new, worn and worn-out spines crammed in there. All too convenient, if you ask me. Who in Azathoth's name would actually read something titled "Congestive Failure Modes of the Human Cardio-Vascular System"? ↑
Either the doctor is asking for too many tests or the insurance company is being overly tight-fisted at the risk of my life. I can guess which is the actual case in point here↑

New High Price, Same Old Crappy Service

2011-01-17T17:15:00.003-05:00

I mentioned a few inches back that the Bloody Long Island Railroad had raised it's prices as of the first of January.

What I forgot to relate was how on the second day of this new Luxury Priced service¹ the Bloody Long Island Railroad, having a problem somewhere at the east end of the Ronkonkoma Branch and needing to reduce the traffic load² canceled the only straight-through train from Atlantic Terminal³, announcing that we would be accommodated on a train at Jamaica.

Now only someone who works⁴ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could think that loading a trainful of people onto a train that began it's journey at Penn Station during the height of the evening rush hour was a good, or even workable, idea, and certainly only someone who works⁵ for the Bloody Long Island Railroad could be so blissfully ignorant of the fact that the train they chose was already the most overloaded train in the schedule.

So it was that we were loaded onto a train that normally doesn't stop at Jamaica and since there were already no free seats and no space to stand in the vestibules by the doors we filled the walkway space between the seats. Naturally the sensitive fellow commuters realized that we were not personally to blame for this inconvenience to them, or they did after one thick bleeper complained a little too loudly about being crowded, at which point I looked him right in the eye and snarled at volume 11 that if he thought anyone standing in the aisles was there by choice he must be suffering from brain damage, and that he might consider that he at least had a seat and hadn't been thrown off a perfectly good train for the convenience of some idiot dispatcher.

This provided some relief but as soon as people needed to get out tempers became frayed. Everyone was wearing huge down coats and most of the commuters that day were of robust size before they put the coats on. The aisles are wide enough to accommodate one person. Not a situation conducive to amity.

This hell went on forever, or at least, it seemed to. Finally I was able to disembark myself and begin the long walk to my car⁶ over inadequately cleared sidewalks.

To sum up: The Bloody Long Island Railroad managed to deliver exactly one and one-half commutes under the new Luxury Pricing before bleeping up and bleeping everyone leaving from ~~Flatbush Avenue~~ Atlantic Terminal where they breathe.

They even forgot to have someone call the Guinness Book of Records so they could claim the Worst Excuse For A Railroad In The World award.

The price is now a luxury, the service remains execrable↑
There is no other explanation of the bizarre nonsense I am about to reveal↑
nee Flatbush Avenue↑
A loaded term and one that implies much that may not in fact be true, but none other fits the purpose here↑
See the previous footnote↑
The evening trains and all off-peak trains stop as far from the West End of the platform as they can in order to maximize the inconvenience to passengers. Everyone on those later trains has had to park in the East end car-parks and people traveling East need to use the ticket machines at the extreme West end of the platform and in inclement weather will be sheltering in the station building, also situated at the extreme West end of the platform. Each evening the platform becomes a jam of people walking West en masse while others sprint East over the icy platforms trying to catch the train before it leaves.↑

Snow, Babylon Town and The Bloody Long Island Railroad

2011-01-17T17:10:00.002-05:00

This miserable tale of incompetence begins at the end of last year.

On Boxing Day¹ to be precise.

In the early evening it began to snow, reasonably heavily, and the snow continued to fall into the following morning (which was a Monday, and therefore a work day). The situation was complicated no end by sustained winds estimated at 40 mph. We usually get wind gusts in this sort of weather, and strong winds, along with the thermodynamic consequences they bring, soon had the electrical wiring failing and snow drifting to ridiculous heights. The back door of Chateau Stevie was blocked by a drift that covered the door handle, which required that I actually remove the glass from the storm door and dig from the house out, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

The Stevieling grabbed her outdoor things and began digging for all she was worth, clearing a path from the front door to the gate and thence to the curb. As she dug, the wind helpfully piled up snow behind her rendering her efforts moot. I called her inside once I realized what was going on. I couldn't tell if it was still snowing or whether it was the stuff on the ground being moved about with extreme prejudice by the wind. I certainly wasn't going out in it, so Mrs Stevie was forced to stay at home being as how the driveway was unnavigable. Snow had drifted up over the door-sill of her Odyssey peoplemover anyway.

The wind dropped around 11am and I was unable to maintain the fiction of inclement weather preventing snow clearance operations, so I was dispatched outside with a shovel and the keys to the garage, where I store Troll, the Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness.

Playtime!

The first job was to move two feet of snow from the front of the garage and get some room in which to pull the Mrs Steviemobile, essential since there wasn't enough room to drive Troll between the vehicles. Normally I would have parked my car in the side bay of the drive (our drive can accommodate 5 vehicles easily) but that has been occupied for almost a year by Mrs Stevie's old Taurus estate wagon, now used as a shed for crap. I know his because th one time I wanted to use the vehicle for the purpose envisaged by its designers I was informed that I couldn't because it needed to be cleaned out first.

That was in June.

Eventually, by a series of two-foot back and forth movements, I was able to move the vehicles apart enough to ensure safe Trollway. Once again the neighborhood rang to the mighty engine-noise of Troll as the magnificent machine made short work of the inconvenient whitestuff, hurling it into Mr Singh's garden in a twenty-foot arc of manly domination over all things snow.

Once again the neighbors shook their fists in friendly salute to my superior tool-deployment versus the elemental fallout. Many of them eyed their snow shovels and I could see the calculation being run again as to which was more desirable: the top-o-the-line Jet-ski or that summer sale snowblower they had sniffed at and walked by disdainfully.

All during the summer I had seen them hooking up their little aquatic motorbikes while sneering at the nascent figure of Troll as it sat sleeping in the garage, hugely inapposite in the heat of summer. Well the Jet-skis were under several feet of frozen water and the snow-shoe was on the other foot now! Ahahhahahaha!

I made short work of our driveway problem, taking less than half an hour to clear the entire thing. As I was finishing up, widening the access to the road, the kid from across the street came over and asked if I was managing, because he had "a better snowblower" and would do the drive for me.

Now I used to give the local kids all the snow-clearance business they could handle, but since I bought Troll clearing snow is actually fun and I look forward to it. Besides, he was way too late out of the gate.

I gently turned down his generous offer and so was spared the financial negotiation that would have followed. It also freed me from one chore: I was on the point of going across the road to dig out their drive for them since when the snow is bad and I have the time I usually try and dig out as many of the neighbors as I can.

Funny thing. As I was getting ready to go over to Mr Singh and dig out the fleet of cars he has in his driveway (he has a fleet of young adults and teens too) the same kid asked me if I would help them dig out their driveway. I could see he had amassed a gang of five or six shovel-wielding pals, but saw no sign of this monster snowblower.

Of course I said I would, and was then flabbergasted when the young man issued a set of instructions as to what needed to be done and disappeared completely out of theater with his gang!

So I did what I was intending to do anyway and cleared most of the snow from their drive and a path to their garden gate. It required shovels to finish the job but all the shovelers were nowhere to be seen ² so I left with a shrug. I could have done more but if they weren't worried about it then I wasn't either.

I did what I could for the Singhs, though their drive always causes Troll problems. Last year I busted a shear pin in the driveshaft on the Singh's driveway. This year I couldn't get traction. Don't know why.

Then down to help Pedro, who had a small snowblower that would take forever to do the job, then down to Mike's, his next-door neighbor³ and back via Crazy Joe's (who had had a plow come and shove all his snow somewhere else before I could deal with it).

That was Monday.

Tuesday dawned and I decided to go to work, there being no earthly reason why there would be a problem now. The LIRR website said trains were running (a distinct improvement over Monday when they had stopped running so abruptly people had been stranded in what passes for waiting rooms all over the system, most of which have no facilities, water supplies or heat so a human interest story was only hours away) so I fired up the Steviemobile and drove to the station.

The roads had only light traffic that day, most people deciding⁴ to stay home again.

Even so there were about the same ratio of nitwits threatening life and limb. The Town of Babylon (the civic and financial body responsible for the snowplows hereabouts) had decided on plow parsimony and the main drag to Wyandanch Station, Acorn Street, had been plowed as a single track route which made driving up it much the same in terms of excitement and anticipation as a rural Canadian logging road. All it would take is one truck ⁵ coming he other way for disaster to strike. But such did not happen that day, and I was thus set-up for the booby trap the Town of Babylon had set for me.

The car-park for the station is bisected by a V-shaped road which trucks often use to bypass an inconvenient traffic light. During the night this had happened, which led me to the mistaken conclusion that the road and the car-park had been plowed. As I turned into the road, it became apparent that the snow had not been removed so much as mashed about and the Steviemobile was soon yawing around as the snow level exceeded the ground clearance of the crankcase and sundry other underframe parts, rendering the Steviemobile like unto a boat. Thank Azathoth for the traction control, which acts to keep any wheel that slips from robbing drive thrust from the vehicle by applying the anti-lock brakes an a per-wheel basis⁶ which in turn has ensured I have been able to get where I'm going in weather that has challenged four-wheel drive vehicles.

So I tobogganed along the road, the car yawing occasionally, but surprisingly little given the circumstances past the car-park that was still a pristine field of unbroken white thanks to the lack of diligence of the Town of Babylon and their inadequate plow fleet. I realized as I went that the car I had passed that I had initially assumed was in the car park was in fact on the road and stuck in a snowbank, the driver having made the same mistake as me but having a better memory for where the road should have been had turned earlier than I had to his great inconvenience. It went very much against the grain for me to just leave someone thus mired, but there was literally nowhere to stop without getting stuck myself.

The Stevieling was not pleased to find a parent hoving into view and ruining her snow day with his presence.

It boggles the mind that 24 hours after a snowstorm has subsided, even a bad one, that what I'm told is the busiest station on the Ronkonkoma branch has a) no plowed space in the car-parks (plural) and 2) its main approach road so inadequately cleared to posed an actual hazard in and of itself.

Days later the carpark finally got plowed, sort of, but berms of snow were left everywhere that blocked otherwise completely clear spaces, rendering them inaccessible. The LIRR got into the act too by not clearing the sidewalk approaches to the station. Indeed, one day I was astounded to see that although the path to the station was icy and in need of salt application in just one unthawed place, the LIRR service crew were sweeping up cigarette buts from the platform.

I looked at the crew. I looked at the path. I turned to a newspaper seller and said "Is this a joke? Are we on camera?" He just shook his head

Two weeks later another snowstorm hit.

This one lacked the howling wind with which to drive the snow into huge drifts, so it made up for that by increasing the amount of snow precipitation. We received about 15 inches of soft, fluffy white snow all over Deer Park and its surrounding towns over the course of that Sunday evening, so Monday morning commenced with my breaking out Troll again and throwing all the snow in the driveway as far from the driveway as 8 horsepower whirly gubbins could manage.

Operations were complicated by Mrs Stevie's enormous peoplemover thing blocking the path, so I asked her to move it over a tad so I could squeeze Troll between our cars. I was then treated to a breathtaking display of ineffective backward-and-forward maneuvering that otherwise increased the Trollway between the vehicles not an inch. I bore this with my usual stoicism, limiting myself to stamping my feet in increasing frustration and waving my fists for emphasis while giving voice to level three and four Words of Encouragement, but all was in vain and eventually I had to evict the woman and get behind the wheel myself⁷ and edge the vehicle closer to the fence.

Then it was a simple matter to climb out of the passenger-siad door and recommence snow rearrangement operations, culminating in driving each car backward into the road and clearing off the foot-anna-bit of snow on every remotely horizontal surface there before reparking them in the now-clear driveway. Mrs Stevie had been wasting time digging out the back garden by hand while this important work was going on, but as soon as she had a route to the road and a vehicle that didn't look like something that would be more appropriately found sticking out of one side of the Titanic she leaped into the shower declaring her intention to depart the scene for work.

I had already showered, and the LIRR was proudly announcing train service on the local news channel on the Ronkonkoma branch so I just departed, or at least I tried to.

Nicolls Road (the one directly outside Chateau Stevie) had been plowed in the night and therefore had a few inches of snow that was already beginning to be packed hard into ice by the occasional vehicle. Deer Park Avenue, the main avenue that crosses Nicolls Road was plowed and salted, but only in one lane each way. This made for interesting driving conditions as people plowing out their business driveways spread snow over the clear road which formed icy skid-pans every few hundred yards. Acorn St, the main drag to Wyandanch Station had not been plowed, but had been traveled by a gazillion tractor-trailer rigs which had squished all he snow into a slippery white lunascape. Driving it was akin to riding a "Wild Mouse" roller-coaster, something I vowed never to do again after the Hershey Park trip in the summer.

It was at the Wyandanch station car-park that the real fun started.

I could see a bucket-loader had plowed the road into the car-park, and could also see the loader plowing part of the car-park so I pulled into the road.

A beautiful job had been done removing the snow, such a contrast to the job done in the previous storm. The car-park entrance was perfectly clear and the loader had moved to another part of the car-park so I pulled in on the wonderfully clear track it had left with a blessing for the driver.

Which turned straightway to the foulest curse in my lexicon when I discovered that the entrance to the car-park was all that had been cleared, and that the car-park itself was a fifteen-inch deep field of unbroken snow apart from the tracks left by a four wheel drive vehicle sometime in the past. That stupid bleep in the bleeping bucket loader hadn't even cleared enough room to turn around in, and so I found myself on snow, tobogganing on the floor-pan before I could stop.

Which meant I couldn't stop now come hell or high (frozen) water because the traction control wouldn't be able to get the car moving again if it bogged down. The traction control system is good, but it's not a miracle worker. My only hope was to follow the tracks and hope they ended in a flattened area wide enough to turn around in without stopping.

It was a good plan with every chance of working I told myself as I stood outside the now-bogged-down Steviemobile. It was just that there was so much unplowed snow that it had piled up in front of the front bumper and that could only end one way. The Steviemobile isn't a bulldozer.

But it does have a very good traction control system that would see me clear if I could improve the odds a little. I hadn't brought a snow-shovel as I would have had to leave it in full view and that would simply be an excuse for someone to bust a window and steal the thing, leaving me to find a cold car full of drifted snow with a flat battery when I got back at 7:30 or later that night⁸ so I was reduced to stomping the snow flat around the car and kicking away as much snow as possible behind and in front of the wheels. This in turn gave me just enough room to rock the Steviemobile until it got a grip and a mere 60 minutes later I drove triumphantly into my driveway and declared a Snow Day.

The next day the car-parks were still not plowed so I parked in a space in a side-street. This had only been half-plowed so I was forced to drive back and forth into a small snowbank until I had formed a track in which to park the front wheels of the car in order not to create a collision hazard for anyone trying to drive along the street with the rear half of The Steviemobile.

On Friday I managed to find a route through the car-park that had been plowed, but since none of the spaces had been cleared I was again reduced to making one by backing in and out of where I thought a space was. I backed in because by now the snow had gone through so many freeze and thaw cycles it was pure ice underneath a thin crust of snow and I couldn't be sure of getting out if the drive wheels weren't on clear road.

It is clear that the Town of Babylon is on its uppers. It'll be interesting to see what civic service is next to degrade past the point of usefulness. Interesting in the Chinese sense, as they say.

It has taken me a few days to knock out this post, and it's now a full week after the last snowfall. Today, Martin Luther King day, I was driving past the Wyandanch LIRR station car-park.

It still had not been plowed.

December 26th, a day all civilized people include in the Christmas Holiday↑
I never got so much as a wave of thanks either↑
Who it turned out had agreed to pay the Fantastic Disappearing Snowshovelers to do the same job, but if they hadn't showed in the time it took me to get there then they weren't coming at all↑
Wisely, as it turned out↑
Or, for than matter, a bubble-car↑
The axle of a car is not solid because a car is wide enough that when cornering the inside wheel takes a much shorter path than the outside wheel does. If the axle were solid, one wheel would have to slip. In reality, both wheels take turn, real-world physics being a democratic process, but they do so unpredictably which gives the vehicle "interesting" handling characteristics. This is gotten round by having a sandwich of gears that allow the wheels to move at different speeds while still getting power transferred to them from the engine. This is what is inside that big bulge you see in the middle of the rear axle of monster trucks. In front-wheel drive vehicles, the device is hidden inside the gearbox. There are a number of surprising things that happen as a result of this arrangement when the wheels aren't where the designer expected them to be. For example, if you jack both wheels off the ground and spin one of them by hand, the opposite wheel turns too, but in the opposite direction! Another side effect of the design is that the power goes to the wheels in direct relation to the ease that they turn, so if one wheel gets on ice or snow, it will spin like crazy but the wheel on dry ground will get no power at all. There are any number of ways to mitigate this. The Steviemobile is engineered to apply the brake to the spinning wheel, thus "tricking" the differential into sending power to the other wheel, the one capable of moving the car. Clever, no?↑
A ~~lifetime~~ childhood spent playing with Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky products have given me a keen insight into when one should be turning the steering wheel and when to apply drive in the proper direction in order to "walk" a vehicle sideways in a small maneuvering space↑
Why yes, I do speak from experience here↑

First Commute of the New Year

2011-01-03T21:31:00.003-05:00

Dag-bleeping blasted bleeping bleep of a bleeper son of a bleeping bleepety-bleeper!

$299 for a monthly ticket?

On this sorry excuse for a railroad?

bleep!

The Crap Goes Ever Ever On

2010-12-31T17:37:00.004-05:00

A Day in The Life of Yours Truly.

Awake after a grand total of three hours sleep. The rest of the time spent coughing up a lung thanks to infection spread by thoughtless clod of a colleague. Reflect that next month the LIRR ticket price will soar to a new high, as will the subway metrocard costs. Contemplate choking to death on own rage at same. Alarm goes off.

Shower. Bath plug-hole blocked again, so end up paddling in mixture consisting of own sloughed-off night sweat, soap, water, Head 'n' Shoulders shampoo and dandruff. Wonder why skin on feet so red and tender. Tread on removed bath plug bruising right sole severely.

Limp out of shower, attempt to dry off with towels rendered water-repellent by various laundry chemicals.

Dress. Discover no clean socks that fit feet, so don toe-socks bought during 70s in France.

Assemble gear for commute, including chapstick for badly chapped lips, and highly acidic wart removal stick for troublesome planar wart on thumb. Place each in its own pocket to avoid possible confusion over similar packages.

Exit house, discover car windows frozen solid.

Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class two Words of Power to melt ice. Lose ten minutes in this way.

Drive to station along frozen half-plowed roads also used by idiots in SUVs. Attempt to find parking spot without ice or broken glass in it.

Buy coffee from Indian gentleman in station.

Hear announcement that train is operating "on time". This is an automated message triggered by the train not having arrived two minutes after the posted time.

Train rolls up three and a half minutes later. Board train.

Discover coffee undrinkable swill. Train picks up loud clods at Farmingdale, then Bethpage. Drink coffee to cheer self up.

Arrive in Atlantic Terminal bursting for a pee. Visit brand new washroom. Discover that after a public information promotion that cost millions on the subject of coughing into one's elbow to avoid spreading disease on the MTA, the LIRR (part of the MTA) has no soap dispensers in the men's washroom. This mirrors the situation at Jamaica. Wonder at acumen of MTA morons who think that coughing is a Public Health problem but unwashed hands after stall use aren't.

Arrive at work and deal with increasingly annoying stuff until lunchtime.

Eat lunch - typically something from one of the three places in easy reach - Chinese food, Pizza or a Kebab. Consider killing self in order to introduce element of variation to lunch.

Deal with more annoyance. At around four pm split lip. Reach for soothing chapstick and, without checking, apply generous coating of acid-laden wax to cracked, bleeding mouth, burning off both lips.

Descend to subway for train to Atlantic Terminal. Delays cause train not to arrive until LIRR train departure imminent.

Run through Atlantic Terminal and board crowded LIRR train.

Ride home in slow train rocking so hard head cracks against window while attempting to snooze.

Pick up car, windows frozen. Sit in car with engine racing using a combination of anti-freeze window washer, cold air and class four Words of Power to melt ice.

Drive home.

Eat.

Go to bed.

Dream of the cold peace of oblivion.

Repeat four times.

Ho Ho Bleeping Ho

2010-12-27T19:56:00.009-05:00

It began sometime around two weeks ago.

One of the consultants in the office began a hacking, bronchial cough¹ worthy of a Dickensian consumptive. The sounds were so bad that I was certain he would take a few days off, but he decided to soldier on and the cough has been ringing through the office now for three weeks. In only a week this thoughtless clod had given his disease to the woman in the next cube, who has just returned from maternity leave.

The woman is on the same team I am. I tried to avoid close contact with her mostly because having spent my Thanksgiving in bed sick I had no wish to have my Christmas ruined, and with each hacking roar from her next door neighbor had to restrain myself from walking over to The Clod's desk and explaining the wisdom in taking sick time, even if you have to foot the bill for same from your own consultant-level wages, at blunt instrument point. Surface. Whatever.

My boss didn't help matters. He likes to call meetings on the spur of the moment, too much of a spur to secure an official conference room in which to host it. He gets around this by ingeniously using his office as the location for these meetings. The office can comfortably hold about four people, four people who must be on very friendly terms given the proximity in which they must sit. Meetings of late have involved from seven to nine people (and in one spectacularly bizarre instance, fifteen bewildered people).

I have pointed out in so many words the wisdom of crowding the workforce, sick and well, into tight spaces and forcing them to share air and the aerosol of spittle we each of us produce as a by-product of speaking. I shall from now on be attending such meetings by phone, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

On the 23rd of December, the last work day in our operation before Christmas, the guy in the next cube to me and I began coughing almost simultaneously, suggesting that something had made its way through the A/C system to the register situated over our desks. Whatever the vector, by Christmas Eve I was so ill I had to cut my participation in the traditional Famile Mrs Stevie Xmas Eve Extravaganza very short and go to bed.

This was a bad idea, because although I was sick as a dog and getting sicker with every breath, lying down with this sort of upper respiratory tract infection only makes things worse for me, and in no time I was in for a sleepless night hacking until my throat ruptured and the post nasal drip reduced the entire back of my throat to one huge sore.

Christmas Day was canceled.

We were supposed to wander over to my In-Laws after we'd had at the prezzies under our tree, but I was so ill I begged off for an alternate plan involving lying on the sofa groaning and calculating how far I could push the dosage limits on the old Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu given that I had already redlined the limits on Vicks Dayquil and the even more warning-infested Vicks Nyquil.

The day wore on with the room rocking back and forth ever more violently while I made an attempt on the world record for facial tissue usage and snot production. The cough periodically made its presence known and by the time the afternoon had reached the point at which in the UK the Queen appears on the telly to tell everyone to buck up and stop whining I had pulled all the muscles in my chest, severely limiting my nose-clearing efforts (but not my body's ability to produce nasal mucus).

That night I decided to sleep on the recliner sofa, but I woke up once or twice an hour through the night and hence managed to get precisely no value from this "sleep".

I cannot sleep sitting up, even if that is the only option.

Now the problem with all this was that there was an awful lot of liquid involved, far more than I could comfortably consume. Every time I awoke I would take a couple of mouthfuls of ice-water (or stagger to the kitchen to refill the pint glass with ice and water, then take a couple of mouthfuls of water), and every four hours I would undertake the chemistry set nonsense of turning Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu tablets into Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine.

Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine is an almost-soluble, effervescent product I find efficacious in mitigating the downside of colds and flu-like viruses. One adds two tablets to water, they fizz for a bit and dissolve - mostly. The process can be brought to more full completement by vigorously stirring the mixture until it stops fizzing. I've found it to be a very effective treatment but it is another 4 ounces of liquid.

There was also the matter of the Metamucil fiber product I have to take at least once a day in order for my digestive system to stay in line and not mutiny with extreme prejudice. This is an orange-flavored almost-soluble powder that upon mixing with water produces a suspension of powder in faintly orange-ish tainted water. I've found better solubility can be had by placing the mixture in a Magic Bullet blender and spinning everything for a couple of seconds.

Better solubility does not mean better flavor.

I have, over the course of a few months of this torture come up with the technique of using not water, but a mixture of 50% thin orange juice and 50% water, and blending in the powder. This works, is palatable in the same way orange ice-lollies that contain no hint of real orange are palatable on a hot day when the thirst is on you, and does what it is supposed to do.

But it is another 6-8 ounces of liquid.

Years ago I could put away several pints of beer over a Saturday lunchtime, but now the sheer volume of liquid called for by that program of events is terrifying. I can't get that much through the old kidneys fast enough that I could even make the attempt today so naturally I looked for ways to reduce unnecessary fluid intake during this fluid-intense Christmas.

Back at Thanksgiving I had been in the same bind vis-a-vis liquids and colliding Metamucil and Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu schedules, and had come up with what at the time seemed like the perfect solution - I would combine the two products in one Orangey Drink of Health.

I reasoned thus: I would first produce the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine and stir until all nascent effervescence had been excised from the mixture. I would use this instead of water in my water/juice/Metamucil charge with which I would load the Magic Bullet. Simple. No downside.

I had, of course, neglected to factor in one quite major downside: that this plan was conceived in Mr Brain, and that the proof of concept mental experiments were run in that perfidious organ's grey matter. I have mentioned before that Mr Brain is demonstrably not my friend² and this was not to be an exception to that rule of thumb.

I spent a depressing amount of time stirring the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu mixture to induce all the treacherous carbon dioxide to come out of solution, then added it to the juice and Metamucil and gave the result two seconds in the Magic Bullet.

A sad mistake.

The stupid Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu solids still had some oomph in them and the vigorous swizzling they got in the blender produced enough gas to lock the blender's container onto the cutter base. Indeed, I could see it was about one more swizzle from blowing itself apart. It took a while and many, many class four Words of Power but I finally managed to rotate the base one quarter turn in the "unscrew" direction.

At which point it did blow apart.

This was foremost in what passes for my mind when I concocted the Christmas Day version. First rule was "No Blending of anything that has come into contact with Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine". I would blend the Metamucil with the juice, then add the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine, pre-dissolved and fizzless. The result would be stirred, not blended.

This plan was carried out as the kitchen reeled and span around me and there was no problem with exploding blenders. There was however a problem in that Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine is all-but immiscible with a suspension of Metamucil in orange juice. Drinking this while all visual stimuli were urging reverse peristalsis in the most strident tones was...challenging. I would go into more detail, but I'm half-convinced I hallucinated the worst parts.

Boxing day was spent feeling horrible. My headache vied with my pulled muscles for who got second billing to the throat. I was now at the point of adding a shot of Southern Comfort to both the juice/Metamucil concoction and the Alka Seltzer Cold and Flu medicine.

And then it began snowing.

It snowed all Boxing Day, all that night and all this morning. This was made infinitely more inconvenient by sustained winds of 40 mph gusting to about twice that. By morning there were over 7000 reported power outages on Long Island and the TV morning news programs were begging people to stay home.

This was made even easier for me by the LIRR, who sensibly shut down, abandoning only the bare minimum of poor bastards to the unheated facilities unequipped with so much as drinking water that pass as waiting rooms on that blighted mass transit abortion. There was an actual American Red Cross mercy mission to Hicksville in order to prevent someone proving that if no-one makes any effort to make things otherwise we live in a world still capable of killing people the same way it did in the Dark Ages - with weather.

I felt well enough to beak out Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness and clean out driveway around 11 am, once the snow had stopped and the wind had dropped. The kid from across the street offered to use "a bigger snowblower" on my drive for me, but I declined, reasoning that there were enough blocked driveways to go around. No sooner was our driveway looking clear than this same kid asked me if I could help him and his brother clear his own driveway! I would have offered anyway so I said I would and did, during which time they disappeared out of theater. Once I had cleared their drive (a little miffed that I had been left to do the job alone, I admit) I did the Singh's driveway as best I could, then nipped down the road to help Pedro and Mike with their drives³.

And so to lunch, and an all-afternoon session with my Jeeves and Wooster DVDs⁴.

I used to get these regularly as a side benefit of my pack-a-day cigarette habit. The sound of the tubes in the lungs abrading destructively against themselves is one of the most easily identified sounds in my sound memory bank↑
And hasn't been for much longer than I suspected when I began writing The Occasional Stevie. Going over all the shenanigans that that miserable brain has set me up for by denying me access to intelligence at key moments of my life has revealed a most insidious pattern. How could I, a chemistry student, have not known that adding Magnesium powder to Ammonium Dichromate would result in a rather weak but still powerful Thermite recipe? Only by having the image of the Periodic Table blanked from my consciousness during this sorry business, that's how. The relationship between Chromium, Oxygen and Magnesium is obvious just by looking at the Periodic Table (at least, the one I used to use; the new one is daft) which was, after all, designed to help spot and avoid accidental stuff like this.↑
Mike called to say that the same kid had offered to clear his drive for cash but had never appeared↑
A present↑

No Title, No Content

2010-11-08T21:08:00.001-05:00

So I looked out of the bathroom window this morning and saw it was snowing.

It didn't stay round for long, but yesterday it was warm enough to go without a jacket and today it's brass monkey weather.

It's like the world decided to give Fall a miss and go straight from summer to winter.

Agony! Much More Painful Than Yours!

2010-11-02T23:05:00.003-04:00

So on Thursday night I started to feel a pain in my lower right abdomen.

I assumed it was just gas, a side-effect of the Metamucil-rich diet Doc Rubberglove insists I partake of, but it didn't stop on Friday, it just got steadily worse until I called Doc Rubberglove's office and begged to be seen.

The trip back onto the island was pure hell, made infinitely worse by the LIRR calling for me to switch trains at Jamaica onto one which started at Penn Station loaded to 150% of its seating capacity. By the time I got to Wyandanch station I was almost in tears.

Doc Rubberglove took one look, gave a grunt of surprise, said "you look really ill, does it hurt when I do this?"

When his hearing had returned somewhat he yelled "It might be appendicitis!", took a quick look at his inch-thick liability insurance policy, hustled me into his own car and drove me to the Emergency Room thereby cutting through about four hours of red tape and getting me to someone with needles and blood-drawing gear in about half an hour. Mrs Stevie hove into theater during the lengthy triage process.

There a man who told me he used to be an electrician but found that people wouldn't pay him on time attempted to mount a hep-lock in the back of my hand and use it to draw blood. The pain of this process was enough to drive the pain coming from my lower bowel from my head and cause me to pass out for a few seconds. While I was out, Mrs Stevie used the opportunity to tell everyone how I'd passed out some years ago when giving blood.

This was a base calumny. I had not passed out. I had told the staff to hide from my sight the bottle steadily filling with my blood as it rocked back and forth on a small device to mix anticoagulants into it, because I thought I might faint. The two other guys I was with had laughed at my squeamishness and called me names. Then with perfect timing one of them took a good look at his rocking bottle o' blood, let out a quavering moan and passed out. Then his muscles relaxed in such a fashion that it took the staff about thirty minutes to clean up the place and he was disinvited from giving blood there ever again. While I and the other guy were waiting for him to regain enough strength to start attempting the commute from the World Trade Center to Penn Station we discussed the problems of navigating a partially disabled person with questionable control of his sphincter musculature through the public transportation system of Manhattan during rush hour. As we pondered the best course of action, a thin, wavering, reedy voice came from behind a screen: "You go on, lads. I'll be alright." I waited about a microsecond for him to request a service revolver and one round before we left, then burst into gales of helpless laughter.

That is what happened that day.

When I woke up the hep-lock agonizer said "So, I hear you fainted the last time you gave blood."

"What? No! It was the other guy who fainted!" I yelled, then screamed as the reflex to sit up to make my point had induced the original reason for my being there.

Doc Rubberglove hove into view. "Does it still hurt when I do this?" he asked, and there followed a couple of minutes of nurses, doctors and patients staggering around clutching their bleeding ears and moaning quietly.

I was made to pee in a jar, then to carry the jar around with me for an hour or so as I was moved hither and yon, ending up in a rather nice, quiet abdominal ER with three patients and about six nursing staff in it.

A very attractive nurse gave me a cup of ice and a bottle of contrast fluid, told me to drink it as quickly as I could and remarked in passing "So, you fainted when you last gave blood?"

"What? No! It was the other guy! I didn't faint!" I yelled as she injected my IV line with something that began with "Z", had four syllables and made my head feel like I'd drunk a pint of Bacardi white rum.

A doctor hove into view. "You don't want to chug that" he said. "Drink it slowly so it spreads out. So, I hear you faint when you give blood."

"Whu? Nnnw. Wuz ovva guy whut fainted." I was having trouble getting my eyes to point in the same direction by then.

"He doesn't give blood anyway" sniffed Mrs Stevie. "He has Mad Cow disease."

"D'n't! Tha's lie! 've g't Prius. Mebbe!" now the stuff that began with "Z" had reduced the pain in my bowels to tolerable levels, everyone around me was attempting to induce a pain a bit lower down. It was all very trying.

"Have you finished that drink yet?" asked the nice nurse who had given me the stuff that started with "Z".

"Doc told me to slow down" I replied.

"Well, the faster you finish the faster we get you into the cat scan and figure out what the hell is wrong with you" she said.

So I chugged it down

Meanwhile, Doc Rubberglove (who has privileges at this hospital) was dictating his notes on my case into a small recording device. I only caught part of it. The part that went "...fainted when giving blood some years before".

Damn that woman!

Another nurse, this one a male biker with a mohawk and tattoos hove into view and demanded more blood. As he was inserting the needle in my arm (the hep-lock was in use) he said "You're the fainter, yeah?"

"B'g p'dun?" I mumbled, attempting to make sense of the world through stuff-that-starts-with-Z-addled senses.

"You faint when you give blood. Everyone says so"

"Whut? No! Wuz other guy!"

"Nope, it was you. I was there" said the ex-electrician as he walked by.

"No! Other time! Not me!"

"I think he's having a reaction to the stuff that starts with "Z"" opined the biker, drawing the thirteenth test-tube full of blood.

Eventually, just as the stuff that begins with "Z" was wearing off I was wheeled down to two guys dressed in black who ran the Cat Scanner. They made me pull down my trousers and lie on a table with my hands on my head, then, just as they were about to start the machine one said "So, I hear you fainted when you gave blood"

"Which time?" I demanded. "Yes I fainted this evening because of all the agony I'm experiencing but no I didn't when I gave blood. That was the other guy!"

The noise of the cat scanner's recorded voice drowned out the last part of my outraged cries but not the unseemly sniggers of the two goths in the control room.

I'd been back in the ER about ten minutes when the nice nurse who gave me the stuff that starts with "Z" told me I was going home because I didn't have appendicitis. This she relayed as "good news". No, what I had was something called "Epiploic Appendagitis" which feels as bad as appendicitis but instead of being susceptible to surgery and quick pain relief it is what doctors call "self-limiting", which is a fifty dollar phrase for "gets better on its own" over an indeterminate number of days but so far longer than four.

Good news indeed, just not for me.

Extreme Weather As Enjoyed While Attempting To Commute On The Bloody Long Island Rail Road

2010-10-23T11:24:00.003-04:00

About two weeks ago or so I was getting ready to leave for my train when foul weather on steroids blew into Brooklyn.

It was quite a sight from the 15th floor. The windows suddenly turned opaque as fog engulfed us followed by a hailstorm, which tapered off to torrential rain that kept me pinned inside long enough to miss my 6:04 pm train from Atlantic Terminal¹, now the only straight through train from Brooklyn to Ronkonkoma².

"No problem" I thought to myself. "I'll wait til this lot lets up a bit, then sprint for the A train to Penn Station and commute from there."

Which is what I did, or tried to do. When I got to Penn Station it was a scene out of some apocalypse movie³ with people packed shoulder to shoulder in every available space. There must've been at least two thousand heads I could see and that was just the in main concourse. And more people were pouring in at a rate of about two hundred ever minute or so as the subway cars emptied out.

The announcement that was being fed to everyone went as follows: "Due to a tree coming down on the tracks east of the tunnels all service out of Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal has been suspended". Periodically they added Jamaica to the list of places trains were not running from. The announcer went on to suggest everyone use the E train, but since the only point to that would be to go to Jamaica and she had told us there were no trains running out of that god-forsaken place no-one was eager to try it as an option.

The irony here is that what the LIRR announcer wasn't telling us was the most useful piece of information: that it wasn't "a" tree but about half the trees in Brooklyn that had been uprooted by tornadoes and flung onto the permanent⁴ way. Had that been said we would have been able to properly assess the commute situation and react accordingly, but we were dealing with the bloody Long Island Rail Road here and they have a policy of not passing on timely, accurate information⁵.

I have no idea why the bloody LIRR cannot get a bleeping grip when it comes to giving their customers information that will help them draw informed conclusions about their commute. Derailments that will take hours to rectify are called "Disabled Trains" which I'll grant is accurate as far as it goes but since they class every involuntarily motionless train as a "Disabled Train" is too broad a category to be actually useful to someone who wants to know whether they should plan on getting home or getting a hotel room. Describing the total devastation the trackbed had suffered that day as "a tree" was about as much use as a ham sandwich at a Jewish wedding.

Back to the scene of the crime.

I stood for an hour or so, wondering to myself how hard it would have been to spread the word across the MTA as a whole and, for example, start marshaling the subway trains so they didn't dump hundreds of people every minute into the mix. I mean, they are all supposed to be the same organization for bleeps sake. The incompetence in this lack of preparation alone is staggering. MTA bigwigs stand around spouting about the advisability of increasing the technology in stations by deploying cameras but they haven't fully realized the potential of the phone network and the PA systems they already have and have had for decades. We'll see how this stupidity was to spread the fallout to as many people as possible (presumably the MTA was working on the principle that if everyone was inconvenienced, when the average reaction of the public to their "solutions" was worked out it would be spread so thin it would actually make them look good.

Stupid bleepers.

I walked onto the E train platform and was confronted by a crowd even more dense, if that is possible, than was clogging Penn Station in a fire marshal's nightmare. It didn't help that the uptown E platform opens onto Penn in a chicane that is about two people wide. If people had panicked there would have been a people fall of bodies onto the trackbed. It was terrifying to see, let alone attempt to get past.

Once I managed to board a train to Jamaica along with several hundred others, packing the car shoulder to shoulder with literally no space between us, we set off and I started to observe through the windows the effect that the lack of any sort of integrated problem resolution was having.

You see, most of the people in the stations downstream from Penn Station, places like Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, are simply trying to get from one part of metro New York (where they work) to another (where they live). Imagine their surprise when their train pulls up, the doors open and there is no way anyone can board because people seem to be making some sort of attempt to get into the Guinness book of records. Imagine how their surprise turns first to puzzlement, then annoyance, then outright rage as train after train after train pulls this stupid trick.

It was obvious no-one waiting at the stations knew what was going on because they were beginning to shout to the crushed, sweating and extremely grumpy people in the trains, asking what the bleep was going on? Naturally, these requests were answered with irony most of the time - usually "Who the bleep knows?"

Now some of those travelers made very determined attempts to board, and fights were only an open door away most of the trip.

I'll break here to suggest that it might have made sense for the Subway part of the MTA to coordinate with the bloody LIRR part and inform everyone at the stations along the path what the hell was going on, along with advice on how to go about mitigating the lesser hell of the stranded subway commuter. Furthermore, it might have made sense to run trains that did not stop at Penn Station on the downtown side so that there would at least be a chance that the local commuters got some sort of service.

It beggars my imagination that for all the bleeping talk the movers and shakers spout about preparedness in New York, a basic plan for moving people in the event the subway was pressed into service in this fashion is still, obviously not in place. I mean, what would happen in the event of a terrorist attack⁶ removed Penn Station as a commuting option? It boggles the mind to think how empty the talk of preparedness is as demonstrated that day.

Back to the scene of the crime.

We eventually got to Sutphin Boulevard, the E train stop at Jamaica. It is a voluminous station with cathedral ceilings and wide, long platforms. What it doesn't have is an adequate number of stairways and escalators to evacuate the occupants of those platforms to the upper station before the next train disgorges another few hundred into the mix.

Or tries to.

Luckily I was let out right by a staircase and so was able to ascend straight away at the shuffling pace of the crowd. As I did, I looked back. The people at the rear of the platform were standing still, and judging by their expressions had been doing so for some time. A riot in the making right there.

Once in the upper station it became apparent that the same design criteria for the stairwells from he platform had been used for the street exit, to which two policemen were inexpertly directing people to use by shouting at them.

I have found over the last 26 years that when it comes to the bloody LIRR there is no situation so bleeped-up that the NYC police cannot make infinitely worse by the attitude they bring to the stranded, uninformed commuters simply trying to get home despite the bloody LIRR.

Better yet, no police had been posted at the top of the stairs to tell people not to try pushing their way down the jam-packed staircases (you have to tell New Yorkers this even if the evidence of their own eyes is that doing so would be a monumental waste of time and moreover a threat to their lives because here in what is reportedly the most cosmopolitan city in the world people are dumber than the stuff that comes out of a cow's rear end). This meant that the cops were screaming in both directions. The upshot of this was that no-one was paying attention to them at all.

Which made them shout louder

I finally got to the street and ran along the face of Jamaica LIRR station looking on the nice new video boards that adorn the staircases up to the platforms for a likely train East, and found a Huntington train was boarding from one side of a platform and a Babylon train from the other. Either would get me out of this hell to somewhere I could apply money to get me back to my car in Wyandanch.

The Huntington train was packed so full that there was literally no room to board any of the cars, and the Babylon train was almost at that stage, so I jumped aboard the latter and found a place in the plenum up against a wall so I could at least lean against it. It was by then about 8:15 pm and the train was posted to leave at 8:10 pm ⁷ but as I looked at the new-fangled train destination display hanging from the station canopy the time changed to 8:20 pm.

More people got on, until at 8:20 the doors closed. We were, by then, packed nose-to-nose.

Five minutes later the time on the board changed to 8:40 pm and the doors opened again.

more people pushed their way aboard and some inside pushed back. Arguments began in each doorway. Because the train was on a single track, there were platforms on both sides of the train and the doors on each side were opening in order to double the chances of violence breaking out. There were, of course, no police officers to be seen.

At a few minutes before 9 pm a man in a suit began remonstrating with everyone that he could see a gap in the trains crowd and if everyone would just move he could get in. Some pointed out that the "gap" he could see was in fact merely a gap in the sea of heads caused by three women who had decided to sit on the floor⁸ but he didn't believe them. Then he forced his way into the train despite being told there was no room, with the result that he was squashed into the corner formed by the closing door and a bulkhead.

The train finally moved.

The seemingly endless trip to Babylon was spiced up for me by the agonizing pains in my legs (my sciatica had kicked in about 15 minutes before the troublesome man got on) and the repeated plaints from the troublesome man that we could all move back and give him more room. By now everyone was telling him to please be quiet. As we were leaving Jamaica (finally) a train pulled into the station from the West. Somehow he got the idea trains had been running from Penn Station, the clear implication being that all these people were being idiots by coming to Jamaica for no reason and crowding him out of a seat. The announcements that could clearly be heard contradicting this view had no impact on his stream of whining. Soon the idea seemed to morph into one in which this train had started life at Penn Station. Why this made any difference was lost on me, but it annoyed the living crap out of everyone.

The train gradually emptied out as we made local stop after local stop until I could, with thee stops to go before journey's end, get a seat. Already sitting was The Whiner who was still asking everyone who would acknowledge him whether or not they had boarded at Penn Station. Every single person who responded did so with some variation of "Of course not! There aren't any trains coming out of Penn tonight", but he seemed to believe everyone had formed a conspiracy to conceal the truth from him.

As I say, a night for madness.

Eventually I got to Babylon where Mrs Stevie would pick me up, but she got a minor dose of the same idiocy I had been subject to: it took her three times longer than usual to make the journey because some idiot was giving someone else a tow, would not exceed 20 mph and would not pull over to let the mile-long jam of traffic behind him subside a bit.

I took Friday off.

or Flatbush Avenue as it used to be called before they spent a fortune in granite wall panels for it↑
Yes, no sooner had they spent all that cash on the station than they canceled most of the useful trains running in and out of the damn thing. This is probably, in the convoluted thinking of the bloody Long Island Rail Road, a great way to save money on station maintenance↑
I am not kidding: I saw the same scene in "2012" when people were futilely attempting to get onto the arks↑
Ha↑
Unless Amtrack equipment is to blame. Then you get encyclopedic updates every four and a half seconds↑
The catch-all disaster role-playing scenario of choice for NY emergency services these days↑
This makes sense when you calculate the times by the secret formula used by the bloody LIRR dispatchers. To decode it you need imaginary numbers in order to schedule imaginary trains↑
Madness, but it was a night made for the mad↑

Good Grief, Look At All These Cobwebs!

2010-10-23T10:26:00.000-04:00

Things have been a bit hectic around Chateau Stevie of late and this has precluded my posting for a while. Sorry. I know here are tens of thousands to whom The Occasional Stevie is nothing if not nothing. Then there's the three people who read it.

To them I offer this promise: That the incompetence of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road, which reached epic proportions last month, shall not go undocumented in my usual neutral style, nor shall they be spared a single drop of my righteous vitriol.

The Tediousness of the Tedious Tedium

2010-09-06T20:20:00.002-04:00

So having moved my entire electronic life onto this laptop, I now have to move it off again so it can go back to Dell to have the cracked casing element replaced.

I haven't had time until now to actually start the process (I got the mailer box to send the computer to Texas in over four weeks ago) but now have begun checking all the various websites that will have to be used in order to re-establish the things I'll have to clean off the hard drive before I return the computer (Dell staff now having a name for trustworthiness second only to the KGB after a handful of very public breaches of trust).

Then, of course, three weeks ago the tower unit that will become once again my digital home blew one of its hard drives (for which it transpired we had no proper backup) so it is limping with broken registry references and shortcuts to nowhere. Spiffy. Let's hope the "factory reset" process is relatively painless.

Ha.

Just When It Can't Get Any Worse, It Does

2010-08-31T17:19:00.006-04:00

Just when I am at a low point, with the damage to my left shoulder proving unsusceptible to physiotherapy and a cough I caught last weekend ripping my throat apart, life deals me a joker.

Again.

For the last two nights, at around 2am, I have been woken up from my agonised dreams of being pursued by gangs of crazed football referees with whistle-mania by an insistent chirping.

A cricket has moved into my bedroom heating baseboard.

Tapping Into My Inner Rage

2010-08-30T14:32:00.004-04:00

I decided on Friday evening that I would have to do something about the leaky bath taps in our upstairs bathroom, since the steady drip I had grown to loathe had now turned into a most healthy (and costly ) dribble.

I couldn't remember how the taps came apart even though I could vaguely recall replacing the hot tap mechanism some years ago. The taps in question are decades-old "Delta" type remote faucets, an interesting design that puts the actual internal workings of the taps inside the wall, typically just out of reach of the typical human finger. I was also concerned, for reasons I won't go into now, about mould forming in the walls and so I though I'd remove one wall tile by cutting the wallboard behind it with my Dremel Tool configured as a rotary saw, and e-acquaint myself with the wheres and whyfores of the taps mechanism with a quick eyeballing. I was confident that I would be able to replace this tile-shaped section of wall with reasonable ease.

Since this would be a relatively quick job¹ I turned off the water to the whole house using my Stevie-installed nifty ball-valve shut-offs. Then I removed the tap handles, the little square lead adapter blocks that allow one to fit taps handles with splines to faucet stems with a flat key, unscrewed the chromed cylinders that encase the remote faucet internal mechanism, pulled out the remote extender spindles and grabbed the Dremel for some quick and easy wall segment removal.

Naturally the Dremel tool bit was wider than the inter-tile gap and thus couldn't be used.

Nor could I find my large razor saw, my backup tool of choice² and so I came up with the Other Other Plan, in which I would employ my scroll-saw to do the job.

It turns out that a scroll saw is manifestly unsuited to the job of removing a section of tile-encrusted wall without damaging the tile, and it cracked in two places and chipped in two more before I had the thing in my left hand while I swore into the hole in the wall.

It was then a simple matter to divine the tap-innard removal technique: Re-insert the 3 inch screw that holds the tap handles to the mechanism and pull.

I went out to Arse Hardware and got a "replacement" fitting that looked similar³ for both the hot and cold taps and returned home for the final fitting.

I pushed the new fitting into place but it wouldn't seat. I removed it and compared the length, diameter and outline with the old fitting, and re-fit the old fitting just to check I wasn't going mad. The old one slipped in easily. The new one couldn't be persuaded to seat down no matter how hard or with what I belted it.

I felt around inside the bronze fitting, which was when a little cap of rubber and a small spring fell out. Here was another piece of the puzzle, a spring-loaded seat for the faucet mechanism I was unaware of, but for which I had replacement parts for in the new mechanism's packaging. Bonus!

I carefully assembled the little spring and rubber cap from the new pieces I had, and attempted to fit them into the tiny hole set into the back of the bronze fitting. It turned out to be nigh-impossible to do without some fourth-level Words of Power delivered in a loud, high-pitched shriek of rage. Extinguishing the small fires my language had started in the wall insulation - some sort of asbestos-wool/sheep's hide composite from the look of it that probably dated from around the time plains apes were belting each other round the head with antelope thigh bones in front of a giant oblong monolith - I again attempted to fit the mechanism into the housing, but it would not cooperate.

Realising that Mrs Stevie was about to reappear in theater, I dashed downstairs and attempted to isolate the upstairs plumbing from the rest of the house using two pre-Stevie installed handwheels. If Mrs Stevie came home to no water there would be hell to pay.

The reason I didn't use these handwheels to shut off only the upstairs water is that they are situated in an awkward place and are difficult to activate. The cold one is easily reached by entering the two-foot space between the laundry room and the basement wall and reaching up and around some piping - the handwheel is in an access space in the laundry room wall itself. The hot line is controlled by a handwheel that is situated right over the laundry room wall in that same access space, but due to some bizarre design ethic employed by the original plumber, points directly towards a large iron wastepipe and is thus most difficult to turn in any way, shape or form without a Stillson's pipewrench. Not only that, the pipewrench is needed to cinch down the wheels of both taps because they don't make good seals (and I don't have the room to take them apart and make them work properly) and the pipewrench is quite difficult to maneuver in that tight space. It is all very tiresome.

However, I did get the wheels cinched closed and turned the water back on just as Mrs Stevie came home.

Pausing only to drink twice my weight in orange juice and ginger ale I then removed another section of wall over the hot tap since if I was going to replace the little spring and cap in that tap I would need to be able to get my finger down inside the fitting and I couldn't do that with the wall in the way. This naturally cracked another tile, and the struggle to get the replacement bits in the tiny hole they were "designed" for was, if anything, even more protracted than with the cold tap. Just for giggles I tried to fit the mechanism that would not go into the cold tap fitting into the hot side.

It fit perfectly.

This caused me to waste another 15 minutes attempting to fit the second replacement mechanism into the cold fitting, but to no avail. I pulled it out and carefully catalogued the differences between it and the one that came out earlier that day. There were some, but nothing I could see that would cause the thing to not fit at all.

So I hurtled off in the Steviemobile in an attempt to find a real plumbing supply place that was a) in existence and 2) open at 4:30 pm on a Saturday. In this there were two factors working against me: The almost complete absence of plumbing supply stores in the aftermath of Home Despot and Blowes and what few there were left close typically at 1pm or 2pm on a Saturday (which is part of the reason they are almost all gone of course).

I found Vic's Plumbing Supply and Taxidermy on Sunrise Highway was still in business, but not at 4pm, Vic being of the 2pm school of Saturday closing thought.

So I stopped off at the nearby Blowes and half-heartedly took a look at what they had to offer. And they had an almost identical "drop in replacement" for my fitting, so I bought it and made my way home to the accompaniment of the low-gas light flashing on and off on the Steviemobile's dashboard. "It doesn't get any better than this" I thought.

The fitting did fit, didn't leak and worked as expected when I turned the water back on. The new fitting, however, had a bizarre operational mode. When I turned it on a little, it poured out hot water. When I opened it full, the water delivery rate dropped to about half. I looked at my watch and declared myself finished for the day, blanked off the hole in the wall with plastic taped to the tiles, had a shower and refused to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday I went back to Blowes and bought another of the "drop in" replacement fittings, returned home and swapped it for the one I put in the day before. It worked, but the tap was working backwards.

This is an annoying feature of the design - you can use the same fitting to install regular capstan-type handles which you crank anti-clockwise to operate, or to install the L-shaped handles that you twist inward (usually) to get water, which involves one faucet opening anti-clockwise and the other opening clockwise. It is all in how you put in the mechanism, which can be installed with the cam on the right or the cam on the left.

I can never remember which way is which and the result of that had been 15 years of weird taps in the upstairs bathroom⁴ that had to be rotated in opposite directions to get water out of them. I had vowed to correct this lamentable state of affairs with this job and so had to descend two flights of stairs, turn off the water, ascend two flights of stairs, dismantle the faucet, rotate the mechanism 180 degrees, reassemble the faucet, descend two flights of stairs, turn the water on again, ascend two flights of stairs and re-test the whole thing. It worked.

So it was then a "simple" matter of replacing the bits of wall. this was achieved with the aid of some lengths of wood glued across the hole with five minute epoxy to which the tile-bearing wall sections were in turn glued. Once that had set up, I re-grouted and went downstairs for dinner.

Another weekend I'll never get back.

Hah!↑
It reappeared in theater five minutes after I had finished the job, as expected↑
but not absolutely identical it turned out↑
The last time I had done this job the Stevieling was still in a car-seat. We still speak of the time I had driven everyone around trying to get a replacement fitting for the one that had been fired across the bathroom in a spectacular failure during Mrs Stevie's shower. Failing to secure one all morning I had taken them all to lunch. On the way home, driving down Sunrise Highway I saw another Home Despot and pulled into the lot. The Stevieling, who was too young to read at that time, saw the distinctive orange sign, and in a tone of disbelief and disgust thundered "This again?!! I responded in placating tones, saying "Honey, I have to find the part for the faucet". She, with almost prescient perspicacity said "You know they're not gonna have it!", and she was absolutely right. They didn't↑

More Madness, LIRR-Style

2010-08-26T22:02:00.001-04:00

So this morning I get to my station and, unsure as to the scheduling situation vis-a-vis rail-mounted public transport-wise, I looked to the electronic announcement displays installed last year at a cost of Azathoth-Nose to see what the LIRR can tell me with regard to train times.

All I could see was "Wyandanch" blinking on and off about once a second.

Call me Susan but if you are standing on a station platform of a morning and don't know which one despite the big tin signs riveted to the handrails every 100 feet or so, then you should just give it up.

More money poured into the Pit O' Waste there, then.

Another Round To The Bloody Long Island Rail Road

2010-08-25T23:55:00.004-04:00

Stop me if you've heard this one

It seems there was this signalbox that had somehow, in the welter of moneyspending that had gone on in the last 25 years had not been modernized much. It still used some sort of comical pneumatic system installed during Warren Gamaliel Harding's administration¹ to work the points and signals and other froofaraw that a railway needs to direct trains through complicated junctions, and they don't come much more complicated than Jamaica (not the good one) where eight lines enter, eight lines leave and in between they can all be cross connected in about 14 bajillion different configurations. Want to send that train that normally stops on track eight to track one? Pushpushpresstwiddle, hishisshissphut! Job done, 23 Skiddoo!².

There was plenty of wiring in there too, connected in some arcane way to the Magnificent Air-Organ of Train Steerage, but I'm not sure what role it played other a demonstrably important one. Some of his wiring was of the hand-extruded, lizard-hide insulated kind fitted personally by Thomas Edison, but at least one was of the newer, "better" machine made plastic coated stuff all we Electrical Savants know and love.

Perplexingly, one Monday, it came to pass that it was this newer, "better" wire that caught fire.

The fire was extinguished in a matter of minutes, but by then the stalwart damage Crews of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road had gotten stuck in and declared a state of emergency, shutting down the entire network. Management than went into crisis mode as they had done so many times before and began sequestering information so that the commuters who were against all reason cramming into Penn Station trying to get home would be able to swelter shoulder to shoulder with like minded free-thinkers in an atmosphere of ignorance for hours.

Well, luck wasn't with the LIRR that day because those same commuters, who should have fallen on bended knee and thanked their various Gods, both benevolent and squamous, for this their gift of a chance to stew for hours in the damp air breathed before by about two thousand people, instead began speaking to the press, opining that in their view said railroad personnel could not for the life of them find their own rear ends with both hands, a map and a top of the line GPS navigation system.

So enraged were the LIRR at this lack of proper fawning that they sent in a spokesman of their own, who stood in front of a camera, "explained" the problem ("the railroad is broken" is a rough paraphrase of his statement) then dodged all questions about why there is no backup system, why the equipment was so easily damaged as to cripple the entire railroad³ and why no-one felt moved to instigate railroad-to-paying⁵-passengers lines of communication, that last a constant feature of all LIRR problems-in-progress. Why the idiots in charge of the LIRR can't get a bleeping clue on this one is beyond me. Any problem on the railroad is made infinitely worse by them not uttering a single sound as to what is wrong and, more importantly, how long it will take them to get one home.

Now your humble scribe dodged this particular bullet by virtue of the fact that he spent the weekend running role-playing games at a local Gaming Convention and had taken Monday off to recuperate, the old manly juices not running so wild as they once did and stuff like this taking a toll on the old constitution⁶.

On Tuesday I attempted a commute, but gave up when most of my morning trains failed to show up. It seemed that the LIRR wasn't done with this particular silliness. Luckily I was not needed at work, so I took the day off and went back to bed in disgust.

Today the LIRR is still in turmoil, and failed totally to move me from A to B successfully, which wouldn't have been so bad if someone hadn't boarded the train at Hicksville who sat opposite me, announced he was a member of the "tea party"⁷ and spent the trip between there and Merillon Avenue trying to get me to agree that everything he was yelling about was right.

Before this event I was tollerant of the (to me delusional) views of this mostly right wing conservative action group, but now I feel they must be stamped on out.

This man knew everything. Socialized medicine was bad and I was an idiot if I didn't see that (no point pointing out that as I had lived both with and without socialized medicine and he demonstrably had not he was in no position to be lecturing me as to it's utility or workability). Canadians were swarming over the border to use up all the healthcare in America. I asked him to explain to me how that worked, and before he could launch into his set speech (derived from Pa Bush's counter-Clinton election soundbites) I pointed out the obvious absurdity of a people who had perfectly good healthcare paid for out of their taxes crossing a border to use an overpriced healthcare system they'd have to pay for out of pocket. He responded by yowling that he'd never mentioned Canadians and called me a "Liberal".

Presumably he would have started in on Mexicans if I hadn't waved my hands and said firmly that I was done talking with him. He tried several times to re-engage but I repulsed all his advances. I don't mind being called "liberal", but when someone in this country calls anyone "a Liberal" all further discussion is futile as they have put their opponent in a box that contains everything that person personally believes is Wrong With America.

When I meet people like this I like to draw them into discussions of the economy (Obama's Fault for not fixing same, of course) and then point out that the last time my investments made any sort of real money was under Clinton, and that under G.W.B.'s stewardship my savings would have been safer if I had put them in a shoebox under my bed and then set fire to my house. The kicker is that the figures can't be argued with, and it drives conservatives, most of whom are Republican voters, up the wall.

To point out that it only takes a second to smash up a car but it takes hours to fix it again is lost on such people who refuse to accept that the country was mismanaged for years and badly mismanaged for the last six of the Bush administration.

I arrived at work to find a gajillion nagging e-mails from various people wondering why I wasn't answering their previous e-mail. Since I had had a particularly aggressive session with a physical therapist that morning I was in no mood to coddle whiners and dealt with them accordingly. Amongst those e-mails was a demand for a status report on a project it is almost impossible to work on owing to the pressures of other stuff.

Next I was summoned to a meeting that made toothache look interesting. This had the usual effect on my bowels so I ran to the gentlemen's rest room and public trash heap. Some days just entering this room is enough to persuade me never to shake hands again. I raced to a stall, grabbed a paper seat-cover and tugged it to release it from its cardboard dispensing box. It tore in half, the box shifted inside the in-wall metal box container and it dropped out of sight into the depths of the wall cavity with a hollow "bong!". I could see it was going to be a good day.

I didn't get lunch on account of whiners taking up all my time. I did manage to deliver a rush job to a developer, who thanked me by asking about two items I had been specifically told not to discuss with him by my ultraboss. This put me in a hard place since I had already engaged with this developer on the items in question before the ultraboss had decided to intervene, and was also doing other sanctioned stuff the ultraboss had demanded be given Top Priority for him. It was impossible to play dead on the other two issues so I simply replied to everyone in the world with a terse statement that the issues were under review.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this will please no-one and result in a shirtstorm from both sides aimed at my desk, so I have only one course of action tomorrow.

Take another day off.

1920 for those too bone-idle to look it up↑
Which raises the question as to why simple train breakdowns bring the entire shooting match to a standstill time after time. No man knoweth the reason↑
A lie of the most blatant stripe. the Port Washington line was unaffected. On account of it not going anywhere near Jamaica (NTGO⁴)↑
Not The Good One↑
Through the nose↑
Though strength, wisdom, dexterity, intelligence and charisma were unaffected. Ahahahahaha↑
A so-called "grass-roots" movement that sprang up in the aftermath of the Obama election win and which has a few good points to bring up hidden amongst a pile of trash-talk that obscures the real issues under anti-Obama rhetoric so virulent I have to wonder if this country has gone anywhere towards racial acceptance in the last fifty years↑

Laptop Annoyance Rant Number 1

2010-08-04T12:24:00.001-04:00

When I got my new lappy, it had what looked like a crease in the thin plastic veneer that surrounds the screen.

Not a big deal, cosmetic, not noticeable. Last night the corner of the screen applique fell off in my hand. So, a crack, not a crease, then.

I attempted first to use the manufacturers website to initiate the warranty service for this obvious manufacturing defect. Lest you suspect me of throwing the machine around and chipping bits off it, an examination of the case will show even the most suspicious person that this machine has been coddled, carried everywhere in a padded briefcase purpose made for the business of not damaging laptops, and that it hasn't been dropped or had something dropped on it.

I wasn't concerned I could be held culpable.

The website had many links. What it didn't have was a "Warranty Replacement" link, so I attempted to email the problem to them using a link it took only ten minutes to find. The link didn't launch any sort of email client or page, but did pop up a JavaScript-driven window to collect the service tag number, which was duly filled in. However, on clicking "next", nothing happened.

A quick examination showed the dreaded "JavaScript error on page" message in the status bar, so I attempted to re-do it all using FireFox just in case it was an IE flavor of JavaScript issue.

Imagine my joy when a message informing me that the JavaScript "applet" would "only run properly" in IE. More ammunition for my grass-roots web experience improvement movement GROUJN¹ right there then.

So it was off to the tech support chat page, which wanted to download an active X control and we all know that is a path to three hours you never get back, so I bit the bullet and called the phone number listed.

And dealt with the ultra annoying "helpful" recorded messages telling me I could probably fix my problem faster by using the webpage to email or chat it away. And waited. And waited. And got through only to have the call dropped the moment a human being spoke.

So I called again, was annoyed by bots again only to be told there were extended delays due to call volumes. So I gave up.

This morning I went through it all again, with the added frisson that the infuriating phonebot couldn't understand my "rapid response number" and so directed me into a five minute maze of irrelevant Q&A before connecting me to the recorded advice about webpages and emailing again.

And Got through, and was redirected to another recorded voice telling me to reboot the computer and see if that would fix the problem (unlikely, but I was getting to the point it almost made sense to try).

And got through to a "technician" who insisted I run a hidden low-level diagnostic that showed me colored bars and asked me if I could see them, and then made some loud beeps so that everyone would know what I was doing, and finally ran a twelve minute memory test.

I asked, bewildered, why we were going through this. The technician said "Believe me, it's necessary".

The test completed with a query as to whether I wanted to run 35 minutes more of memory tests just as he came back on the line and told me he had spoken to his supervisor and I was to return the computer. I asked again why the tests on the memory and disks had been "necessary", and inquired if it was because they thought I had dropped the computer. The technician said that it wouldn't matter if I had since I had paid for a warranty that was good for damage due to dropping.

So the necessity of the test was to give me something to watch while he did whatever he was doing.

And now I won't have my computer just in time for an event for which I would probably be using the computer more in those three days than in the three months since it was delivered.

This reminds me of the Jeep I once owned; whenever the weather was of the sort that four wheel drive was actually necessary as opposed to merely being extra weight to be lugged around at 12 miles to the gallon, the damned thing was in for repairs.

Get Rid Of Useless² JavaScript Now!↑
I realize putting "useless" and "JavaScript" in the same phrase is redundant↑

Now That's A Pretty Song

2010-07-22T14:37:00.001-04:00

"Daddy's Here" from the album Spiral Staircase by Ralph McTell.

This early McTell album has a number of good tracks on it, but is usually noted for kicking-off with the original, unorchestrated version of "Street of London". His voice isn't as strong as it would later become and falters on a couple of tracks, but that doesn't detract from the genrally high quality of the work.

Nestled in the middle of side two¹ is this little gem about the experience of a young boy and, tangentially, his brother during the evening that an obviously estranged father visits his mother.

Spiral Staircase was the second album I ever bought and was replaced with a CD fairly late in my collection, so there was a period of redescovery undergone with the aid of headphones and portable players of various types² and not a hearing goes by that I don't find something new in the recording, possibly due to the remastering process.

Either way, "Daddy's Home" has been a favorite of mine for 38 years.

Ask your grandfather about "sides"↑
I recently switched this album into my iPod↑

Happy Birthday To Me etc etc etc

2010-07-22T14:32:00.001-04:00

Another ring around the trunk.

Woke with a ferocious pain in my lower right leg, so I lay there screaming until the muscle pulled, then was visited by The Stevieling bearing a very clever card she'd made for me themed around my fanatical love for the game The Call of Cthulhu¹ which included four suitably robed paper-doll cultists for me to array on my wall, one of whom seems to be carrying a staff bearing a likeness of Cthulhu's head. Cthulhu seems to share many of my facial characteristics in this rendering, a message I'm still trying to decode.

And so to work.

Look it up, dammit!↑

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

2010-07-13T21:25:00.001-04:00

Nothing much changes no matter what I do to change things.

Case in point: Back in April I decided to equip everyone with their own laptop because I was getting pretty tired of trying to use our communal tower unit. A typical attempt would involve me signing on perhaps to print a couple of pages of some document, only to be confronted by some situation that would involve me sitting in a tiny room with the computer in pieces while I attempted to put right whatever had happened during the last person's session. The least annoying thing that would happen would be that I'd sit for five minutes listening to the disk clicking while - I presume - gigabytes of cached yootoob video were thrown away. The worst could involve a registry error of some kind.

It was always after one of the women had used the damn thing too. I never had it throw a wobbly after I'd used it once, then used it a second time with no female-themed uptime squeezed in between. Amazingly, whenever I asked "what did you do with this last time you used it?" I would get back one of two answers: a) "Nothing" or 2) "I don't know".

Now call me pedantic, but if you either have nothing to do on a computer or you don't know what you want to do with it, switching it on is not job one on your list of Things To Do that day.

Of course these answers were synonyms for "I can't be bothered to remember what I did because even if I remember word for word the big warning message that popped up before I impatiently stabbed the 'off' switch you'll only get mad and what's the point of that?"

So I finally wised-up and got everyone their own computer on the theory that the kid could virus herself to Chechnya and back without taking me out of the water and the missus could do whatever it is she does to zap the bloody thing into brickdom without impacting my ability to write my world-shattering blog posts. They would be happy as they could brick their own systems in peace. Win-win-win.

So on Saturday I wanted to print something. I haven't been able (trans: can't be bothered to spend hours trying) to get network access to the printer attached to the tower unit, so I just unplugged the printer and attached it to my laptop. I only needed 6 pages.

I got five before the printer ran out of paper.

Now this is something that makes me mad as hell. Whenever I need to use that bleeping printer, there is always and I mean always some problem left for me by the bloody women of the house. Usually just not enough paper, as in this case, but often some stupid coloured paper left over from some greeting card production epic and not replaced afterward with normal paper. I've had documents printed in blue ink on blue paper, images rendered on virulent pink paper and in one memorable bleep-up a word document printed on 3x5 glossy photo paper all because the bloody women can't be arsed to put things back the way they were when they're done making girly-stuff.

This time things were made worse by the fact that I was in a hurry and they'd used up all he damn paper in the house, not a sheet to be had for luvner money, which made the printer sit there beeping at me like it was my fault instead of printing the last page so I could leave the house.

I finally found a single sheet that they had somehow neglected to wrinkle, toss out or cover in felt-pen drawings and was able to complete this Agrosean Struggle in a World Gone Mad.

Why is it that when I use the last sheet I load a fistful of paper even if I only need a couple of sheets, but that everyone else can’t give me the same courtesy? As I pointed out with some heat at the time, I have to put up with that sort of horseshirt at work because I work with bone-idle bleep-holes who were it not for certain nanny-state laws would get a slap round the head with a toner cartridge as a performance-art demonstration of my dissatisfaction with their lack of respect for their co-workers¹. I see no reason whatsoever to put up with it at home.

That night, Mrs Stevie used the tower unit to retrieve and print (she'd bought more paper by then I guess) a Google Map for her mother.

The next day, Sunday, I got up and, thinking to use the tower myself, powered it up and went out to put the kettle on. When I thought to look in at the wretched thing I saw the light blue screen of disk problems, which was busy scrolling up a gargantuan list of unreadable sectors on its "D" drive. The entire disk turned out to be unreadable, suggesting that something pretty horrible had gone down in the last session.

I knew it was pointless, but ritual demanded I ask Mrs Stevie what she'd seen while doing the Google Maps thing when she returned from religious indoctrination. The answer was, of course "nothing". She then asked me where the pictures she'd transferred from her digital camera were kept on that computer.

"The D drive" I told her. "I have everything up to just before last Christmas on another drive. Everything else is toast."

The irony here is that I bought Mrs Stevie a digital picture frame at Christmas and an SD card to store the pictures it would display in a continuous slide show. Had she done as I suggested and moved a few pictures each week to the card she likely wouldn't have lost anything at all. But she didn't, so I'm now looking to see if I can read the disk by booting he tower as a Linux machine since XP won't touch it.

I doubt it'll work.

A piquant protest indeed. Toner now requires a personal note to the office manager to obtain. Someone on the night shift (a group of no more than about thirty people that comprises some of the most lazy gits on the face of the planet) decided that this was too much bother and simply removed the toner cartridge from one of my team’s laserjets. Didn’t even leave the empty one, which complicated matters even further. I finally managed to get a replacement after three weeks, but made out a big sign “NO TONER” and stuck it on the printer. This subterfuge wouldn’t fool anyone but the brain-dead thieving idiots on the night shift, of course, but it has worked so far. Of course, someone on my team didn’t have a clue and so loudly cried out to the world that the printer did have toner – apparently he thought I’d forgotten loading the cartridge some thirty seconds before – but fortunately none of the night shift were on hand to hear him and the rest of us punched him until he figured it out↑

Now That's A Pretty Song

2010-06-21T23:11:00.002-04:00

How Can I? from the 1977 Steve Hackett album Please Don't Touch. Found on a pre-recorded cassette tape I got in a remainder bin in Woolworth's in The Precinct, Coventry sometime around 1980 and probably never listened to in all honesty, and had sat in my basement through I don't know how many floods.

It took me a very long time to figure out that one phrase had been "borrowed" from Across the Universe, and that Richie Havens was doing the vocals.

The Loathing And The Even More Loathing On The LIRR

2010-05-19T21:25:00.008-04:00

The good thing about finally having a laptop to use is that I can drool this dribble "on the go¹".

That includes time spent "commuting" on the bloody Long Island Rail Road, who often demonstrate to the world that they couldn't find their rear ends with both hands and a map.

Take this morning for instance.

The day got off to a crummy start when I woke up to the shrilling of my alarm feeling like I hadn't had any sleep at all. I staggered round the house, stark naked, clutching a towel in my twitching, sleep-deprived hand and bumping into things until a shriek of rage indicated I had bumped into Mrs Stevie, who was taking her early morning nap.

Staunching a number of small wounds with the towel I made my way to the shower, where I realized that the dripping tap now resembled an ornamental wall fountain and Something Would Have To Be Done.

All this staggering, bumping, wounding and showering made me slightly late, but that didn't matter as a profusion of total nitwits on the road made me quite late indeed. Each traffic light took two changes to get through because of SUV drivers too afraid of their own shadow to actually drive when the light turned green until someone else had gone first to prove terrorists hadn't somehow subverted the very tarmac, and since each lane was filled with the ugly gas-sucking things no-one went anywhere until the yellow light showed, spurring a panicked dash for freedom.

The bigger the car, the smaller the brain.

I finally boarded my standby, get-me-there-on-time train and settled in as the announcer announced a twenty minute delay west of Jamaica² into Penn Station, which translated into "trains backed up in the Jamaica station throat because we don't have anywhere to put them". Magic.

That meant that just about the time I should have been boarding my Brooklyn-bound train I was able to watch it cruise into the station while I was still several hundred yards out of Jamaica. And of course, they couldn't hold the Brooklyn train because that would cause congestion.

We pulled in slightly after the following train to Brooklyn, the one that comes ten minutes after mine and stops everywhere so it always carries me 15 minutes into the part of my time card that will, due to the vagaries of the bloody Long Island Rail Road and their idiot schedules, get me home again a full 90 minutes after my usual Azathoth-awful arrival time, typically sometime around 9pm - too late to get anything useful done but eat and get indigestion in time for bedtime.

For our convenience it was brought in not on the adjacent track so all we would have to do was cross the platform, but on the next platform which required us to sprint to a staircase, vaulting over the slower fellow commuters, run up the stairs gasping for breath, dash across the bridge and down the stairs and try and find a door not clogged with standing would-be passengers. For our further convenience this train was a couple of cars short, so it was full to overflowing. But wait! For our absolute convenience the train was held so a few more trains full of people could attempt to transfer onto it from the apparently doomed Penn Station bound trains.

Yes, once again we were being treated to a "tunnel signal problem" fiasco, a staple of the Long Island Rail Road commute.

The problem, they say, is that of the four tunnels under the East River that connect Long Island to Manhattan, only two are signaled in both directions. One of those is permanently in use by Amtrack, who own Penn Station or the tracks into it or something. I lost track of the fine details of this particular needless idiocy years ago.

So, during normal operations the bloody Long Island Rail Road uses two tunnels in the "peak" traffic flow direction and one in the opposite, "off-peak" direction. Should one of these tunnels be rendered unusable due to, say, oooooh a signal problem or something, there is an obvious problem in that using the two remaining tunnels for peak direction traffic is only possible if the problem isn't in the one tunnel that has signals in both directions.

Edit: Which shows how annoyed I was. It of course doesn't matter which tunnel gets knocked out as the bloody Long Island Rail Road dispatchers aka the IQ Brigade will continue to run Off-Peak trains and so any failure will reduce the Peak traffic under the East River by 50%. Were the IQ Brigade to consider not running Off-Peak trains for the duration of the emergency, there would "only" be a 66% chance of a Peak service impact.

That's right, of those three tunnels, traffic can only move safely in both directions through one of them, because in the other two the signals only work in one direction, one into and one out of Manhattan.

Brilliant, eh?

"But Stevie" I hear you ask, "Surely this ancient, steam-era situation has been remedied by now?"

Well, you'd think so wouldn't you? To my certain knowledge the problem has been discussed as a "must get done" item for twenty five, going on twenty six years, because I've been riding the bloody Long Island Rail Road that long. That’s right, the bloody Long Island Rail Road can't get a relatively simple signal installation done in twenty five bleeping years.

"But Stevie" you say, "if the track belongs to Amtrack how can they?"

Well, since the bloody Long Island Rail Road is part of MTA which in turn is part of the city government which in turn is part of the State government, and Amtrack is, via an equally twisty chain of connections, part of the Federal government, both are paid for by Taxpayers and so there should be some way of getting a simple wiring job done. I mean, there are infrastructure Stimulus Dollars to be had that would pay for it.

But in time honored fashion the bloody Long Island Rail Road talks the talk and leaves it up to their passengers to walk the walk (due to cancelled trains).

So I got to work just in time, by hustling. Of course, my colleagues were discomfited by my staggering around the office, throat roaring as I drew in volumes of life-giving air, my face bright red and by my pleas to be euthanized immediately.

So much for the ride in.

The ride back looked to be much better as I sat typing this TOS entry, until the bloke next to me showed me the screen of his Blackberry with an e-mailed alert that "due to a track condition outside Westbury Station, our train was being taken out of service in Jamaica. We discussed the matter for a bit, noting that the crew hadn't alerted us yet and we were very close to Jamaica.

Then we realized that this was the bloody Long Island Rail Road and the crew was probably just trying to avoid unpleasant reactions from the commuters. This turned out to be the case, and as we pulled up to the platform the bleeping useless bastards told use what we had already known for about five minutes.

bleepers.

To understand why the crew were so scared and why everyone was so pissed-off you have to know that there are exactly two trains that leave Brooklyn (which used to be called Flatbush Avenue but since the Granite-Lined new station was opened they re-titled Atlantic Terminal, requiring changes to every automated ticket machine in the system not to mention all the relevant printed schedules and how much did that cost I digress) that do not require the passengers get off at Jamaica and try to get on another at Penn Station are the almost useless 4:34pm and the very useful and popular 6:04pm. We used to have a useful and popular 5:01pm instead of the idiot 4:34pm that is too early for anyone to use, but some bloody Long Island Rail Road wuckfit decided it should run out of Penn. I've actually caught it. It ran almost empty the entire journey that day, but I'm sure that was an atypical day. Riiiiight.

Anyway.

If you take a train that means you have to change at Jamaica, you will almost certainly be catching a rush-hour train out of Penn Station that left already jam-packed full of commuters. When forced into that sort of commute I always ride the subway to Penn and board there because, Mr clueless bloody Long Island Rail Road dispatcher, I can get a bleeping seat that way. I once had to wait almost two hours on a frozen Jamaica platform becuase the system was so thoroughly bleeped to Port Jefferson and back that fewer traiins were running and there wasn't any room on any train that came through.

Well, track problems, congested systems, it's understandable that they'd have to reduce the traffic, but it's rather less obvious why it should be the 6:04pm out of ~~Flatbush Avenue~~ Atlantic Terminal every time this needs to be done, and it isn't at all obvious why, as we stood crammed face to face on the 6:22pm out of Penn why there were so many off-peak trains clogging up the same congested rail system we had to change trains to open up.

My theory is that given that the Ronkonkoma line was the last electrified, and since the computer dispatching system was up and running years before that, the Ronkonkoma schedules haven't been properly integrated into the system and it is just easier to delete trains from that schedule than to try and deal with the problems intelligently. This would also explain, mostly, why numerous times a year the 6:04pm peak train sits at the west end of the Pinelawn-Deer Park single track chicane for ten minutes so an off-peak train can get past us. Call me Phalthobart Malthusian Befubbleblatt but that doesn't sound like anyone with an active brain cell is at the dispatching desk. Can you imagine if the UP ran their line that way? Perishable fruit would sit rotting while a load of coal sauntered the afternoon away with priority routing.

I've often said that the bloody Long Island Rail Road couldn't find the cheeks of their own arse with both hands and a map and that they couldn't get me drunk in a brewery, but today they proved they couldn't get me laid in a cat house.

And indeed, on the job↑
Not the good one↑

The Great Deer Park Chainsaw Death Fiasco Debacle

2010-05-18T22:34:00.002-04:00

I almost killed my chainsaw three weeks ago, though to be fair it tried to kill me back.

Mrs Stevie¹ had expressed a desire to have the enormous Arbor Vitae bushtree growing between the King Crimson Maple we planted in the corner of the property and the struggling-back-to-life stump of the Intolerable Berry Menace - already subjected to chainsaw justice two years running - pruned tootsweet, so I dug out the 20-inch Poulan Pro and went at it.

I'd done most of the cutting, and turned the bushtree into a sort of vertical green poodle, it being several feet taller than me, when the chainsaw let out an almighty bang and tried to leap out of my hands.

Regular reader² of this blog will know that I'm long accustomed to power tools attempting wily bids for freedom, so it didn't manage to free itself from my vise-like manly grip.

Which was a pity really, I realized when I came to think about it later, because a spinning chainsaw blade has a lot of energy that has to go somewhere in the event the engine comes to an abrupt stop, and that was why the blade - which had decided to make an independent bid for freedom and jumped off the guide bar in anticipation of getting a head start while I chased the saw around the garden but had hung up on the drive cog - swished around in impressive, razor sharp circles, threatening now my crotch, now my face.

Mindful of the hazard posed to others in the vicinity I warned them of the danger by emitting a series of loud, falsetto shrieks as I desperately dodged the whirling blade of unpleasant and embarrasing cuts should it score a palpable hit. It was all very trying.

Eventually the blade was done with its anti-handyman jiggery-pokery and I kicked aside the sawn-off bits of bushtree and sat on the lawn to assess the damage.

I thought at first that maybe the chain had broken, but it seemed whole, though hopelessly tangled. It took me several minutes to puzzle out the series of events that it had gone through to achieve the knotted mess it had become, and restore the more usual circular arrangement.

Next I figured I'd check out the cog, but first I should remount the chain on the chainbar. This required me to get covered in oil and gasoline, not sure why, but the saw was feeling mischevious that day as events had so ably demonstrated. I was checking the gas levels as a possible reason for the motor stalling and the saw rolled over in my lap and gave me a refreshing dousing in unleaded gasoline. The oil was from just touching the saw's guide bar, which was about as oily as the Gulf of Texas right now.

Since I was already covered in odiforous flammables I decided to check the oil levels as a possible reason for the failure. The chain needs constant oiling otherwise it overheats and might seize in the guide or break or expand so much it jumps out of the guide. This sort of failure is usually signified with lots of blue smoke from the workpiece³ but the branches I'd been cutting were thin so maybe they didn't get time to overheat. No, there was plenty of oil.

I then decided to remount the chain on the guide bar. The chainsaw blade has sharp, hook-shaped, horizontal teeth on the cutting side, forming a never-ending chain of miniature planes that shave the wood away, and vertical teeth remeniscent of those on the backs of T34 tank tracks⁴, which engage in the drive cog and in a slot in the guide bar, which keeps everything pointing the right way⁵. When the engine is turning, a centrifugal clutch, formed from whirling pivoted weights in a bell-shaped housing which is attached to the cog, allow the drive to slip and the chain is motionless. Rev the engine by pulling on the trigger in the handle and the engine speeds up and the weights fly outward and catch on the bell housing causing it to spin and drive the cog which in turn makes the chain move. Where was I?

Oh yes. Well I checked the guide bar for damage and, finding none I could see, attempted to get all those vertical teeth back in the slot in the guide bar, but they wouldn't go. It turned out that some of them had suffered damage that knocked up spurs of metal on them, widening them quite a bit. Well, that was that then, a new chain would have to be bought . I surmised that he damage occurred at the drive cog.

I didn't have time to find out though because at that point I accidentally let the little finger of my left hand brush up lovingly against the engine's muffler, still very hot after all the sawing, and as a result spent some time explaining how very unpleasant that was to the neighbors, then even more time attempting to stave off the inevitable agony with ice cubes and cold water.

Why I do this I don't know since it never works. As soon as the cold is removed, typically because I've run out of ice, the pain reasserts itself, building to a crescendo that, once passed, dies down to something only moderately intolerable.

Overcome by ennui and agony I refused to work any more that day.

A week later I managed to track down a new chain and reengaged the saw in single combat for mastery in a World Gone Mad.

First I stripped the chain guide off the saw completely and checked that the motor would in fact start. The "clonk" it had emitted had sounded like a piston breaking, and this motor only has the one. It started with only eight to ten minutes of pulling on the starting cord and yelling the Magic Start Words, which not only removed one item off the "possibly busted up good" list but removed the gaggle of jeering neighbors and their children from the vicinity too. Bonus.

I checked out the drive cog for damage while I was at it. There were some marks on the teeth, but the wear seemed even, such as might be suffered during normal wear and tear rather than a ding caused by the chain attempting a break for it.

The new chain came out of its packaging tangled, so once again I was obliged to become a master of improvised topology before I could start the Main Attraction - fitting the chain to the guide.

First I ran a few of the teeth along the guide bar to check that the slot really was undamaged and clean out some of the gunk a year and a bit of sawing had left in it - a lotion made of pulverised tree in chain oil is what it was. Then came the fitting together of all the bits.

The correct proceedure is:

Hook the chain over the sprocket, allowing a couple of tangles to form in the chain
Untangle chain, cutting exposed skin on teeth of chain
Fit bar on bolt-and-peg seating. Tangle chain again.
Untangle chain and hold in one hand, while keeping guide bar aligned with other hand.
With other other hand fit combination cover/guide lock/guide extender and attempt to locate the extender wheel indexing pin in the matching hole in the guide bar
Fail spectacularly
Turn saw over in an ultimately futile attempt to see the pin and the hole in order to match them up, spilling the chain in a tangled heap into your lap
Untangle Chain
Repeat from step 1 until utterly overcome with the desire for death
By dismantling the saw and adjusting the bar extender to wind the indexing pin as far back as possible, figure out the position at which the guide bar will properly engage the index pin
Untangle the chain again
Reassemble the saw, guide bar, chain and cover, finally engaging the hole in the guide bar on the adjustment pin
Untangle chain
Gradually lengthen the guide bar by turning the thumbscrew downward
Or was that upward?
Before the guide bar gets too long, hook the chain over the length of it
The end, the bit with the cog inside, is tricky so mind you don't...
The band-aids are in the bathroom
Well, you should have bought some more last week while you were in the pharmacy!
Once the bleeding stops, refit the chain and wind out the guide bar using the thumbwheel until about an 8th of an inch gap shows between the chain and the bottom of the bar when you lift the end
Tighten the cover and you're good to go

I grabbed the chain and ran it back and forth to confirm that it was moving through the sprocket without binding, and declared it good to go, though I haven't actually tried to cut wood with it yet. By the time I was done reassembling the wretched thing I couldn't bear to have it near me any more.

Two weeks later the burn is healing nicely. The inch-long blister has burst, the old skin has sloughed off and I can finally bend the finger again.

So the time is ripe for a rematch with Mr Bushtree.

So many of my life's more exciting moments start with that harridan's "suggestions"↑
singular↑
One of my old chainsaws had had it's automatic oiler fail. That's how I know this↑
Don't know what that looks like? Look it up! I recommend Squadron Publications' T34 in Action. Squadron is based in Texas somewhere I think. Good luck↑
Normally↑

An I-Con Of Science Fiction

2010-05-10T17:21:00.010-04:00

I-Con was a blast.

I-Con is a convention run at the Stonybrook campus of SUNY¹ for fans of Animé, SF & Fantasy. The VIPs run tha gamut from the movers and shakers in the comic industry to the actors in the most popular SF films and shows of the time such as Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, Star Trek Lord of the Rings and so on, and authors. In past years they had real astronauts and cosmonauts, but these days it is rare to find a real spaceman at this convention. I doubt any of the attendees would recognize them anyway.

At first, Mrs Stevie would attend every other I-Con to coincide with the attendance of Harlan Ellison. After the Stevieling was old enough to attend (11 months) we started going every year. As time went on the con got bigger and started to take over more and more of the Stonybrook campus.

In the early years of our attendance, it all packed into one building, the Javits lecture theater complex, a neat octagonal building with lecture theaters opening off corridors arranged in a cross form, the hub of the cross being a small plenum/atrium for lounging about in. Authors and media guests would be sitting at tables in the plenum or at the ends of the corridors and you were never more than a hundred feet from whatever event you next wanted to attend. It was in the Javits building that I met C.J. Cherryh², Michael Dorn³ and Walter Schirra⁴ to name just three.

A big part of the SF con scene is the so-called "dealer's room" in which people can buy badges, props and clothing of an appropriate theme, which in the Javits era of I-Con was a terrifying thing to visit. You'd be shuffled at about a half a mile per hour past the various dealer tables by the force of everyone else packing shoulder-to-shoulder in the tiny room⁵.

You'd have to make two circuits too: one to select what you wanted to purchase and a second to transact the sale. Azathoth help the person trying to use a credit card. That would mean a third trip and the fervent hope the dealer hadn't given your card to someone else by mistake as you raced from the exit back to the entrance. Good times.

These days the dealer room is housed in a huge sports complex. Media guests also have a speaking stage in there. I have a picture of The Stevieling with George Takei⁶ taken in that place, and another of her with Billy Boyd⁷. In bygone years Mrs Stevie has run into Majel Barret⁸ and John De Lancie⁹ walking around that dealer room.

There are tables set up in that room for media guests to sign autographs. There's also a table in there somewhere (it never seems to make it to the key on the map) which is used by authors for signings. One of my fondest memories is of Ben Bova¹⁰ being dragged across the campus by the very young Stevieling. He had given a reading, then announced he was signing in the ISC¹¹ but had no idea where it was. "I can show you" piped up The Stevieling and promptly did so with extreme prejudice.

Dr Bova is very generous when it comes to tolerating eager youth.

More and more, video games and Animé have taken the prominent role and the old-fashioned type-on-paper SF and Fantasy has been marginalized. I guess it's a sign of the times. Last year, Jack McDevitt¹² had to cancel his guest appearance at short notice on account of the lousy weather (would that I had had as much sense) and such was the paucity of recognizable names ¹³ the con was effectively a waste of time for me that year.

Lest you are an I-Con attendee¹⁴ and think I am subscribing to the view that the con was doomed by having to temporarily relocate to Brentwood as the consensus seems to be amongst I-Conites, Brentwood had many advantages from my perspective over Stonybrook and I cut the organizers a lot of slack for having to work with an unfamiliar infrastructure. I've been there and done that. I was rather hoping for a second year at Brentwood in fact.

I was rather more scathing on certain other factors, chief of which is the ludicrously time-wasting method they choose every year to give people the tickets they bought and paid for months in advance, and which I hold to be extremely poor return for the faith shown by those advance purchasers in the con and their support with much-needed funding ahead of the event itself¹⁵

The I-Con staffers have stopped sneering "Well, if you can suggest a better method..." at me because I can. And I do.

Less than 9999 people attend I-Con in any given year. Allocate each ticket sold a five digit number. Mail out the tickets (which are also the badges you must wear to prove you belong in the con when challenged) with a missing component. The tickets are usually a piece of thin printed card with a small, square holographic label stuck in one corner. Have the labels held by the people at the desks, each of whom has a clipboard with the alphabetized list of names of people who have pre-bought tickets along with the matching allocated number assigned to their ticket, which could be hand-stamped on a generic pre-printed badge using the same sort of indexing stamp used when numbering banknotes during the quality control phase of production, or could be printed at the same time the ticket is. It could even be written on by hand, like the name usually is.

So to recap: you pay up front, months before the con. Sometime between then you receive through the mail you ticket bearing your name, your registration number but no little holographic sticker (the actual difficult-to-forge part of the credential). At pick-up time you get on line with about a thousand other people in freezing, wet weather, but the line moves really quickly because (and this is the clever bit) anyone can be checked in at any of the tables, since the people sitting behind each table are each capable of validating your badge against the lo-tek master list, unpeel a sticky hologram label from his or her own reel of same, and sick it on the ticket/badge, thus completing the check-in process.

It would also free up the four-to-six guys they need to marshal people into the small area they usually set aside for this "badging" to do real work.

With this scheme everyone is happy. I am because the line moves at a reasonable speed instead of clogging because there are, once again, against all reasonable expectation, fifty times as many people crowding into the L-S line and blocking anyone from getting to the empty A-E table. I-Con organizers are because fraud is guarded against effectively¹⁶. Even the people manning the tables are because no-one is snarling at them about terminal bleeping stupidity year after year and them not being able to get me laid in a cat house or drunk in a brewery.

Where was I?

Well this year I-Con returned to Stonybrook and not only did Jack McDevitt agree to try again at being an author guest, but Samuel R. Delany¹⁷ was to attend on the Saturday, participate in panels, do a signing session and read one of his stories!

Samuel R. Delany wasn't the first SF author I ever read, but he is the one that is first in the old brain when people ask me who was. I can clearly remember pulling a copy of The Einstein Intersection, a Gollancz publication in their characteristic bright yellow dust covers, from the shelf in the library of St John Backsides. Within about a half hour I was rubbing my eyes and saying to myself "You can do that with SF?"

The Friday badge pick-up was the usual cluster-bleep and took more than two hours. It was made particularly hellish this year by Mrs Stevie deciding that since she has a brand new shuttlecraft¹⁸ she should offer to ferry every one of the Stevieling's peers who wanted to go to Stonybrook, so I was riddled with cooties before I even got there. Then two of the young ladies had to buy tickets at the door, which took even longer to achieve than trying to liberate an already bought one. Then I got into a stand-up, knock-down argument with security on the entrance to the dealer's room, the only thing worth visiting by the time we had cleared immigration, that ended with me being ejected over a bottle of water

A goon attempted to grab my water bottle from my bag so he could toss it. I explained I would rather he didn't and it would have ended there with me returning to the vehicle and stashing the aqueous threat to Democracy but a uniformed campus cop, all of about 25 years old and full of himself in front of the giggling 18 year old girls filling the place by then, decided that I was arguing and didn't understand that the security staff had orders. I eventually got so tired of being lectured by this little sheep-pimp I told him to bleep himself and left. He fired a witty "enjoy your ride home" at me, so it became a matter of honor to bleep with him.

I had to give Raven his revolving jewelry display case of extreme inconvenience, Raven was in the dealer room, I would enter the room and drop off the case despite Officer Wannabe.

I simply dropped off the offending water and grabbed the case, which was packaged in a box that originally contained an air conditioner and was a lightweight luggage trolley, and talked my way in through the vendor-only entrance. I spent so much time chin-wagging with the people I knew from all the years I've been attending that I cooled off and jettisoned my plan to stroll out and greet the Idiot In Uniform as I walked out of the exit. I knew I had won.

Word to the wise to any goons-in-training: I get that I can't bring drink into a place where that same stuff is being sold, and will certainly comply with that policy. All you have to do is say "You can't bring that in" and we are jake. If you grab for anything without so much as a by-your-leave, we are on the outs - and I have an attack paralegal on permanent retainer. We now return to the scheduled program in progress.

Saturday dawned, and I grabbed two boxes, one filled with my entire collection of Samuel R Delany books (around 14 paperbacks) and the other with everything I had by McDevitt except the two books I bought the first time he had been at I-Con, about five years before (he and Ben Bova were the SF author draw that year)¹⁹, about 17 paperbacks (McDevitt was a lucky find for me and I'll buy anything he writes these days). I was in for a treat. But first we had to pick up the gaggle of young women that "we" had agreed to transport.

I once read a story in which the POV character spends the entire thing in a traffic jam with a heroin addict, who is going into noisy, painful withdrawal. It turns out at the end that the POV character is dead and in hell. After I-Con weekend I now envisage hell as being on the road in a Honda Odyssey with Mrs Stevie and five screaming teenaged girls blithering on about Azathoth-knows what. The level of noise would gradually climb to a crescendo, at which point Mrs Stevie would press the reset button by yelling "Keep it down!" and it would start all over again.

I was climbing the walls by the time we reached the Stonybrook campus, a thirty-five minute drive that Mrs Stevie can manage in about eighteen since she has no sense of smell and the stench of burning tire rubber doesn't bother her at all, and she fears nothing under the sun, including the Sheriff's Dept who now police the Long Island Expressway instead of the Suffolk County Police due to budget crunches. I digress.

As we were entering the car park, one of the young darlings in the back of the van cried out "I've forgotten my ticket! We have to go back!"

To understand the effect of this announcement you have to understand the parking realities of I-Con. We like to put our vehicle behind the sports complex so the walk to it during the con isn't an epic trek. Throughout the day the vehicle will get visited by me so I can drop off books & collect other stuff, and Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling (and, this year, the entire cast of "Hell on Wheels" - a Story of Teen Angst²⁰") attend in costume²¹ and sometimes need to swap out attire as the day drags on. Parking space in this car park is at a premium and you have to be there 30 minutes before the con opens just to find a spot.

Mrs Stevie first ascertained that this wasn't amusing improvisational Théatre-de-Van, then the screaming started.

I maintained an amused distance, knowing a) that Mrs Stevie had brought this down on herself by volunteering to transport lackabrain teenaged girls, and 2) I wasn't driving so I wouldn't have to go home at all. I could grab my gear and I was good to go.

Not only that, Mrs Stevie had only herself to blame. At every stop to pick up a teenager, Mrs Stevie had gone through a lengthy "Have you got your ticket? Show me!" routine, but had been so eager to depart by the fifth one that she had forgone her ticket check. I remember thinking at the time it was a bit foolish and she really should check all the girls had their ticket, and that in her place that's what I would do. But I had no desire to get on her bad side by interfering so I kept mum and assumed she knew what she was doing.

What then ensued is best viewed from a distance of about three miles through heavily smoked glass from within a half-buried concrete bunker. Mrs Stevie had a full-blown conniption fit.

It would have been interesting to watch under other circumstances since I've only ever seen these from the viewpoint of the target and have often wondered in the short moments of lucidity that come between cranial impacts what they look like from the outside.

Unfortunately I was too busy screaming about the parked cars we were about to crash into and clawing at my seat belt in a futile attempt to escape the hurtling Pilotless Ballistic Van of Certain Death in which I had been unwittingly trapped to pay attention to anything else.

Fortunately the other occupants of the van managed to draw her attention back to controlling the vehicle, by means of a group pantomime involving madly waving hands, informational facial expressions and in one case improvisational urination. It was all very trying.

We parked the van and Mrs Stevie explained that we would not be returning home, suggesting an alternative plan in which the young woman bought a second ticket, the price of which would be refunded on presentation of both tickets at the ticket booth on Sunday morning. There was a deathly silence, followed by general agreement that this was a good plan, and then I ponied up a sawbuck so the kid wouldn't be broke all day as a result of her incompetence and off we went, Mrs Stevie to breakfast followed by Ren Fayre goings-on, me to change my pee-soaked underwear and then to the first author panel of the day and the kids to get a new ticket and then wherever their little hearts took them, clad as they were in incomprehensible Japanese character drag.

Indeed, a little later in the day The Stevieling begged us to allow her to spend a fortune on a rather daft wet-look overcoat that was supposed to be worn in some Japanese cartoon show. The coat featured an oversize zipper with teeth the size of my little finger's last joint, and since the zipper didn't open fully the coat had to be stepped in and out of like a shiny hula-hoop with sleeves. Ridiculous.

All the kids were wearing them too. I shrugged and said "It's your money" which made the daft-mac lady and The Stevieling very happy and Mrs Stevie very unhappy, but hampered by her Ren Fayre finery she couldn't move fast enough to reinforce her side of the argument so that was that. I escaped to the building where the afternoon panels were to be held, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first panel was on the subject of whether someone should start their SF/Fantasy writing career by writing short stories for magazine publication or go straight for the novel. The answers to this question see-sawed back and forth as the panelists, all published authors, some with decades of experience in selling their work, gave their take. Most seemed to feel that you should write what you intend to end up writing - if you are a budding novelist, write novels, if you prefer the short form, write in it. The surprise was Carol Emshwiller, an author of longstanding reputation, who felt that it didn't matter, and went on to illustrate how she had broken every one of the "rules" the others had sagely concurred were in effect during the creative process and marketing of the results afterwards.

After the panel was over, I used the time to ask Samuel R. Delany if my 14 books would be too many for him to sign at one go (some authors have policies on what and how many they sign) and he graciously said no, no problem at all, then asked his helper where he was due to be next and was told he was scheduled to do a reading. He looked alarmed and said that he hadn't been made aware of this and that he had nothing to read. I said that I had everything the con attendees would know of his work in the box I was carrying, and that I would be honored if he were to pick something from that and read for us.

And that's what happened.

Unfortunately, when he opened the volume he picked, I don't think he realized how old the paperback was and he broke the spine of my early 80s vintage "Driftglass"²². Now I look after my paperbacks, and most of mine do not have broken spines as a result. It would be fair to say that if you break the spine of one of my books, I'm not your friend any more until the heat-death of the universe. But somehow, although I heard the "Crack!" and knew immediately what had happened, I didn't mind at all. It was worth it to hear the Grand Master read Aye, and Gomorrah, my favourite Delany short story. Afterwards, during the signing session, he was gracious enough to add "I-Con 29" to each signature so in years to come they would act as reminders of the day.

Authors are often surprised that I ask them to add this, and wonder why I don't want t he date. My answer is that since I have no plans to sell the books (said books are usually from my collection and may be upwards of twenty five years old) that knowing where they were signed is more important and anyway, if anyone wants the date, all it takes is a bit of research.

That said, I used my time on the Delany signing line to buy the new reprint of The Jewel Hinged Jaw, Delany's critique of SF, possibly one of the most sought-after analytical books on the subject and long, long out of print²³. It was a good day for Science Fiction.

I followed Delany and McDevitt around to their various panels (both are very interesting speakers) but missed the Delany-biopic "Polymath" because McDevit was signing at the same time and I was eager to get the autographs over and done with so I could return the books to the car. I bought a copy of McDevitt's Time Travelers Never Die while on line, so it turned out to be eighteen books I was handing to him. He was surprised to learn that I had acquired (and read) all the books since his last visit to I-Con, and we chatted about his upcoming fiction while he wrote a book's worth of signatures for me. I reckon I gave everyone writer's cramp that day.

Incidentally, I recommended the McDevitt book Polaris so often that Mrs Stevie demanded to be shown said book when we got home (as this was my first McDevitt book, bought at the other I-Con and signed then, it wasn't in the box) and has since devoured half a dozen McDevitt works and wants to read the others. You really should give Polaris a look.

Seeing as I was already in the dealer's room (the author signing table being in the back of it) I did some T-shirt shopping before returning to the Van of Death to drop everything off. I picked up a couple of T-shirts and a rather neat golf shirt with a really subtle Cthulhu logo on the pocket. S'my fave shirt now.

Saturday evening rolled around and the guests all made off to attend the traditional con banquet, which I'm told now features decent food in sufficient quantities for all. Past fiasco has made it a non-starter for Mrs Stevie and me though. We gathered the girls and departed for a diner, then returned them all home, getting back to Chateau Stevie around 9:30 pm or so, and falling into bed exhausted.

The next day was a much lighter program. I attended more panels, readings and whatnot, Mrs Stevie hobnobbed with Celtic bards, the kids went and got their refund on the ticket and then disappeared into the con for whatever they were going to do. For the first time in years I reached the end of the con before I was really aware it was all over. I swung by one of the filk singing events, but before I could get settled in it was over. I would have bought one of the singer's CDs, but the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the building. I spent the last half hour reading The Jewel Hinged Jaw in which Delany was developing the idea that form and content cannot be seperated, and then Mrs Stevie arrived in theater and I was told we were leaving.

It was much more fun than last year.

State University of New York↑
Author of Downbelow Station, Cyteen and the Foreigner series. Buy them. Read them.↑
Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation↑
Real Spaceman, not an actor↑
Actually, there were two of them↑
Mr Sulu↑
Peregrine Took↑
Mrs Gene Roddenberry aka Lwaxana Troi↑
"Q" of Star Trek:The Next Generation↑
"Hard" SF author of Mars, Venus and other books with slightly predictable names. Buy Mars and read it↑
something-beginning-with-I Sports Center aka dealer room during I-Con↑
Author of Polaris, an SF "locked-room" mystery that takes the Marie Celeste story and runs it into places it was meant to go. I can't recommend this book highly enough. If you haven't encountered McDevitt's work and plan to do so, start with this one. You won't be sorry↑
A condition I readily cede is as much to do with my lamentable lack of familiarity with the newer authors as the I-Con executive's innability to stock the con with top-shelf talent↑
A vanishingly small possibility↑
This nonsense is worth a posting to itself, but I'll summarize: One buys a ticket in advance and gets a receipt. On the opening of the Con, typically late afternoon on the Friday, everyone is forced to stand for as much as three hours in March weather while once again the I-Con executive fail to get a clue. They arrange for people to sit behind desks with the tickets in a file box, alphabetized for ease of use. They break the alphabet into ranges of letters and allocate one file box to each range along with one of two people to verify you are who you say you are and give you your already-bought ticket. This wouldn't be so onerous and time-consuming if the idiots would realize just for once that the ticket-buyers do not spread across the alphabet evenly with respect to last names, but clump around certain letters. Like "S". As in Smith. You'd think that somewhere in the executive there'd be a halfway competent statistician, or someone who could remember last year's fiasco, but no.↑
The real reason no-one gets their bought-and-paid-for badge when they pay for it: fear the purchaser will scan the badge and run off a few more With my scheme the secure credential that must be guarded with life and limb until the con starts is the box of stickers↑
Author of such seminal SF works as The Einstein Intersection Babel-17, Dhalgren and a baker's dozen more titles available on request or by using you own Google nodes↑
A Honda Odyssey seven-seater. Long story to come in another post if I remember↑
Polaris and Hello Out There if you're interested↑
As in: Angst brought on by teens↑
Mrs Stevie in "Medieval Drag" and everyone else channeling some Japanese cartoon character or other↑
A collection of Samuel R Delany's SF short stories↑
I had been looking seriously at a copy printed in 1977 just weeks before↑

Lappy Happy

2010-05-05T14:43:00.001-04:00

So to celebrate the fact that this year, by dint of figuring out what our taxes should be and doubling the amount, I overcame the inability of my HR department to calculate my withholding correctly¹ and we are due a sizable refund².

We decided that we had enough with certain other funds put by to forgo the new desktop computer we had planned on buying and instead purchase three laptops, one for each of us.

This plan had many advantages.

First, The Stevieling has been silently jonesing for a laptop of her very own for years, but after one oblique inquiry a few Christmases ago, when the realities of the "vast" Stevie fortunes were revealed to her disbelieving ears, she abandoned hope. When she answered "nothing" to the inquiry as to what she would like for her birthday present, the perfect opportunity to surprise her occurred.

Second, Mrs Stevie, The Stevieling and I contend like heck for time on the desktop we have. Action was Called For on that front alone. The Stevieling had to be able to spend hours watching vapid Yootoob videos and Mrs Stevie's interminable web-forum dallying was of paramount importance. I was having trouble getting time on the thing just to get the taxes done, and my e-mail piles up unread in a big, electronic unread pile.

Third, every time I tried to start the computer after one of those bally women had been using it it would take forever to boot as it went crazy trying to clean up resources left by their web-consumption.

Fourth, one time in ten there would be a problem with something, and I was getting well-tired of asking "What did you do last night?" and getting back "Nothing". All I can say is that the Women of Chateau Stevie can take a bloody long time to do "nothing".

So I struck a deal with the devil and bought three Dell Inspiron laptops, each in a distinctive colour³, one for each person in The Steviemanse. The Stevieling was gobsmacked once she cottoned on to the fact that the blue laptop on the kitchen table was hers to have and use with no sharing at all. Naturally it's three days later and already there is a problem with one of the pre-loaded packages. Par for the course. It's entirely possible I broke it during the irritating set-up. Well you try registering McAffee from the applet. You'd think that if a company made a product they absolutely wanted registering over the web, the biggest thing on the unregistered version would be a screen-filling "Register Me Now" button. You'd be wrong. I gave up looking after almost an hour of poking the application. I probably tweaked a control that said "never allow this to launch again". It would match the design ethic of the rest of the application.

I've also spent hours just trying to connect to he wireless public networks all over NYC. I suspect the same software that won't tell you how to register it is forbidding the network DNS servers to supply me with a valid internet address. I did manage to access the sign-in page of Optimum WiFi, the semi-secured public WiFi my cable (and internet) company provides, but the servers were so sow responding my train had limped out of range before the sign-on was completed. One day my dream of uploading TOS entries on he iniquities being visited on me by the LIRR as they are happening will come to pass. One day.

Not only that, the perl thing I wrote to manage the stream-of-drivelness run-on sentences and let me convert them to less onerous footnotes will not run properly, and I've wasted huge volumes of time trying to make it do so. I eventually simply rewrote the script to turn the stupid bug into a feature, in the best traditions of IT workers everywhere.

So there you have it. The Stevieling's computer hasn't got the flash authoring environment installed on it, so she can't do what she most likes to do - make incomprehensible web videos. Mrs Stevie only uses hers as a web-access tool, so all those megawatts of RAM and SATAs of disk are wasted on her. And mine is only used to write stupid stuff for this blog - a job I formerly did on an antique and oft-malfunctioning Handspring Visor. All in all a waste of all the power the latest technology⁴ presents to me in the attractive red package currently sitting on my desk.

Which is why I feel obliged to play the latest and greatest 64-bit version of Minesweeper at all times.

They got it so wrong one year I was dunned by the IRS for quarterly estimated payments, something usually reserved for rich-git Bankers, owners of corporations and others who play fast and loose with the tax system. I tried to get this fixed the proper way, but ran up against "we don't make mistakes. Ever." within the first three minutes and once you get there with this crowd you might as well give the bleep up. Another way to combat this brand of dimwittedness is to submit a W4 document that names a specific amount to be withheld over the year rather than use a calculation based on circumstances. My lot have replaced the "inefficient" paper W4 with a web version that - guess what - won't allow me to implement this simple anti-idiocy scheme↑
It remains to be seen in these cash-strapped times whether we actually ever see the money we loaned the various government bodies interest-free of course, but hope springs eternal↑
Mine's red. Red ones go faster↑
Minus six months as I can't afford the money or the time to configure and overcome the teething troubles with the bleeding edge machines the kids are toting to college, which is to say what I bought is already obsolete by three months↑

Another Great Start To The Week

2010-05-04T21:08:00.000-04:00

So Monday started with a bang.

To begin with it was raining just hard enough to force me to wear my London Fog duster, which is nice for rain but awkward to get out of and back into on a moving train, and will pretty much guarantee that the day will turn out to be scorching hot, forcing me to either carry over one arm (requiring a third arm be grown before 5 pm but we don't sweat the small stuff) or to wear it and risk death by heat stroke.

Then, the rain increased in volume just before I left my car in Wyandanch LIRR car park and stayed at drench factor 11 until just after I took shelter in the station, when it reduced to drizzle. This was just long enough to flood the sidewalks and completely soak my coat so the weight of the thing climbed north of a hundredweight and the lining became damp.

I was just congratulating myself in having picked the one pair of shoes I possess that don't leak when some jerk deliberately drove through the flooded water in the curbside gutter and soakeed me from knee to the soles of my feet. Of course, this was the one time when the usual collection of broken bottles, barbed wire and razor-sharp metal fragments had been washed away so I didn't have the pleasure of seeing the bleep-hole shred his steel-belted radials. bleeper.

I hate this commute.

Overwhelming Cricket Noise

2010-04-30T11:40:00.002-04:00

I've been to busy, sick and despondent to post of late.

That's not an excuse, just a reason for the sounds of silence of late. After this weekend I shall be in a position to rectify this veritable famine of fiascos, debacles, screw-ups and annoyance at the hands of those iniquitous swine, that cabal of insidious workers to the detriment and defeat of the working man, The Long Island Rail Road.

Posts in the works include the I-Con report (last years I-Con was such a disappointment I think I actually forgot to deliver the promised post on it) including how a Very Famous Writer savagely cracked the spine of one of my treasured ancient paperbacks, and why I don't care about it as much as I should, a serious plea for people to stop using the trains as a means of ending their now-pointless existence on the planet or at the very least to start using the South Shore Lines so I can get home on time for once and the acquisition of new technology and my struggle with it in a World Gone Mad.

Oh, and Mrs Stevie's Shuttlecraft will be there somewhere.

The Rain In Wyandanch Stays Mainly On The Carpark

2010-04-01T22:26:00.005-04:00

I have spoken before about the cunning and innovative civil engineering used in constructing the drains of Long Island in general and Wyandanch (Pearl of the East) in particular

So I shall use the relatively new Blogger feature that allows me to upload pictures to this blog without an account with a third party web-host and a degree in computer science to demonstrate that I do not "make this stuff up" as certain people have recently been hinting.

The picture appearing above (hopefully) is of the place the rain should have gone over the last week, during which the Western Hemisphere's entire supply of rain for spring was erroneously delivered to my address all in one go over the course of three soggy days and nights.

Luckily, the Wyandanch civil engineers realized that a gentle flow of water sluicing over the various cracked curbstones, potholes and ill-laid tarmac that make up the North-East carpark complex would be just the thing to raise commuter spirits dampened during the previous week, and arranged for the carpark to become a massive shallow reservoir that should take another three to four days to drain dry by the stunning expedient of placing half the drains halfway up the various hills and slopes that make up the local topology.

The pool depicted wraps around a small complex of shops and restaurants, none of which can use their rear entrances owing to between 3 and six inches of water pooling round the entire mall. As you can see, their is a very nice, large, clean drain within a couple of feet of this lake, but as it lies a good foot above inland sea level it is of no use in reducing the amount of wet lying in square yards all over the place. In a stroke of genius, the elevation of the drain exceeds that of each and every doorstep by at least six inches, so maximum fun was extracted from the inclement weather and many of the establishments are still trying to dry out.

And they say there's no more greatness in the world.

The Saga Of The Jewelry Case Comes To An End

2010-03-23T11:24:00.006-04:00

I have finally completed the repairs on the Jewelry Display Case of Extreme Time-Wasting and Expense.

I said I'd have a go at making this thing after a friend who sells pewter statues, chess sets and jewelry, broke his rotating triangular case o' jewelry displayage by bashing and smashing it for a few years. Since it was made of Perspex, it just about disintegrated. He asked me as I passed his booth at I-Con one year if I could fix it, and I said no¹, but that I might be able to make him a new one.

I dithered for about two years and came up with a hexagonal design (the issue was not the shape², that was 5 minutes worth of overheating brains, smoking hair and so on) but how to realize that shape in the footprint required to house a reasonable number of the little display cards the jewelry comes fastened to.

These cards hang from a metal hook-shaped clip fashioned into the top of each card, which engaged in a slot in the original display case. I thought that six columns of two cards, six high would work. I had one of the cards (I had though far enough into the process while I spoke with my friend to realize the need for one) and so it was a matter of simple arithmetic to figure out the dimensions of the hexagonal prism required to do the job. The problem was that no-one makes hardwood in such dimensions that the hexagonal base and top could be simply made from two planks, and if they did I could never afford to buy it given the rarity of hardwood in general - I had decided to go with maple for the construction as I could work it easier than I could oak and it would be hard enough when finished to withstand a fair degree of bashing and smashing without getting dinged-up.

I finally had the required brainwave and figured out that if I made the core prism out of MDF (a sort of hardboard) and used small lengths of aluminum channel bolted to these panels as hooks for the cards to hang on, I didn't need the base to be solid. It could be annular (ring-shaped). The top could also be made annular, and the hole could be covered up by a second, smaller hexagon of wood. So that's what I did. The whole thing was held together by a threaded truss rod joining the top to the base.

The finished object was, if I say so myself, a thing of beauty and I presented it to him at I-Con four years ago.

The next year he gave it back. He had stored it for a year in an unheated garage lockup and the top had cracked through due to thermal creep and, I suspected, an over-tightened truss rod. I told him I'd repair it and return it, but the top ended up needing to be completely re-fabricated and during that process my drill press died and my router self-destructed, so it wasn't ready. The next year Mrs Stevie was ill and I had no thought for woodworking. So this year, four years after I originally made the thing, I finally am able to re-present it with the proviso that if he stores it in a garage and it cracks I want nothing more to do with the wretched thing.

It was quite a struggle to get the damned thing built too.

The original was clearly not properly assembled, so I resolved to make the joints more accurately this time. The best accuracy I could get in tests on the Miter Saw was about 1/3 a degree per cut, which translated into an accumulated error of about three degrees over the entire ring, meaning it was a spiral with either an overlap at the final joint or a gap. Experiments with my new table sanding machine could not improve on the error in the time I had, so I went cheap 'n' cheerful and decided to make two half-hexagon rings, then machine each half-hex to match the other. This would result in a slightly irregular hexagon, but I was getting fed up with the whole thing by then and didn't care.

The crowning hexagon was machined as six triangles, and was glued down to the hexagonal ring, centering it as best I could.

I took some precautions to avoid Splitting Top Syndrome while I was at it. The lack of biscuit joints, dovetails, tenons or whatever meant that the joints could easily fail as they had before (I had used biscuits³ in the previous design, but they let go). I considered using metal plates screwed over each joint, but that would only hold one side of the joint and allow expansion stresses to build up and twist the top apart again.

Then I had what I hope was a better idea. I machined an extra slot in the ring and the crown, sank some screws in the slot, leaving the heads proud, and poured quick-setting Alumilite liquid plastic resin⁵ into the slot. Now each hexagonal piece has an integral O-ring holding the joints together.

The goodies on display are kept safe from the light-fingered by six Lucite windows that engage in a slot in the base and have a top piece made of wood that has a pin which engages in a hole in the top of the case. The original design was a bit too fiddly when it came to hooking up the windows after a sale, so I added knobs to the bottom of each window fabricated out of the flat-top screw bolts used to hold Swedish furniture together.

It all looks quite good now after a minor paint touch up to the core (which is matte black to emphasize the goods on display)

but there are two minor gotchas that have me grinding my teeth.

First, I forgot that in transit the windows need securing and managed to construct the top with no regard for the clip-on hardboard "transit disc" that held everything together on the original. Fixing that requires dismantling the whole thing, a non-trivial operation at this stage in the game, so that has to be worked around with rubber bands.

Second, sometime between me giving my friend the case and my finishing it yesterday, the windows gat marked up. I was very careful to store them in wrappings, but I can't say for sure they got scratched in a damp garage as opposed to my basement. Most of the marks could be polished out with a polishing compound and some elbow grease, but I haven't the time or the inclination. I can replace the windows for about 20 bux and a weekend's work (and about two weeks recovery from the wrist strain cutting Lucite with a special scoring knife will cause) but I'm unwilling to invest more cash in this project. It has already cost north of 100 bux and enough is enough.

I am almost as glad to be rid of this albatross as I was to get shot of Bil the Elder's G4.

After I'd done laughing↑
The original case was triangular but my friend had asked for a square one to increase capacity. The problem with a square prism that revolves is that you have to allow a footprint that accommodates the sweep of the corners but hat is otherwise empty. I knew from observation that space tended to disappear on his table as the day went on, so a hexagon seemed a good compromise. Smaller sides meant smaller storage space per side, but the difference in diameter measured from point-to-point as opposed to that measured from flat-to-flat would be small making for no illusory free table space to be swallowed by tidal crap↑
Biscuits are small, oval pieces of wood that sit an a slot machined⁴ each face of a joint so that the joint is bridged by the biscuit which is secured by a water-based glue. The water in the glue causes the biscuit to expand and lock the joint firmly together. Unless some gimp stores the joined pieces of wood in a cold-then-damp-then-hot-and-damp garage for a year of course, in which case all bets are off↑
Using a biscuit-joiner↑
A truly marvelous product that can be used to make all sorts of things very, very quickly↑

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

2010-03-18T16:51:00.002-04:00

I'd never been to Carnegie Hall before.

Last Thursday The Stevieling was part of her school choir, which was joining five others in an evening of music in the Isaac Stern auditorium, Carnegie Hall, and the family decamped there-wards for some culture.

Seated all around were other proud parents, some of whom I knew, some from many years of meeting at similar, if less upscale, events. Behind me, with her family, was an enchanting five-year old girl who - like most of her kind - reminded me of the days when The Stevieling was that age.

Since our choir was on next-to-last I got to see a cross section of Long Island school choirs sing. There isn't much to say. The youngest kids had material that was too repetitive and went on too long for non-parents to appreciate, while one of the older kids' choir presented a "World Premier" of a piece that could have had a subjective month lopped off it without ruining the experience in my opinion.

But everyone had practiced until they'd turned blue and was giving it their all in Carnegie Hall for crying out loud! I gave each kid in each choir a heartfelt round of applause when each choir's program ended, and I meant every handclap as a salute to their hard work and professionalism under stress.

Then I watched my all-but seventeen year-old daughter mount the rostrum with her peers, and a peculiar double image formed in which a choir of five year old children mingled with the evening dress-clad young women and dress suited young men on the stage. I couldn't figure out who these young women and young men were. It wasn't that long ago that I was building her tree house, surely

The music swelled and folded us in simply wonderful for about twenty minutes, and all too soon it was over and I was on the sidewalk wearing a stupid expression while trying to find everyone in the crowds.

I still can't figure out when my little girl grew up.

Technology: Never use It

2010-03-18T16:19:00.003-04:00

Everything is attempting to be paperless around here.

This means that the need for a paperful system (to coin a nasty little word entirely in keeping with the modern IT trend of needing a new word for everything and stating the bleeding obvious at all times) is being simply ignored. The net result is that there's never any printer paper when you need some, and people have started stealing the toner cartridges from each-others' printers at night (leading to the inescapable conclusion that it's the 12 bloody people on night shift doing it).

It came to pass today that I needed a paper copy of a 600 page PDF describing Enterprise Java Beans, which isn't anything to do with coffee but a piece of technology with a "clever" name that bolts to another piece of technology - with a "clever" name. If you think this is cringe-inducing, shed a tear for the days when the "java" brand was new and every sodding vendor that repackaged it exhibited at trade shows with a coffee bar. "How original" I hear you saying. "Not at all hackneyed before the first group of marketers had finished bolting together the exhibition booth".

The irony being, of course, that each of these "clever" marketing ploys was being done on behalf of people who wanted you to think they were innovative.

Anyway.

When I need these mega-prints I send them to the photocopier, which can deal with the bulk involved without melting, and I usually give people the courtesy of waiting until after-hours. Since my nearest laser printer has been Hors De Office these last two weeks due to some midnight toner-thieving I decided my colleagues could suck on it this time and I sent the 600-page manual to be printed mid afternoon. I ordered portrait orientation, double-sided, with holes pre-punched for the three-ring binder I had to buy out of my own pocket since all our spare 3-ring binders were thrown away five years ago when we relocated. I protested at the time, but was shouted down by "wiser heads" who "understood the economies involved" better than I did. Shirtheads.

Where was I? Oh right.

So I sent the print to the copier, then grabbed a pre-arranged pack of paper, since long experience has shown that none of the idiots I work with has the basic decency to fill the copier paper hoppers and I could guarantee it would send a "paper out" alert ten pages in. Which it did.

But the most annoying, stupid, asking-to-get-an-axe-taken-to-it part was when it printed the cover landscape in direct contravention of the requested orientation, burped while it got it's act straight and re-oriented the rest of the print run. This caused every page after the cover to be printed on the wrong side of the paper.

I'll wait why you think about it and say "so what?" in puzzled tones, realizing as you do that it doesn't matter a jot, other than adding a single sheet of paper to the run. One sheet in 600? "Chicken feed" you say, and you're right. I'll give you another minute or so to pat yourself on the back and tell each other what a Nidiot I'm being.

Of course, if the hole punch is on, it is now punching holes in the wrong edge of the paper. Which it was, and it did.

So now I'm the proud possessor of the world's only Manga copy of the Enterprise Java Bean manual for the Weblogic Application Server, which not only must be read from back to front, right page before left page like the daft comic books my daughter is addicted to, but must be put in the binder upside-down or the rings pop open every time I open the cover.

Out Of The Furnace, Into The Fridge

2010-03-01T15:57:00.004-05:00

When we moved in to Chateau Stevie it had a boiler made as one of a batch, the rest of which were installed on RMS Titanic.

It had, I think, been converted from oil to gas in the far distant past, and had probably run flawlessly for thirty plus years before we saw it. The outside was rusty, and the coil¹ would give only about one minute of hot shower water even with a lo-flo shower head, but it worked, sorta.

Admittedly we had to heat the top floor with electric heaters on account of the bloody plumber doing the plumbing "Genaro Fashion²" and relying on some sort of goodwill to move water out of the furnace-pipes-downstairs baseboard radiator-pipes-furnace circuit via a T-fitting and into the upstairs pipework.

What actually happened was that the vertical pipe would get hot, but no water would flow because there was no reason for it to do so.

One day the furnace gas valve required a tap with a Brummy Screwdriver³ to get it to open and provide us with life-sustaining heat and I finally had to admit we were in trouble. A quick check showed that we had hit the usual watershed: four grand in the savings account. Whenever we manage to scrape that amount up (which takes years BTW: no power earner me) something will come along to wipe out some part of the domestic infrastructure worth exactly that amount. It's sort of the universe's way of telling me exactly what my worth in the scheme of things is. One time it was a driveway that broke up and a hundred feet of fencing that fell over for example. This time it was a decent hot water system to replace the hope-anna-prayer job that was then sitting in the basement.

We had the Stevieling in the house by then, so I knew that keeping a furnace that might one day malfunction catastrophically was Not On. Accordingly we had fitted a "state of the art" Slant Fin furnace and a fifty gallon separate water heater, and had the installers create two pump-driven zones with proper valving for the upstairs and downstairs heating circuits. I still remember walking upstairs into warm air for the first time since we closed on the house, and the first post-water-heater-installation shower I took, five minutes after the last plumber left the house, which featured the luxury of being able to dawdle for more than one minute in the stream of hot damp.

The next day, which happened to be Thanksgiving Day, the brand new, state of the art furnace wouldn't fire up and the house was ice-cold.

I poked and pried and discovered that I could, by tapping hard on the flue vent, persuade the thing to open and the furnace to start. I spoke to the installer and said that since I could get the thing started manually, and since we were going out for Thanksgiving Day dinner that day, I could spare him sending out a team on Thanksgiving Day if he would set us up for a fix at start of business on the day after, Friday. He was very happy and promised that would be done.

Naturally, Friday rolled on and at 10 o' clock I called the installation company to find out what the hell was going on. The woman who answered the phone began her side of the conversation by asking "Do you have a service contract?" to which I answered "No". She then told me she couldn't send anyone out unless I had a contract with them. I then explained in increasingly harsh tones that I had a warranty, that the unit was less than 48 hours old and that if someone didn't come round and fix it at once I was calling the better business bureau and my lawyer, in that order. Someone came around noon and replaced the automated flue vent required by NY state law, the servo motor of which had malfunctioned, closing off the flue and thus triggering the fail-safe on the igniter.

The bloody thing malfunctioned every single year with the same fault for the first three years (the warranty period) and the same process of arguing with Ms. Service Contract or Nothing followed by threats followed by a late night visit by a "specialist" who would replace the same motorised flue vent was gone through each time. After the third replacement, the "specialist" said that legally the unit had to be fitted, but it didn't have to be used. The flue could be left open. The reason it is closed is to prevent backdrafts filling the basement with carbon monoxide, but the furnace also has a sensor to shut it down if it detects that happening (and it has on a couple of occasions when I've had a high-velocity fan blowing out of a basement window). So I had the unit deactivated.

The next failure, a couple of months later, was a carbon monoxide sensor shut-down caused by a freak windstorm, and the "specialist" showed me the secret restart button not included in the instruction sheet the installers left for me.

Then the warranty went out and the price quoted for a service contract by the installers would have put a man on the moon so we parted company. The furnace got clever and started chewing through thermocouples every year.

The thermocouple is a little copper tube that pokes into the pilot flame and tells the electronic gas valve that the pilot is lit so it can turn on the main gas jets when it wants to. When the thermocouple breaks, it breaks in "do not start" mode and the furnace does what it's told. The first I know of it is usually when I get home and enter a freezing house. "Why is it so cold in here?" I will ask, and get blank looks from the shivering women lying in wait.

This time I got up on Sunday morning, wandered about the house crashing into things and generally trying to get the old body started properly, and was ambushed by The Stevieling who said "The thermostat is set for 70 degrees but it is only like 60 in here. Is this normal?"

Now, in all the years she has lived there, she has been through several "cold house" moments and she knows darn well it is never "normal". This was just her trying out her mother's circumlocutory powers.

I went down into the basement, covered in sawdust and bits of wood from a frenzied attempt to dominate wood with power tools in a World Gone Mad the day before. I reasoned that it was possible that all the activity, including a high-throughput shop-vac doing duty as a dust collector, could have tricked the sensor into sniffing the dreaded carbon monoxide so I pressed the secret button in full expectation of hearing the boiler fire into life.

It didn't.

I wasted a few minutes taking the cover off the furnace and poking things in the hope Magic Poke Cooties would fix things, then stood up and did the Rage Dance while improvising a rap composed of my very best third order Words of Power.

Mrs Stevie said "Call the guy who always fixes it for us", so I did. This was a self-employed heating engineer who did a bang up job of restarting the damned furnace two or three times in the past and didn't charge a limb of any kind for the privilege.

He denied ever visiting us.

Since he wouldn't actually discuss things until we had resolved that, Mrs Stevie was forced to join the conversation (she was the only person who'd ever met him). He finally allowed as how he might have worked on our furnace, but said he was in semi-retirement now and couldn't help until Monday at the earliest.

Mrs Stevie then went and found another firm who agreed to come over⁴ and left for organised religion with The Stevieling in tow. I had to go and dismantle my production line so the furnace guy could actually get into the basement (which is filled floor to ceiling with crap everywhere there are no tools, workmates supporting tools, router tables on workmates or floor-standing tools). Since I was frantically trying to build a replacement top for the Jewelry Display Case of Annoyance, it was all very tiresome and I explained how tiresome it was at length, to the air in a monologue consisting largely of my very best fourth order Words of Power, as I moved, folded and dismantled various tool set-ups.

John the Furnace Guy came in, took the furnace apart, installed a new thermocouple, reassembled the parts⁵ and lit the thing, then presented his bill, all in a trice⁶.

I apologised as I paid him, but he said his bank had no problem cashing tear-stained checks, and since he always took the precaution of putting in ear plugs before presenting his invoice his hearing hadn't been damaged by my shrieks of dismay.

American domestic furnaces often feature an internal coil that is used to heat a separate water circuit, typically used to provide the domestic hot water supply↑
There're four ways of doing things: The right way, the wrong way, the hideously dangerously and/or uselessly wrong way and The Genaro Way. This is an ordered list↑
A pipe wrench↑
Mrs Stevie has a knack for finding reliable people on the strength of the briefest conversations, though I'm not certain threats are involved in every case↑
And had none left over afterwards↑
Defined in this case as just under an hour↑

Oh, What A Lovely Bore!

2010-02-10T21:26:00.004-05:00

So much for the blizzard that had everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I went in early, so early I won't get paid for about an hour and three-quarters unless I request overtime which will be denied, and left at mid-day to avoid the chance of being marooned by the Long Island Rail Road, who now have a policy that once the snow is 10 inches deep, they don't run any trains.

This is because in the last snow storm they left a train full of people with no power, light or heat for six hours, and to their surprise were roundly vilified in the press and by anyone with breath in their bodies as a result. Rather than fix the systemic problem (no procedures to cover evacuating trains stuck in super-inclement weather or to attempt to restore "hotel power" - as heat and light are called in railroad parlance - so people don't freeze) they used the Clawhammer o' Never Again. So when a train stalls out due to a colossal rain storm, it'll be the same story because THEY HAVEN'T FIXED THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM.

Anyway

All that rushing around and for what? About nine inches of slush.

Good one, weathermen. A credit to your skills with the cutting edge technology you have at your fingertips.

Update - 0600 Hours am o'clock, Thursday

I spoke too soon.

Approximately 12 inches of snow fell all over the place overnight, then most of it blew into 2- and 3-foot drifts in my driveway, trapping the Steviemobile and the MrsSteviemobile behind impenetrable walls of weatherfluff. After that, it was a simple matter to have the town's snowplows throw whatever snow had not blown into my driveway into my driveway.

You have won this round, Mr Weatherman!

A Royal Pain In The Rear End

2010-02-10T21:12:00.007-05:00

Warning! The following blither is totally disgusting, involving what can only be described without negating all purpose in this alert as "The Toilet Regions", and I'm not referring to the bathroom when I say that. Those with a weak stomach and those who find the subject of certain parts of the body repugnant should surf over to something else for a while. You have been duly warned. It's trousers down from here on in.

I had cause over the Xmas period to visit with a colorectal specialist.

I will pause now while those who unwisely ignored the big red warning at the top of the post finish throwing up into their keyboards. All done?

The reason was that I had somehow done an injury to that opening in my body not capable of coherent speech. I figured it would heal itself in time, almost every minor tear in the skin eventually does¹, but Mrs Stevie was adamant I seek proper medical attention. I argued that there was no real need, but she countered this clever line of reasoning by citing towel racks ripped out of the wall, torn linoleum and bite marks in the toilet seat, so I gave in.

The doctor was clearly an expert in wringing the maximum amount of humiliation from the situation, and had a highly trained staff. No sooner was I in the office than he had me drop my pants and underwear. The nurse held up a paper napkin around the same size as those in an average fast food restaurant, claiming it was to save me embarrassment, but she blew it by sniggering as she said it.

Once my trousers and underwear were around my ankles, I was instructed to kneel on a sort of leather and stainless steel chaise-longue of the kind often seen on exclusive members-only German bondage web sites and in the main parlour of Mistress Alexa's House of Executive Correction. It was, of course, some eight feet away, and so I was obliged to hop vigorously over to the device to the delight of the nurse, who had dropped all pretense of trying to preserve my dignity. I comforted myself with the thought that under normal circumstances, this procedure would have set me back a good $500, assuming Mistress Alexa could fit me in (she has a very crowded schedule).

I first began to appreciate how much real trouble I was in when I heard the doctor say: "Nurse, pass me the Hobbs retractor. It's that thing that looks like a bicycle pump with ridges around the end. No, the big one. And be careful. Those ridges are razor sharp. Now Mr Stevie, relax. You'll feel a small pinch."

Naturally, as soon as I heard that old "small pinch" line, the very same one Doc Rubberglove uses when he jabs me with his signature blunt hypodermics and leaves me with a dinner-plate sized bruise that fades in only 10-12 days, I tensed up tighter than Mrs Stevie's best choke hold, and the doctor was obliged to use brute force to insert whatever it was that he was holding into me.

"Just be careful doc", I whined. "I'm very tender back thereYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGH!"

The doctor, wise in the ways of colorectal examinations, had his nurse pinion me while he used his sheer muscle-power to insert fourteen inches of cold steel into places I had no idea I even had, while I thrashed around, screamed, begged for mercy and/or death and so forth. Before I knew it (actually, a good deal after I knew it to be honest), it was over.

"The original tear is healing. I'll give you some ointment for the four or five new ones you just got. Oh, and you should have a colonoscopy, being as how you're over fifty."

"I was thirty eight when I bent over your ruddy couch" I told him, attempting to sit on only one buttock.

And so the colonoscopy was scheduled, and was undergone last Monday.

Others in my office claimed to have had to drink gallons² of some sort of white liquid to clean them out (the hosepipe up the jacksy is, thankfully, no longer a recommended way of cleaning out the pipes of human beings prior to sticking something the size of a drainpipe up their rear ends). I'd seen the dentist on the movie "Ghost Town" drink some sort of disgusting white glop for the same purpose, and a co-commuter told me her husband had been made to drink something akin to clotted milk in sliminess to do the job.

I, however, was told to just take four laxative tablets on Saturday, drink one 10 oz bottle of cherry-flavoured Magnesium Citrate (another laxative) around six pm Sunday, and another at six am Monday. For once I was on the winning side of things it seemed.

Not for long though

The tablet-form laxative was supposed to begin laxavating my innards in three hours, but took nine. However, after a mere 30 minutes I was as dehydrated as a vulture's crotch. Every molecule of moisture was torn from my tissues, and I couldn't drink enough water and Gatorade to offset the dehydration. Result: a vicious hangover headache, which I still have days later.

The cherry soda had much the same effect, to the point that I was moaning and clutching my head for most of Superbowl Weekend, which was a curiously apposite title from a personal perspective given that my diet for three days consisted primarily of laxatives and water. I didn't watch the game on account of I couldn't get out of the bathroom for more than about two minutes at a time. At least I had no more need to rip out and/or bite down on the fixtures, the good doctor's ointment having done its job.

On Monday I was required to drink nothing in the final four hours, and I nearly went mad from thirst and the pounding headache.

Once in the doctor’s office I was made to remove everything except my socks. For reasons I cannot elucidate, being naked is nowhere near as humiliating as being naked except for socks. Like I say, the man is a master of the art.When I folded my trousers, my cell phone fell out of the pocket and onto the floor, where it disassembled itself into it's various removable parts.

I found most of the parts quite quickly, but not the battery. I searched high and low but couldn't find the bloody thing, then spotted it lying in the space under a door marked "Staff Only", so I had to get dressed again in order that I could contravene office policy and open the door to retrieve the damn thing. It was all very tiresome and par for the course.

Once on the operating table³ I was asked when I last ate ("Three years ago" I snarled) and drank ("Four hours, twenty-seven minutes and eleven seconds" I whined) then the anesthetist stuck me with a hypo full of Valium and something with three syllables, and the headache immediately went away. I was so relieved I thanked the man and began regaling him with one of my wittiest anecdotes. After about ten seconds he let out a strangled cry and stuck another hypo in me and that was the last thing I remembered until it was all over, at which time Mrs Stevie hove into view⁴ and the headache came back again.

The doctor said he'd removed a couple of polyps but couldn't see anything esle wrong, then left shoo-ing the crowd of Russian webcam operators and total strangers invited in from the street before him, and I was allowed to get dressed and go home.

Apart from the headache, the only thing I've been able to take away from the whole miserable business is that the threat to "tear me a new one" now holds no force, since I am intimately familiar with what it feels like and can sneer "been there, done that" at the manager attempting to motivate me with those words.

Albeit in age-related increasing timescales that can induce worry in your scribe at times↑
Well, gallon. The container is hucking fuge↑
Face-up; presumably some ultra humiliating pose was forcéd upon me once I was unconscious, possibly involving stirrups. Or they may have simply turned me over, but the photographic humour possibilities in that are minimal↑
You can't have a general anesthetic without someone waiting for you so they can drive you home. State Law, I think. Same thing was true when the cracked tooth was pulled.↑

The Great (Coal) Train Robbery

2010-01-15T00:06:00.001-05:00

Ken was not a happy camper.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were 15 years old and had only a hazy idea of the legalities involved, and anyway, if no-one caught us we had got away with it and therefore were, by definition, innocent. Anyway, it was all Ken's idea.

I don't mean to suggest I was unwilling, far from it. I pretty much leaped at the suggestion we mosey on over to the smokeless fuel processing plant marshalling yards and take a close look at the coal wagons. It was winter and I found the reflection of the moon off the pools of solidified lime that dotted the landscape thereabouts quite evocative in the way only a 15 year old does. The Gothic Gloom of the place was a Lorelei Song to a moody teen and I went there often to think about life and stuff.

I was dead philosophical at that age.

Anyway, Ken and I had been kicking around the railway yards a couple of nights before and he had opined that the very acme of desirable memorabilia in his humble opinion was the heavy, oval cast-iron makers plates fastened to the right rear and front left corner timbers of each coal wagon. I took a look and was dubious.

"There's a hundred years or black tar and two ginormous carriage-bolts holding the thing in place" I noted. "Why on earth would you want something like that on your wall?"

"Idiot!" said Ken in that playful manner he had after we had been in each other's company for a couple of hours. "I'll use the gas torch in the school metalwork shop to burn all that crap off and repaint it first! If we can get the bolts out I reckon it'll prise off with a big screwdriver"

"The bolts are square, though", I said. "We'd need a big Stillson's pipe wrench to get those buggers out. Like the one me dad has hanging in the shed. He won't miss it for a couple of hours or so, and then there's the big World War I - era screwdriver in the toolbox. I'll use my duffel-bag and we can carry the plate to your house in it when we're done."

And so we had. At dead of night the next, er, night we stole into the yards, keeping well away from the highly illuminated part, and relieved one of the ten-foot long coal wagons of one of the two makers plates it bore. Ken was ecstatic at the haul and I was pumped with adrenalin as all criminals must be after their first "big job", and we gleefully made plans to repeat the process the next night.

During the day, news of The Big Job had somehow gotten to the ears of our mutual friend, Dave, who had insisted on being "in". We both shrugged and said "okay", but we had unwittingly made a mistake.

You see, Dave was An Adventurer in the making. He later went on to climb mountains, dive reefs and all sorts of other moderately daring stuff, but he was already taking himself Very Seriously when it came to capers. Well, we all did at that age, but Dave was...epic in his approach.

We were lulled into a false sense of security when he rendezvoused with us wearing black trainers, pants, pullover and woolen hat. He looked every bit the part. Indeed, he looked like he was going out to blow up railway lines and thus put yet another spanner into the well-oiled works of the filthy Bosche war machine that had run rampant over his beloved France in 1939 and abruptly ended his innocent adolescent life as a simple grape picker plunging him into a life of deadly intrigue, guns and high-explosives. Mon Dieu!

We stealthily made our way into the railway yards once again, Ken and I with the sure tread and wary eye of the seasoned coal-wagon burglar, Dave with...wait! Where was Dave?

Sometime between our reaching the ultra secret weak point in the smokeless fuel plant's security, known to those prosaic, stiff-necked Denizens of the Daylight Hours as "the level crossing on Blackberry Way" and our insertion into the high-risk area about two hundred yards from the day-bright Klieg lights illuminating the live part of the yards, Dave had slipped fully into character.

Once we spotted him it was easy to deduce that he had elected himself "Look-Out". He was running back and forth, diving periodically between wagons and then sticking his head out to check for observers, his shoes making the canyons of steel up ahead ring with the sound of scrunching gravel.

Ken did a little dance of annoyance, as did I, but we resolved to work further back down the trains of parked wagons so that we'd have a head start should Dave's "precautions" bring disaster.

We pulled off one maker's plate after about five minutes of unscrewing and levering, and moved on to a second. I should point out that the plates in question were, once the tar was burned off, beautiful items¹, dating from well before World War II in some cases and that there were several different ones available. Ken knew the ones he wanted - no mere opportunistic thieves were we, but refined aesthetes with a discerning eye. Well, Ken was. I was just easily led².

We did, however limit ourselves to only taking one of each pair when we selected the ones we wanted, partly because we didn't want to overly inconvenience the poor buggers in the maintenance shops, but mostly because being more than a foot over the long axis these things weighed a ton. What with the Stillson's pipe-wrench and the screwdriver, which appeared to have been machined out of depleted uranium despite being over 50 years old (no screws made after 1935 had slots wide enough for the blade I might add), I was in serious danger of having the bottom fall out of my duffel bag. Two was our limit that night if we were to avoid Explanations to parents³.

We were removing the second plate when Ken became aware that Dave was now leaping from wagon to wagon, clearly outlined against the sky. I also became aware of this around the same time, because Dave was good enough to stop right next to us and comment loudly that we should bring power tools the next time. Then he bounded off again into the night. I could see his gymnastic form as he occluded the light from the smokeless fuel processing plant itself. I think probably anyone could against that light, just by looking out of their kitchen window, and the nearest house was about a mile away.

"He's gonna get us caught!" snarled Ken.

"Where will we plug in the extension cords?" I asked, dubiously

"What?"

"For the power tools. It's a great idea, but I can't think where we'd get the juice from", I said

"Idiot! yelled Ken, quite forgetting in his indignation where we were and the perilous situation Dave had put us in vis-a-vis being rumbled with a bag full of cast iron swag. "Not only is there nowhere to plug in these power tools you pair want to bring in, the sodding things will make enough noise to raise the dead!"

"I hadn't thought of that" I admitted ruefully.

"Stealth!" howled Ken. "Stealth is the key to not getting caught!"

"Will you keep it down?" hissed a voice, unexpectedly coming from just overhead.

"Argh!" Yelled Ken.

"Argh!" I agreed.

We sat and caught our breath while Dave returned to his lonely, leaping vigil, then Ken said "I want one of those!"

"One of what?" I asked. I'd been looking into the lights again and couldn't see what he was pointing at.

"That. The destination board. I wannit."

I looked for a bit, and checked I wasn't going mad. "This?"

"Yes, that."

"But all it is is a block of wood with what looks like a mousetrap mounted on it. Why would you want that?"

"They put routing information slips under that spring clip. I want the thing."

I could see we were going to get nowhere unless I did what Ken wanted, so I took a look. The block of wood was held onto the wagon frame by two nuts. The bolts were either captive stud-type things, or were inserted from behind the frame and had domed heads, 'cos I couldn't find anything to grip that side of the frame. In order to remove the device, Ken would have to hold back the "mousetrap" waybill retainer, which swung down against a very strong spring, while I used Mr Stillsons on the nuts. Ken concurred and we got to work.

Now my part of the job was tedious but involved constant work, but Ken's was really just standing and holding back this mousetrap thing and he had time to get bored and start obsessing about Dave again.

"Look at that idiot! He's gonna get us caught. I mean it! We are gonna get caught because that twit thinks this is some sort of game."

The litany went on and on for the entire duration of the job. Indeed it went on a bit further. Ken was so caught up in his monologue that he was quite oblivious to my having removed both the nuts holding the device to the wagon frame. All that was holding it now was whatever environmental gunk had stuck the wood of the base to the wood of the frame.

"Ken, the nuts are off" I hissed. "Ken! I'm done! Ken!"

Which was, of course, the point at which the wood came away from the frame and snapped closed on his fingers with a mighty THWACK! that I was sure could be heard for miles.

It is at times such as this that the true mettle of a man is shown to the world. Ken was magnificent.

Well aware of the need for silence after the night of lax stealth protocols, yet having been dealt an injury of heroic, nay, super-heroic proportions, he was faced with a difficult decision. Not since Wiley Coyote had almost the very same thing happen to his paw during a particularly trying bout with the Road-Runner had one being been dealt such a hefty whack with such a thin piece of metal to such a delicate set of bones and tendons.

Doubling over yet somehow managing to show his face to the world at the same time, Ken puffed out his cheeks (both sets), drew back his lips in a terrifyingly wide grin and went for a hop around the shunting yards, all the while making a sound like a distant steam whistle with his nose while gnashing his teeth hard enough to flake enamel off them. I stood and watched admiringly from the shadows, while Dave, sheltering from possible detection in one of the wagons, offered the shouted opinion that Ken should be more circumspect in his fooling around.

Eventually Ken was able to regain control of his voluntary muscles and we made our way home to the sound of his fingers throbbing. Dave thought the evening had gone very well. I was less sanguine, but then I had been volunteered to carry the cast-iron swag. Fortunately, about half a mile from home, the bottom tore out of my duffel bag, which lightened the load drastically at the cost of waking up the entire neighbourhood. It was, we decided later,⁶ a good night, but not good enough to do again.

Not even on a bet.

If you like that sort of thing↑
M'lud↑
To be avoided at all costs. We had taken great care not to worry them by telling them anything about our nocturnal quests, and there was no need to get them all excited over what was, when all was said and done, nothing really to speak of⁴↑
Which is why neither Ken nor I have ever spoken of it⁵↑
Until now↑
Months later↑

Ho! Ho! Ho! And Pass The Batteries!

2010-01-07T13:06:00.001-05:00

Nice One Santa!

Good haul this year.

Mrs Stevie gave me a watch I'd been lusting after ever since my old one fell apart. The old one, which still works on account of the bit that disintegrated was the fancy case that turns out is totally ornamental and the works are all in a waterproof cylinder to which the strap is attached, showed the time as small digits in a crowded display, and had an alarm function, a stopwatch and a countdown timer. It ran for years before I had to change the battery.

The new one shows the time in letters large enough to be seen from the International Space Station, and has a stopwatch, five alarms but no countdown timer. Instead it has compass, barometer & temperature and altimiter functions and is the bestest watch since the chronometer I was given for my 15th birthday.

She also gave me Super Mario Cart for our Wii console, and I've been buried in it ever since. I've been addicted to this game for years in one or other of its many incarnations, but this one, with its wireless steering wheel gadget, is the best yet. Everyone knows now if they wander away from the TV during their favourite show, they may not get it back until the Mushroom Cup Challenge is over. Hence, the other members of the family have been hogging the TV set for days.

No matter, I can always play with my Hess truck, which this year is actually two racing cars, one hidden inside the other. Most of the Hess truck collectors I've spoken with confess to a slight disappointment with this year's model, and I'm one of them. The big car is the usual high-quality affair with lights and sound, and a lifting front section that opens to reveal a scalextric-sized second vehicle, a pull-back-and-go version of the larger car. The thing is, it's not a truck. I was still ~~playing with~~ studying last year's offering (a dump truck with front-end bucket loader) in late November, but I expect I'll pack this year's away soon. Hmm.

I also got a copy of the new four-player Super Mario Brothers game, which is spiffy but everything looks so small on our old-fashioned 27" TV I suppose I'll now have to buy a hucking fuge flatscreen in order to play it. Azathoth alone knows where I'll put such a thing though.

I also scored a magnetic poetry kit on the off-chance I suddenly develop an ear for the stuff, some tasty chox (scoffed), a desk calendar and the daftest multitool I've ever seen.

It features a hammer on one end and is so idiotic in concept it deserves its own post, so it'll get one. Mrs Stevie only bought it because I laughed so hard when I saw it hanging on a hardware store wall.

Mrs Stevie got a digital picture frame from me, as demanded with menaces two weeks before Xmas, a book set in Henry VIII's time that she also was most definite about and some fancy Roger & Gallet soap I scored from the only shop in NY that stocks it. I was careful to select one of their many fragrances that would most likely bring her out in an amusing rash, but either she hasn't used any yet or I need to pick another scent.

The Stevieling made out like a bandit. Mrs Stevie gave her a game for her DS handheld that she's been using every free moment to play, a speaker system for her iPod and cosmetics. I gave her some supplies for creative card and letter crafts (stamps, sealing wax and seals and so forth).

Mrs Stevie's big present to the Stevieling surprise was undermined by Bil the Elder giving the Stevieling The Beatles Rock Band game at our traditional Xmas Eve gathering. Mrs Stevie had bought the thing the day it came out, stood on line at 6 a.m. etc etc etc, and had crowed daily for the last three months about how clever she was, only to have the wind taken from her sails with less than 12 hours to go. I laughed and laughed until Mrs Stevie hit me in the head with a Christmas-themed china platter.

Good times.

Ho Ho Argh!

2009-12-24T22:55:00.003-05:00

Ho Ho Argh!

So tonight we had the traditional meet'n'gift exchange with the in-laws.

It was all very pleasant and a good time was had by most. Everyone gave people stuff they didn't need in the established western way, we ate food and regaled each other with tales of our exciting lives. It's true that my tales tended to induce either snores or sobs, sometimes both at the same time as the fact is my real-life stories induced snores in the listeners and sobs in me. Happy times.

On the way home the festive mood was ruined and we were almost killed when I was cut off by some idiot driving an overloaded vehicle with no regard for anyone else on the road. That the driver was drunk I have no doubt whatsoever. He was laughing like an idiot the whole time for all to hear. The poorly secured load was threatening to fall to the road at every jink and swerve, and I doubt the vehicle itself was legal for highway use in New York State.

Snow or no snow, an overloaded sleigh drawn by reindeer should not be on the public highway on Christmas Eve.

Teeth: A Bad Idea

2009-12-22T22:37:00.002-05:00

Time to tell the tedious tooth tale.

The eager reader of TOS¹ will remember that I was having trouble with an upper right-side molar³. I had been driving past Doc Tugmolar's surgery when a nugget of mercury amalgam weighing about a pound and a half fell out of my head, uncovering the delicate hurtybit inside the tooth.

"What a stroke of luck!" I remember crying out⁴ and had dashed in and made out a very good case for a temporary filling being fabricated for it immediately. I'd had the damn thing root-canalled, but the endodontist had pulled a face at the time and said the tooth was cracked and probably could not be saved.

During the next few weeks I went back and forth with one of Tugmolar's young associates as to whether it was worth even trying to cap the tooth. Leaving it as a stub like the other one was one option, but the dentist didn't think she could fill the tooth effectively without putting a crown on it, specifically a post-and-crown cap, which would involve putting a peg down the center of the tooth.

I thought that this plan would result in me spending a lot of money (for my insurance plan has an age-related exclusion clause on crowns⁵ which would make me liable for most of the 1600 bux this one would cost) and then, if things went the same way they did for the other cracked tooth I root-canalled, I would have to have it pulled anyway due to the agonising pain every time something brushed the tooth. If it was only going to have to come out anyway I'd just as soon be not 1600 dollars in the hole. There was also the matter of the endless stream of ear and sinus infections I was having, and the fact that my face felt like it was on fire much of the time. A cracked, infected tooth root snugged up against my sinus cavity was looking more and more like the route⁶ for the germs into Mr Head.

The dentist was most persuasive that the post would stabilize the tooth and called me in for the appointment to make the impression. I was in the chair about ten minutes while she X-rayed my jaw, then she came back and said that not only could the tooth not be capped owing to the severity of the crack, not only would it indeed have to come out, but that they couldn't pull it because the root was snugged up against the sinus cavity and I would therefore have to visit a oral surgeon.

They did recommend a surgeon, so I called and made an appointment. I discussed the details with the surgeon's PA, confirming that my insurance was good and so forth when the lady asked "Do you want to be awake for this procedure?".

"You offer general anaesthesia?" I asked.

"Of course" she answered.

"Will my insurance cover general anaesthetic?" I asked dubiously.

"Oh yes" she answered.

"Then I would most certainly not want to be awake" I said with feeling.

I mean, who would? There's the hundred and fifty jabs in the jaw, the horrible, bone-jarring cracking as the tooth is ripped out of your head, fragment by fragment (cracked, remember), the gallons of blood gushing from the gaping wound. Not to mention the bruising from the places the oral surgeon will have to grab your head to get the leverage required.

The only problem, such as it was, was that I would have to be ferried to and from the surgery. Mrs Stevie had plans to be in Manhattan with The Stevieling all day, but grudgingly allowed that she wouldn't be due to leave until after the surgery was done, so couldn't pass up the chance to see me in post-surgical agony and offered to drive me there and back.

On the day, I was X-rayed in surround-rad in a stand-up rig that gave me my yearly dose of Roentgens in 15 seconds, then I was conducted to the operating room and helped into the leather recliner that would be the scene of the action. Mrs Stevie announced she was leaving to get gas for her car, and I engaged the surgeon in conversation. I was in the middle of regaling him with one of my many witty stories, when he leapt onto me and stuck a needle into my arm. Long years of life with Mrs Stevie have granted me immunity from such minor assaults and so I didn't break the stream of my amusing narrative. Five seconds later, just before the hysterically funny climax of the tale, I passed out.

I was awakened some 45 minutes later by the frantic nurse who demanded to know where Mrs Stevie was. I wracked my brains, wooly from the aneasthetic and also because my head was stuffed with real cotton-wool, and realised I didn't know since I had no idea where she went for gas. The nurse started yelling about how she would have to take me home, but I couldn't pay attention to her because the room was swishing around and I was very tired, so I just said that she should leave me propped up in the waiting room until Mrs Stevie returned, at which point Mrs Stevie returned.

The rest of the day was spent attempting to shrug off the anaesthetic, which left me with the mental acuity of a drunken hedgehog for about 17 hours.

But.

The operation was painless and so was the recovery. Even after the sleepyhappy juice wore off I had absolutely no discomfort at the wound site. Mouth felt a bit odd with a hole in my toothline you could drive a bus through, and I drooled uncontrollably for three days, but no pain from that side of my mouth.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for the other side, where the stub of the other root-canalled tooth was cutting the hell out of my tongue. I think I was biting myself in my sleep, probably during nocturnal gnashing brought on by the need to do constant mental battle with the mercurial and ultra-violent Mrs Stevie. I stood it for a couple of weeks, then begged Tugmolar's team to give me an appointment so someone could file off the sharp edges. It's fine now, no biting my own body while I sleep and no more drooling and, finally, an end to the endless ear infections and burning sensations in my right cheek.

Oral Surgery is the best thing ever.

It is a central literary conceit of TOS that there are people who read it, and that they are eager for each installment².↑
In fact, a recent survey of the system logs here at TOS Ents (North America) Inc. have shown that almost 100% of the visitors to a given page promptly navigate back off it again in less than 12 micro-seconds, which outpaces even a sugared-up teenager's click-read-click rate by several orders of magnitude and strongly suggests these visitors are in fact robotic spiders dispatched by the various web search engines for book-keeping purposes. The small fraction of a percent of visitors who do not go somewhere else in a gnat's eyeblink do so after about two point eight seconds, suggesting they were directed here by the said search engines but were looking for other types of content. There's a way to figure out what they were looking for, and I would indeed offer such content if I could figure out a) how to get pictures onto TOS, 2) how to circumvent certain petty federal obscenity statutes and web host terms of service and ♥) how to persuade Mrs Stevie to pose with the various pieces of equipment and/or farm animals that seem to be in demand. Experience has taught me that Mrs Stevie has ultra-conservative views on such matters and a tendency to illustrate them by the percussive use of cookware on my skull↑
Number three for the dentophiles out there↑
Or words to that effect↑
I imagine this policy would most benefit young professional hockey players or kickboxers since apparently one can get all the crowns one can stand before a certain, undisclosed age, at which point you can't have any.↑
aHahaha↑

Good News For Once

2009-12-20T17:10:00.000-05:00

Mrs Stevie just got the results of her last tests in.

The PET scan shows no activity in the site at which she had the beginings of a tumour last year. This is about the best Christmas present anyone could have given her.

There had been some concern about something the PET scan had shown concerning her thyriod, or what's left of it (Mrs Stevie had Hashimoto's Disease shortly after we married and underwent a hemi-thyroidectomy). The results from the "thyroid uptake test" - whatever that is - just came in and she's "clean".

So all those life-insurance policies I took out on her were a collosal waste of money and yet another retirement investment scheme has gone nails-up.

And Then Came Saturday

2009-12-20T14:09:00.007-05:00

And Sunday too.

Saturday began with a bang when everyone in the whole world decided to get in the car with their dog and do some seriously witless driving, on account of there being two flakes of snow per cubic metre falling from the sky. This meant that the world was about to end and everyone knows you can't meet the end of the world without a cellar full of canned food (if you can get it, the early birds being up and about very early this morning). I wanted to go out to get my shirts from the dry cleaners and the part for the washing machine that stops it winding the legs of jeans and apron strings around the agitator drive shaft, so I was part of the fun whether I wanted to be or not.

Such was the chaos that it took me about four times longer to get my stuff from the cleaners as it usually does. The drive down to Sid's Appliance Parts and Ammo Shoppe was even more annoying and took so long, what with people forgetting how traffic lights work and deciding on novel interpretations of the lane markings that have only been on these roads for about thirty bleeping years, that it was snowing for real by the time I entered Sid's door.

Sid didn't have the part, either.

I returned home and, aided by Mrs Stevie, wrestled the electric Christmas bush o' merriment from it's storage niche in the garage and took it inside the house so Mrs Stevie could erect it and festoon it with crap. It was now mid-day and I already felt like I had gone eight hours with a tax inspector. But things were about to get worse. Immeasurably worse.

No sooner had Mrs Stevie deployed the first stage of the tree¹ than she found that a grand total of zero lights were working on it and demanded I fix them tootsweet, and my spirits, already low, sank south of utter depression.

The tree's lower stage has two strings, each running about halfway round the tree. I found a broken bulb, replaced it from a set of coloured lights I had bought years ago just for replacement bulbs (it's about a zillion times cheaper to do this than buy replacement bulbs in three packs) and half the bush sprang into glorious coloured illumination. The second string was to prove more of a ~~pain in the ass~~ challenge.

To find the blown bulb in a string, I normally remove one of the good bulbs from a similar set that is working and test each of the bulbs from the unlit string by plugging it into the working string, and this is what I did with the tree. At first I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Every bulb I tested in this fashion allowed the string to light but wouldn't light up itself. This is how Christmas lights are supposed to work these days, but who has ever seen it work properly? The mechanism is simple: the filament holds apart two spring-loaded contacts that slam together when the filament wire breaks.

Heh.

I think everyone has had experience with how well this works in real life, which is to say usually not at all. I'd put the ratio at one bulb that shorts itself when it blows for every three hundred that somehow still manage to take out the entire string. I had assumed this to be the case with the tree, but in fact I was seeing a textbook case of what happens when the mechanism does work but the bad bulb is not noticed.

Each bulb consumes some of the total electric power coming out of the wall. If one blows, each of the other bulbs gets a little more juice than it was intended to cope with, shortening their lifetimes. The next bulb blows, and the situation for the survivors gets that much worse, making for an even shorter time to failure for the survivors. Given enough time in service, it is possible for the shear amount of electricity coursing through the bulbs to cause a cascade of failures, each one quicker than the last until either the whole string is dead or one bulb fails in the more usual string-killing manner and puts a stop to the avalanche of popping bulbs.

I found myself hoping for this string-killing behaviour in one of the bulbs before I got through the entire string, but in fact I was 2/3 of the way round the tree and had replaced all but one bulb before the dead string of lights burst into glorious multi-hued splendour. I immediately unplugged them of course, because I noticed that the other 1/3 of the string was still un-illuminated and that that could only be because every single bulb from that point on was dead! Had I left the string plugged in, each bulb lit would have been overpowered by about 25 volts and I would be likely to see first hand the Wonder of the Popping Bulbs.

In all I changed over three dozen bulbs from that string. Only two bulbs from the originals were still working from the entire string of lights. And that was my Saturday shot to hellanback. By the time I was done it was after six and the snow was coming down hard.

Sunday dawned and I leapt from the marriage bed before Mrs Stevie could wake up and complicate matters and ran to the front door. Then I remembered the conversation with officer McDermot and went back for some clothes, then opened the door to survey the problem.

Snow was still falling, just, and had piled up in front of the storm door. I pushed it open and discovered I could get it to open enough for me to squeeze out with a snow shovel (unlike the year before last when I had to remove the glass from the storm door and climb out through it). We'd had about 15 inches of snow, which had drifted to several times that level in places, notably around the Steviemobile which had so much snow piled around it the hood (UK Bonnet) was below ground level.

I dug for about thirty minutes, opening up the deck, steps and front path, then waded through the knee-deep snow in the driveway to the garage. It was time to once again deploy the mighty Troll, The Snowblower Of Supreme Spiffiness.

Troll has a maw on it that is 27" wide and about 20" tall. Today, the snow was just the right sort for maximum fun - not too dry, not to wet, and so deep that Troll was tunneling for some of the time requiring second and third passes over the same terrain. How the early morning idiots attempting to drive on the roads marveled at the graceful arc of snow, twigs, small rocks and fragments of frozen turf that flew from Troll's ejection chute to a height of perhaps thirty feet before falling all over their vehicles². How they screamed their own enjoyment of the snow-clearance process to me as I in turn howled in the sheer primal joy of my manly domination over the mounds of soft, frozen inconvenience lying about the place.

I did our driveway, the sidewalk in front of my house and that of Mr Singh the next-door neighbour, Mr Singh's drive, because Mr Singh has rescued my bins from the road and cleaned out the leaves from the property boundary which was half my job and I like him. I was just mulling over whether I had enough gas to go and clear Mike's driveway when Troll mutinied and refused to move any more.

Once my brain was clear of endorphins, which it was quite soon after the manliness factor evaporated, I realized something serious had gone wrong with my beloved snowblower. The self-propulsion drive was inoperative probably due to the malign influence of the dread anti-handyman demons, which had been quiet - too quiet - of late. I dragged Troll back to the garage and located the manual for it which for once I had not put in a Safe Place and therefore rendered un-findable until the snowblower was but a dim memory. It looked like the problem could be one of two things: a) the drive belt could be broken, or 2) the drive wheel could be damaged.

The transmission on these devices is fairly straightforward. The engine spins a shaft, which drives two belts, one for the self-propulsion drive and one for the augur (the thing that munches the snow, then throws it over Mr Singh's garden wall). The self-propulsion belt drives a wheel oriented vertically across the width of the machine. A second wheel, much smaller and with a rubber rim, can be brought into contact with this spinning wheel to transfer the motion to the wheels via a chain-and-cog reduction gear. Why so convoluted? Because you derive the speeds by moving the small wheel across the diameter of the larger spinning wheel with the "gear shift" lever. In near the middle of the spinning wheel gives you a slow speed, out near the rim gives you a much faster one³ and across the center and over to the other side a bit gives you reverse. Simple and fairly robust, but a bugger to service because it means pulling the snowblower apart.

I removed the cab, which was heavy and made tipping Troll up on her scoop almost impossible. Fortunately, the manufacturer foresaw the need to occasionally be cabless and it is a matter of undoing two ripstock nylon belts and removing two cotter pins to get the cab off. Finding somewhere to leave the cab while you work is another matter, but I managed to find somewhere that wouldn't result in a damaged window. Then I upended Troll and removed the steel plate covering her underside to reveal the works. Turns out it was in fact option þ) that was broken. The final chain-driven cog that turns the roadwheels is mounted to the axle with a bolt. This bolt had broken. I thought it might be a shear-pin (something that is designed to break to prevent something much more expensive being broken) but I wasn't sure and it would be an odd place to put one. I couldn't get to any local Sears likely to stock the part (and I doubt that any Sears stocks the part anyway) so I nipped down to Arse Hardware where they very kindly sold me a suitable bolt and nylock nut. It was a very pleasant shopping experience, which if it hadn't involved driving on the same roads as the other idiots out doing Xmas shopping and trying to get ice-melt at this late stage in the game would have been idyllic. Said idiots included a number of teen and twentysomething morons on quads racing around at far above the speed limits, ignoring the everyday restrictions on overtaking, traffic light precedence and so forth and posing a threat to life and limb. One, for example, blew through a red light on a main road and came this close to going under a car that was spinning its wheels, and which made contact with tar and catapulted forward - with a green light - almost hitting the berk on the quad, who had the nerve to look surprised. It's bad enough when these quad and skidoo morons come out on the roads late at night when there's little to no traffic, but to do it on a main road in busy traffic? Idiocy of the first order. While I was ploughing out the drive I saw a couple of quads come screaming up behind a convoy of slow-moving cars (the road was still snow-covered at that point) and the quads pulled out into the oncoming traffic's lane and hit the gas. I was absolutely flabbergasted that people could be so monumentally suicidal. Bear in mind that these vehicles are not legal on the roads and therefore their drivers carry no insurance. The threat they pose to children playing in the snow - themselves not noted for common sense when the whit stuff is abounding - is terrifying.

Anyway, I bought the bolts and some snow-melt on account of mine had migrated from the place I put it at the front of the garage in July to Places Unknown⁴ and returned to Chateau Stevie to fix Troll.

I'm well aware that replacing what might be a shear pin with an ordinary bolt is a) asking for trouble, 2) an enormous and potentially costly gamble and ♥) akin to replacing a troublesome fuse with a coin, but there may be another dose of this white stuff coming our way and a buggeréd snowblower beats a buggeréd heart any day of the week.

I tested everything worked, put all the bits I took off Troll back on, pumped up the tires which I noticed during the drag back from Mr Singh's driveway were flat for some reason and, infused with sheer manly fixiness turned my attention to the matter of the Steviemobile's blown headlamp.

The drivers' side headlamp has been dead since at least the time I last loaned the car to Mrs Stevie (I only say that because that's the first time in ages I've seen the car at night from the outside, not to infer that Mrs Stevie somehow broke the lamp - though I wouldn't put it past the woman). I bought a new bulb, anticipating the same job that I had when I replaced the other one. Remove the bayonet fitting dirt cover, undo the clips unplug the bulb, put in the new one and do everything else in the reverse order you did to get the old bulb out. Easy.

The drivers' side one is a tad more involved. Following a design ethic that I haven't yet fathomed, the Elantra design crew called for the drivers' side headlamp to be entombed in front of the battery, itself fastened down with a clamp and then obscured by a plastic cover bolted to the engine with a bolt and to the front metalwork of the car with Phillips head screws. No problem then. Out comes my TR6-era Hilka socket set, lovingly brought from England and now showing signs of rust since someone left it near the garage door during a storm and water splashed all over it in such profusion it got into the closed steel case. Where was I? Oh right.

The bolt came out no problem, but two of the three screws simply turned without unscrewing, while the third locked tight and then the screwdriver slot chewed up since the screw was made of soft engineering plastic. If I was going to pick an unfeasible material to fabricate screws from I'd go with poster-putty, then ice, then this engineering plastic, though it would be a close thing between the three materials as to which was the most ridiculous choice. The spinning without coming out behavior was simple to divine. It was caused by the fact that the screws did not screw into a threaded hole in the steel, but into a rawlplug-like device similar to those things you put in plasterboard to hold shelf brackets on with. The plastic plug swells up (in this case deploying four stubby "wings") to lock it in place while providing a surface for the screw thread to bite into. My best guess is that mechanics simply cut these off and replace them in the shop when they need to get the battery out.

Exhaustive study showed no other obvious way of replacing the bulb, though I did try to remove the headlamp module and work on it while it hung off the car. I failed to find the hidden third bolt securing the damned headlamp module to the car after a half hour of looking, and so was reduced to deploying some class three words of power and resigning myself to getting the job done when the next service comes due.

I went out to a Pep Boys, a sort of American version of Halfords crossed with Clutch Brake Autospares, with a view to obtaining the Haynes Manual for the vehicle, to see how the trick was done.

Now Haynes Manuals got off to a running start when they published their first book, the one on the early minis. This book was a diamond in the rough and an indispensable piece of any mini-owner's arsenal as it gave incredibly practical advice on how to do literally everything to a mini, from changing the wiper blades to rebuilding the gearbox. It scored over the Austin/Morris (later Leyland) workshop manual on just about every job, not the least because the tools required were described and, where possible, improvised rather than the Morris standard Service Tool 18G-something⁵

It might have been expected that every Haynes manual would be so complete and well thought out, but in fact that was not the case. Indeed, judging from my own experience and that of people I've spoken to on the subject, none of the other Haynes manuals achieve the clarity and error-free procedure schedules of the Mini manual, and there's a good reason for that. The reason is that the compiler of that first manual was Paddy Hopkirk, who rallied Minis in the late 60s and early 70s and who developed a series of radical procedures for quickly servicing these cars⁶ and therefore not only knew every shortcut and trick in the book, invented the tricks and wrote the book. The man was a genius. Not so the man who oversaw the Vaxhaul Viva manual, and who miscounted - low - the number of bolts holding the water pump to the engine block, or the nitwit who advised me to undo the eight bolts holding the prop shaft on my TR6 to the rest of the drive train and simply lower it to the floor and forgot that on a real car there was an exhaust system in the way.

With this in mind, I decided to read the bit on the headlamps before I bought the Haynes Hyundai Elantra manual. Good thing too, because the instructions read: remove the dust cover, undo the clips, remove the bulb and unplug the wires. To install a new bulb, reverse the procedure. I'm paraphrasing, but my version is not that far from the Haynes one and the salient point is that there is no acknowledgement whatsoever that there might be a bit of a problem when it comes to doing the driver side bulb because some fat-head put a battery and a big plastic cover in the way. No sale there then.

So, as of today I still have only one headlamp because I could not get the battery cover off no matter how much I swore. I mean, is it really necessary in this day and age, when buying a car to have to ask the salesman "can I change the headlamp bulbs without substantially dismantling the vehicle"? So I'll just have to give the mechanic at the dealership the bulb and ask them to fit it for me.

At a standard rate of 80 bux per hour or part thereof.

There are three, rather like a Saturn 5 moon rocket except greener, needley instead of frosty and each stage has umpteen strings of lights pre-strung on it instead of being filled with cryogenic rocket fuel. The first stage has two, the second four or more. The third only one, I think. It's pretty right up to the time they don't work.↑
Troll is very loud - and therefore very manly - and I can't hear motorists approaching even when they sound their horns almost continuously and scream through their open windows so it is sometimes the case that a foolish driver, more intent of getting to their destination than pulling up until I'm done with that bit, will be forced to drive through the ejecta plume. This is very unwise, but then again, so was driving on the roads that day.↑
If you don't get this point, pop the lid on your CD player and look at the rate at which the outside of a spun disc zooms along compared with the middle for the same rate of spin (rpm). If you steal your final speed from the disc you should see that it matters where on the disc you steal it from↑
Stuff migrates in my garage, especially during bike-riding weather, without my touching it. This means something.↑
every tool in the official workshop manual was referred to not by common name but by an alphanumeric identifier that started with 18G-. Something that was described as Service Tool 18G-451-763B might be better known as a hammer for example, yet the workshop manual eschewed such pedestrian terms.↑
Which were so small and light you have to wonder why no-one else thought to just turn them on their sides instead of jacking them to change the wheels and look at the underside gubbins↑

A Bad Day

2009-12-20T14:06:00.004-05:00

Friday started out as a much better day.

I compose may of my TOS posts on an aging Handspring Visor that I have repaired and resurrected many times, but that has recently developed a very inconvenient habit. It powers itself off if it gets a physical shock because the battery (or the battery connections) are disconnected from the unit. If I don't notice and rearrange the two AAA cell batteries it runs on and by doing so restore the power in a relatively short time, the bloody thing forgets everything and I have to restore it from a backup.

Like everyone in real life, I don't backup the Visor anywhere near enough for my usage of it, which means stuff gets lost. If I don't have a paper backup (I do for some of the things I use it for) I am up a certain creek without a paddle.

This morning, wile commuting in to work, I had composed the beginnings of a very nice TOS entry and was planning on working on it on the way home. You can guess what comes next. Sometime during the day the bloody Visor took a hit and forgot the future TOS entry. I had a backup on a so-called springboard module (a forerunner of today's memory sticks) so I could get it back up and running but it was thouroughly annoying.

This evening, the train began moving, and proved to be one of what I call the "Seaview" trains that throw the passengers violently from side-to-side if the track is not arrow-straight, such as in the Flatbush Aenue to Jamaica section of track. The train just crossed a switch and almost threw me from my seat, so this evening's commute looks like being a real doozy.

While I was waiting for the restore to finish, the train smashing me first against my co-commuters and then against the window, my water bottle contrived to upend itself on the seat. This would not have been a problem last year when water bottles typically had a pull-to-drink nipple on them, but these days the bottled water companies fit flip-top nipples and the damned thing leaked all over the seat, me, my coat and my book.

And people wonder why I'm constantly in a foul mood after my commute.

It's Getting Better All The Time

2009-12-01T21:36:00.001-05:00

Just heard President Obama's address to the nation on the subject of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you didn't catch it, he touched briefly on what Operation Iraqi Boondoggle¹ aka The Phony War² has cost us. This has been the Fact No-One Must Ever Mention until now because doing so would cause members of the previous administration to scream "Why do you hate America?" and froth at the mouth. Listening to these swine yap on about how we must cut education and health coverage to kick-start the economy when a thousand times more money is poured into a war we should never have started in the first place and another we should have piled in weeks before we did has made me froth at the mouth for years.

Anyway.

The President has promised that we will be out of Iraq by next summer or so (schedules in these sorts of affairs being a tad slidey) and that we finally have an exit strategy for Afghanistan. About bloody time.

Afghanistan is a real problem. No-one has been able to get the place in order because the only thing that will grow there in any sort of profusion is poppies, and the illicit drug trade only makes a few select individuals rich, not a country. Shutting the drug trade down and turning the land over to conventional crops is a non-starter. But I would like to know if anyone has considered getting the pharmaceutical companies to fund bigger poppy crops for more benign purposes. The way you get rid of loony regimes is to make everyone rich as Croesus. Give everyone a chance at paradise on Earth and they won't be so eager to scatter their bodies over the landscape on a hunt for however many virgins the going rate is today. Is there no legitimate way to make the opium crop pay for Afghani education and infrastructure?

It remains to be seen whether or not this charismatic young President can energise the people of the USA and get them behind him and his many agendas. The political landscape here right now is a joke. Eight years of a regime that threw away or simply disregarded every check or balance put in place to prevent unilateral power developing in the Executive branch (and a lickspittle Congress and Senate that let them get away with it), followed by an almost unprecedented turfing out of the old guard in favour of the new, and now there's "worry and concern" about checks and balances from the right.

Politicians who can't understand the difference between a public spectacle put on by shills for the insurance industry and the State of the Union speech. Mendacious, evil, manipulative people who, against all reason, can still find an audience for their monumentally stupid "birther" blather⁴, and I don't know what other madnesses today will bring. The only way to stay sane is to contemplate one blindingly obvious and unquestionable truth:

It's good to have a man in control of the Nuclear Deterrent who can actually pronounce it properly. The last bloke to sit in the chair got it wrong on a daily basis for eight long, long years.

My title↑
AKA by me³↑
And probably me alone↑
That's the one that goes: We believe that the President is a citizen, but some people have legitimate doubts. The President should produce his birth certificate and end the debate. Until this unspeakably idiotic nonsense came about I had thought the stories that mainstream America was racists at heart were overblown, but how else can you explain how people could possibly believe that the issue of a candidate's citizenship wouldn't be a matter of intense scrutiny before his or her party would think of endorsing a run for office?↑

Playin' The Slots

2009-12-01T21:04:00.000-05:00

Why do the designers of machines that accept credit cards for whatever service it is that will cost the user deep in t'purse make it so bleeding difficult to actually swipe¹ the card to complete or, more often, initiate the transaction?

Consider: The vast majority of the world is right-handed² and so will pull the credit card from a wallet, purse or little Kevlar™ envelope with the right hand. The natural action would then be to take the card orient it so that it is vertical with respect to its short edges and attempt to insert it in the slot provided.

The MTA machines that sell metrocards for use on the subway require the card be inserted flat, with the magnetic band pointed down, on the left side of the machine. The card must be oriented with the stripe to the right though, so even a lefty will be in trouble here. No doubt there is a sound design principle at work here. If only it were a little more obvious.

The LIRR ticket machines have the slot (again, card goes in flat with the stripe down) on the right, but at such a height that the user must employ an awkward cocked wrist arrangement. Then again, the LIRR has a long history of incompetence and being bloody awkward just for the heck of it, so we shouldn't look for more from them.

Gas pumps often employ a vertical slot. Huzzah! But the card has to go in backwards (lefty-fashion) so on any given day you can see drivers madly revolving their credit cards to get the bloody pump to recognise the bloody card. This is not funny, because these days a five second delay in swiping the card can mean another 5 cents a gallon for regular unleaded. I mean, if we had been put on the Earth to pay exorbitant gas prices we'd have been born in Europe!

Point-of-sale swipes usually require the card be upside-down and back-to-front. No doubt this arrangement won a major design award for someone.

Much more of this and I'll be forced back into using cash. Would do so now, only I haven't got any to speak of.

See, the ATM machine at my bank can only be unlocked by swiping my card and I can't figure out which of the four possible (horizontal) orientations actually unlocks the bulletproof glass door instead of flashing a little red light at me and sounding a buzzer.

in the US sense rather than the UK one↑
Un-PC but indisputably a fact. Swivel on it, lefty southpaw losers!↑

An Ode To My Ex-Tooth

2009-10-25T12:04:00.002-04:00

There's a hole in my head
Where a tooth used to be
I'd write a bit more
But I have to go pee

Teeth - Forswear Them

2009-10-22T00:31:00.004-04:00

Remember the root canal I had in June?

A problem involving my pig-useless dental insurance plan meant that it took until the end of last month before I could move forward with the crown and peg the dentist had been recommending. I also wanted to examine the options since the damned tooth was cracked and hurt like blazes when subjected to sideways force despite having no nerves in it any more. This was exactly the same as the last one I had done, and I wanted to make sure the dentist was sure about her descision and that she was clear the crown would have to sit below the datum line of the other teeth so it would stand a chance of 'settling down" (a technical phrase thrown about by dentists).

Anyway, I was finally convinced and had the insurance go-ahead (they were going to pay about 250 bux of a 1400 bux bill by the way). The dentist removed what was left of the temporary filling (replaced several times over the months), then whent "Hmm" and decided to take an(other) X-Ray. She now announced that not only was she sure she couldn't fit the crown on account of the crack, but the tooth would have to be pulled - something I had been trying to get her to discuss weeks before on account of I don't have 1200 bux lying around for a tooth that will probably need pulling out 6 months after it is crowned.

Not only that, she told me that because the root was nestled up against my sinus cavity (which explained all the ear and throat infections I've had in recent years), she couldn't pull it. I would have to go to an oral surgeon.

The Oral surgeon's personal assistant was very helpful and determined that my insurance would cover full anaesthesia, so I should be asleep for the duration of this miserable business. There's even a slight chance I might not wake up afetrward, which makes it all the more attractive to me after the year I've had so far, but I couldn't be that lucky.

The tooth comes out on Saturday at around 10:30 am, setting me up for a weekend of sheer misery. Mrs Stevie has been supportive, and has offered to drive me to and from the dentist's office. She rather spoiled the moment by grinning savagely and rubbing her hands together as she made the offer, but I need a ride apparently; they won't let me drive myself after the surgery. I don't know if that's because of the anaethetic or because driving while screaming in agony and trying to strangle yourself into merciful oblivion is considered unsafe.

The aftercare will be a solo affair it seems, as Mrs Stevie has elected to go into Manhattan with the Stevieling rather than minister to me in my hour(s) of need.

Rong Agen

2009-09-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

Well, that didn't take long.

I recently detailed how two nitwits pulled into the hard shoulder behind a tractor-trailer rig under the impression they were in a turning lane, and I explained how no truck driver would have been so monumentally dimwitted as to use the hard shoulder as a turning lane because their vehicles have such a wide turning circle.

This morning I observed a tractor trailer rig do just that at the turn before the railway bridge, the one with the doughnut shop on the corner. In order not to mount the curb he had to pull so far ahead of the turn that he came this close to clipping someone trying to turn left out of the road he wanted to enter.

So once again my "I'm an unlauded genius" theory has gone down under the wheels of Mrs Stevie's "You're A Nidiot" premise.

Goodnight Pool

2009-09-28T22:09:00.004-04:00

It is that time of year again.

More precisely, it is weeks before that time of year has taken place in years gone by, because come hell and high water I wasn't going to be attempting to shut down the swimming pool in a force ten October gale while the womenfolk stretched out in the house and watched TV.

Accordingly, I raced out of the house on Saturday, pulled off the solar cover and vacuumed up all the crap the Maple tree had dumped in it over the week. I cleaned up all the air pillows with a scrubbing brush, and got the crud off the solar cover while I was at it. Curse that aerial plague on mankind known as "birds".

Conventional wisdom says you should tether a 4-foot diameter balloon in the middle of a pool our size before covering it with a winter cover. This allows the cover to fill with rainwater that holds the cover down in gales. Over the course of the winter months the trees, birds and insects conspire to convert this "water" into a soup of such disgusting olefactoriness that it defies description. Steviewisdom says "sod that for a game of soldiers". Last year I augmented the 4 foot pillow with three 4x8 foot blimps, and apart from some teething troubles when it rained so much the cover almost burst with the pooled weight of water it went rather well.

Well enough that I decided to up the oomph, blue vinyl balloon count wise, and purchased another 4x8 foot pillow and a 4x15 foot one that I envisaged forming a sort of ridge pole for the tented cover.

Inflating these things is a bit tiresome to be honest. They do not have a standard fitting such as one might find on a vinyl dolphin, inner tube with a pillow, fancy airbed or other non-life-preserving swimming pool fun-enhancer. They have instead a one-inch plug that has a sort of inexpensive one-way valve underneath it when you pull it out. This means that standard fittings on compressors or hand-pumps will not work, a decision that was no-doubt taken for consumer convenience reasons.

The proper method for inflating an air pillow is as follows:

Go down into the basement and retrieve shop-vac.

Spend fifteen minutes locating the hose which you removed three months ago, the last time you used it, when the damned thing attempted to snag you with its tentacle as you walked by it. Twice.

Wrestle shop-vac up basement stairs, dislodging carrier bags of crap hung on walls at shoulder height by spouse and child so that the contents form a satisfactory hazard the next time you descend those same stairs.

Bang head on door at top of stairs and come this close to going arse-over-tip down them.

Emerge into light of day clutching shop-vac and hurl it onto living room floor so the power cord can unspool.

Wrestle the shop-vac out of back door and tangle power cord on screen-door handle, slamming said door on left elbow punching a hole in screen.

Disentangle power cord from screen door, pick up shop-vac and stumble over hose.

Fall down short flight of concrete steps, twisting right ankle and give siding of house a good banging with head.

Once shop-vac is successfully situated on the patio, deploy hose in "blow" configuration.

IMPORTANT - connect vacuum to power supply and switch on while pointing hose away from anything you care about, own body, windows, car etc, so as to avoid a repeat of the Low Compression Air-Powered Sawn-Off Shrapnel Gun Fiasco.

Lay out air pillow on clean lawn furniture so as to not pick up crud from the floor and thereby transfer it to the pool - once was enough for that oversight.

Unplug air hole and poke finger in to bend back flap of valve otherwise it will take all day.

Grasp air hole fitting by making a ring from your index finger and thumb underneath the plastic valve.

Switch on vacuum.

Leaping smartly aside to avoid flailing hose, switch vacuum off again.

Grasp hose under right armpit wile grasping valve of air pillow as described before with left hand.

Switch on vacuum.

Flail about for ten seconds attempting to get right radius and ulna to spontaneously develop extra joint.

Turn off vacuum.

Grip hose between manly thighs, ignoring unseemly comments by family members, neighbours and other onlookers, grip air pillow valve as described before in left hand and switch on vacuum. By pressing vacuum on the ring formed by your finger and thumb you will eventually persuade the air pillow to inflate.

Wash blue vinyl blimp with hose to get all the stuff off that stuck to it anyway, and transfer pillow to pool, fighting sudden gale-force wind gusts, and lash at each diagonal with ratty clothesline.

Repeat.

The process became much more fun with the 4x15 foot pillow, which in only half an hour went from being an unwieldy, unmaneuverable, heavy blue vinyl tarpaulin to an extremely unwieldy, unmaneuverable, unaccountably even heavier blue one-inch-to-the-foot scale model of The Hindenburg. With perfect timing a small gale blew up just as I was getting a proper hold on the damned thing and I was swept around the garden from pillar to post, augmenting my manly grip with that of my manly teeth and, on one occasion, one of my legs too, all the while chanting the most powerful charms against the forces arrayed against me in a World Gone Mad. My vocabulary came into its own when I was slammed up against the razor-sharp corners of Mrs Stevie's four-burner barbecue which had decided to join the fun and become just mobile enough in the windy chaos to intercept me as I was pushed backwards and cushion what could have been a nasty collision with something not sharp at all.

Well, to cut a long story shorter, I finally had all these pillows inflated and resting in the water, ready for me to apply the pool cover. Which was when I realised that I had never gotten around to cleaning the crud of it last spring. I had no time to do it now. The topside was clean because I had managed, in typical a moment of genius, to lash the damned thing on upside-down last autumn. But I emphatically did not want the dirty side anywhere near my pristine clean pool what I had spent lo! These Many Hours that morning cleaning out. So I once again mounted the cover on the pool in inverted configuration. This wasn’t optimal because the seams are tucked under and form places where filth can be washed to form colonies of Azathoth-knows what if they point up and out but I was at the end of Mr Tether by then and speaking in tongues. It is my hope that the tented arrangement will allow the dirt to rinse off in the coming fall monsoons.

I had no more ratty clothesline for temporary cover securage, so I cut up one of my nice sheathed ropes. Normally, this would have been unthinkable, but it was getting late, the wind was getting up and I was getting fed up. With the cover on I set the pump to run for twelve hours and dropped in a “winterizing orb”, which is basically a way of adding copper sulphate to the water as an anti-fungal/algaecide. It didn’t work last year, but I noticed they’d changed the instructions and so gave it one more go. Worse comes to worse, I’ll just eat one load of diatomaceous earth next season by vacuuming up the crud at the start of the season. This new filter is so good I was tempted to not bother winterizing at all to tell the truth. The D.E. is so cheap it won’t matter if I have to completely clean out and rebuild the filter after the first cleaning next year, and the water stays clean.

Once the pool was down for the count I dismantled the tent gazebo and packed it into the garage, then called it a day. Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling are off to see Hamlet on Broadway tomorrow so I can get on with productive stuff then. I retired inside to staunch my wounds, shower and mess around with what Mrs Stevie is pleased to call "pointless crap".

I’d earned my supper this day.