The Block

When I decided to start this thing I had so many things I wanted to write about. But now I'm just drawing a blank. It seemed like a great idea at the time - an outlet for all my ideas and thoughts and blah, blah, blah. Blank.

So I guess I'll have to tell you a story.

Herman was a ladybug. Not very lady-like, I know, but Herman wasn't your ordinary ladybug. He was terrified of flying because whenever he was off the ground he got airsick. Airsick? It's the damndest thing I'd ever heard too, but I'll tell you I've seen it for myself.

When he was just a little pupa, he had a horrible experience. A bird got hold of the leaf he was cringing on afraid he was about to get eaten. But the bird wasn't looking for a quick snack, she was grabbing leaves and twigs to make her nest. She took him so high in the air and over a lake that he was sure he was going to fall in the water and be devoured by a hungry fish. When he got stuffed safely into the nest he vowed to never leave the ground again.

The problem with Herman's promise is that ladybugs fly. A lot. It's pretty much their only means of transportation and, as he found out, walking from plant to plant takes an awful long time. He would stay on the plants hunting aphids long after all his friends had moved on to better pastures in the garden.

And oh how his friends mocked him. "Don't stand under Hurlin' Herman when he takes off! You'll get a faceful of aphid." "Here comes Heavin' Herman again!"

It was the worst shame he'd ever felt in his short life. It only took him a few weeks of ridicule before he came to see me about his fear of heights. We talked through his phobias until we were blue in the face, but I couldn't get him to leave the ground for anything. I finally decided that I'd get my friend the Paul the Praying Mantis to jump at him from behind the doorway to scare him into flight. It worked like a charm.

When he'd been up in the air for several seconds I yelled "Hey Herman, you're flying!"

He looked at me, looked at the ground, and promptly threw up on my carpet. It looked something like this:

*

Safety first.

I do heating and air conditioning for a living and one of the primary objectives of my job is customer safety. In my opinion this comes before customer comfort. If we find equipment that is unsafe, we're required to inform the customer of the situation and then, if they want to leave the equipment operational, they are required to sign a release form saying that they know it's not safe to operate but are willing to do it anyway.

Last week one of the technicians I work with went to a commercial property and found a furnace with a bad high temperature safety cutout and two large holes in the heat exchanger. The high temp cutout is designed to turn of a furnace if the temperature gets too high. As he was supposed to, he informed the manager and turned off power and gas to the unit until the owner could decide what he was going to do. Today we get a call from the owner saying that another company came out and said that the heat exchanger was fine and the unit only needed a new temperature switch.

So I just got back from the frigid roof - 35 degrees and high winds - trying to confirm a hole in the heat exchanger. The two holes were pretty hard to miss if you actually took out three screws, removed a cover and looked. When I looked at the burner section I was rather surprised to find this:

If you can't read small yellow text: Left arrow - "Hole where high temp limit should be" Right Arrow - "Wires that are spliced together to bypass safety." Sorry, camera phone.

The company who came out to give a second opinion bypassed one of the most important safeties on this furnace. If, for some reason, either the blower fails or the gas valve sticks open there is now nothing to keep this unit from overheating and possibly causing a fire. It makes me wonder how this guy sleeps at night.

Next came the joy of telling the store manager what was going on and giving him the option of shutting it off or signing the release form I had in my hand. His main concern was for his customers, but when the release form came out he did the smart thing.

I know this one is particularly long, but I have to just say that I take great pride in what I do and stuff like this just really pisses me off. Someone was willing to take a dangerous shortcut with other people's safety to either gain a customer or prove another company wrong. Looking like the good guy isn't worth all that to me.

Testing, testing

Sometimes I just don't want to log on to firefox and go through the steps of opening up my blog account if I've got something to put down before it flies out of my brain.  So I've decided to try Windows Live Writer to create offline and upload whenever I feel like it.  We'll see if this one shows up.

 

Edit: I guess it works. Rather well too I might add.  I have to give props to MS on their new "Live" line of products.  To find this one follow the LINK.

My God, the local news

So I'm sitting here reading the news online and the local news is on the TV, which is rare because the TV is hardly ever on in this house, and they keep teasing a story that I don't really care about. Ever since 5 after 10, or whenever they go to their first break, they've been saying "Coming up next, a story on how close people are to identity theft", or some such crap. I turned it off at 10 till 11 and they were still saying the same thing. I know they're hard up for viewers, but damn that stuff drives me nuts.

Going to Beantown

Last year I think we started what I hope will be a continuing tradition. While we were in New York we caught a Thrashers game a Madison Square Garden. We were going to NY to see an Atlanta Symphony concert at Carnegie Hall and the Thrashers just happened to be in town at the same time.

This year we were planning a trip to Maine to visit grampy and my very astute wife realized that the Thrashers are playing in Boston the weekend we were thinking about going. Through some creative Travelocity manipulation she was able to get us a flight into Boston, tickets to the game, a rental car at Logan International, and a hotel in Maine for about $500 per person. I think that's a pretty good deal. Kudos to B for being persistent!

So in what I hope is year 2 in a long tradition of watching our home team playing in an out of town arena, we'll be proudly wearing the colors of Blueland in Beantown.

The Deal Addiction

Over the past year or so I've found out about some very cool, and some not so good, deals sites. Some of them have adopted the woot! style of one item per day until it's gone style and others are compilations of great deals around the web.

I got started with this while looking at I hacked, a pretty cool site dedicated to making things work better. And a few things that could get you into trouble if someone saw you do it. While cruising around their site I found a link to what is now my favorite deal page around slickdeals.net, a forum page dedicated to online and offline deals around the country. Most of the people that post here are linking to technology deals, but you can find everything from restaurant coupons to kids' toys. Some of the items are even free after rebates and price matching to other stores. It all depends on how far you're willing to go to get something free, cheap, or even get money back. So far I've managed a free hard drive and a free coffee maker. Along the lines of slickdeals are two other pretty good sites: Fatwallet and gottadeal.

Now for the addiction part. Every morning I get up, make coffee, and sit down at the computer. The first page I visit is Woot! and if there's nothing of interest I have a bookmark for about 10 other one item/ one day sites that I check out. Then if I have time I'll cruise around slickdeals for a little while and see if there is anything I just have to have.

THE DANGER

Eventually you're going to find something you don't really need but it's such a good deal that you have to buy one and find a use for it. Like the hard drive and the coffee maker. Or worse, one of the one item per day sites will have a mystery bag for $5.00 and you order one on the chance that you're the one who gets the x-box 360 or the LCD tv. What you end up getting is crap most of the time. They don't lie, though, when they say that whatever comes will be worth at least what you pay for it. You just wind up with crap worth $5.00.

So beware. Once you start in on the deal hunting it gets very time consuming. All the rebate forms to mail and keep track of, trying to find deals to post on the sites for other people to find, and staring at forum after forum can take up hours at the blink of an eye. Other than that it's pretty fun.