A long time ago I was talking with some folks on the Facebook about the Route 1/130 traffic circle. The site of countless crashes over the decades – from fender-benders to fatalities – the infamous circle was finally replaced by a modern flyover-style intersection.
Eventually I moved the photos over to Google+ to reach a wider audience.
Here I’m testing the Google+ API that allows embedding of posts. I’m pleased to say it works well.
Enjoy.
The other night the Ford F150 left us stranded.
On the way to the local Johnny Rockets we hit some heavy rain. Some of the puddles on the right side of the road were rather deep and I found myself quite glad for the new tires we put on some months back. They cut right through but sent water flying everywhere. The truck didn’t miss a beat. We lucked out and parked right in front of the eatery, and went inside to consume heart attack inducing burgers washed down with some of the best milkshakes on Earth.
Satiated, we left the restaurant and climbed into the truck. I knew something was wrong the instant the key moved through the positions, the usual sounds and bongs were… well, they were different.
The mini message center displayed a cryptic message: Check Gauges in that odd font that LCDs use when making text from a limited set of segments. No starter crank at all. Instead, only an audible click coming from the fuse box under the passenger side kick-panel.
Hoping to avoid a call to Triple-A I dialed some friends to beg a ride (thanks Randy & Rose!), intending to leave the truck where it sat and troubleshoot in the morning. I felt pretty strongly that the problem was moisture-related – that was an awful lot of water! Maybe it would dry out overnight.
Around noon the following day I returned. The truck started as though nothing happened. I listened for a few minutes – nothing odd – turned it off and went home to get Pam to drive the thing home.
The round trip took about an hour. Pam jammed the key in and… yup, no crank! I got behind the wheel and gave the key a few disgusted twists. Wonder of wonder it fired and settled into a welcome idle. Pam drove it home without incident. But in the driveway it wouldn’t start again until the problem was found and solved.
When it comes to auto (and motorcycle) repairs there’s nothing in the world like the actual factory shop manuals. I have ’em for all our vehicles – except this truck. That’s because you can’t simply buy the shop manual for the F150. About the best you can do without springing for an expensive subscription to the online manual – like a dealer has – is to rent access to a section for a day. And that really sucks! So when things go wrong this truck either goes to the dealer or I use the Internet to learn from those before me.
The first likely candidate for failure seemed to be the Fuel Pump Driver Module (FPDM). This aluminum and plastic box, which regulates fuel pressure by modulating the voltage pulses sent to the fuel pump, is mounted directly to a steel crossmember under the bed, above the spare tire. The dissimilar metals tend to corrode the FPDM’s case, eventually allowing water to harm the circuitry inside. Water. I dropped the spare and unbolted the module, disconnected the single plug and brought it to the bench. The metal case was plenty corroded but intact. I didn’t open the plastic cover. Back onto the truck it went, with no change in symptoms. I never learned whether FPDM failure would cause a no-crank condition, or simply a no-start condition.
I entered the truck’s test mode and scrolled through the displays in mini message center. I found DTCs D900 and D950, but searching online for those codes brought no insight. It seemed like there was fuel pressure, consistent with an undamaged FPDM. There was lots of other stuff in the displays but much was undecipherable.
I figured it was time to add a new tool to my collection: a reader to plug into the truck’s diagnostic port. I grabbed one of the bikes and took a ride down to the local parts store, the nearest was Advance Auto Parts. I intended to just get a simple reader but ended up going a little more spendy for a unit that promised to talk to my Android phone and deliver more comprehensive information. The device I bought is called U-Scan by Actron, model number CP9599.
I had problems with the CP9599. It didn’t seem to want to talk to my truck – but it had no trouble at all talking to my Jeep. This proved to be an important clue. Instead of just some random failure, now the trouble seemed like something was awry with the PCM. Maybe it had taken on some water? Maybe communications, maybe power, hmmm.
I pulled and inspected the condition of all the under-hood accessible plugs I could find, checking for changes after each. No change. In the passenger-side kickpanel box, I pulled and checked every fuse. No issues found. The fuse box also contains several relays of two different types. I began swapping positions of like-type relays to see whether the problem would move. After swapping the relays in positions R202 and R203 (the final pair to try – figures, right?) all the symptoms disappeared!
The truck cranked and started; the CP9599 connected and displayed DTC P1000 (which is normal after a PCM reset). I swapped the relays back to their original positions and the problem returned in all its glory. Relay R203 is documented as PCM power.
The original engineering part number for R203 was F57B-14B192-AA. It’s been superseded by Ford part number F5TZ-14N089-B, which costs about $15 from the dealer. I sprung for a pair of ’em, figuring a spare might be handy.
The truck is running normally now but there’s still a some work to do. I want to mount the FPDM on standoffs, which should halt the dissimilar metal corrosion. This ‘mounting on standoffs’ is part of the repair kit if you buy a replacement FPDM from Ford. Also, when in the fuse box, I found a significant amount of water in the passenger side rocker panel, which leads back from the area under the fuse box. I found the water accidentally. When pulling fuses from the back of the fuse box it seemed as though a dropped fuse could be troublesome to retrieve, so I reached down to see how hard that might be. There are no electrical connections in the rocker panel tunnel, only wire bundles, but I did find some evidence of moisture on a few fuse blades during my check. There’s water getting in there from somewhere! Online, some owners have mentioned trouble with gasket sealing on the brake/bed light housing, and I’ve had that off several times over the years. But I also have a sunroof. More investigation of the water’s source is needed.
The day before yesterday I bought a flaring tool. A ruptured brake line in the Jeep needed repair and I couldn’t find mine, tools still in ~70% disarray since the move…
So yesterday it rained. All day. Relentlessly. It rained and rained and rained. Then it rained some more. And I didn’t work on the Jeep. Come nightfall it rained. Thursday turned into Friday and it kept raining.
In Florida it doesn’t matter how much it rains. Remember the genie in the 1996 movie Aladdin and the King of Thieves? “Sand… It’s everywhere, get used to it.” The sand just soaks up rain like… well, like sand.
It works great except, duh, where there’s no freakin’ sand! The driveway doesn’t soak up the rain, but it drains into – you guessed it – sand. No problem there. Then there’s the pool. Uh oh, the pool’s full of water, the same stuff that rain’s made of. And pools don’t automatically drain, no siree, they contain. So this morning I found the pool full – TOO full – of water. Close to overflowing, it was, so much water that the skimmer couldn’t skim. Up until then I had no idea that it was possible for a pool to have too much water. Live and learn.
It took about two hours to lower the water to the correct level.
Later in the day I formed a piece of brake line and installed it. I was about to begin bleeding the system when… uh huh… it started to rain.
I gave the Dyna its first decent cleanup and detailing since I put tires on about a year ago. It was a lot of work – but worth it.
I was down to the last bit of detailing – the wheels. I don’t care whatcha say, handling laced wheels is the crappiest part of the job. I don’t mind the mechanical stuff – checking spoke tightness, wheel trueness, tire condition, brake pad thickness, rotor condition, and so on and so forth – but the actual cleaning itself has its own section next to “suck” in the dictionary. But this time I found some kind of gunk on *some* spokes, and on *some* of those the gunk had come dangerously close to getting through the chrome itself.
Now, by “some” I mean this. Imagine standing in front of the bike, maybe five feet to the right of the brake pedal, about a quarter-bike length ahead of the front wheel. Position a gunk-emitter at about air cleaner height and fire a bike-wide spray of gunk droplets at the rider’s ass but toward the ground. Considering that it wasn’t all the spokes and none of the rest of the bike had the gunk, it’s almost like the gunk-emitter was fired when it was parked.
It took serious work to get that stuff off. The best method turned out to be auto wheel cleaner to soften it, coupled with a razor blade to ease it off. A toothbrush was useful for applying the wheel cleaner, but the best way turned out to be manual. I got to learn where each and every hole in my hands’ skin was located – that stuff is nasty.
Job’s done now, and my hands have more-or-less regained their moisture. All that remains is to clean up the back end a little where water had splashed. Oh, yeah, and hit that back wheel with the other miracle product: NevrDull.
Still not sure where I picked that stuff up. It’s been about a year – the last tire change – I’ve given that bike a thorough cleanup. Even the last interval service didn’t get one. I hate working on a dirty bike, but I was so busy preparing to move…. It’s not on any of the other bikes, either. Probably a one-shot deal, no pun intended, when I rode through something or parked in a bad place.
I’ll just have to pay more attention from now on.
Or should I just call it SimShitty, as some have taken to calling the recent launch?
The other day Pam plunked down her sixty bucks, minus five with a coupon, plus another fifteen for a strategy book… lemme check the math, that’s seventy smackers, plus some Florida tax… damn, my head’s swimmin’. And for what? Not a lot.
She’s gone through the tutorial and that’s about it. The Origin servers are all down and there’s nothing else to be done. No serv-o, no play-o. The stuff she learned in the tutorial’s largely forgotten. After all, what you don’t put to use in 24 hours of learning is gone the next day, the brain folks love to tell us at training seminars. Use it or lose it.
Okay, everything’s social now. I get it. But SimCity’s largely a game where a single player tries their hand at lording over an infrastructure that happens to include, well, a simulated population. It’s not like your city’s populated with Aunt Jane or the dork you went to school with or… damn… your boss. No, the social part of this title is nothing more than a bag on the side.
So tell me… why’s it necessary to connect to Origin’s server to play?
Oh, yeah, DRM. Those evil thieves… er customers… are trying to steal your stuff.
Listen up, Electronic Arts.
You’ve got this customer, her name’s Pam. She’s known about you since you were one of many. Back when I used to game. Think Archon on the Apple ][. Yeah, that long ago. She got into The Sims. I bought her a box to play it on. She bought every expansion pack. Then Sims 2. I built her a (then) kick-ass box to play that on and she bought all of those expansion packs, too. Sims 3? Yup. I think she has all of those packs. Books and guides for the lot of ’em, too. I know, I just packed and moved ’em all – a pretty big box – from Jersey down here to Paradise. So Pam knew Sim City from when I played it on the Amiga, and Sim City 2000, too. The ads and previews for the newest SimCity were pretty damned enticing. And not one review – as far as I know – had mentioned this insane reliance on a server connection. So here’s this customer, a good customer, a spendy customer, that threw Electronic Arts a pile of greenbacks for a promise.
And EA failed her.
Over the past few days she’s checked in to try to play, all hours of the day and night. All servers are down.
You failed her bad. There’s no reason to require a remote server connection for single player play. None.
If Pam listens to me, or to our son, or to countless others with similar experiences, she won’t be back.
Shame on you, Electronic Arts.
As big as you are, you really should know better.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a cheap post.
Let me point you to a set of images that chronicle the construction project that produced our new home. The series begins with Pam & me standing in front of an empty lot, the camera in roughly the same place as the image to the left.
We made the trip down in mid-December 2012. It was a bumpy transition, mostly because the project was late. In this next set I show some of that bumpiness, which continues through today as bits and pieces struggle for completion.
Enjoy!
The last two times I’ve relocated I’ve taken the time, when packing, to develop a pretty comprehensive inventory of my stuff. Yeah, in fact it is a pain in the ass to do that. Takes time, too. So what’s the point?
This is also the second move that’s been somewhat less than ideal. There were wildly different reasons for that, but the result has been the same: lots of boxes stacked chaotically for a an extended period.
The movers delivered us, offloading into the garage, literally an hour after the garage doors had been hung and tested. That’s tight timing. Stuff went in as it came off the truck, nothing like the way it might be needed. We had about 500 pieces.
About ten days later I dug into the pile. The goal was simple. Stack like-sized containers into rows with their identifiers arranged so that they could be read. When the parade of subcontractors had subsided just a little, being able to find stuff by searching a list saved us a ton of time.
Yesterday Pam & me spent some time recycling empty cartons and rearranging the rows, the first time since the first triage. The bikes fit comfortably now and the idea of allocating some workshop space doesn’t seem so far off.
I need to spend a moment talking about the tools I used, mostly because it was a little different from the way I did it about a dozen years back. Back then it was a simple text file on a computer, which meant that I needed either the computer or a printed sheet to use the inventory. This time I used a document on Google shared using Google Drive. This meant that the inventory was always available no matter what device was handy. That was a big win. There were two downsides, though. The first is my own – I’m just not very effective with data entry on a phone. I don’t know how these kids do it. Voice input isn’t there yet. The second is that search blows, which is kind of funny since it’s Google. Search wasn’t terribly important until we hit the ground, so it was easy to turn the document into a portable and searchable PDF.
I’m here today to report that the old saw “no project ever ran perfectly and yours won’t be the first” is just as true as ever.
I guess I set the tone eight days before the moving van showed up when I took a crowbar to the master bath in the Jersey home for a ‘quick’ renovation. Needless to say, that went incomplete at showtime and I’ll need to go back to complete it before I hit the market. So what; I am a full-time Florida resident now.
I was pretty ambitions when I initially wrote about my plans back in July. I never actually documented the ups and downs of minding a construction project from so far away as I intended. I guess I’ll have to pick that up again.
For now, though, despite the inevitable screwups, it’s kinda nice. Got what passes for Internet service in rural Florida running a couple of days ago. The spa’s running and I had a good soak night before last under a pretty much full moon. The county signed off on all the trades yesterday, making us legal (we’ve been squatting in our own home for some 17 days). Yeah, kinda nice indeed.
More later. And this time I’ll deliver.
This is from today’s (27-October-2012) newspaper. You might be able to find the article on myCentralJersey.com, a Gannett Company that takes pains to keep people like me from pointing people like you to interesting disturbing articles like this one.
Just one more reason that I’m getting the fuck out of New Jersey, pronto.
Update: South Brunswick animal sacrifice found to be in compliance with state permits
SOUTH BRUNSWICK All permits were found to be in compliance for the sacrificing of goats by a religious group on Friday at a Dey Road site.
Detective Sgt. James Ryan said officials from the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals visited and determined the activities were consistent with state permits.
At about 11:30 a.m., township police received reports that members of a religious group were conducting animal sacrifices on Dey Road. Police checked with state officials and local animal control officials to see if a religious group has permission to sacrifice animals.
Ryan said group members told police they had a permit from the state Department of Agriculture to sacrifice a group of goats penned up near a white house on Dey Road, about 50 yards off of a two-lane country road near the Cranbury border.
South Brunswick animal control officers also responded to the scene. Ryan said the property had a large pen containing the goats.
The airport was crowded, busy, and the girl in front of me was ordering this coffee-drink. You know, the kind of coffee-drink with the fancy-ass name that takes two breaths to say, and dammit it had better be exactly right or else… You’ve heard the expression high maintenance? The epitome, right there in front of me, at the front of the line, standing at the service counter. So she made her order and I rolled my eyes.
The kid behind the counter glanced at me, I met his eye and said simply, “Coffee. Black.” The kid turned to his work… and turned back almost immediately with my black. The girl sputtered, started getting arrogant. I smiled and slid a fin, a crazy over-payment for the black, across the counter, turned and walked away. I didn’t look back.
I wouldn’t mind meeting up with her again in the middle of the apocalypse, watching her cope. It’d be cheap entertainment.
Many of my friends and acquaintances already know this so it’ll be old news, but I’m happy to write that I’m finally leaving New Jersey, once and for all.
Shocked? Well, the time has come.
Pam and I plan our lives on rather long timelines. We may not know what next week holds. But we know what we want to be doing along periods measured by several years or even decades. This chunk was to finish raising Damian, get him though High School and off to college. That part’s just about done. (I think we did a fine job of it, too. What parent doesn’t?)
So we’re off to Florida. Why the Sunshine State? Mostly for the endless motorcycle riding season. Central Florida holds some of the best riding on the east coast, and the best of that will be in our backyard. We figure it’ll hold our interest for many years to come.
Another big reason is that New Jersey is literally sucking us dry. Cost-of-living, taxes and more. So many hands in my pocket I can’t find my… well, you know. We stay here, by the time we’re ready to recreate full time there won’t be anything left.
So, we’re packing up. Taking our property, our money, our spending, our business, and all that other good stuff. Away. To where it’ll do US good.
So far we’ve acquired property, custom-designed/modified a plan (AutoCAD rocks!) for a home that’s perfect for us, contracted our builder… We’ll be breaking ground soon. And come 2013, not a dime more goes into New Jersey’s coffers. Yeah, it really feels damned good to write those words!
Over the coming months I’ll tell you more about this all-consuming adventure. You’ll hear about some of the cool people I’m meeting and doing business with.
WTF, maybe you’ll end up following us down!
“Be seeing you.”
A few years ago we discovered the Beach Bar. In nearby Asbury Park, NJ on the south side of Convention Hall it was a fun place to just drop in, hang out for munchies and a couple of cold ones. Can’t say how many times it was the destination for a quick, couple-of-hours-to-kill motorcycle ride.
Yesterday we took a ride down, the first time this season. It just might be the last. Huh?
It’s ruined. The atmosphere is, well, gone. Where to begin…
In the past, the first thing you’d see were the potted plants and trees, even a fake palm. Gone. Now just a sign announcing SECURITY and ID requirements. The outside seating, once tall tables and chairs, now replaced by low, slouch-style plastic seating. It’s comfortable enough, I guess, but encourages sleeping, not socialization. What’s worse, the view from the low seats is now dominated by railing, not ocean and beach. We went for their Sangria, once pretty good, but they no longer offered it. We quickly switched to beers. We were hungry for a little lunch but no, there was no menu, no food for love or money. Time and again I saw people sending one of their group out to the boardwalk to bring food back. The experience was a total disappointment – except for our server, who was competent and attentive.
Now, I’m not shy so I asked around. (I won’t give any clues about who I talked to; most were candid and deserve to keep their jobs.) It turns out that management changes had brought a series of changes. Employee protests had fallen on deaf ears. It’s as simple as that, a story we hear all too often. Was it just too early in the season? Nope, this is it. How’s business, overall? Okay, but not like it was – and trending downward. Any hope for change? Any hope for better drinks? Any hope for food? Those I talked to had heard it all before – from customers and fellow employees alike – but it just didn’t matter.
Only 4-5 weeks into the season? Could be trouble. Bummer, that.
I had a look at their Facebook page just now. The contrast between last year’s activity and now is like night and catfood. Yeah, that different.
I’m afraid I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this place anymore.
We left, much quicker that usual, to find nourishment elsewhere in town.
Thor was dirty. No, Thor was filthy. Thor is Pam’s desktop computer, an Intel quad core box I built for her back in 2008. Next to her desk, it’s raised off the floor a few inches and we regularly clear off the surface dust and air filters but it had been a while – a couple of years, probably, since it’s been properly torn open and cleaned. Lately, signs of instability were growing more frequent. So the other day I opened the case.
Well, I guess it was to be expected. The innards were choked with dust. The squirrel-cage fan on the graphics card, one of those big honkin’ GeForce cards, hardly had room to spin! I looked inside the box, looked at the can of Dust Off in my hand, looked back inside, thought about how many cans I might have in the basement store… Nah, this would never do.
So I set up a work table outside the garage door and hauled out my shop compressor. 100 PSI? I thought about the possibility of blowing components right off the motherboard, the moisture that would accumulate in that air after a few cycles… I changed the blowgun tip to something a little more diffuse and got to work.
It took a while. But when I was finished Thor’s innards once again looked like new. I closed the box, cleaned up my tools, wrestled the box back upstairs. And it wouldn’t boot.
Nothing really seemed out-of-place, I was careful with the air streams, I hadn’t forgotten any cables. Still, no boot. Or, more precisely, the pulsating orbs of Windows 7 starting up would halt and the blips of drive activity would take on a regularity that indicates a hang. To add an interesting twist, it booted nicely to Safe Mode.
Because of the way Windows works, this was pointing toward an issue with video. The card was obviously initializing so I replaced the driver and exercised the various modes. All looked fine but the situation was unchanged.
Maybe the boot drive was going south from running in all that heat before the cleanup, and the shock of moving stuff around pushed it over the edge. Before I went to work I imaged the drive. I could virtualize the image, recover Pam’s settings and apply them to a new Windows 7 install. As part of Thor’s long-overdue maintenance I planned to change out the boot drive for one of those hybrid drives I like and the drive was in there anyway, empty and waiting. The install media booted fine and the installation began. Wouldn’t you know, though, when the installer got the point that it boots the newly installed kernel, before personalization, it hung again!
Puzzling. The hardware POSTs, Safe Mode boots, a normal boot hangs, as does a new Windows install. Log checks in Safe Mode, as well as other diagnostics run from bootable media all seem okay. Everything pointed to a video issue.
So I pulled the GeForce card out, grabbed a loupe and looked it over. Aha! There was corrosion on some of the contacts! Cleaned ’em up, that’s what I did, and coated ’em with Stabilant. What’s that? From the tech notes…
Stabilant 22 is an initially non-conductive amorphous-semiconductive block polymer that when used in thin films within contacts acts under the effect of the electrical field and switches to a conductive state. The electric field gradient at which this occurs is established is during its manufacture so that the material will remain non-conductive.
Thus, when applied to electromechanical contacts, Stabilant 22 provides the connection reliability of a soldered joint without bonding the contacting surfaces together!
It’s amazing stuff. It’s also seriously expensive. It’s by far the most expensive fluid in the house. Old whisky? Nah. Even printer ink is way cheaper. But it works. On the good side, a little goes a long way. I’ve still got more than half of the 15 mL I bought back in 2006.
The graphics card slipped into its connector with friction-free ease. And not only did Thor POST faster than I’d ever seen it POST, but it booted like nothing had ever been amiss.
My son’s in his senior year of high school. One of his classes, technically called COURSE 8144Â HEALTH IV LAB has a section where the kids are supposed to learn about the evils of unplanned reproduction. Yeah, that topic has been the source of school controversy on and off over the years for various reasons. The study material seems to follow a pattern: explain the nuts & bolts, so to speak, in the most clinical and least offending way possible before lapsing into scare tactics. Today’s scare is twofold – personal convenience paired with economics.
On the convenience front, many students elect to provide care for a pseudo-baby, a small sack of flour that they get to carry around everywhere in their day-to-day life. I think they even need to dress the thing. I suppose (but I’m not sure) that at the end of a period of time the sack’s inspected for wear and tear. A couple of years back, with the assignment complete, one student ‘celebrated’ his regained freedom by hurling his sack across the gym up into the bleachers.
Turning to economics, the assignment has students researching the costs of the necessities of life, from food, shelter and transportation to phones and cable TV. The inevitable conclusion is that you really can’t afford it, especially in New Jersey.
So where’s the spam come in? In at least one instance, a required source of research material was a commercial Website where the student was compelled to register with their email address. Recognizing the potential problem, we created a new email address specifically for this purpose. It turned out to be a worthwhile precaution. The spam received there swelled until the account was shut down. But the school apparently passes student information to others, too. The assault on our physical mailbox continues. It started with the magazines that target new parents and grew from there to include envelopes full of coupons, pitches from insurance companies, photographers, doctors, drug companies, internet services like picture and social sites, and a whole lot more. Some companies send samples, too: diapers, formula and so on.
And once the spammers get going you know they don’t stop.
In fact, I saw an interesting somewhat related Forbes article where a dad found out about his daughter’s pregnancy by way of advertising from Target. Pretty creepy stuff.
I’ve been producing and consuming quite a bit more social media over the past couple of months. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it has certainly had a deleterious effect on what I do here.
Google+ just rocks. I’ve met more smart, creative people on Google+ than you can shake a stick at. There’s a lot of stuff that Google’s gotten right with Google+, and the features just keep coming. It’s open social, wrapped around the whole (online) world. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend having a look.
Facebook is, well, Facebook. People had been pestering me, to one extent or another, and yet I resisted. So after years of holding out I finally took an account there some months back. Over the Christmas holidays I became a little more aggressive about establishing relationships which, as everyone knows, must be reciprocal. Managing Facebook is, frankly, a pain in the ass. But I have been catching some up with people I forgot I knew. Remember that old platitude, “we are the people our parents warned us about”?
I’ve drawn the line at games and apps on those platforms. They’re just too invasive. The closest I came was with a billiards game on Google+. It looked interesting, like it might be fun while I waited for this process or that to finish, so I ran the installer. The first thing it did immerse me in a competitive world of other players. Statistics,rankings, invitations to play, and more! All I wanted to do was bang some balls around now and then, not make a career out of it! I uninstalled, and so much for that.
I guess I’ve got some stuff to fix.