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Election time is always a fun time of the year
I sure do love receiving the phone calls (luckily to a voicemail only number) and the printed junk telling me what to vote for in the upcoming election. Luckily I don't have to sit through the TV commercials as we skip through them on TiVo. One of the interesting pieces of junk mail we received today had Mac OS X written all over it. They modified the Finder's Go menu and added Uncover->The Hidden Agenda. Very slick looking and then they used Safari for the web browser pictured in the ad.
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Daylight savings time
I hate the change back to standard time as it gets dark so much earlier and kind of cuts my days short. However, what is even worse than the change is having to deal with daylight savings time as a software developer. Most of the software I deal with lately is synchronization and each device handles daylight savings time differently which results in major headaches. Too bad it isn't all standardized to make life easy. Oh well, these issues keep me employed.
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The fix to a broken heater
In one room of our house, which was an addition to the main house, we have an electric, in-wall heater. We never really cared about using it as we haven't had guests in the winter. Well this morning I turned it on to see what would happen as my in-laws are coming for Thanksgiving. The heater turned on for about 30 seconds and then shut off. I fiddled with the knob and it worked for another 30 seconds. So, being the good engineer I am, I shut off the circuit breaker, and disassembled it so that I can get the parts tomorrow. I had the main piece (the thermostat) on the counter (it's a 30 year old heater, so it is pretty simple) and explained to my wife how it works. See tells me to try moving the thermocouple away from the heater (it was sitting in front of the heating element). I didn't really think it would make a difference, but said OK, put it back together, moved the thermocouple, turned on the circuit breaker and gave it a whirl. Well, it worked and the room started heating up (slowly, but surely). I'm not sure why I didn't think of that "fix" as I'm an engineer and knew exactly how the system worked. So simple and my wife proved that it doesn't take an engineer to solve a problem.
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San Diego Union Tribune - Not worth the paper it's printed on
I've lived in a number of cities and had the opportunity to read newspapers daily in some of the cities. The more I read the San Diego Union Tribune, the more I believe it is one of the worst papers I've ever read (even worse than USA Today). For starters, they put editorials on the front page; I learned when I was on the high school newspaper that editorials shouldn't go on the front page. Second, they put stories that are fluff stories on the front page. A few months ago, there was an article about Rejection Hotline on the front page even though nothing was new about it. This morning's paper (Sunday) had an article about the city attorney. While the article, itself, was OK, it wasn't breaking news as it followed the city attorney through a typical day and mentioned that it was done in September.