Category Archives: Ramblings, ravings

Episode #34 in which our hero needlessly spends too much money

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The other day I dropped my phone.

This is nothing new, I’ve dropped the darn thing 20 times at least. I’ve got a nice slim case on it, so its never been a problem. It bounces, it slides, and then I pick it up again. The difference was this time it landed perfectly flat. And that was all it took. The screen completely shattered.

After determining that it still worked (it did), and cleaning the small pieces of glass out of my fingers tips, I went online and filed an insurance claim because I have insurance on the thing. The insurance company said they send me a new phone (a silver one instead of a white one, but that’s not a big deal) and I was happy.

Except I wasn’t quite sure. The deductible was $149, which is a lot of cash.

So today I started poking around on the web looking up iPhone repair and screen replacement. That’s when I learned I could have bought a new screen assembly for about $50, including tools, and replaced the screen myself. Doh! When I called the insurance company to cancel my claim I discovered they had already shipped my replacement, so I was stuck.

Had I but waited a single day, had I thought through the problem looking at every solution, had I been just slightly more motivated, I could have saved $100.

Damn. I hate it when I’m stupid like that.

So let this be a lesson to you. Think, search, then act. Not the other way around.

A snippet of an idea

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He died before he could defuse the bomb of his passing.

I woke up this morning with this snippet of an idea in my head. Its not meant to be directed at any one person or thing, just a piece of language looking for a story to attach itself to. Its birth can probably be traced to the shot of whiskey and the late night conversation I had by chance with a neighbor last night who is a 23 year-old horror movie director.

A ghost story

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Canteen

The other day in preparation for a hike, I got out my old camping gear, including a couple of canteens. One in particular dates back to 1981. Its an old army surplus canteen I bought for my first class in college. Alas the cover for the canteen was in poor shape, so the canteen stayed home. Later the next day I broke out the sewing kit and made some repairs; reattaching the belt loop which was about to fall off, fixing up the wool felt lining which had fallen into pieces, and tightening up the corners so the canteen fit more snugly.

Just as I was finishing up, I flipped the canteen over and saw on the bottom the initials PJ. And that’s when I knew I was in a ghost story.

You see, back in 1991, which was a few years after I moved to LA, I hit a point in my life where I seriously crashed and burned; loosing a friend and a girlfriend in a one of those big dramatic messes that seem to come with youth. When the fire finally went out I found myself broke, and renting a room in Sherman Oaks from a man who ran a dance studio. For about a year I lived in that place and slowly rebuilt my life from the ashes.

My next door neighbor in that place was a newly single mom with three bright boys. Over the course of that year the mom and I became close, and I began to see the boys often. At a very dark time for me they were the bright spot of my life. The oldest boy, PJ was about 10 at the time. He was kind, and smart, with a ready smile and a passion for jumping into things. So when he went on a camping trip with his school I was happy to lend the use of my canteen for the journey. His mom, being especially good at motherhood, was careful to mark his initials on the bottom of the cover, and thereby guaranteeing, by some inexplicable rule of the universe, that the canteen would never be lost. Hence the PJ.

And that’s about it for the story. Time went by and I moved on. I stepped out of the nice safe shell I had built and slowly stumbled into adulthood. The mother eventually remarried a wonderful and talented man, and the boys grew older. PJ went to a nice private high school, and did quite well. He gathered around him a collection of friends who were kind and bright and fun. He was by all accounts the kind of child any parent would be proud to have. My last strong recollection of him is talking math with him and his friend who only ate cheese pizza and was about 20 times better equipped for the conversation than I was.

If by wishing we could make things happen, then I really wish I could end this story here. PJ would quietly move on into that nebulous and shiny land that people go to when they exit your life. The same place one wishes upon ex-girfreinds, distant family members, and former workers. The land of happiness, and wealth, and opportunity. But, as I suggested in the title, this is not a happy story. This is a ghost story.

They say marriage changes things, and its true. Only sometimes the things it changes are not the things you expected. My friendship with the boy’s mother, which had limped along for years and had every indication of lasting longer, did not survive my marriage. I say this not as something I wished for, or even something I liked at the time, but something that happened. Nor was it the only thing that fell from my former life to make room for the new. Maybe a bigger man, or a wiser man could have walked that path. All I know is I couldn’t or didn’t. Alas, along with that friendship went my ties with the boys.

But friendships are tricky things, and once someone has burrowed their way into your heart they leave connections behind like a spider’s web that tug and pull long after they have stopped being the center of your life. While you may stop seeing a person, you will still be connected to them indirectly through the friendships you once shared together but now maintain separately.

Thus it was that I still heard about PJ from time to time. I learned that he graduated from high school, that he had in interest in music, and that he apparently showed some talent as a music producer. Then one day that spiderweb of connections was tugged, the various strands tightened, and just like that PJs bright shiny future ended.

I was a car that did it. A drunk driver if I recall correctly. It happened right across from his high school. He was 21. And. Just. Like. That. He was gone.

I may have got the details wrong. It was some years ago, and like I said, our connections were indirect. But still, the results were the same. He was gone.

At one time I was quite close to PJ, but now, some 23 years on, I find I cannot recall much about him. When he was young he liked Transformers, and had a fondness for video games. He was at times fiercely protective of his brothers, but at other times was happy to use his larger size against them. He liked to play, and could be strongly competitive, but he also had a big heart and a ready laugh. Even now I find I can recall his laugh quite well.

And that is largely how I remember him. In my mind he is still the boy he was when we met. He is still in that nebulous fog all kids exist in until they grow old enough to discover their future selves. Because to me he hadn’t discovered his future self yet. To me, all his futures remained unmapped, and uncertain. Not that these things didn’t happen. I just never saw them.

In a happier story, the one without a car crash, PJ would now be around 33. Old enough to start getting serious in life. Maybe marry, maybe see a therapist, maybe start a family of his own. Old enough to grow up into a interesting adult, and surely PJ would have been an interesting adult. Many of the people I count myself lucky enough to work with are about that age, and I like to think that in that happier story I would one day run across PJ at an office and share old remembrances. Maybe we would have lunch together, tie up some loose ends, reconnect in ways that are healing and less painful.

But this is not that kind of story. This is, as I said, a ghost story.

There is a hole in my heart from a boy who is no longer a boy, and who is no longer there. There is no future I can connect him to so he can safely move on, and no past I can remove him from without also destroying myself. Thus he sits. A hole that cannot be removed nor repaired. A wound that cannot be healed. In short, a ghost. Perhaps he is only my ghost, which would be a much nicer ending for his friends and family, but a ghost none the less.

So when I flipped over that canteen cover, and saw his initials on the bottom, all of this came to me in a flash, like a wave that rolled over your head and buried you in the bottom of the surf. Because this is not a happy story. This is, as I said, a ghost story.

The problem with the neighbor

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Lets say you and your family move to a new town. Its a small town, and prosperous, with a tight community and good schools. The kind of place most parents would like to raise their children.

The house you buy is a nice one. Its on a good street, with lots of other homes of similar value. Most of the neighbors have kids in the same schools your kids will be going to, and they all share similar values, attend the same churches, are at the same socio-economic level, etc. Though you come from a different state your neighbors do a good job of making you feel welcome and at ease. Everyone in your family agrees, they feel like they belong there.

Right next door to your new house is a prosperous family with deep connections to the community. The owner of this home, your neighbor, is the owner of a factory that employs about 20% of the community. He is well liked by everyone you meet. His factory sponsors many of the local sports teams for children, baseball, soccer, football, etc, and he himself often coaches these teams, although he is happy to step-aside if someone else would like to coach instead. His wife keeps a good house and is socially active in the community (she’s on the PTA, is a board member of the church, raises funds for the volunteer fire department, etc.). Their children are polite and well behaved, which you notice every time they visit to play with your kids, or when your kids go to their house to play. Moreover the children are always supervised well, so much so that you always feel your children are safe when around them.

Then one day one of their kids come over to your house and you notice some bruises on his arm. There are four of them, a series of circles going up his arm in a line about a half inch apart, each one the size of an adult’s fingertip. Since you came from a rough part of town, you have a good idea of the cause, this is the classic indication of a grab mark. You ask to see the inside of the child’s arm, and there you find a fifth circular bruise that perfectly matches the placement of a thumb.

About a week later, another one of their children is over playing at your house and you notice a similar pattern of bruising. You don’t want to alarm the child so you don’t point it out, but later that night you talk to your spouse about it. You both agree this might be a worrying trend, but you’d rather be sure before you say anything. After all kids often play rough, and can sometimes bruise themselves like this.

A few weeks later your spouse tells you that your neighbor’s wife showed up at a PTA meeting with a black eye. She’d covered the bruise up with make-up, as good as she could, but it made people uncomfortable in the room. Everyone pretended as if it wasn’t there.

That’s when you start to cautiously talk to your other neighbors about the bruises. At first most people are reticent to talk to you, after all you are an outsider in their community, but after a while they start to open up. You hear stories about when your neighbor was a boy and in high school that are worrying. They seem to indicate a pattern of violence. There are rumors that he was arrested several time for assault, but then let go because his father was the mayor.

Some of the stories you hear are so outlandish that you’re pretty sure they are fiction. They’re the kind of stories that are spread by people who are jealous of another’s power or position. But some of the stories you hear are disturbing in their detail. They sound to your ear much more factual. To make matters more difficult the town is divided about the issue. Some people you talk to readily believe your neighbor is a monster, while others are equally sure the man is innocent and is being framed by outsiders for nefarious purposes. Though you try to remain as neutral and as objective as possible you discover that just bringing up the topic is enough to place you in one camp or the other. Worse still, you hear rumors that the local police, the local schools, and members of your church, have actively harassed the families of anyone who asks too much. So just trying to gather reliable data is enough to see you and your family hounded out of the community.

Meanwhile, your children continue to play with your neighbor’s kids, your spouse continues to work in the community, and you still have a job to do and the ever present need to pay the mortgage. Your family is entrenched in the community, is prospering by all accounts, and has never been harmed by your neighbor. The victims of his actions have never come forward and claimed to be injured. No one you know, including yourself, have witnessed your neighbor committing a violent act since he became an adult, but at the same time you’ve gathered enough evidence to be sure there could be no other source. The bruises not only line up exactly with his hands, they also sometimes show ring marks that are consistent with only him. If you were a prosecutor you would have sufficient evidence to prove a case against your neighbor to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” yet if your also equally aware that if you tried the man in this small tight-nit community you could never find a jury that would convict him.

So what do you do? At what point is the evidence sufficient for you to say something? If you do nothing, people will be harmed. If you do something, you and your family will probably be harmed. What do you do?

The thing about money

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A while ago a friend of mine posted something on FaceBook about how money cannot buy you integrity. I responded in my typical snarky fashion that while money can’t buy you integrity, it can certainly buy you the appearance of it. This is, after all how advertising works. Don’t believe me? Look at any political add, ever. They’re either selling you a “bright shiny future” and then sticking a politicians name and face on the end to create a positive association, or their selling your a “dark sad dystopia” and then sticking their opponents name and face on the end for a negative association. This is in a nut-shell how political advertising works.

All snark aside, my friend was correct. You cannot buy integrity. You have to earn it, usually the hard way. The same is true, as the popular sayings go, for happiness and even love (although I’d argue in the case of the latter what they really mean by “money can’t buy you love” is that money can’t buy you trust).

These are not new ideas. Besides Jesus’ memorable quote about the odds for rich people entering into heaven, he provided a smashing good illustration of his opinion about money in the church proper when he went after the money changers in the old temple with a whip. Even now, years after I stopped being a believer I still get chills at this action, giving the proper Californian response to anything awesome, “Dude!”

So this got me thinking. If money is so pernicious then what can you buy with it? As it happens I think there are a whole lot of things perfectly suited for my money. Books, probably tops the list, followed by anything my wife or son wants or needs. (Although, to be fair, “wants” and “needs” in this context is strictly limited to the realm of realistic.) Chocolate also comes to mind, although I’d qualify it with “good” chocolate. But even this leads to problems. Books I have discovered can lead one to be overweight (don’t look at me like that, you know its true) The same can be said for chocolate. Giving too much to a child, I am told, can lead them to be lazy and spoiled. Apparently the same is true if they are an adult and poor. Although curiously this phenomena is limited to only government hand-outs. When individuals give to the poor, or when churches give to them, then they somehow don’t become lazy and spoiled. I suspect my many conservative friends will tell me its not that government money makes people more lazy than money from the church, its that the government is giving away this money without their consent. I find this argument (if in fact this is what they would say) more compelling, but then it just makes me think the issue is not about the money itself but about who is in control of it, which is a whole nother weird thing. (one weird thing at a time, please)

So if books and money make one fat, and giving money away is problematic, then what can one buy that doesn’t taint their everlasting soul? I don’t have an answer to this. I’m not the teacher here. Hell I’m still stuck in the back of the class with my hand up. But what I’ve found is there are some things you can buy that do make life better.

Money can buy you time. This is pretty straight forward concept, but a surprisingly large number of people miss it. We sell our own personal time to our bosses in exchange for money. This is, after all, how employment works. But the equation of time=money also works just as well in the reverse. One can trade money for time. Need a dress hemmed for a date on Saturday, but don’t have the time? A dry-cleaner or a tailor will be happy to do the work for you, at a cost. Need a computer part sent to your home by tomorrow? Amazon will be happy to ship it next-day, at a cost.

Of course, there are problems with this. You need to have enough “extra” money laying around to afford the expense, and the need has to be greater than the cost, but there are plenty of times when both of these are true. The classic example of this being the vacation, where you trade your regular income for time to not come work. Of course, many employees have some form of vacation pay in their contracts so their bosses in effect pay them to not come to work, but the self-employed and the unemployed don’t have this advantage. And don’t even get me started on those poor souls who work at home raising their children. For them there is no true vacation. Every where they go, they are still on the job.

All of this leads me to conclude that there is one other thing money can buy, and that is peace. You may not have enough money to buy that beautiful house in a remote part of Hawaii, but almost all of us can afford to rent the experience of living there, for a week at least. And oh the peace that comes to your soul when you do. You may not have the spare $25,000,000 laying around to help stop Ebola like Mark Zuckerberg did, but you can still contribute to Medecins Sans Frontieres. And yes, I’ll bet you’ll feel better afterwards. You may not have enough money to stop the grinding poverty in Africa and Asia, but you can give to companies who will oversee the work for you like Heifer International. And yeah, that feels pretty good to.

Of course all of this requires that you have “extra” money, and extra money is a rare thing for most people, especially the poor who are ironically the ones who need it the most. I suspect they could use a vacation from their poverty about as much as you and I can use one from your jobs. Maybe vacations should be a part of welfare. Or maybe people on welfare should be able to select a charity so portion of their un-earned income is sent to those with even more needs. Is that just too weird, or should I go looking for a whip?

Repairing a Kenmore clothes dryer

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I’m posting this as a place to store my notes concerning repairing our dryer. Feel free to ignore.

About a month ago our clothes dryer stopped drying. It would still spin, but it didn’t get hot. Its an older dryer, having come with the house, and it had done this once before. I was all set to call our repair man again, but Teri thought it might be worth while to do the repair ourselves. So after a week of not having a dryer (or possibly two) I finally got tired of it and started searching on the internets.

Searching for “kenmore gas dryer spins but no heat” gave me lots of results. The best was the two videos below. They’re not the same dryer as we have, but all of the parts are pretty much the same. Teri was right. Dryers are dead simple, so working on them in only a matter of looking and testing.

Sears Parts Direct has a full diagram of the dryer, and allows you to purchase many of the parts you need. It was an invaluable source for learning the names of things. That way I didn’t have to show up at our local appliance parts store and ask for a dohickey, or a thingamajig, both of which I was liable to otherwise.

 

 

Opening the dryer

There are two black metal clamps that hold the top of the service panel in place. You can see them in the next two photos. Slide a flat-head screwdriver along the top of the gap between the panel and the dryer door and over the top of a clamp. Push down on the clamp and it should release enough for the panel to move forward. Release the clamp on the other side and the whole panel should pivot towards you. Lift the panel from the bottom pins (see third photo) and set it aside.

IMG_2671 IMG_2670 IMG_2669

 

The next thing to remove is the air duct which is the olive green part in the middle. Make sure you take the lint trap out of the dryer first before attempting to remove as it rests inside of the duct. Manhandle this part and you’ll break the lint trap.IMG_2661

 

 

The air duct is held on with two screws on the top, and a metal leaf spring on the bottom (see photos). After the screws are removed the leaf-spring can be slid along the white frame to the left to clear the duct, or it can be bent backwards enough to allow the duct to clear.
IMG_2674 IMG_2675 IMG_2673

This is what the dryer looks like with the duct out of the way.

IMG_2662

 

Pull out your ohm meter and set it to 2k ohms. This works pretty much like a continuity checker. Any change in the number below 1 means the part is good. Some parts, like the igniter coil, will have some resistance (the meter will read 0.35 or so), which is fine as long as they still have continuity.

The first thing to check is the radiant sensor (also called a thermal fuse) and the thermostat. They’re found right in about the middle of the dryer, right above the orange sticker on the light green ducting. The radiant sensor is rusty looking part to the left with the black and blue wires, and the thermostat is to the right with 4 wires. Check for continuity across the long ways on the thermostat, and across the two pins of the radiant sensor.  If neither one works, then replace. Otherwise move on to the next step.

IMG_2668

Burner assembly

Unlike the second video, there are 4 things to check in the burner assembly, not 3. They are the valve coils (or solenoids, or just coils), the glow bar igniter, the igniter thermal fuse and the thermostat. The valve coils are easiest because they’re the two black parts near the front. (See the second video to learn how to test them.) The glow bar igniter can be seen just to the left of the coils in the first photo. It has its own thermal fuse just to the left of it. The final thermostat can be found on the top of the burner duct (the tube the gas burns into). You can see it near the top of the last photo, the one with red and blue wires going to it.

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And that’s about it.

Specs:

Kenmore Ultra Fabric Care
Model # 11087984110
22,000 btu

Two cool things I found

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I got a little bit of research time in today, and came across some interesting finds on teh interwebs.

#1 an interactive map of the ocean floor. Think Google Earth, but underwater. Its pretty darn cool to look around at stuff. There are mountain ranges, canyons, etc. all existing underwater. You could float right over them and never know they were there.
Note: If you’re seeing a whole bunch of brightly colored lines you might want to uncheck all the boxes on the left.

 

#2 A completely crazy secret Christian sect in Tsarist Russia. They were called the Skoptsy, and they took the idea of living a pure life to the extreme. Apparently they read Matthew 18:8: If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire, and took it quite literally. So if you found yourself sexually attracted to the wrong person, these guys thought the best solution was to sharpened their knives.

I get spam…

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This one was really fascinating to me. It reads almost like poetry. Like its intentional, not someone who isn’t fluid in English ramming random sentences together.

“Attractive component of content. I simply stumbled upon your site
and in accession capital to say that I get actually
enjoyed account your weblog posts. Anyway I’ll be subscribing
on your augment or even I achievement you get entry to persistently rapidly.”

I am definitly looking forward to entering persistent rapid.

If it doesn’t have an MOE, its not the Truth

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We talk about “truth” a lot, especially in politics. And what I’ve noticed is that we seemed to have blurred the lines between the things that are true, and things that are not. That is, there appears to be little separation between the things that can be verified as facts, and the things that are opinion. My secret pet theory about the fruit on the tree of knowledge (you know, the whole Adam and Eve story with the Serpent and the fruit) is that by eating it, it allowed us to mix up fact and opinion.

Skepticism as an Anitivirus

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I went to a movie with some friends the other night and afterwards we fell into a discussion on alien life on our planet. One of us brought up that an ex defense minister of Canada believes there are E.T.s living among us. What’s curious is I found myself taking up the position of the skeptic. Apparently something I do. A sort of devil’s advocate to friendly discussions. Perhaps this is because of the way I was raised, at least in part, but I think there more to this going on.

We live in a world of belief. We see things and apply belief to them. If you’ve read Michael Shermer’s rather wonderful The Believing Brain, then you’d know that belief is our default mode to understanding. Rationalization comes later. We literally believe things, and then rationalize them, not the other way around. And this is true for everyone from the most ardent scientist, the the most delusional religious zealot. The only difference between them is not the way they approach what they believe, but how they prove to themselves the things they believe.

Let me unpack this a little bit. Both the scientist and the zealot will disbelieve things that run contrary to their understanding of the world. This is understandable. If I tell you the moon is made of green cheese, you will disbelieve me, because this information is counter to what you already believe. But what if I tell you something that is untrue, but is similar to what you already believe? That’s where we run into trouble. Again, its not just you or me, but all of us. When we get information that is similar to what we already believe to be true, we are far more likely to accept it as true. And, heres the important part, when we get information that proves false something we believe to be true, we ignore it, or we try to tear it apart, usually via a whole host of false arguments. We say the author slept with his cats (which is called an ad hominem), or the author obviously didn’t consider the intergalactic aliens (a red herring) or we claim the author cannot be correct because no “real” scientist would make such a claim (a no true scotsman), or a whole host of other logical fallacies.

My problem isn’t that people believe in things, or that belief is dangerous (belief can be dangerous, but it can also be helpful). Its that we believe too easily the things we like, and believe too dubiously the thing we do not. Belief than becomes a way to keep our ideas consistent, but not necessarily correct. There’s no built in system to determine if what we believe to be true is actually true. From the inside our own heads we cannot tell.

Worse still, when we’re exposed to information that is close to what we belief, then we are prone to spread it around. Think of an idea as a virus, and our brains as their hosts. If you’re brain is infected with the belief that X is true, you will pass on this notion to other brains. But only those brains who believe similar ideas will be susceptible to your virus. So brains that believe X is false will probably not get infected, but brains that think X might be true could get infected. Again, this is not bad in the main, but there is no way to determine if what we’re spearing is true of false.

(as an aside, this is the whole idea behind the concept of memes. The idea was that ideas spread like viruses, passing on their information. Since ideas don’t have genes (that is, they don’t replicate with genetic material) the way to explain them was to develop the ideas of memes. A meme being the genetic material for ideas, sort of like dna.)

So what we have are all these beliefs being passed around, with no way for the those infected with these beliefs to tell if their beliefs are true or false (or in-between. Assuming everything has to be true or false is yet another logical fallacy called a false dilemma).

What’s interesting to me is what doesn’t get passed around as easily: Anti-belief. By this I mean the entire logical structure needed to eradicate a belief. For instance, If I say Global Warming is a hoax, I’m not passing around the proof that climate change is not real, rather I’m passing around my belief that it isn’t. In other words, I’m nearly passing on my belief. Anti-belief does not come in an easy to digest packet that is readily consumable. Moreover anti-belief is highly specific to the individual. The information that may cause me to no longer believe that X is true will more than likely be different for you.

So what does one do when presented with belief? Especially when we are constantly bombarded with belief, and have to work hard to find anti-belief. The only solution I can think of that we can do as individuals is to attempt to disbelieve every belief we encounter. That is, to be skeptical. Mind you, this is much easier to do when we’re exposed to things we don’t believe already, and much harder when exposed to things we’re more susceptible to. But still the only way to stop being infected with some beliefs is to attempt to not be receptive to any belief.

Does this work? What do you believe?