Category: Tech

Bulb-ous

It’s always something. Got home late tonight, after what I admit was a fairly successful sojourn of Christmas shopping. Carol reported that the light under the over-stove microwave oven was out. So I got a Phillips head screwdriver and removed the cover.

Both bulbs were out, which seemed a little strange. The bulb on the right came out easily, but when I tried to unscrew the bulb on the left it looked like this.

Kenmore/Whirlpool over stove microwave oven

So… not knowing which circuit breaker the microwave is on, because most of the breakers aren’t labeled, I took a pair of insulated needle nose pliers and deliberately shorted out the socket. There was a little explosion, and knowing the bulb’s current comes straight from the 120V outlet, I could assume that the circuit breaker would pop with no damage likely to the microwave oven.

With the power off, I was able to get the screw cap out of the socket with the pliers. Then I took the other bulb, intact but burned out, to Lowe’s — a five mile drive — checked the wattage (40), and bought a couple of replacements.

Got back home, installed the bulbs, and screwed the glass cover back in place. I went downstairs, reset the circuit breaker, went back upstairs, turned on the lights and — voila! — problem fixed. And after all of that I didn’t feel like writing about anything else.

Embedding down with Hulu

Some people — those younger than I — really, really keep up with what’s going on. I sort of keep up. For example, I don’t know how big an audience Hulu has, but every time I see it I’m impressed by how much video is there, although some of it — hot, current stuff like Battlestar Galactica — has an expiration date.

The first thing I watched on Hulu was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, after it jumped over there from iTunes. It was created by the slightly horrible and very fannish Joss Whedon, who previously had done the short-lived sci-fi series Firefly. You’ll find Firefly on Hulu, including this episode that features actress Christina Hendricks, now famous as Joan in the AMC series Mad Men. Rated TV-14

K3: Suitable for framing

Long term, printing digital photos doesn’t make sense, so for Carol’s (too close to Christmas) birthday, I gave her a Kodak M820 digital multimedia frame. These things have a ways to go, but they’re starting to be at least workable. It can play videos, but not completely smoothly. But heck, it’s still a nifty gadget. I kept the lights low so the screen wouldn’t wash out, and the camera made everything look more yellow than it is.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/K3/K3onKodak.flv 640 480]

For you rabid K3 fanatics, here are the ladies presented on DogRat for the first time in full TV resolution. This was taken in October. Bright red coats for a cold, gray day in Holland!

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/K3/K3Eindhoven.flv 624 352]

Bigger, Better BlogRat

Lots has been changed. Not just with the blog theme, but with how I capture and edit video. With any luck there won’t be any problems serious enough to force me to go back to the way the blog looked. Let me know what you think. You may, of course, prefer the more claustrophobic format.

One topic I’ve wanted to tackle for a long time is Ayn Rand. Her influence extends from Spider-Man artist and co-creator Steve Ditko to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Here are ten minutes from The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/DEC/TheFountainhead.flv 480 360]

Searching comments

There’s an add-on feature for WordPress that I’ve played with a few times that extends searching to include comments. But it has a couple of quirks. It adds an index that’s seen as an error by the database, and it prevents me from searching posts when I’m in the editor. Anyway, it’s enabled right now, so if you give it a try you’ll probably see it brings up posts that don’t appear to have the thing you were looking for. You’ll undoubtedly find it in the comments.