Yesterday, looking at the Verizon FiOS bill, it had gone up $18 for no apparent reason. After two very long bot chats, and a very lengthy phone call with someone in India, not only was the $18 charge gone, my service had been upgraded from 100 meg to a gig.
Also yesterday, I was preparing for today’s colonoscopy, my third since first Prattling here. For the third time I was prescribed a different prep. How many different formulations are there to do the same thing? All of them are varying degrees of awful.
Let’s travel back in time to that first exam. There are comments from Monte, whose father, Charles M. Schulz, died of colon cancer.
Sixteen years ago, I was reminding myself to tell of my experience with Transcendental Meditation. Having not done that yet, I’ll have to remind myself again.
I’ve become cynical about government industrial policy. The reason why is the risk of picking winners — and losers — in a targeted market. Which happened with the HITECH Act of 2009 and hospital information system software. Epic Systems was the big winner, with its database vendor, Intersystems, also benefiting.
Tomorrow, my 2011 Honda CR-V will be at a dealership for an outstanding recall that was announced a year ago. I was told the job will take most of the day.
03/30/2023
SUMMARY:
American Honda Motor Co., Inc. (Honda) is recalling certain 2007-2011 model year CR-V vehicles. In salt-belt states where de-icing agents are used to maintain the roadway, the de-icing agents, along with mud and water, could enter the rear frame through drainage/positioning holes when the vehicle is driven through flooded areas or puddles at high speeds. Over time, the accumulated de-icing agents/mud/water mixture could cause corrosion to the frame’s internal structure. If this occurs, the rear trailing arm can fall off.
SAFETY RISK:
The corrosion to the frame’s internal structure can cause the rear trailing arm to fall off, increasing the risk of a crash or injury.
Registered owners of affected vehicles will be notified by mail and asked to take their vehicle to an authorized Honda dealer. Dealers will inspect the rear frame for corrosion to determine the remedy. Owners who have paid to have these repairs completed at their own expense may be eligible for reimbursement, in accord with the recall reimbursement plan on file with NHTSA. For additional questions, owners may contact American Honda’s Customer Support & Campaign Center at 1-888-234-2138.
Not long before the recall was announced, the rear trailing arm broke on this college student’s 2008 CR-V. Not knowing the recall was forthcoming, and somehow having access to a fully equipped garage, the very capable mechanic and Taylor Swift fan did the repair himself!
My CR-V is three years newer, and its 79,000 miles (about 6,000/year) are 200,000 fewer than that guy has on his car. So it’s in much better condition, and I don’t know what the extent of the “remedy” will be, but thanks to that video I now see why the garage wants it for most of the day.
Here is the enterprising young man after the recall was announced. The proof he did the work is on YouTube, and I hope he will be reimbursed.
Follow-up: Well, that turned out to be not a surprise at all. The recall resulted in nothing more than an inspection, and the car passed. It was actually a fishing expedition, and of course the dealership found several thousand dollars worth of problems that “must” be fixed. Having been screwed over sixteen years ago by the same dealer, after the air conditioner “Black Death” in my long-gone 2002 CR-V, I’m not inclined to give them money unless absolutely necessary.
The owner of the excellent and trusted local garage I have relied upon for 25+ years has the print-out of “urgent” repairs. He’ll decide what really does need to be done, and I’ll drop the car off next week for him to do the work.
The motivator behind finally telling this story is Martin Baron’s memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and THE WASHINGTON POST. In chapter 18, “Uprisings”, Baron explains what he considers to have been his failure, as the Post’s editor, at resolving the disconnect he felt with Black staffers in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in 2020.
Ted was hired, and after attending a week of employee orientation he joined my group. The job required a decidedly mixed skill set. It was split between a lot of hands-on technical work and teaching classes on how to use the system. (My most difficult challenge in doing that was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.)
Someone who wasn’t comfortable with frequent air travel, technical troubleshooting under pressure, or public speaking wouldn’t have been qualified. Ted seemed suited to the job. He liked electronics, he was well-spoken, and his personality reminded me of the DJ’s I’d worked with in radio. In fact, Ted had a side gig as a club DJ.
The technical aspects of the job required a lot of time to learn; one year for basic proficiency. So the goal for new hires was to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, to start traveling and to provide the onsite training.
Everyone in my group needed to be able to fill in for one another to do the traveling and the training. For the technical work, I tried to give each of them their own specialty.
For many years I was the go-to guy for customer data communications problems. Dealing with the confounding aspects of serial interfacing and data flow control in the Universal 7-Part Data Circuit model was a big part of my job. (Thank you Intel, for implementing unidirectional XON/XOFF flow control in your modems!)
Ted had an interest in, and aptitude for, data communications. Which made sense to me, because just as I had been a radio DJ, Ted was a gear head with his own DJ setup. I welcomed the chance to train Ted and offload some of that datacomm work.
With my usual obsessive behavior, I have been deep-diving into Logitech Media Server, now that its MySqueezebox intermediary service has been shut down. I am very pleased to have restored some long-lost streaming services.
Years ago, for whatever reason (probably non-technical), the TuneIn app for LMS that I relied upon dropped AAC codec support. The result was the loss of iHeart and BBC stations. The fact is, although my TuneIn account is needed when using a Web Browser, the phone app, and Roku, I shouldn’t have bothered with it for LMS.
Thanks to some plugins, iHeart stations and BBC Radio are back on my LMS network. The only iHeart station I care about on LMS is WBZ in Boston*, but the BBC is a variety-filled candy store of listening. By chance today, I caught this radio play with Prue’s old drinking buddy Norm Rossington.
There are two plugins for accessing the BBC stations. Shown above is the official, full-featured method, BBC Sounds. But take note below of the alternative selections I have set up for BBC Radio 2, and the Classical station, BBC Radio 3. Why the three ↑↑↑ arrows?
The BBC Sounds stations, that are so nicely presented with images and descriptive text, run at Profile 3, HE-AACv1/96kbs (high efficiency). The other plugin I’m using accesses the raw audio feeds, including Profile 1, AAC-LC/320kbs (low complexity) that is not available outside of the UK on BBC Sounds. One arrow for good quality, two for better, and three for best. No fancy features, but the sound quality on headphones and IEMs is as good as streaming stereo audio gets.
* I listen to iHeart’s WZLX-FM, Boston’s Classic Rock, on the porch’s Bose Wave.
