After about three and a half years of heavy usage, my Melitta Fast Brew coffee maker finally bit the dust. I noticed a few days ago that the coffee wasn’t as hot as usual. That was a bad sign, especially since I put the finished coffee directly into a glass-lined Thermos air pot to stave off overheating by the burner and heat loss.

I threw a fresh pot (water only) and put my thermometer inside the carafe as soon as the Melitta was done brewing. The proper brewing temperature for drip coffee is around 195°F. Accounting for some heat loss by brewing into a room-temperature carafe, I’d expect the final temperature to be around 180°F or so.

The Melitta brewed at 160°F. Definitely a bad sign. The stainless steel heating element in the Fast Brew is surely dying.

We’re limping along with the Melitta for now. I figured it was time to order a new machine to replace the old bird before she died, so a Bunn is on the way. I’ll run the Bunn for a bit before doing a write-up and give the Melitta a proper burial.

Rest in peace, my sweet.

In the spirit of the “How many five year olds can you take in a fight” quiz I wrote about almost two years ago, The Accountant™ passed along the “how many 90 year olds can you take in a fight” quiz.

Some new rules apply here versus the original:

• Everyone is ambulatory (no wheelchairs)
• Everyone is wearing groin protection — this is a big update from the first quiz
• The “arena” is bigger, about the size of a basketball court

My results:

I could take down 35 90 year olds in a fight.

This is all in good fun. If you are thinking about submitting my results before the court, this in no way implies that I would actually take on 35 90 year people at once, or that I would want to.

I run up to six computers in my house. I turn them off or suspend them in order to save money and reduce my impact on the environment. I recently discovered a problem when doing this, though. I want to watch a television show or movie when I power on my HTPC. When I shut them off or suspend them most of their “lives,” all of the system health stuff runs at the same time I am trying to watch a program.

For example, I run Grisoft’s AVG antivirus software and Windows Defender. Both run on schedules and both can take a fair amount of CPU, RAM, and hard disk I/O resources. If you leave the machine off long enough, it’s possible to have both programs running at the same time.

This makes the rest of the system run slowly. This is particularly annoying when watching a 720p HD show via Boxee, which takes a pretty healthy dose of resources up on its own.
Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, here’s a fun game I played with my friends and family this holiday.

You’re in the middle of a major world crisis. Zombie apocalypse. World War Three. Super deadly strain of Hamthrax breaks out. Hockey gets canceled. Whatever the reason, you’ve got to leave wherever you are, and get to some place “safe.” The “safe place” isn’t important; what’s important is that you only have time to take one of each of these things with you when you bug out.

You have to have the item in your possession, either in your domicile or in storage less than 15 minutes away by vehicle.

You can only take one item from each category. Not two. Just one.
Read the rest of this entry »

I spend some time at the end of every year and think about the best and worst things I’ve reviewed. I wrote 63 reviews this year, from sock garters to headphone amplifiers. What were the best and worst things I bought all year?
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been an XM Radio subscriber twice. When I started driving to work last year during the fall I called in and got the “open secret” $77 annual membership deal. Service is usually $13 a month, so I was glad paying more than 50% off. However, as the weather got better I rode my motorcycle so much I didn’t listen to XM for months at a time. Even then, I wasn’t a big fan of their music selection and wound up listening to just two channels, something I wrote about almost four years ago when I tried XM for the first time.

Anyway, my year subscription expired about three months ago. I called in and spent forty-five minutes on the phone with an account representative and canceled my membership (which was set to auto-renew at $13/month).

What followed was a ninety-plus day barrage of sales calls trying to get me to become an XM customer again.
Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday I noticed that some of my things were damp underneath the kitchen sink. Turns out that there was a small leak coming from the cold water hose. No problem, right? I read the specifications right off of the hose, went to Home Depot, and purchased a replacement.

I turned the knob on the cold water shut off valve and started to unscrew the old hose. Water started spraying out. Hrm … didn’t I just turn the valve off? I turned it the other way, to make sure. Then this happened:

The knob snapped off right in my hand. Water sprayed ten feet back and all over the floor. I clamped my hand over the spray; it was the best I could do while Sedagive? scampered for a bucket. The bucket filled almost instantly.

Here’s the fun part: I had no idea where the house’s shut off valve was, and the last time I had to do this the valve was under a manhole-style cover in my yard in Williamsburg. We had about four inches of ice and snow in the yard, and I didn’t even know where to start looking. I decided to try underneath the house in a hope that the shut off valve was in an accessible — and dry — location.

Sure enough, there were three valves under the house. I channeled my inner R2D2 and shut them all down. It took us quite a while to clean up the water. We went to Lowe’s to get a replacement plastic valve, and the gentleman explained that the valve was a Quest fitting that was no longer made. Apparently Shell made a bunch of this shit out of polybutylene and it had a reputation for failing. Shell settled a class action lawsuit for a billion dollars (which I missed by seven months).

I bought a metal “shark’s tooth” style replacement fitting. It didn’t make me super confident — you just push the fitting onto the pipe and it clamps down on its own. How reliable would it be? What made me even less confident is that while the cold water started working again, there seemed to be a leak from the hot side now. My dishwasher feeds from that line, and I didn’t want to deal with trying to replace that fitting.

The plumber is here now, and he had to scrounge for some antiquated Quest parts. Keep your fingers crossed.

I used to read a lot when I was younger. My father had a rule: I had to go into my bedroom at 9PM, but could stay up as long as I wanted as long as I read. It was a win-win for everyone. My father got some quiet time, I read a ton, and eventually reading made me sleepy so I slept better. My parents engendered a desire to read, and I continued to do so throughout high school.

Then I went to college, and double majored in English and History. I read even more than before, but seldom for pleasure — unless you count my native interest in course material. Well, well over a decade has passed since I graduated, but my desire to read for “fun” never really returned. I attribute it mostly to getting burned-out in college (I was assigned over 120 books in one semester), but there are other reasons, too. One is that I have other things to occupy my time, like riding my motorcycle or gaming. Another factor is book portability. I just couldn’t take transporting books every time I moved, and so I bequeathed my nearly 400-book collection to my friend Ed.

Every now and then, though, a series would hook me. Or I’d learn about a book that might be of interest. I didn’t want to stockpile more books, so I’d try my best to borrow them from a friend or borrow them from the county library system. The problem with being a geek in a conservative region is that a lot of the books my friends read aren’t available at the library.

eBooks have been around for a long time, and having an eBook reader may assuage some of the problems I have with meatspace libraries. It has been years since I’ve last read any books in my favorite vampire series, but I want to give them a whirl again. With a real book, I’d have to store (and pay to move) those books until I read them again, if I ever read them. With an eBook, they just kind of hang out in the ether until I am ready to read.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is the one thousandth published post on Gibberish Is My Native Language. What does over four years of posts add up to?
Read the rest of this entry »

About a month and a half ago I left for Georgia on vacation. My friend Grizzly Adams stayed here at the house to watch the dogs and keep an eye on the premises. When I came back, the upstairs was 78°F. The downstairs was 72°F and the air conditioning was running full-speed. Normally I keep the house at 68 – 72° at all times, and I have separate air conditioner units for each floor. I have a home owner’s warranty on the house (they replaced my upstairs unit already), but I was tired and wanted to go to sleep with cool air blowing through the house. I reset the breakers, waited awhile, and turned the unit back on. Everything seemed cool.
Read the rest of this entry »