Previous News08.15.2011 - Terrence Marks:Happy Monday.
What have we been up to? Last week I took some time out for fun and went to see DEVO with my friends. The guys put on a good show. Decent mix of old and new material. I hear it's hard on a band when most of the crowd's there to hear your hit single. It must be harder when most of the people are there to hear the hit single from thirty years ago. But they still rock. I prefer guitar-based DEVO to keyboard-based DEVO; Are We Not Men is my favorite album of theirs. I enjoyed the concert, but I was delighted when they switched instruments halfway through.
As I mentioned last Sunday, we had some car issues and some Internet issues. Planned on going to work a bit early, maybe get some overtime. I turn the key. The engine chugs once or twice, then just clicks.
According to the Internet, it's either a battery issue, a starter issue, or an alternator issue. Now, I'll mention that last year, my car went through four starters in three months. This one has been working pretty well, but I really don't want to start that process over again.
So I open the hood and start cleaning the battery contacts. It's not the most likely fix, but it's one of the few useful things I can do with the tools available to me. Turns out the battery/alternator/starter wasn't the only thing to go. The hydraulic thing that holds the hood up when you open it doesn't work either. So I have to keep pushing it open every minute or so. I get the corrosion off the contacts just in time for me to leave for work, and nothing. The car still just clicks.
None of the local places rent cars on Sundays. I work until midnight, a long way away so there's nobody I can ask for a ride. I could try to find a mechanic that's open and get it towed there, but my car has over 200,000 miles on it - there's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay to keep the car going, and that limit is slowly getting lower and lower.
Fortunately, my father-in-law is a mechanic. He has a multimeter. It turns out that it's a battery problem, which is the cheapest and easiest of the alternatives. He also remembers that the battery is under warranty. I was able to get this fixed for under $30. And a day of work. But it's fixed.
That night, we also had out wireless router stop working three times in an hour, which is why comics were late. That story is less interesting. (It's not the first time it happened, so we went and bought a new router. The end.) It wasn't a good day to be an electrical device that we owned, though.
Favorite ND character (round 2)
Twix Snickers Cerise Mamma Dorpe Murphy Dorpe
Really? No love for Murphy Dorpe? Just one vote? I'd think the moustache alone would be good for, like, ten. Snickers won this one handily, with Twix and Cerise rounding out the Dorpe-Namir family poll.