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Some of the gunk on the rear window is from the plastics in the car out gassing. It's a sublimation process so sticks to the inside of the glass.

notfred wrote:

Some of the gunk on the rear window is from the plastics in the car out gassing. It's a sublimation process so sticks to the inside of the glass.

How long do they keep outgassing? This car is 14 years old...

Regarding road rage, my personal explanation is simple.

Imagine you're walking on a sidewalk. Constantly you have people cutting you off, suddenly stopping, nudging you out of the way, turning around, etc. Basically, there's no respect for your personal space and mobility. Eventually your Rage-O-Meter fills up.

The car and roads, as I see them, are essentially you and your sidewalk, with the vehicle being perceived as an extension of your body, and as such requiring its space, travel flow, etc. Add to that the psychological fact of knowing that slamming a 1 ton+ object against another can very well result in grieve injury or death, and it's only natural that one gets angry when people don't respect road rules or are otherwise obnoxious.

just brew it! wrote:

notfred wrote:

Some of the gunk on the rear window is from the plastics in the car out gassing. It's a sublimation process so sticks to the inside of the glass.

How long do they keep outgassing? This car is 14 years old...

Should be done by now unless you are cleaning the plastics with something like ArmorAll, or suddenly parking in the sun when it has spent all its life parked in the shade. May be just the road grime as the good Captain suggested earlier.

Stupid circuit breaker for the bedroom keeps tripping every day or two. Aside from the breaker, nothing seems amiss; and there's nothing plugged in to that circuit that should be drawing an appreciable load. Barring an intermittent in-wall wiring short, I'm guessing that the breaker is just bad.

Guess I'll try replacing the breaker. Never done that before, but it looks simple enough.

just brew it! wrote:

Stupid circuit breaker for the bedroom keeps tripping every day or two. Aside from the breaker, nothing seems amiss; and there's nothing plugged in to that circuit that should be drawing an appreciable load. Barring an intermittent in-wall wiring short, I'm guessing that the breaker is just bad.

Guess I'll try replacing the breaker. Never done that before, but it looks simple enough.

Depending on the brand, it should be pretty easy. Only one wire involved.

The more a breaker trips, the less able it is to hold at its rated current

Is it a standard breaker or something like an arc-fault one? Our bedroom plugs have to be on an AFCI. This gives you more failure modes on the breaker, in addition to the more real faults it will pick up e.g. like loose connections.

I have a sub to Amazon Prime; TNG is on that.

So I was rewatching Chain of Command; and all I could think of was someone doing that to Sam. And I was ready to kill someone with my bare hands if they tried; and I actually think I could have at that moment if I needed to. Is that sort of thing normal?

paulWTAMU wrote:

I have a sub to Amazon Prime; TNG is on that.

So I was rewatching Chain of Command; and all I could think of was someone doing that to Sam. And I was ready to kill someone with my bare hands if they tried; and I actually think I could have at that moment if I needed to. Is that sort of thing normal?

Perfectly. Just goes to show how well that two-parter was written, acted, and filmed. The best stuff in movies/TV so engages your emotions that you ARE the character and feel as the character does. It's not often pulled off but when it is and is done as well as Chain the personal emotional effects are, as you found, undeniably powerful.

notfred wrote:

Is it a standard breaker or something like an arc-fault one? Our bedroom plugs have to be on an AFCI. This gives you more failure modes on the breaker, in addition to the more real faults it will pick up e.g. like loose connections.

Just a standard breaker. Replacement was uneventful, and it hasn't tripped since.

Do people generally power down the whole panel to do a breaker replacement? Seemed unnecessary to me as long as the breaker being replaced is switched off prior to disconnecting the wire...

Lost J.J. Cale today. Writer of "Cocaine" and "After Midnight", performed many times live with Clapton. All-around musician whose influence sneaks under the radar.

just brew it! wrote:

Just a standard breaker. Replacement was uneventful, and it hasn't tripped since.

Do people generally power down the whole panel to do a breaker replacement? Seemed unnecessary to me as long as the breaker being replaced is switched off prior to disconnecting the wire...

I hate arc-fault breakers. Haven't ever had one that would pass its rated current even with a pristine run of romex to the outlet. GFCI breakers do OK, though. Prefer standards just because they'll actually pass their rated current.

As for working in the panel, I'm a very bad example. I work in the panel live all the time, even adding circuits and feeds. The only time I tripped the main was when I moved the main from the meter socket on the front porch (which fed a woefully-undersized branch panel that purported to serve the house) to the newly-installed main panel in the cellar. The key is to properly route and bend all 3 wires so that it only takes one hand to insert the wire into the breaker/busbar and then screw it down with one hand. Two hands in the panel is asking for trouble.

That said, don't be stupid like me.

Captain Ned wrote:

The key is to properly route and bend all 3 wires so that it only takes one hand to insert the wire into the breaker/busbar and then screw it down with one hand. Two hands in the panel is asking for trouble.

That said, don't be stupid like me.

I attached the wire to the new breaker *before* inserting the breaker into the panel.

just brew it! wrote:

I attached the wire to the new breaker *before* inserting the breaker into the panel.

Not how I would have done it as to me the flex in the black wire as you bang in the new breaker should be avoided (just like most of my in-panel working theory). To me, inserting the breaker poses more potential danger than inserting the hot wire into the breaker terminal (with breaker switched off), but YMMV. Still breaks all the rules and would fail the journeyman exam if an inspector is present.

Gene Ray wrote:

If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic corner days rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Earth, proving 4 Days, Not 1Day,1Self,1Earth or 1God that exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- antipodes. Add +0- as One = nothing.

Been a few years since I've visited the Time Cube site. If anything, he's gotten even nuttier (and/or gone senile, though I'm not sure it would be possible to tell).

For those who aren't familiar with Gene and his... *ahem*... theories, he's one of the original "Internet cranks". His site has been around (in more or less its present form, though the exact content changes sporadically) for more than a decade and a half.

And the belly button proves it? Holy ****. I've been on this site before, but like you it had been a long time.

Damnit, now I've gotta get back into my daily rhythm.

Spent a week at KansasFest. I think I'll just post this picture, regarding the pure undiluted awesome that it was this year.



For those unaware, that's a real Apple 1 (the kind that's been selling for $600k lately), and the owner (at the keyboard) actually let us program it. And, the guy in the blue shirt next to the computer is Steve Wozniak. Yes, that Steve Wozniak. And he actually hung out at KFest for three days.

OK, that's awesome.

FroBozz_Inc wrote:

OK, that's awesome.

I see The Woz still likes the chunky watches.

I spent most of the weekend going through crap from the crawlspace. It's amazing what over a decade worth of accumulated junk looks like. Unfortunately, the crawlspace has been my default place to stash "I'll deal with this later" things. Somehow, "later" never seemed to happen, until things got bad enough that nothing would fit any more.

Everything from years worth of old tax/IRA paperwork and bank statements (which should've been shredded long ago); to boxes of dead PSUs and CD-ROM drives (never know when you might want to scavenge a fan, a power connector, or... something...); to boxes of beer 6-pack holders I'd been saving for unpacking day at the beer competition I help run (but which had gotten shoved behind boxes of other stuff years ago and forgotten); empty cardboard boxes and packing material from electronics we don't even own any more; various PC motherboards dating all the way back to the Socket 7 era; piles of manuals for MS-DOS, Windows 3.x/9x, and other antique software; long-forgotten cases of empty beer bottles; a case of dodgy homebrew I'd shoved in there several years ago to get it out of the way "just to see if it gets better with age"; more half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper than anyone should own; a huge box of old cassette tapes I used to listen to in the car back in the day; and so on.

Yes, I'm a major procrastinator. And a bit of a hoarder. No, I'm not getting rid of my old (nearly complete) collection of Byte magazine (yet)!

The recycling guy is gonna be pissed. There will be a mammoth mountain of boxes full of glass bottles, cardboard 6-pack holders, and shredded paper, plus a heap of broken down cardboard boxes this week. The back seat of my car is also piled with boxes of dead electronics, which I will be dropping off at the local electronics recycling center on my way to work.

And I've barely touched the heaps of stuff in my office (which have started piling up because the crawlspace was full). At least some of the stuff in the office is of recent enough vintage to be candidates for selling/trading/giving away at the BBQ in 2 weeks. (Hmm, maybe even some of the stuff from the crawlspace would be of interest to Starfalcon... )

Hmmmmm.......mystery computer stuffs from a crawlspace.....OMG the lootz

You didn't even try to build a frankenbot?

paulWTAMU wrote:

You didn't even try to build a frankenbot?

Oh, I'll still have plenty of stuff left for that. Hoarders don't give up their hoard that easily! I'll probably throw my current desktop (an FX-8320) and a 1090T (or two!) on, come Frankie time.

Completely changing the subject, I love today's xkcd. I think I will have to use that line on someone. Maybe tomorrow (eh, actually today... OK, after I sleep), on the somewhat elderly receptionist at the office building where I work when she asks me how I am in the morning. 50/50 odds I get a blank stare.

JBI wrote:

a case of dodgy homebrew I'd shoved in there several years ago to get it out of the way "just to see if it gets better with age"

Did it?

Don't keep us in suspense!

Glorious wrote:

JBI wrote:

a case of dodgy homebrew I'd shoved in there several years ago to get it out of the way "just to see if it gets better with age"

Did it?

Don't keep us in suspense!

++

Its probably skunked and lumpy by now.....I would not try it

Talking about the beer.

monts wrote:

Glorious wrote:

JBI wrote:

a case of dodgy homebrew I'd shoved in there several years ago to get it out of the way "just to see if it gets better with age"

Did it?

Don't keep us in suspense!

++

Probably not, haven't tasted it yet. But as of a couple of years ago (when I found the other case of that batch and tried one) it had not improved; the original flaws (lack of carbonation and cloying sweetness) had merely been augmented by oxidation (which comes across as a stale cardboardy flavor) and a hint of sourness. It was already at least 2-3 years old at that point.

This case may meet the same fate as the first one -- a donation to the BJCP to be used in beer judge training and/or certification exams. Judges need to be able to recognize and diagnose off flavors and out-of-style beers, and at best this beer was an example of a Belgian Tripel gone wrong; now it's just a bad Tripel that's gone even further off from sitting in a crawlspace for half a decade.

vargis14 wrote:

Its probably skunked and lumpy by now.....I would not try it

Talking about the beer.

Actually, it shouldn't be skunked (since it has been in a dark crawlspace), and it looks pretty darned clear (sitting undisturbed for years will get pretty much anything suspended in the beer to precipitate out). And pathogenic bacteria can't survive in beer (especially a high octane one like a Tripel), so there's no danger in tasting it.

I plan to taste one before dumping it (if it's too horrific to inflict even on student judges), donating it (if it tastes as I expect), or keeping it (in the unlikely event a miracle has occurred).

I'm eager to hear how this taste. How do you *expect* it to taste? Bad but not gut churning?

paulWTAMU wrote:

I'm eager to hear how this taste. How do you *expect* it to taste? Bad but not gut churning?

Yeah, pretty much. Last time I opened one it was drinkable (barely), but not pleasant. Definitely failed the "would I ask for another one of these" drinkability test.

It is actually pretty difficult to brew a truly gut churning beer. Unless you royally screw up, you will end up with something which is at least drinkable 99% of the time [/handwave]. In ~18 years of homebrewing I believe I have only dumped 4 batches (not counting this one). 2 of those were weird-ass experiments (which I knew were somewhat risky going in); 1 was a batch that I just let sit too long, the airlock on the fermenter dried out, and the batch got horribly oxidized; and 1 was an early batch where the fermentation got stuck about halfway through, for reasons I never really figured out.

In ~12 years of judging competitions, I've encountered a fair amount of bad beer, but only 2 which I would describe as truly "gut churning". And neither of those was actually at my table; they were both "hey, you need to come check this one out, you won't believe how bad it is!" things (yeah, beer judges do that to each other sometimes).

That said, the anticipated "badness factor" of this Tripel just went up a notch. A few minutes ago I stuck a bottle of it in the freezer to chill, and looking at the sticker on the cap realized that it is a bit older than I thought. This batch of beer is actually 8 years old, as of tomorrow!

This should be interesting...

It's actually less bad than I expected. Very sweet (cloying), absolutely no carbonation, some alcohol burn, oxidized & stale. Hard to say for sure since it has been a while since I last tasted this train wreck of a beer, but it is probably about the same as it was last time I tried it.