Lee.org

My car has been running a little rough at idle when cold. It would sometimes cut out for a moment and almost stall. The “Check Engine” light came on. It was due for a Test-Only smog check so I took it in for a smog test. The smog guy said the car passed except for the Check Engine light. He handed me a paper describing a $500 repair credit for smog-related repairs from the State.

I took my car to the mechanic at 400 Guerrero. He said, “I looked for a few hours. Maybe it’s the throttle sensor, maybe the computer. I don’t have the equipment to check the computer. Take it somewhere else. I won’t charge you.”

I took my car to a dealer in Walnut Creek, Michael Stead (because all the local Chrysler dealers are closed because of effing General Motors going into the shitter). They replaced the throttle sensor for $500. Before I got home, the problem manifested itself again.

I took the car to the dealer again and now they say it’s an intermittent open connection in the electrical system. They want to charge me $1,800 to replace the entire wiring harness. Is this reasonable?

The dealer will reimburse me the $500 for the mistaken throttle sensor problem. And I should get $500 free money from the state.

If I get a second opinion, might a mechanic be able to find and replace the one bad wire in the electrical system for less than $1,800? Do I dare try cutting and soldering wires myself? I mean, if it’s broken copper in a wire, it’s $1 of wire that’s gone bad.

My car is in for service. I just got a call from the dealer in Walnut Creek, Michael Steads Walnut Creek Chrysler Jeep Dodge.

…
The service rep asks, “The mechanic opened the hood and… has there ever been a fire in your car?”

“Hmm? mmm. Ha! No, but it’s been to Burning Man! All that dust under the hood! And you can never get it out. The mechanic has never seen a car that’s been to Burning Man, has he?”

“Ah, he thought that was fire extinguisher dust…”

This morning Sparkfun had a “Free Day” giving away $100,000 in $100 increments to shoppers. Obviously, their servers came crashing down.

Eric asked on the SWARM list
Eric: anyone get anything?
Lee: I clicked Refresh until my fingers were bloody stumps. But nothing. I’m writing to you now with voice recognition soft wear because I have no fingers.
Mark A: lolz… “soft wear”

I was lying in bed this morning (after being up a while) and the bed started rocking. An earthquake! Wee!! It was really tiny, like 5 seconds total. It felt like someone was at the foot of the bed wiggling the frame a little.

Just now I just tried to wiggle the bed like the earthquake but the frame is too stiff. It was the building doing that wiggling! The motion was entirely horizontal, head-foot / east-west.

The US Geological Survey says this about the earthquake:

Last night I reported how “it was on fire when I got here“. Well today, I get to report how my neighbor’s apartment caught on fire, nearly burning my building down.
Yipe.
I’ll write more later but the short form is:
I called 911 at 11:23am
The first thing they brought out was a smoldering mattress
nobody hurt
fire limited to 1/4 of one apartment, surprisingly little, maybe 1/4 the stuff in the place is smoke damaged.

Ok, they’re rude. But they’re funny. They are.

I’ve loved this list for years. I remember when Luke Sullivan started quoting them at me with funny faces. I laughed and laughed! Though, truth be told, I was and am jealous that he has such an awesome memory… he could quote most (all?) of this list from memory!

Don’t explain, just tell these to your friends, one at a time with a slow wry grin until they make a disgusted face at you.

Some of Larry’s favorite er-jokes:

Continue reading ‘ER Jokes’ »

My friend Marcus, the founder of the Berkeley Revolution is at this moment in New Zealand with his  unicycle basketball team having a blast playing against all the best unicycle basketball teams in the world!

local version:

He is at Unicom, The 15th International Unicycling Convention and Championships held in Wellington New Zealand this year!

I just read news and see that they are doing quite well in the standings. Of course, it’s much more about the journey and having fun, but it feels good to know that Berkeley is representin’!

From their website:

We won our second game 44-2 over NT Cyclones, and we won our 3rd game 32-6 over RSD United, a German team. RSD United gave us a game for a while, we were up just 6-4 at one point–they have some of the world’s fastest unicyclists. But things are going well so far. Tomorrow morning we play probably our toughest prelim, …against a French team (CYCL’HOP), and in the afternoon we will have our first quarterfinal game.

Marcus is 4th from left in the photo

Christmas trees burning on Ocean Beach

As I stood on one side of the street, a cadre of Christmas tree bearing revellers trotted across the street, passing the ranger’s police car. He came on the PA and meekly said “Put those trees down, we’re going to be arresting people real soon.” The last two words trailed off in that “I wish it were true” tone of voice. He might as well have ended with upspeak. I’m sad that I’m the only person that heard him say it. Corey was in with the cadre and he only heard the first half of the plea, taking the tree I gave him over the hill to the already raging bonfire.

I want to thank Michael Prados for the beer, Jon for the happy wave, Jean and Ben for the conversation, Corey for his blatent disregard for the law, Rick for his balancing tree act and Charlotte for everything.

I wrote this little guide for my aunt. Her email password got hacked a while back. If you don’t currently do something similar, you should!

First, here is how to make a bad password that will get hacked:

• Use a word that is in the dictionary, even if you r3place s0me l3tt3rs w1th number5 (that’s an old trick) or…
• add a 1number1 to a 3word3 (that’s an old one too)
• Make your password a too common phrase like your favorite band, “Flock of Seagulls”, or your birthday “2/2/1980”. There aren’t enough 80’s New Wave bands or birthdays to fool a brute force attack on your password.

Now here is how to make a good password that is easy to remember and won’t get hacked:

Change all your passwords to follow a pattern. Make the pattern something you can easily figure out but a password thief could never do.

1. Start with a basic password that is something you like, but misspell it. For example, “caps” to “kaps”.
2. Change it so that it has a capital letter, a number and punctuation. For example, “Kaps^2”.
3. For every website you go to, prepend part of the website name to the new password. For example, maybe use the first 2 letters and the last letter of the site. You’d get “amn” out of  amazon.com. So your password for Amazon.com would be “amnKaps^2” and your password for Bank of America would be “baaKaps^2”.

That’s it!

Your final password should be between 9 and 12 characters. (some websites stupidly limit the length of your password, and you don’t want to have to use a different strategy on those sites, lest it be harder to remember.

You now have a REALLY GOOD PASSWORD that is REALLY EASY TO REMEMBER and REALLY HARD TO GUESS. And it’s DIFFERENT ON EVERY SITE so when one website gets hacked, the bad people don’t know your password on other sites!

————————————————–

If you have gmail, I strongly recommend you turn on 2-step verification.
How to enable it.
A friendly video that walks you through it.

Yes, it takes a little effort, but so does locking your front door when you go out.

Short story: last year I sat down at a public computer at City College. As I typed in my password, I got this chill, wondering if there might be a virus on the computer, sending my password off to some nefarious Russian hacker den or somesuch. So the first thing I did was enable 2-step verification.
Flash forward 3 months to this ABC News article that starts out “A computer virus found at the City College of San Francisco may have been part of an elaborate international scheme stealing students’ personal information for more than a decade.”

Yes, the bad people got my password. But my password strategy and 2-step verification protected me. Nuff said.

I’d like to teach a class with the Institute of Urban Homesteading. To do to the class, I need a space in or around Oakland that can handle a bunch of people playing with bread dough. Can I use your kitchen? If you have a large oven and some space in or near the kitchen, I’d gladly pay you and/or have you attend the class. Call me!

Here is the tentative class description:
Bread in the Oven
3 hour weekday evening class
Cost $30-50 plus $5 supply fee to be paid on day of class

The focus in this class is making an excellent French bread with just a few minutes of effort. Making bread is easy. It doesn’t have to take a long time or be a lot of work. You can make fantastic bread every day or every week for well under a dollar a loaf with less than 10 minutes of effort including cleanup! We will talk about instant yeast and sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb shaping, ammendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! We will eat and bring home what we make in class.