THE WEISS CHRONICLES

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

A Different Reboot 

We had a power outage again last night between about 11 pm and 1 am or so. Everything came on after the power was restored.

However, about noon or so today our Air Conditioner went out.

I did the usual check of the thermostat and that seemed fine.

Then I checked the circuit breaker and that seemed fine but just to be sure I cut the A/C circuit on and off and then the whole house circuit on and off.

Nothing happened.

Then I went to the place where the inside stuff is for the A/C and kicked the aluminum housing that surrounds it. A little humming began and a few minutes later the A/C was on.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 5:26 PM

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Did the Cat Scare the Mouse 

Ann called out to me, "Please help me, the cursor disappeared".

I went into the room she uses to 'compute'. Our cat Trina (or Katrina) followed me in and started investigating the desktop area. Yes the cursor had disappeared. I checked the electrical outlet; it was plugged in just fine. Then I pulled out and checked the hard drive and that was just fine also.

As I was putting the hard drive back, the cursor appeared on the screen.

Did Katrina scare the mouse?

posted by Martin Weiss  # 1:18 PM

Friday, July 20, 2012

Coolant and the Cobalt 

One of our cars is a Chevy Cobalt.

The other day I noticed that the coolant temperature, as shown by the dashboard digital display was 197. The car had only been running about 5 to 10 minutes at the time.

I wondered if this was a point at which I should replace the coolent.

There was a discussion board on the internet about this very topic. It seems that this model runs 'hot' compared to other Chevys (or to non-Chevys) and up to 210, there is nothing to worry about. Even up to 230 is probably not a problem.

I also read up a bit on the general subject of coolant used in automobiles. Almost all cars made in the past decade or so use a combination of water and glycol. The glycol has a lower freezing point than water and thus makes the coolant into an antifreeze as well. Automobile coolant is transitioning from ethanol glycol to propylene glycol because of the lower toxicity of the latter. If your coolant gets low, just add water because a 45% glycol mix works as well (actually slightly better as a coolant and slightly worse as an antifreeze). Wooopee.

The discussion about the Cobalt was here.http://www.topix.com/forum/autos/chevrolet-cobalt/TL430B6JQGCF4VNS1 another, not focused on the cobalt was here.http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070427234653AAdPlm0.

A discussion of the function of coolant is here. In the image above, the coolant  tank and overflow reservoir is on the right.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 5:41 PM

Monday, July 16, 2012

Rebooting Works Again 

I had an awful problem with my ACER Netbook. The upper case was locked in place for the top row. Thus when I typed a'1', it showed a '!", when I typed a '2', it showed an '@', etc.

I tried many different work arounds, many different fixes with the function keys, the caps key, etc.

Finally, I remember the computer guy's famous question whenever I brought a problem to him, "...well", he always asked, "did you try rebooting?"

It turned out that rebooting did fix the problem.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 7:28 PM

Monday, July 02, 2012

Storm and Aftermath 

We had a storm blow through Friday night. We lost electricity for about 46 hours.

As of today there are still many traffic lights not working and large portions of Montgomery county has no electricity. Interestingly, as in several previous outages, the zip codes with the highest average income tend to have the longest power outage (perhaps because of the old trees).

We lost a lot of dairy and products made with eggs. However, our downstairs freezer held the cold in quite well and there was no loss of the expensive cuts of meat down there. We did have some defrosting of the upper refrigerator freezing department and we took several pounds of meat to Gerry Berg who stored it for a day or so.

Stanley Cohen didn't lose power.
Kevin Shaw got power back after about 110 hours. 
Irwin still didn't have power after about 130 hours.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 8:02 PM

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