All posts by jah

Technology

Hot Tub Woes

So I love looking for inexpensive bargains, especially to spruce up the backyard.  Mostly I find things at the thrift store that are weather-resistant that I can hang up or display from my kitchen nook to make me feel happy when I see them, and also to entertain my niece and nephew when they come around.  At Big Lots I found these really cute floating flowers for a buck each, so I bought a half dozen.  Within the first few minutes, Bobby asked me where the red one had gone, and I wasn’t sure if it had been one that we put back or not.  We then noticed a bunch of the other ones start to fall apart as the glue that adhered the lily pads to the flowers and leaves were weakened by the water and chemicals, so it didn’t seem to work all that well.  Added to this mixture was my probably not-so-brilliant idea of putting bath OILS in the hot tub. They had a nice vanilla cupcake scent, but the side effect was a virtual bubble bath that went out of control when we turned on the jets, even though this was decidedly not a bubble-bath product.

So after having replaced the most expensive part of the hot tub in recent months ($500 not including labor!), I called the repair guy again.  He doesn’t give free estimates, but I had to bit the bullet.  I was terrified that the similar symptoms of “low flow” (which is LF on the display) meant I was in big trouble, and that perhaps something had burned out and wasn’t working correctly because the displacement of water when a few big people leave the hot tub can cause the water level to drop dramatically.  That may have contributed to the problem the last time, although the hot tub was manufactured seven years ago (even if five of those years it sat in a warehouse).

Fortunately the hot tub repairman advised us never to use those damn dollar flowers anymore, because that damn red flower that disappeared almost instantly had brought our hot tub to a screeching halt for weeks.  Lesson learned!

We were also advised that bath oils are not the same as hot tub scents, so I won’t try to go cheap on that again, either!

Politics, Technology

Wieners in DC

I definitely respect Wiener for exposing (sorry) the ugly side of politics over the many years he was in Washington.

Democrats take the position of resigning when they are caught with their pants off (even if there is no insinuation of physical contact with women on the other side of the country), but there is something that precious few talk show pundits have been discussing in recent weeks.  The difference between the Wiener scandal and all of the other, ignoble, far more egregious and often criminal cases of salacious sexual impropriety among Repubs, is solely that the Repubs have not been caught engaging in their exploits on camera.  The pictures went viral because they could go viral.  It was far too easy for Wiener to have accidentally mixed his public photo cache with his very private cache.  He doesn’t sound like the most tech-savvy guy in the world to begin with.

In principle, I’m not surprised how many people have x-rated photos of themselves online, even headless ones and even among heterosexuals, although I would wager that far fewer women are asking to see body parts before taking someone in the ether very seriously.  I’m not surprised that the exchange of pictures is not dominated by teenagers, as some reports have recently shown, but let’s remember that Anthony Wiener was not in Congress lecturing others about sexual morality and he was certainly not preaching his views to the public about what people should do in their private lives.

I wish Wiener luck on his new marriage and prospective fatherhood.  I don’t think they should try to make him to go rehab.  No no no.

Technology

My Droid can’t spell “Droid”.

Further to my rants about the auto-correction on my new Android phone, I’m surprised that every single time I type in the word “Droid” I get “agreed”.  I realize that this technology is improving, and that this new phone probably needs to get used to some of the colloquialisms I use, but I can’t believe this is forcing me to remember some of the alternatives when I don’t notice the changes until later.

It’s also amazing to me how curse words are never in the dictionary, even when they are REAL words, like “shit”.  It seems a bit paternalistic to me.