There were cheaper things on the menu. But, there were two problems. First, I didn’t have a lot of time. I only had a 15 minutes before they started bordering. The Ice bar was right across from my gate.
So, I could stand to linger over my salad until boarding started. When I travel I always like to eat at the bar. You get better service and it’s just friendlier. And you can see the TV’s. The Ice was showing the final round of the Masters on one TV and some rodeo from Las Vegas on the other TV. The bull riding was more interesting than the putting. Eventually, some of the other people at the bar got them to turn on the Masters.
What is too expensive? Is $1 for a bottle of water too much? It’s only a few pennies worth of water. Why is it $1? Worse yet, sometimes it’s $5. It depends on the location.
If you’re sitting in your kitchen, $1 is too much.
If you’re in a football stadium on a hot August afternoon, $5 sounds about right.
If you are lost in the desert no price is too high.
I wasn’t exactly in the middle of the desert, but I also wasn’t in the middle of my kitchen. I was on a trip once again.
See, my second problem was that I recently lost a lot of weight. (How I Lost 30 lbs . . And Why You Can’t.) Except it’s up to 37 lbs now and I want to drop the last 8. I was 165 lbs when I graduated from high school. Six months ago I was 210 lbs.
Six months I’d worked on that goal. What was a reasonable price to hold on to that goal? 5$? 10$? Or was it worth $15 for a platefull of lettuce?
It’s not just lettuce.
How often do we walk away from our goals because of the cost?
I’ve been writing this blog for over two years. I’m amazed that some of you find value, or at least a little entertainment in the poor scribblings I put down on this electronic paper. I often talk to people who want to write. When they hear I write five days a week, they always say the same thing,
How do you find the time?
The answer is that I don’t. None of us “find” time. Ben Franklin, more than 200 years ago pointed out that we all have the same amount. So, I don’t “find” time, I “make” it. There have been plenty of times that I’ve been so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes opened for more than a sentence or two. Feel free to speculate which posts those were. I’ll give you a hint, they typically had the most typos.
But, like my $15 salad at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, it’s worth it because it’s a goal I set a long time ago and I have yet to find something, certainly not sleep, that I like more than having been a consistent writer for the past two years.
What is your goal? What is your $15 salad?
Whatever it is, to others it is going to appear to be WAY overpriced. It’s not. Just remember what you’re doing it for.
It’s definitely worth it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss) or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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I wasn’t going to Be abel to get it done. The pain in my stomach had nothing to do with any physical ailment. I was going to fail in a commitment to my son and the pain of it was killing me inside.
The assignment from my son’s freshman Spanish class had been simple enough. Create a 3-5 minute video cooking a traditional Latin American dish.
Dad, can you video me cooking something for my Spanish class?
Sure son, just let me know when you want to do it.
And then I went on with my busy life. My life is busy, but I’ve always been committed to being there for the things that are really important. (It’s What I Do…Not Who I Am) I could certainly make a simple video. I have a phone, a digital camera, an iPad, I even have an old school videotape camera. Of course, we could get this done.
Hey, Dad, do you think we can do that video on Saturday?
Yeah. Wasn’t it already due?
Well, I’ll turn it in late. You were busy and I thought maybe I’d just skip the whole thing.
No, you don’t need to do that. We’ll do it Saturday. I’ve got some other stuff going on, but we’ll schedule around your cooking. You just let me know when you want to do it.
And he did. He wanted to record at 1:00 pm. I got up early on Saturday. I had to replace the passenger side door on my “Iron Man” Car. (My Car The Super Hero.)
To replace the door, you have to remove the fender. To remove the fender, you have to remove the headlight and wheel. It’s a bit involved. And I had a commitment at 6:00 PM to be at the temple.
And then work called. . .Not a huge outage. Just an authentication issue for all my agents. As normal, we were the first supplier to report a problem to the client. I left my car up on blocks with the wheel removed and the headlight out.
I have to admit I had less patience than normal on my outage call. Finally, we had everyone back up and running.
Okay, I’m going to let you guys figure out the lost agent minutes. I’m up to my elbows in a car repair.
Have fun, Rodney.
Yeah, it was fun. But, knowing there was a deadline made it just a little stressful. Mid morning I finally got the fender and the door removed. I was switching all the hardware from the old door to the new door when my son appeared.
Dad, about that video. . .
What? Is it one o’clock already?
No. Just that I looked at the instructions and the food needs to chill for two hours after I do the first part.
So, your want to put off the filming until 3:00?
No, we need to film at 1:00 and then again at 3:00.
Sure. No problem. Come get me when you want to start.
I was switching the interior door panel, the door handle, the mirror and the lock from the old door to the new door. Most of it went pretty easily until I got to the lock. I called my neighbor who had done the driver’s door.
Do I have to take the guts of the door out?
No. There is a 10mm bolt that you can access after removing the panel. Then, turn the lock a quarter turn clockwise and it should drop out. You’ll have to move the rod that connects to the lock and the wiring of course.
The problem was I’d found the bolt, but couldn’t get to the lock from the back of the door. I had been struggling with it for an hour.
Hey Dad, can we do the video now?
Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Just let me wash my hands.
We’d suggested that my son write a script. He wanted to do it live. We did a couple of different takes of the beginning. Typically, each video would end with “Can you pausse it?”
I wasn’t worried though. That’s what video editing software is for.
He mixed milk and butter, onions and lemon juice. Then added hamburger. It looked delicous. Unfortunately, much of the video was simply watching a pan cook.
I wasn’t worried though. That’s also what video editing software is for.
A final shot of him putting it in the refridgerator and we were done for a couple hours.
I finally got the lock out. I did have to pull the guts out of the door. But, only a few. I started reassembling the door. Next was to mount it on the car. Mouting a door is a challenging process. Worse when you are doing it alone. I ended up using a floor jack to hold up the other end of the door. It fit perfectly the first time. Next up was the fender.
Dad?
Yeah? Oh, right. Ready for the next part?
Yeah.
Just let me wash my hands.
He took the hamburger mixture and formed it into the shape of eggroles. He then rolled it in crushed crackers and then fried it. And with that, he was done. Great.
The clock was not my friend. I needed my car back together before my 6:00 event. I finished the fender and started on the wheel cowling. Instead of the problem of too many bolts, I ended up with not enough. No matter, I used some from the Red Lexus.
Minutes were ticking by.
Daddy, your phone was ringing.
Can you bring it to me?
My daughter appeared with with phone and set it on the car. If it was a work call they would leave a message. . .No corresponding tone. Good, whomever it was could call back.
Next the headlight went in. A support broke when it came out, so it was supported by only two bolts instead of three. No matter, I’ll swap out one of the Red Lexus’ headlights later.
HONK
A car in the street was honking at someone.
HONK, HONK
Just about got the last bolt.
HONK, HONK, HOOOONK!
Hey, Rodney!
Huh?
Yeah, I called but you didn’t pick up. We’re headed over to the temple now.
Okay, I need to be in the temple at 6:00?
Six thirty.
Great. See you there.
Finally, the wheel went on. Torque each lugnut to 100 ft/lbs, drop the car off the jack stand and run for the shower.
The event at the temple went great, but I didn’t get home until after 10:00 PM.
I wasn’t worried. Even though I was leaving on a trip on Sunday, my flight wasn’t until 3:30. Plenty of time to edit my son’s video. I even slept in late.
But, my flight wasn’t at 3:30. It was at 1:30. I figured it out when I went to print my itinerary. And the minutes were ticking by and I couldn’t make it work.
My phone records in MP4 format. Windows Movie Maker cannot read MP4. You just need a new codec, or format file, right? Sure, and all the ones I checked were full of malware, spyware and probably viruses.
I’m a tech guy. This was a tech problem. I should be able to fix it. My Vista machine (Don’t judge me) didn’t have a program that would read the MP4 files.
And I wasn’t going to make it.
I stopped trying and went to pack and take a shower. I travel enough that packing is a 15 minute job.
Perhaps I was approaching it wrong. Maybe instead of finding a codec, I should find a converter between MP4 and Windows Media Format (WMF)? I still had 20 minutes before my time to leave.
Maybe I would make it.
I found one that didn’t look like it was from a spyware company.
YES! They do conversions. I downloaded the file. It was agonizing watching the progress bar. Every minute of download time was one less minute to get the work done.
How long would it take to learn a new piece of software? Probably longer than I had. Still I was making progress.
Nice! There were prompts on where to load the files and where to export them to. I was going to make it.
NO! The trial version wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t me to upgrade. Was it worth $40 to make this work? Was it worth $40 to keep my committment to my son?
And there went $39.95.
And I hit my time limit. I wasn’t done and it was time to leave. What would you do?
I started eating into my buffer. All Project managers have a buffer. Mine looked like this:
- Flight Time: 1:30 PM
- Time to airport: 45 min
- Leave for airport: 11:30
Plus there’s always a “What is the contingency plan?”
Worst case? I have to reschedule for a later flight. There’s a 3:30 flight. I know this because I’m scheduled on that flight next week.
I got the files converted and I started working through the editing. When I started it was 14 minutes long. The requirement was 3-5 minutes. I started cutting with one eye toward shorting it, and the other eye watching the clock.
I made it through about half. The video file said 4:32 and the clock said it was past time to go.
Did I make it?
It depends on how you measure it. I provided my son a video of him making a dish. But, the editing was terrible. I was rushed. I could have done much better.
I’m not sure if he was disappointed, but I knew that I was.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss) or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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Iron Man or Transformers?
My car was back among the living. While the literal heavy lifting of doing a partial engine rebuild was being done, I spent a lot of time doing body work.
My car had some dings and scrapes. Nothing that affected the driving, but the looks were not great. A local body shop quoted me $2800 to fix it. (It IS a Lexus after all.) The door alone was $1000.
But, the car we were parting out, the Red Lexus had a gorgeous body, expect for the right front corner panel where it had obviously hit something. So, while my neighbor was swapping heads, I swapped hoods. . .and trunk lids. . .and doors. And a whole host of other pieces that were nicer on the red one.
Swapping out a backdoor is pretty easy. Swapping out a front door gets complicated. Especially when you want to keep the mirror, like I did. And the locks had to be swapped, and the power window didn’t work on the Red one. When we got done, the car looked . . .different. The body was in good shape, of course, but the two-tone paint was a definite fashion statement.
We finished up, a day and week after the car blew up. The engine swap, which never happened was supposed to take a day or two. Instead we’d spent 8 days and probably 120 man hours rebuilding the bad header and getting it back up and running.
And it wasn’t cheap.
$315 towing
$163 for a new oil pump (The largest single expense)
Hundreds for fluids and new tools and bits and bolts. The grand total was $962.34. That number is high, but nowhere near the $5000 I was quoted for a new engine, that’s because the spare engine, and the labor were free. If we’d paid $40/hour for the mechanic services we’d be right in that $5000 ballpark.
In addition to a running car, I also have “spares;” spare alternator, spare transmission, spare tires with Lexus rims, spare seats that need refinishing, spare brake pump, a whole bucket of spare bolts. And, of course a spare engine that we will rebuild over the coming months, just in case the car dies again.
I started this week talking about how I’m Afraid Of My Car. . .But, I Have A Good Reason. The biggest difference that this week made for me was that it removed that fear. Remember, we often fear what we don’t understand. Many people are afraid of computers for the same reason.
I’ve looked into the heart of the engine. I helped pull it out, rip it apart and then put it back together. . and it worked. My car could still die on the freeway. The rings are probably bad and we didn’t touch those, and it still has a power steering leak. Or any number of things can go wrong with a car with 250,000 miles on it.
But, never again do I have to stare at a broken car on the side of the road and wonder if it’s broken too badly to fix. (Well, assuming I didn’t wrap it around a telephone pole, of course.)
Thanks to my neighbor, I now felt confident that whatever goes wrong. . a battery dying, an alternator going out, even an engine seizing up, it’s fixable. And at this point, I have a spare.
The only question left was what to make of the paint job? Was the two-tone too much? Did it look like some Frankenstein monster assembled from a red one, a gold one and a white one?
My neighbor’s son called it: Iron Man. The coloring and the location of the doors and panels make the car look like Tony Stark built it.
(Photo Credit: Marvel)
Or, even better, Iron Man meets Transformers!
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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I was just minding my own business driving to work on a Friday and here it was Tuesday night and I’d gone from:
Working car. . .
to . . broken car. . .
to. . .blown engine will cost $5000 to replace. . .
to. . .we can swap it ourselves. . .
to. . .nah let’s partially rebuild the one we have.
I have no idea really how I got here. What do I know about rebuilding an engine? Nothing. Seriously, I’m not even sure what the term means. (I’ve been informed we are only doing a “partial rebuild.” That doesn’t make me feel any better.
But, my neighbor Jonathan is the very picture of confidence.
We’ll just pull the head of the engine from the spare red Lexus, and we’ll put it on your gold Lexus.
So, you’ve done this before?
Well, I helped a friend of mine do it on his car.
But, you were the lead, right?
Nope. I just watched him.
Oh. . .Wait. What?
I just need to get my laptop.
You’re going to google how to rebuild an engine?
I began to wonder how long I needed to wait before I could declare defeat and just go buy a car? I figured I had to give my friend Jonathan at least until the weekend.
Wednesday we worked on pulling the seized engine out of the gold Lexus. And we started to pull pieces apart. We had two tables set up in my garage. It resembled a blue collar operating room.
The one on the right had our tools laid out on it. Sockets were set in neat rows, with the size written on the paper. (All metric.) We had wrenches, screw drivers, mallets. Everything was in it’s place. The table to the left was used for keeping track of how things came apart. As we disassembled a part, we would place the screws and any removable pieces on the table and label it: “air intake,” “ABS system,” “transmission bolts.” And in the middle of the garage we had the two engines and two transmissions.
And we started stripping the engines down. A modern engine has a lot of pieces to it. And to get everything to fit, the components are packed as closely as possible. To get the seized head off my engine, we had to remove the air intake system. Then, we had to remove the fuel injectors. Next the valve cover had to come off. Finally we were able to take off the head.
A head is the part of the engine that sits on top of the pistons. So, at this point we were looking into the very heart of the engine. As pulled the head off, we exposed the camshafts. And we noticed something worrisome.
The cam shafts weren’t seized up. They didn’t look too bad actually. I pushed aside the idea that maybe my entire problem had been a weak pulley that simply decided to shatter.
Cam shafts have a huge amount of stress put on them. You know when your dashboard says that your engine is spinning at 3000 rpms? That means the cam shaft is spinning 50 times per second. We didn’t worry about the “bad” one. But, when we went to pull the replacement head, we had to be very careful how we removed it from engine A and how we installed it on engine B. The order the bolts get turned is critical. We made a map.
Thursday was a regular work day. I borrowed my wife’s car and went to work to try to keep too many things from blowing up. By the time Friday rolled around we were ready to start reassembling the engine and put it in the car.
Have you ever taken something apart that you really didn’t know how to put together?
When I was about 14 years old, my older brother had a gas powered airplane model. It was in the days before radio controlled planes. This plane had two strings that attached to a handle. You would “fly” the plane by starting the engine and then spinning around holding onto the string. Yeah, you’d get pretty dizzy.
Anyway, the engine on this plane didn’t work.
Hey, Rodney do you want my plane?
Sure.
It doesn’t work.
I don’t care. I’ll fix it.
So, I took his plane and completely disassembled the engine. I cleaned all the parts and put it back together. I had no idea what I was doing. I just put it back together in the same order I took it apart.
It started up the first time. My brother was impressed. Unfortunately I was a better mechanic than I was a pilot. The first time I flew it, I crashed and snapped the plastic body in half.
That’s what we did with this engine. Sure we wwere referring to the official engine manual, but for a lot of it, we just kept track of how we took it apart and tried to put it back together the same way. We have another neighbor who watched our efforts with curiosity. He would come over everyday after work and get an update. I don’t think he believed we could make it work. It was in a lot of pieces.
I was afraid he might be right. What if we got it all back together and it didn’t evewn turn over? I would have just wasted a week and I’d still be out of a car.
I tried to put those thoughts aside as we spent most of Saturday putting the finishing touches on the engine, reattaching the transmission and then trying to muscle the engine back into the engine compartment. For some reason even though we had a half ton jack, we still ended up lifting the engine at time.
Finally the engine was in and bolted to the frame. We hooked up anti-lock brake lines, power steering lines, brake lines, axles, tie rods. We walked our way back down our parts table installing one piece after another. Most importantly we didn’t seem to have any extra parts. We poured gallons of fluids in..
We all four stared at the car.
Well, I guess someone should try to start it.
Jonathan, you did most of the work, you give it a try.
I was shocked when the engine purred to life like it had never been sick. And even more shocking, the CHECK ENGINE light didn’t come on.
Should we take a test drive?
Rodney, you should drive.
The test drive took about 20 minutes. At 15 minutes the temperature gauge maxed out. The engine was burning up. I coasted the last two blocks back to my house.
The internet is your friend. we googled:
LEXUS TEMPERATURE OVERHEATING
It was either a bad thermostat or air bubbles in the cooling system. We had replaced the thermostate a few months earlier and it was a pain to get to.
Given how tough it is to replace the thermostat, I vote we try the air bubbles solution.
No one disagreed. To clear air bubbles you literally “burp” the car. No one had to pick it up. You get a special funnel and let the car run while the funnel is full of anti-freeze.
And that was it. Well, there’s a leak somewhere in the exhaust system that makes the six cylinder Lexus sound liek a big V-8 muscle car. We’ll fix it eventually.
There was just one unfinished part to the story. While my neighbor was doing much of the engine work, I was doing some body work. If you look at the picture above you will notice that the fenders are two different colors.
Tomorrow I’ll explain how I turned my car into a super hero and I will never again “lose” it in a crowded parking lot. Plus, I’ll let you know how much the adventure cost me. Was it worth it to do a partial rebuild ourselves and avoid the $5000 for a new engine?
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss) or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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What would you do? The mechanic says your car has died a terrible death and the only solution is to replace the engine. A used one is $3,000-$6,000. The car is probably only worth $4,000 at the most.
And of course, I had plenty of time to make this decision. Well, not really. I was standing in the mechanic’s shop on a Friday afternoon. The clock is ticking. What’s it going to be? Do I have them call around and find a used engine or do I put a stake through the heart of my car and move on?
I did want many people do in this situation. I opted not to make the decision just yet. Oh, I had the mechanic start calling around looking for an engine, but I hedged my bets.
Do you ever have money unexpectedly show up just before you need it? Is that serendipity or just an excuse to impulse buy something really big?
I called my friend, Jonathan. He’s a backyard mechnic. . .if your backyard mechanic rebuilt cars and then gave them away. Jonathan had given me the car a year earlier. It was a “free” car. There are two types of free: free like a lunch and Free Like A Puppy. This puppy had run up some pretty substantial bills, even when you consider that Jonathan and his sons did the labor for free. (No, I don’t really understand it either, but that will come up later in teh story.)
Good morning!
Jonathan answers the phone like this regardless of what time it is.
I’ve got a car problem.
Oh?
The Lexus engine seized up. I’m at the mechanic’s now. They are looking for a replacement.
How much will that be?
Probably $3,000-$6,000. I don’t know if the car is worth it.
You know we have that other Lexus, the red one. We could take the engine out of that and drop it into your car.
How long would that take?
We could probably get it done tomorrow.
Why is this sounding like a good plan to me?
Because it IS a good plan.
And so we decided that we’d try the swap the engine process. I’m not much of a car guy. I have a garage full of tools because my grandfather was a junk dealer and no one else wanted his tools. But, I figured, what do I have to lose? Worst case, I’m out the towing fee and no worse off than I am now.
I went and hunted down the mechanic.
I think I have access to a spare Lexus engine.
That’s great.
One question, Mine is a ’96 and the replacement is a ’95. Will that be a problem?
Not at all. 95 and 96 are interchanable.
The two truck came and loaded up my car and drove it 20 miles back to my house. Another $150. Tally so far? $315 in towing fees. We parked the broken gold Lexus in my driveway facing my garage. Next we had to get the red Lexus moved. It was only a few miles away and a friend offered his 20 foot trailer. Loading the non working car onto a trailer was an interesting exercise. Basically, we threaded a tow rope through the trailer and then Jonathan “drove” the car. We had about 4″ clearance all around the car when we got done.
That car also ended up in my driveway facing my garage.
I was also holding a friend’s car that had a dead battery. I realized my driveway was turning into a redneck joke.
I have four cars in my driveway. Only one of them works. . .It’s my wife’s.
Remember the backyard mechanic description for my neighbor? He’s the only backyard mechanic I know with his own engine lift, engine stand and transmission jack. We all set to work disconnecting the engine in the red Lexus. “All of us” included Jonathan and his two adult sons. I mostly fetched tools.
The idea was that we’d pull the red Lexus engine, put it on the engine stand and give it a good working over and then move the gold Lexus engine to the red car and then drop the “red” engine into the gold car.
Simple, right?
Yeah, I didn’t think so either. But, Jonathan was offering to do this for the price of a couple of lunches. Remember we were goign to done on Saturday. No. That didn’t happen either.
Lexus, like many cars is front wheel drive. That means that there is an axle going from the wheel directly into the engine. If you don’t take out those axles, there really isn’t room to lift out the engine. The axles were not cooperating. We spent a lot more time on them than we expected. Well, one axle popped right out. The other one wouldn’t budge.
After a couple of fruitless hours where I thought Jonathan’s kids might pull the red Lexus off it’s jack stands, we decided that we didn’t have to keep that axle. Remember, the axles in teh gold Lexus were fine. We could cut the boot off this on and just use the one in the other car.
By the time we got to that point it was time to quit for the day. Saturday? We almost got the engine out. None of us wanted to work on Sunday. And besides, I’d put in a lot of long hours at work. I told my boss I was taking Monday off. After all, it was only one more day.
Monday we all skipped work. But, it was going to be worth it to get my car back. After a lot more hours than I expected, we finally carefully lifted the engine out of the red Lexus. It comes out attached to the transmission. We had to lower the car to clear the fender.
as we started to prep the engine for a move to the gold Lexus we started to run into a couple of problems. First, there’s a bolt that connects a pully to the drive shaft. We had experience with this bolt on the gold Lexus. We’d had to use the engine’s starter to get the bolt off. We tried everything. We tried breaker bars. . .really really long ones. Like a 15 foot steel pipe extension. We tried impact wrenches. Another neighbor is a Snap On dealer. We borrowed his impact wrenches. We tried dousing it with oils. Nothing worked.
This was a show stopper.
Without removing that bollt, we couldn’t mmake the engine work in the gold Lexus.
So, Jonathan,, what’s our plan?
Well, I we can either take this engine to a machine shop and have them break it free, or we can switch directions and partially rebuild your current engine.
How long will that take?
Probably one more day.
The second problem we discovered with the red engine was that the oil had congealed to the consistency of chocolate syrup. It looked delicious, but would have not been good for the engine.
As Monday drew to a close we were not much closer to a running car. I was beginning to think that I might as well buy a new car. Well, a used one anyway.
No, it’s simple.. We’ll just pull the head from the red engine and replace the bad head on the gold engine. And we should replace the oil pump while we’re at it. It will go much faster tomorrow.
Tuesday was scheduled as a work from home day. I was sure I’d get some work done. And it was just one more day.
Tomorrow I’ll explain how building model airplanes prepared me for engine rebuilds. And I discover something disturbing about my neighbor’s qualifications.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss) or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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It was a shudder. Hardly noticable. It might have been a slight pothole in the freeway, but it wasn’t. Like the presence of a single drop of water appearing on the page of a book, it was something that didn’t belong there. In the car’s defense the the Check Engine light did come on. I think it gave me about about 30 seconds warning before things went really bad, really fast.
Yesterday I talked about how I’m Afraid Of My Car. . .But I Have A Good Reason. My car is old. It has a lot of miles. And I decided on a whim to take it on a 1900 mile journey from Pleasant Grove, UT to Olympia, WA. It was Wednesday and I saw a post my younger brother put up on Facebook. It was announcing a surprise 70th birthday party for my mother. My younger brother and my mother both live in Olympia. I called my older brother in California.
Hey, I just saw a post that John put up. They are having a surprise birthday party for Mom on Sunday.
Oh?
Let’s go. Let’s just not tell anyone we’re coming and show up. What do you say?
Okay.
And that was how we decided. Now, I’ve had my car for about a year. I commute 80 miles a day. One of the things about it is that it drinks oil pretty bad. So, I made sure to check the oil, and all the fluid levels before taking off. There is a lot of loney highway up I-15 and over I-84 and I-82.
Saturday I left Utah at noon. It’s about a 13-15 hour trip to Olympia. I drove as far as Pendleton, OR on Saturday. I stopped for dinner and the night. First day’s travel was about 600 miles in 8 hours. The freeway speeds through Northern Utah and Southern Utah are 80. If you typically drive ten miles per hour over the speed limit, you are flying across the Rockie Mountains at a rate of 3 miles every 2 minutes. . .and it puts a lot of strain on your car.
In Pendleton, I also added a quart of oil. Typically the car didn’t drink it quite THAT quickly, but it wasn’t anything unexpected. Three hundred and fifty miles to go. The party was scheduled for 5:00 PM on Sunday. I figured I had plenty of time.
As an IT guy, my computer is my primary tool. Well, that and my phone. But, my technology tools are what let me do my job. Without them I’m stuck. Computers are like cars in many ways. Instead of checking the oil and anti-freeze level, instead we backup our data. Or, we should at least. But, we always think, “No, it’s not a danger. It’ll be fine. It was fine yesterday. Why wouldn’t it be fine today?”
I know I do.
Breakfast Sunday morning in Pendleton was gorgeous. The early Spring was turning Eastern Oregon into a little bit of Ireland.
I turned North at Umitalla and headed up through Yakima. If you’ve ever made the trip from Utah to Washington, you know you have a choice: river or mountains? While the Columbia is a beautiful river, it rolls through some really ugly country. No trees. Lots of rocks and dirt. Unless there’s a risk of snow, I always take the Northern route through Central Washington.
After a couple of hours I hit the Cascade Mountains. I live in the Rockie Mountains, but the Cascades are some of the prettiest in the world. As you start the trip up the Eastern slope, you progressively go from pine to fir to cedar and hemlock. It even started to rain, something we’ve missed in Utah this winter.
I arrived about 2:00 pm and hung out at my brother’s house. We all headed to Mom’s country club about 3:30 to set up. The party was a huge success. I Made My Mother Cry. . .And I’d Do It Again. The surprise was utter and complete. We made some speeches, ate too much cake and had a great time.
That night I stayed at my Mom’s house and got up early Monday morning to head home. Thirteen hours to get there, probably thirteen to get home and about 19 hours in Olympia. Worth it? Absolutely.
However, my car needed oil again. The engine sounded strong, but it was burning through the oil at a worrisome rate. For my trip back, I took White Pass. It was snowing at the summit. Something else we’ve missed a lot of this winter in Utah. No breaking up the return trip. I had to be back at work on Tuesday. My brother gave me a 9 CD set of Lord Of The Rings. It helped the time to pass. It wasn’t lost on me that I was ALSO headed East. Of course, I was going 90 MPH and not headed toward Mt Doom. . at least not intentionally.
Well, about 17 hours later I pulled into my driveway about 2:00 AM. Safe, right? My car is doing pretty good if I can up and decide to make an unscheduled 2000 mile trip. And it had rolled past 250,000 two days before my trip. Yep, I really started to trust it.
Tuesday I worked from home.
Wednesday I drove back and forth to work. The car blew a little blue smoke, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Thursday I headed back to work. Eighty miles round trip through construction zones with no shoulder.
Friday I got a late start. I headed out at 7:00 AM. I made it to a spot called Point of The Mountain. It’s where the construction zone is. It’s also where the warning light on my car came on. . .30 seconds before the engine blew up. I didn’t know it blew up at the time. In fact, I managed to coast down off Point of the Mountain and to an offramp.
And there I sat. The car was deader than dead. Unfortunately my mechanic is south of my house and I work North of my house. The tow truck ride was $165. (Not the last or most expensive cost in this story.) After hours in the mechanic’s shop they finally had some news for me.
We think we know what the issue is, but we have to show you.
A piece was broken. Literally a plastic pulley housing was shredded and the pulley was a jumble of metal confetti inside.
So, what’s it mean?
We think the pulley broke because the engine seized up. The broken pulley is actually a good thing. If the pulley hadn’t shattered, something else would have tried to. And you might have come to a screeching halt going from 60 MPH to 0 in the middle of the freeway.
What do we need to do to fix it?
You need a new engine.
How much is that?
Well, we can’t say for sure until we locate a used one.
Ballpark.
$3500 – $6000
Two thoughts crossed my mind.
First, I had just gotten a call from my accountant while sitting in the wating room. My refund was bigger than I expected. How much bigger? About $5000.
The second thought was “Is there ever a good time for your car to break down?” YES! And 1000 miles from home on a lonely stretch of mountain highway, possibly in the snow isn’t that place.
I’d gotten lucky. If you can call a blown engine lucky. But, now what do I do? Pay for the new engine? Or get a new car? Or maybe I could think of another alternative.
Tomorrow I’ll explain how the decision kept taking “Just One More Day.”
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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I’m not afraid to admit it. My car can send shivers up my spine. The tiniest hiccup, or stutter or wobble gives me chills. My car is a 1996 Lexus ES300. A couple of weeks ago it rolled over 250,000 miles. They have been hard miles. I got the car about a year ago when it had 231,000 and was dead to the world.
The car was free. There’s two kinds of free: free like a lunch and Free Like A Puppy. But, we got it running and it certainly got better gas milage than my suburban.
And yeah, it was sorta cool to drive a lexus. Even one with torn up seats, body damage and nearly a quarter million miles.
I commute 80 miles four days per week, so I started racking up the miles fairly quickly. And there were bumps and repairs along the way. (Things That Go Bump At 75 MPH.) But, overall I started to trust the car.
I felt confident enough to take it on an extended road trip a couple of weeks ago to Washington. The trip from Pleasant Grove is about 1900 miles round trip.
I’ve never really been a car guy. I can change the oil and replace the wiper blades, and I have a garage full of tools. But those belonged to my grandfather. They were my inheritance. I often don’t know exactly what to do with them.
So, why does my car scare me?
The same reason that computers or networks scare a lot of people. Lack of knowlege.
We fear the unknown, what we don’t understand.
My car could decide to stop at any moment and I have very little idea how to fix it, or even prevent it.
I’m not afraid of computers. Networks don’t scare me. Sometimes, I get frustrated when my computer won’t do what I want it to, but I’m the master of that domain. At least enough to not be afraid the computer will suddenly stop working and I’ll have no way to fix it, or even prevent it.
I’ve known a lot of people who feel about computers the way I feel about my car. Sure it’s working fine NOW, but at any moment it might suddenly blow up. It’s interesting that we all use computers and we all use cars. And yet we often don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on under the hood or the cover.
This week I’m going to tell you the story of some “car troubles” that I had last week. I think the story, and the lesson I learned from it relate very well to computers. So, if you’re a car guy, prepare to laugh at me for the next 4 days. If you have a computer phobia, hopefully my experience can make you a little more comfortable with your PC. (MAC people are already comfortable with their computers.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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I like peant butter. I especially like it with rasberry jam on my wife’s homemade bread.
I have a housefull of teenagers. Five of them are boys. Two of them are rugby players. So, the bread. . .and the peanut butter go pretty quickly. It seems like every time I want a sandwich I’m confronted with a near empty jar of peanut butter. You know the kind? Where you hold the knife with two fingers and dig at the bottom while trying to keep your fingers from bumping against the top of the jar and getting smeared.
Have you ever wondered why that works? I mean, why you can get that last bit of peanut butter?
I worked for Microsoft for much of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. During that time Microsoft and Intel created one of the greatest corporate partnerships in the history of business. Like Brangelia, it had its own cool nickname, Wintel. It was an awesome partnership for everyone except maybe the end users. Heres how it would work.
Microsoft comes out with a new version of Windows, say Windows 98. The new operating system would run on your existing hardware. . .just not super well. It would run so much better if you updated to the newest processor, made by Intel. Or, you went out and bought a new processor. If you really wanted to get the most out of your new hardware, you needed to update to the latest version of Windows.
This upgrade cycle rolled over about every 18 months. It sold billions of dollars worth of hardware and software. Microsoft and Intel went together like peanut butter and jelly.
It’s easy to look at the Wintel partnership and think that it’s just the way things turned out. They they fell together like some sort of happy accident. They didn’t. There were some other companies competing for your computing dollar as the 20th century drew to a close. Microsoft Windows was competing with IBM Warp and other less well funded products. Intel was fighting off a serious threat from AMD. The Wintel parnership, while not an official partnership was great for both companies. And had the advantage of making it harder on their competitors.
Think about your office. Are there natural synergies that exist between departments? How do you recognize when synergies would be helpful to try to create?
Obviously, like any transaction, there has to be something for each group. But, when I looked for these synergies in companies I worked for, I didn’t approach other departments or groups with an explanation of how we could work together and help them. Instead, I explained how a closer working relationship would help me.
Selfishness, or self interest, works. And the reason it works is that it’s based on honesty. We’ve all been approached by sales people who want to “help us.” Maybe they want to put us in a new car, or sell us a new security system, or any number of things. Do you think that salesperson is just helping you? No. He’s also helping himself. And if they are upfront with that fact, I know they are being honest with me.
At my current job, I work very closely with a number of teams. One of them is our Desktop Engineering team. I really need this team to help me. Normally we have to enter a ticket to get an engineer to help with something. Tickets can take days to get addressed. I’ve made it a point to befriend our Desktop team. They know that I need them in order for me to be successful. At the same time, I try to help make their jobs easier.
It’s a win for both of us.
So, what’s this have to do with peanut butter?
Remember trying to get the last of the peanut butter out of the bottom? Have you ever wondered about the knife you are using? Peanut butter jar makers realized that they were constrained by the size of the knife. And while I’ve often had to scrape the last of the peanut butter out of the jar, I’ve never found a case where the jar was so tall I couldn’t reach it.
The jar is a perfect match for the size of the knives in your kitchen drawer.
Some synergies are so seamless you don’t even notice them. Those are the best kinds.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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It went on for two and a half hours. Every single person stood up to speak and after only a couple of minutes it was obvious that they were lying. Each seemed on a mission to outdo the rest. Even the kids were doing it. One little girl was 4 years old. She had to stand on a bench to reach the microphone. She looked out at the crowd gathered at the Orem Public Library and flat out lied. But, cute as she was, her lie wasn’t quite good enough. She didn’t win. Her sister did.
Last night was one of my favorite events of the year, the Utah’s Biggest Liar competition. I’ve been involved with the Liar’s contest for 4 or 5 years. It gets better and better every year.
You might think it’s easy to tell a lie, or a Tall Tale, as the contests are sometimes called. It’s not. The competition is fierce. The premise is pretty simple. Each teller has 6 minutes to spin their yarn. There are very strict judging criteria. For example, just getting up and announcing that you the richest man in the world, for example, would be a lie, but not a convincing one. The talent is in the telling.
You have to start with a reasonable premise. Then build gradually to a whopper of a lie. The really good ones can do it in such a way that you are two or three minutes into the lying portion before you realize it. The tellers need to use story development, charater voices, and they have to get a reaction from the audience.
George McEwan defended his title this year. Two years ago he lost out on the top prize. He went home and immediately started writing his lie for the following year. To be a really good liar takes commitment. It takes practice. You have to be willing to practice your lie.
Utah’s Biggest Liar competition is connected with the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. This is a three day storytelling festival over Labor Day weekend. People come from all over the country to tell and hear stories. Not all of them lies, but George and our youth winner will be telling their tales that weekend as well.
April Johnson started the contest eight years ago. We have mutual friends and she got me involved four or five years ago. Being a judge was too much work. The tellers are so good that selecting the best one is nearly impossible. I switched to emcee and have a great time telling a few jokes and introducing the talented liars.
The contest has become so popular that we have to hold auditions earlier in the month to get down to just the 8 best tellers. I was once approached by a politician asking about joining the contest. We had to turn him down.
The competition is for amateur liars only.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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It was a simpler time. Before we’d lost our first hard disk crash to a trojan. Before we’d suffered our first denial of service attack from a botnet full of zombies. Before we learned to never click on unsolicited attachments. Thirty years ago, computers were a lot less complicated.
Sure they couldn’t do as much. In fact, you smart phone has more processing power, memory and storage than my first business computer.
But, they also didn’t get us into as much trouble back in the 1980’s.
I was working for WordPerfect Corporation supporting WordPerfect Library. It was a collection of utilities and a simple DOS Shell. (Graphical user interfaces for the PC were still years away.) One of the utilities was a file manager. A program that showed the files and folders (called directories at that time.) In addition to showing you a navigatable view of your hard drive, a very cool and innovative feature. File Manager, as it was called, also let you set passwords on files and directories.
This was a radical new concept. Networks were becoming more widespread and the idea that you would share the same set of directories with other people was a new concept. The programmer wanted to make the passwords case sensitive. I mean, why would you not? Everyone knows that passwords are case sensitive.
Except that our users were new to networks, new to email and new to security. They wanted to pick passwords that were words like “bookworm” or “ladyliberty” or “password.” If you say any of those passwords, you have no capitalization in your speech.
We were convinced that people would forget if they had used a capital or not. In DOS, the operating system for the PC back then, the operating system didn’t care about case sensitivity. Much like PC systems today, you didn’t have to worry about upper or lowercase in your file and directory names.
If you force them to be case sensitive users will screw it up. We’ll get flooded with calls and we’ll have no way to help them.
But, case sensitive is more secure.
It won’t matter. They will be so secure they cannot open their files. Case sensitive passwords are a terrible idea.
And he agreed. Actually, he didn’t so much agree with our logic as he agreed to make the passwords non case sensitive.
Thirty years later, I still remember that conversation, not for what it says about the products. WordPerfect ceased beign a company years ago. But, what it says about the time. We didn’t have to be quite so careful when we ventured outside our digital front door.
I kind of miss that.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss) or email him at rbliss at msn dot com