I’m busy today doing lots of things to get ready to take off to Phoenix for the Space Access Conference tomorrow, and I’ll be there until Sunday. I may post from there, depending on what kind of internet access I have, but make no promises.

For long-time readers, note that I’ve taken down blogspotwatch. It hadn’t been working properly in months, and I think that the need for it lay in a past era.

Not here, as far as I know, but I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that some blogs are coming up totally FUBAR in Mozilla (Firebird .7), though they appear OK in Explorer. I’m not sure, but I think they’re all blogspot sites. Here’s an example (one that’s a regular read for me).

I don’t have the time or the inclination to dig through the source to figure out what the problem is, but if anyone else is interested, they might want to tell the site owners, so that they’ll be more accessible to the rest of the non-Microsoft universe. The problem seems to start right after the words “Advertise on the world’s biggest nanoblog!” which makes me suspect that there’s a blogads problem.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

I just checked Nanobot again, and it’s OK this morning.

<shrug>

Sorry, had a busy day. Here’s an interesting article at the CSM that says that cars are becoming disposable.

…many new cars today cost so much to fix that it’s becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that hit McConnell’s shop had dual front, side, and side- curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

It’s not just airbags–if it were, we could just chalk it up to idiotic federal regulations.

As the article points out, this is an inevitable (and disturbing, at least to me) trend. I first noticed it over a decade ago when my first “Hi Fi” VCR had the stereo die in it. I took it to a VCR repair place and described the problem to the repairman, upon which he said, “yeah, I can fix it, but you can probably buy a new VCR cheaper.”

This came as a shock to me, because when I grew up, when a piece of high fidelity equipment broke, you fixed it. In the early seventies, I was a radio engineer at the local public broadcasting station (in high school). My step-brother had purchased a Sansui stereo receiver when he was stationed in Thailand during the war, while in the Air Force, and one of the channels had died in it. He had paid probably three hundred bucks for it in Asia (a decent amount of money at the time).

The power output transistors had died, which I determined fairly quickly by determining that they were shorted, using a volt ohm-meter. I pulled them off the heat sink and replaced them with new ones from Shand electronics, and he was back in business. My time (at minimum wage–I think a couple bucks an hour) was a couple hours, to diagnose, go to the electronics shop, and solder in the new transistors. It clearly made sense to fix it.

In the face of the VCR problem, I had a piece of equipment that cost a couple hundred bucks, but the repairman’s time was fifty bucks an hour, and there were few discrete components on it–it probably involved replacing an entire board that would have cost fifty bucks or so. It just didn’t make sense to spend the money since, at that time, the price of a new one had dropped, and would provide much better features. I could spend my own time, but I’d have to get some specialized equipment to do the circuit tracing, and still have to get the original factory parts. It just didn’t make sense.

In one sense, it’s great that things are getting so cheap that they’re not worth repairing. That means that they’re becoming extremely affordable.

But I wonder what it means for the new generation. When I was a kid, it was fun to take things apart to figure out how they worked (and useful to do so to figure out why they didn’t). If there was a problem with a part of it, it was affordable to go buy a new one and fix the de-vice by replacing it.

What does a high-school kid with an engineering aptitude do now? What opportunities are there for him or her to indulge in exploration and trouble-shooting (the root bases of science)?

I’ve got a 1986 Honda Accord with a quarter of a million miles on it. It’s got lots of problems–a windshield wiper switch that causes the wipers to come on when you hit a bump, a sunroof that doesn’t open because it needs a slight adjustment to a tensioner that can only be accessed by completely removing the roof from the car and dismantling it, upholstery that’s ripped and dissipated by age and sun, worn carpet, a slightly schizophrenic fuel-injection system that causes the engine to “breathe” when it idles, varying between 900 and 1500 RPM with a frequency of about 0.5 Hz, a hatchback in which the hydraulic lifts have lift their last, the original clutch (which still seems serviceable). It needs a new right axle, which makes little “click-click-click” noises on turns, due to a failed CV joint, and causes an unpleasant vibration in the front end at highway speeds.

On the other hand, the engine still burns no oil. This would have seemed miraculous to a high-school kid of my generation, when cars needed to have rings and valve-guides replaced at least once per hundred thousand miles. The synchronizers in the gearbox are still fine (including the ones in first gear–an unaffordable luxury when I was a teenager–I didn’t have first-gear synchros until I got my first BMW in the early eighties). These would have had to be replaced in any of my MGs with regularity when I was a kid, to to the point that always double clutched on the principle that it was easier to change the disk than rebuild a transmission, and I always did compression braking to save on brake pads (and especially, in the rear, on shoes).

When I was in high school, I would have killed for a car with this performance and handling, even with all the cosmetic problems and things to fix. What’s it worth to a high-school kid today?

I don’t know, but I may find out, because it’s not worth driving or shipping 2500 miles from southern California to southern Florida, where I’ll be living in a few weeks.

But while it’s great to see the costs of sophisticated mechanical equipment or electronics (and the tools to repair things, or construct new things) reduced to the point at which almost anyone can afford them, I think that something has been lost when the cost of manufacturing has become less than the cost of repair–the wonder of taking it apart, and the thrill of putting it back together and having it work, particularly when it didn’t work before you took it apart.

And I wonder where our next generation of engineers will come from.

…to all of my Christian readers.

David Nott emails me to say that people who subscribe to Reason magazine by 5 PM tomorrow (I assume that’s PDT) will get a personalized cover on the June issue–a satellite photo of your house with your name.

Sorry for light posting, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to do around here, and I’ve been fighting with my computer all day trying to get a new mouse to work. Why can’t I just plug in an optical mouse and get it to work properly out of the box? I tried a Logitech last night, and it wouldn’t work at all (I’m guessing because it’s a combo USB/PS-2 that I was running into a PS-2 port on my KVM switch). I went out and bought a cheap one from BTC. It sort of works, but I had to install some software to get it to work properly, and when I did, it kept popping up this stupid control panel over the cursor from some program called KeyMeistro every couple seconds, which I had to manually close each time, so it was really impossible to use.

Back to Frys to try something else. Sigh…

I’m not much of a baseball fan, but when they’re winning, just out of ancient tribal loyalty, I’m a Tigers fan. And given my experience of the past several years, I can’t help but feel a little schadenfreude for Joe.

7-0 losers. Against the worst team in baseball. On Opening Day. With last year’s Cy Young Award winner on the mound for the Jays. Oh, the embarassment.

As Glenn would say, heh.

She gave herself an auto-Caesarian.

Glenn is having a little dispute with Josh Chafetz over whether commercials and programs that depict men as fools and/or weaklings (relative to women) are a good or bad thing. While I agree with Glenn’s point, I wonder how much of this is a backlash from previous days when the reverse was true. I’m going to be heretical here and say that I never “loved Lucy.” I never found it all that funny, but moreover, if I were a woman I would be appalled at the image that she represented–she was a perpetual adolescent, with no common sense, and values so shallow that they’d be swamped by a dry lake. I don’t watch the show, but on those occasions that I have, I was embarrassed for her.

On the other hand, this is anecdotal, because I can’t think of any other show, off the top of my head, in which women were depicted as such self-centered idiots as that one. I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on the relative depictions of men versus women on television and radio over the decades, to see if there has been any overall change. Could be a good topic for a sociology thesis.