Category Archives: Weird

Business, Weird

Crazy Business Practice

20 Comments

So I need to replace the front passenger door for the BMW. I look online, and find this site. They have several for sale, in Adelanto, available for local pickup (it’s about an hour and a half drive), and the price is great.

The only problem: I don’t know what color any of them are (the car is silver). So I call the phone number, and after being on hold for almost an hour, finally get someone. I ask if I can drive up there to check them out, to make sure the one that I’m getting will match. She says, no, I can’t look at them until I buy one, and they don’t accept returns for the wrong color. She had no explanation for why this was the policy, but it makes no sense to me. So not sure what to do now, other than buy one, hope for the best, and be prepared to paint it.

Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Another Weird Car Problem

10 Comments

My adventures in diagnosing the BMW made me decide to get another bluetooth OBD plug for the Toyota, and use an Android tablet as an extended dashboard. But I can’t get it to pair. My phone can’t even see it. It can see the one in the BMW next to the car in the driveway, but it can’t see the one that’s two feet away in the 2013 RAV4. The light is on, so it has power, and I turned the ignition on to make sure that it was transmitting, but no dice.

Another weirdness of the car (which may or may not be related) is that one of the keys doesn’t unlock the car electronically, and I’ve never been able to get it to go into programming mode to reset the key, despite following all the incantations of opening and closing doors and turning the ignition on and off that they say to do online.

[Update a few minutes later after a quick search]

Looks like it’s not just me.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Mystery partially solved. I plugged in a stand-alone OBD reader, and there’s no output. Maybe I need to look for a blown fuse?

[Monday-afternoon update]

OK, I pulled the fuse, clearly marked “OBD,” and it’s good. Now what?

[Bumped]

[Update]

I put the fuse back in, and now it works. Go figure.

Technology and Society, Weird

Sprinkler Update

18 Comments

So I got two free timers from Orbit after I called them.

I hooked up one of the new ones, and it still doesn’t work. There is supposed to be 24VAC at the terminal when it’s running, and the voltage is zero. Just to be sure, I checked the resistance on a couple of the solenoids, and it’s about 70 ohms (the reactance is no doubt quite a bit higher on AC). But clearly, if there is no voltage at the terminal, the solenoid isn’t going to open. I went to the Orbit site for troubleshooting, and it says that if there is no voltage at the terminals, the timer has to be replaced…

At this point, I’m wondering if the system is haunted.

[Update Saturday evening]

People commenting, go back and read the original thread. I’m not clueless. I’m pretty sure that if there was a short to ground, I’d see it when I measured the resistance on the solenoids.

[Noon update]

OK, it finally occurred to me to check that it was getting 24VAC input. It wasn’t. The upstream GFCI had tripped and the transformer wasn’t outputting…

One of the ones I took off had an indicator saying “No AC,” but I swear I didn’t see that when I was working on it. I now have five of them, four of them (AFAIK) functional. I’ll return at least three to Home Depot (since that’s how many I bought there).

[Update a while later]

And yes, I was a dumbass.

Business, Law, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

First The FAA

18 Comments

…now this: “The Department of Justice filed a request for a court order to enforce an administrative subpoena in an investigation into Space X on a charge of discrimination in hiring. According to the filing, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) said it received a complaint from a non-citizen in May, and Space X had not fully complied with information requests…”

I don’t know if this is hostility to SpaceX from the new administration, zealousness in “protecting” immigrants, or both.