Uncle Biek

I just had to share this little ‘funny, but not haha funny’ moment with you guys.

Picture this: I’m at work, fixing the PC of a colleague. It obviously is Christmas time here too so with the holidays that come with it, things are lovely quiet at the moment. The ideal timing to look into PC troubles for as far as I’m concerned, just as long as it’s a PC from work and not my own machine again. ;-)

Well anyway, he’s had some sort of Windows Update failure and now the entire Windows Update feature isn’t working anymore. It’s stuck in a loop, telling me that Windows update itself needs an update first, followed shortly by a notification that informs me that this update can’t be installed due to an unexpected error. Right. Makes you almost long for the time when errors are simply expected so you work your schedule around them, doesn’t it? :P

But with me being the optimistic guy, I’m looking into all of this, browsing website after website, forum to forum, with my close friend Google and all of a sudden this pop-up comes up in Vista:

How’s that for irony, hm? Here I was, under the impression that they had to make Windows better, so we could just get back to work … As it turns out now, they don’t even know what the problem is and are asking for our help.

I hear a discount coming up folks. *grin*

Hey folks, how was your Christmas?

Mine was pretty nice.First Christmas day I did nothing even remotely related to Christmas and basically just took the day off. Although as you may have read I did use it mainly to sleep a bit more, do the Volvo valves and just kind of hang around for the rest of the day.

Second Christmas day, however, I spend with part of the family and that was very nice. My sister, Stefan, the nieces and I were over to dad’s and Margot’s place for the afternoon. It turned out to be better than I hoped, so that was a pleasant surprise. In all honestly I’m usually not that thrilled about these larger get-togheters because somehow I tend to feel just a little bit left out, not quite sure how to explain it, that illustrious third wheel I guess. But not this time so I guess there’s hope. :-)

We all had a nice dinner together from a raclette set so each kind of cooked his and hers own food in little pans. The ingredients are a mixture of meat and vegetables which you put together to your own taste and then cook. For the nieces we also had pancake batter but us adults also had a few pancakes ourselves, they are just too good to ignore. :-) All in all I love this type of cooking. It’s great!

The way I see it, the only problem with this type of dinner/cooking is that you tend to eat way too much food. It’s all in the rhythm. Normally you prepare the whole meal up front, fill up a plate and dive in. with that twenty four hour economy in the back of our heads we empty that plate in record time and that’s that. Belly filled, we feel good, move on with our life.

With cooking from a raclette set, however, you eat in much smaller portions and in general take much, much more time for the entire dinner so you don’t feel filled up that soon, if at all. By the time you do feel it, though, you’re actually more than filled up.

These cozy Christmas dinners must be one of the main reasons people include losing weight in their new-year resolutions. ;-)

Amongst all sorts of other machinery, engines have them too and they use them to breathe through. The B18D in my Volvo has valves too of course, a humble eight of ‘em to be precise, and they need adjusting every once and a while. And with every once and a while I actually mean sometime between every five and ten thousand kilometers, depending on in how little time you covered that distance or, in other words, how kind you were to the engine during those kilometers.

The more aggressive you drive, the faster those valves need readjusting. And if you drive very nicely they’ll last a bit longer. Easy.

What’s also easy with these older engines is checking and adjusting their clearances, especially after having watched dad do it the first time. With the Volvo one can have this job done in roughly one hour, give or take, and that makes it a nice and even fun task to do. The best part I guess is that when you’re done, the engine runs smooth as silk again and fur us technical folks that’s our little victory right there.

So what did you all do on the first Christmas day? ;-)

Remote control

–noun
1. control of the operation or performance of an apparatus from a distance, as the control of a guided missile by radio signals.
2. Also called remote. a device used to control the operation of an apparatus or machine, as a television set, from a distance.

Forget that guided missile stuff, all I wanted to do was regain control over my Kenwood receiver. I’ve had that box for a number of years now and it really does everything I need, and does it well. I can hook up all the other stuff to it easily, it has crystal clear sound through either Dolby Digital or DTS processors and has been the heart of my home cinema ever since I got it.

Problem was, however, that the remote started to fail on me and with a receiver that has as much functions as mine you really need that remote to set and control everything the way you want to. Most of the time you just need select the apparatus you want to listen to and choose a volume setting but ever so often I’m changing little things to see if it sounds better. Plus I’m lazy. :-)

Mainly because of all that fiddling around that I do my first thought was that the batteries had simply gone empty and replaced them with a spare set I had lying around. That didn’t work too well so I figured that the set had been on the shelve so long that they too were probably empty. Unfortunately for me, even the brand new set of batteries didn’t bring my remote back to life. Or, actually, not entirely.

You see, the problem I had (and, as you will find out when the story progresses, still have) is that it seems that the receiver only processes the given commands for around fifteen seconds and then not for at least fifteen to twenty minutes. After that you can alter the volume a step or two and then nothing again for a period of time.

The only conclusion I could then think of was that the remote itself had gone bad. And even though I’ve had that receiver for years now, this still surprised me. I take very good care of my remotes, they never drop or get thrown around, so it shouldn’t have had much to cope with during its time with me. Even the remotes of much older apparatus still work fine so why this one failed, I had no idea.

Anyway, I first tried one of those simple universal remotes but either that one just didn’t speak Kenwood or was only setup for default amplifiers; it didn’t work at all.

So last week I decided that it was time for a good solution and I purchased one of those multi device remote controls which can even learn from the old remote, should that still work. The Philips SRU8015/10 was my weapon of choice because of the nothing but good reviews it got and simply looked sexy as h*ll. :-)

Happy as a kid with a new toy which, despite my alarming age I still am sometimes, I first set up the TV downstairs: flawless. The remote simply asked me to point it at the TV, press a button and release it when the TV reacted. Easy as pie, I had it done in less than 5 minutes, and that’s including setting up all icons for the TV stations (a very cool feature by the way).

Next was the TV upstairs and the DvD player. The principle was the same: point it at the device, hold a button and let go when something happened. After that default setup you can choose to give buttons different functions, depending on your personal taste and habit and those too were very simple to program.

Finally I set down for the Kenwood. Since that’s a much more complicated device than say a TV or DvD player I got myself a fresh cup of coffee and got down to business. The initial part went perfect, just like it did with the other devices, but when I was ready to customize the button arrangements my receiver wasn’t reacting to the new remote anymore. At all. Basically it did the very same thing the original remote did: a few functions for a short while and then nothing at all.

My fear is now that I may have bought a shiny new device but haven’t solved the actual problem. The way it seems now is that the IR receiver inside the Kenwood, or some attached piece of electronics is somehow malfunctioning. So I’ve emailed Kenwood and asked them if they know of similar cases with my receiver and if anything can be done to solve it. So far no response but they’re probably having a holiday week or something.

To be continued.

Man, what a night. I just came home after having to work my way through another adventure with the Volvo.

Olof and I worked late on our telephone server software and after we were done I walked over to the Volvo, simply planning on going straight home. Unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen.

However, as soon as I put the car in motion and slowly left our street it felt like slowing down, as if I left the handbrake on. It wasn’t, which was to be expected since I never use it in the first place. But it had been a cold and wet day so I figured that possibly one of my brakes had jammed a bit and just needed to loosen up. So I gave it a few hundred meters to return to normal operation.

Well, it didn’t so I pulled over on the nearest spot I could and walked round to see what the problem was. Upon arriving at my right rear wheel the problem was easy to spot: air. Or rather: the lack of it inside my tire. Great, there goes a perfectly good chance to lie on the couch at home.

For a second I thought it would only set me back fifteen to twenty minutes but when I opened the trunk and wanted to get the jack and wrench out I noticed that, not unlike the air in my tire, they weren’t there. Needless to say that messed with the earlier mentioned time table ‘just a bit’.

So I locked up the Volvo and head back to work on foot to get one of the company cars. After a twenty minute walk I was inside it driving passed the sad sight of my Volvo all alone beside the road and was heading for dad’s place to pick up a good jack and wrench.

Another twenty minutes later I had all I needed and was driving back to my Volvo to replace the flat tire. Now that I had the proper equipment that took a mere ten minutes after which I returned the car to work and walked back to my Volvo. As you may have guessed that took around twenty minutes again and then I could finally carry out my initial plan: go home.

I sincerely hope that you all had a better night than I did …