Blessed by the Potato

I find the most dangerous thing is to be close to solving a problem. Sure, not getting anywhere is frustrating and just generally no fun… But it’s when I’m just that close to finishing something or making a breakthrough that I find myself awake at 5 am, just needing a few more minutes to taste victory.

After graduating, I need to come up with a gift idea for myself. My dad doesn’t know what to get me, and I have no idea what to suggest. He’s thinking he’d like to give me something that I’ll have for a long time and might actually use, like a watch or ipad or 2nd monitor. But I can’t imagine really using any of that: I used to get like really anxious if I didn’t have a watch to know the exact time, but that phase has long since passed, and I hardly wore a watch at all the last decade or so since I found they irritated the skin on my wrist. Then once I realized I was reaching into my pocket to grab something to check the time anyway, I just started using my cellphone as a clock to cut down on the stuff in my pockets. And other than angry birds, I have no idea what an ipad might do for me that my blackberry, kobo, and laptop aren’t already doing in a superior way.

But other than shooting down his suggestions, I have no ideas of my own.

The problem is all I can think about after stretching the budget for so long is rent and groceries. Which is not helped by being faced with the prospect of my contract running out in just a few more months with no job lined up… I’m just not far enough up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to think of gift ideas right now.

Wayfare saw an interesting ad for a house recently, claiming among other things, that there were 5 new appliances.

Now, this listing was very familiar: it was the house we’re renting now (and leaving soon). The thing is, we can’t figure out what the 5 new appliances could possibly be. What counts as an appliance? I guess we’ve got the dishwasher, stove, fridge, washer, dryer, and maybe the mini bar fridge in the basement. So 6 potential appliances that could make up the advertised 5. Except, only 2 of those are actually less than 3 years old (what I might consider “new” without stretching the truth too much): the dishwasher and the mini bar fridge. Maybe the fridge and stove are new-ish: they’re still in decent shape, but even though I haven’t searched too hard for a date of manufacture, I’d guess with a fair bit of confidence that they’re at least 5 years old, and likely more than 10. Not exactly new.

Even then, that only brings us to 4 (mini-fridge, fridge, stove, dishwasher). Neither the washer or dryer can count by any rational use of the word “new” — they’re possibly older than I am.

So what’s the 5th appliance? We’re trying to figure it out. There are some straightforward answers: perhaps the landlord is planning on replacing some of those appliances so they will be new for the next tenants. Maybe he’s counting the air conditioner, or the new doors we installed. Perhaps the medicine cabinet? More troubling answers might be if he just recently counted appliances when visiting, and is including our stuff like the microwave, storage freezer, or toaster oven that we bought for ourselves (and will be taking with us). Perhaps he’s confusing “new” with “working” and is counting the ancient washer and dryer.

Or maybe it’s just an honest error, which reinforces the need to take ads with a grain of salt.

The book is now live on Amazon. It’ll be a while longer before I can get it into the Kobo online store. Once it’s live in both I’ll do a more thorough promotional post.

I have to say, after putting so much work into formatting the book in what is, IMHO, a very professional manner, the ebook formatting capabilities were very lacking. There was no footnote option, so all footnotes are now endnotes. I had at the end of several chapters a collection of key points in little “call-out boxes” with bulleted lists highlighting the take-home message. While those lists are still there, the boxes are not, so they don’t stand out as much. Even the straightforward tables didn’t translate well, so I had to insert them as images (with an accompanying loss in visual quality). In all cases, limitations are as far as I could determine, so there is a possibility that I might yet figure out how to format the book the way it was meant to be. Suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for software developers that release a beta product and patch it later (one upside to ebooks)!

Edit: It looks like Kobo strongly prefers to only do self-publishing with authors that have ~10+ titles, and they’re suggesting I go with a consolidator/publisher. All of the ones they recommended are American (the book is for Canadians, which is part of why I wanted to focus on Kobo). I’ll have to take some time to read through their offerings and costs to see if any of them will work — I can see right away some of them want to take a step back (after working so hard to create the epub and get an ISBN myself, some of them want to start from the Word doc stage). Most offer to push the book to a number of retailers, including Amazon (which I already covered myself).

So for now, until I find some time to figure Kobo out, if you want the book you can either buy it from Amazon in Kindle format, or send me an email and I can set it up so you can pay me by PayPal ($5 Canadian) and I’ll send you a DRM-free PDF and ePub formatted file by email (good for your Kobo reader or any number of other non-Kindle devices, including your PC).

I had the under-engine cover replaced today. It went well: though the US TSB I found didn’t apply in Canada, they did have the newly revised part in stock anyway, and replaced the cover under warranty.

The new part still doesn’t have a proper hinge, but the bit of brittle plastic that bends is a little more sensibly designed:

Since we were taking the cover off anyway, I decided to do my next oil change, etc, a little sooner than necessary. The weather is just barely below 15°C these days, but I do much of my driving at night, so I also had them put the winter tires on. A somewhat unexpectedly expensive step was getting the transaxle oil changed. Oddly enough, there is no recommended change interval: just an “inspect and replace as necessary” guideline in the maintenance schedule. Except there’s really no way to do that: there’s no dipstick, so you have to open the drain plug anyway, and no real way to cheaply test the viscosity or for contaminants. Some of the car geeks have been doing that analysis to try to come up with our own user-generated set of change interval guidelines, and the initial evidence is that the first change should be made pretty early on (about 2 years in, so pretty much where my Prius is now). I didn’t bother to try to save any of my transaxle oil for analysis, but it was discoloured relative to new oil. I’ll probably plan for the next change at about 120,000 km, though I’ll be watching the high-mileage geeks for hints ;)

The service guys were pretty good, and let me poke around under the car while they had it up on the jack. Unfortunately, it looks like there’s a little bit of rust starting in places (a few bolts, and on a spot by the exhaust system, pictured below). For a car in Canada, a few little spots of rust is nothing, but it has only gone through one and a half winters, so that’s a little more than I wanted to see this soon. This particular part of the exhaust, around the heat exchanger (unique to the Gen 3 Prius AFAIK) is a bit of a hotspot for rust, and he hypothesizes that there’s a chance that may be a recall item in a few more years.

I’m going to look into perhaps rustproofing: I used Krown oil spray on the old Accord, and I think it did the job, but I’ve been hesitant with the Prius since it is a bit different. The tech at the dealership said it wouldn’t help there, since the exhaust system will get hot and burn off an oil spray — it’ll just stink it up for a while is all. I don’t recall that happening with the Accord though. Instead, he recommended a tar-like coating, which I’ve always been a little leery of vs. the oil spray technique. Anyway, something to think about.

Though I didn’t like the look of the rust on the bits that had it, I was a little amazed at how clean most of the underside of the car was. Granted, my last car was 14 years old when I finally got rid of it, and though it wasn’t structurally unsound, there was not a single part underneath that didn’t have at least some rust veneer.

One other potential issue they pointed out was that a small ridge was developing on one of the brake rotors. I don’t know how serious that really is — as long as the pad conforms, and it’s radially symmetric, it should still function as a brake, right? — but he told me to watch for any signs of shaking while braking, etc. The brakes themselves still have a tonne of life left on them: that’s as expected since much of the braking is regenerative, not friction, but still nice to have confirmed.