Blessed by the Potato

The police called last night around 1 am, and of course it was the first time in a year when everyone was in bed early so no one answered. We just called back and they had a bit of good news for us: the GPS locator in my dad’s car worked and it has now been recovered! Unfortunately, the police computer system is currently down, so they can’t give us any details (arg!). We don’t know if the car’s been damaged, we don’t know if they recovered the other two along with it or not, we don’t know if this lead to a big bust with someone in the driver’s seat or a big warehouse full of stolen cars, or if the display said “tracking active” and they dumped it seperately. Actually, I think I’d like to make a hack for those multifunction displays in cars that comes up after say 5-10 minutes of driving with “recovery tracking active” just to see if it would foil some thieves…

At any rate, the police still have to do their forensics on the car, and then we’ll be able to pick it up later tonight or tomorrow morning. It’s a big relief for my dad, who wasn’t able to find the details of the insurance policy for that car, as it means he won’t have to worry about whether he was covered for the replacement cost, or just the depreciated value of it. My mom’s car we know is covered for full replacement (and even if not, it’s less than a year old so there’s been less depreciation).

Update: Just a bit more information: we know now that the car was recovered in 33 division and will be moved to 32 division for forensics (so it didn’t get too far away…)

Update 2: Well, there are fingerprints on the windows which we don’t think are ours, so the cops have taken those, and aside from the cash my dad keeps in his car, nothing seems to be missing. There is some damage to the centre console (likely trying to tear out the GPS), but we haven’t seen it yet. It has been confirmed that the Mercedes GPS tracking helped find it (dumped in a neighbourhood near Cummer & Bayview), so as much hassle as they gave us to start the track, it did actually work! They are at least partially forgiven for that…

And no sign of the other two cars :(

It’s hard to think of a good introduction to this sort of news, so instead I’ll just get into the nitty-gritty: 3 cars were stolen out of our driveway this morning.

The thieves broke into the house through the side door, took the car keys off the hall table, and just drove off into the night. They didn’t touch anything else in the house, not even my dad’s wallet which was also on the hall table, which sort of indicates that this is a pretty professional operation. The bulldog was asleep on the couch downstairs, not 10 feet from the table and never made a sound. I think she’s fired from guard dog duties now.

So, as we woke up and looked outside this morning, the driveway was empty. Gone was my brother’s ’03 Accord, my dad’s ’04 Mercedes sedan (a nice one), and my mom’s brand new ’06 Mercedes SUV. My car was still there, thanks in part to being shitty, and thanks in part to the fact that I never leave my keys on the hall table. I wonder if some of the other cars would have been spared if we had left my car closer to the street like it usually is (my mom was planning on driving somewhere first thing in the morning and so we swapped cars around just before bed).

The police came shortly after we called, but didn’t find anything useful around the hall table or back door. We went through the process of giving descriptions of the cars and their contents, then tried to call Mercedes to activate the GPS tracking on my dad’s car. That was a complete farce. First, we tried calling the dealership, but they were closed. Then we called the roadside assistance number, and they told us that the tracking would be done through the dealership and they couldn’t help us. We told them that time was of the essence and the dealership was closed, so they gave us another number to try, which just had a recording that business hours are monday to friday, 9 am to 5 pm…

We let the police try after that, and they managed to get someone else (I think it was at the dealership and it was just getting close enough to 10 am that someone was there to pick up). This person was also somewhat useless, needing both my dad’s security word (which was set 2 years ago and tough to remember) as well as a police case number. The officer told him that we didn’t have a case number yet and gave him her name and precinct #, but it wasn’t good enough, so she had to call back to the station to get them to open an empty case report for us (I gather that typically the report is only opened after the cops get back to the station with our statements). “Useless.” she said “Just useless.” We then had a discussion of how such a high-end car company could have such terrible service. Their website wasn’t really any help either (it didn’t even have a search box!)

We still haven’t heard back from them if they found it or not (and going on 5 hours now), so I suspect that we won’t ever see that car again. My dad made a good point: Mercedes has a bit of a vested interest in not recovering the car since if it’s gone it amounts to a sale of a new car on insurance replacement (and as much of a piss-off as this is, and as much as I try to steer my parents towards a more sensible car, they’re already looking for which Mercedes they want to get to replace it).

At this point I’d like to give out the number the police called, in case it helps other Mercedes drivers in the future (not that any of them read my site): 1-800-750-9018 (I can’t quite read her handwriting, it may be 1-800-756-9018). The (useless) operator she spoke to was #8070, though she didn’t give me her name. (I asked her for all this information so I could write a nasty letter to Mercedes, which will basically be a cut & paste of this entry).

Then it was time to call the insurance company (also in the hopes that they would have contacts at Mercedes to light a fire under their asses about tracking the cars). They were also pretty useless. Chubb not only couldn’t tell us how long it might be before we could look at getting replacement cars (whether we would have to wait until they were gone for 2 weeks, or if the police report indicating it was professional and we probably wouldn’t see them again would be enough to start shopping on Monday)… not only that, but they also couldn’t tell us if we were covered at all, so we’d have to wait until Monday to find out. My dad knows that we are covered to some degree, but he doesn’t know if only the market/depreciated value of the cars is covered, or if their new value or replacement value is. He knows that he upgraded to new coverage for the new year that had more than replacement costs (purchase value plus an allowance for a rental car and to cover taxes, etc), but that policy won’t take effect until January 25. They did say it was unbelieveable that 3 cars were stolen at once like that (5 thefts in a year if you count my car going missing twice — I should start a new category for car theft here). At least we were told that they would cover a rental car for over a week, so my parents have a Jeep Cherokee for the next little while. (My dad’s review: “It drives like a North American piece of shit.”)

Anyhow, I don’t really know what else to say at this time. We’re all safe and alive (and were actually going to have a celebration dinner for my dad, since he got his CT results yesterday and doesn’t have a cancer relapse), though the stress has kind of wiped us out for the moment. My car is still here, and as much as I keep offering it to my parents to use for the rest of the week, they keep insisting that I can’t get back to London without it (there are trains). It was a bit of a pain of the butt trying to book a rental car for them, since there wasn’t anything available at the Discount close to us, so I booked one at Yorkdale. My dad blew up at me when I told him, saying it was too bloody far to go to rent a car, even though he wanted to then drive straight to the cottage to see if his insurance policy was there, and even though it’s the second-closest location to us. I ended up cancelling the reservation and we went with Budget, who we’ve had problems with in the past, but at least they’re closer. (I don’t know why closer matters though, since it’s not like my dad is going to walk there).

I’m sure you’re all bored of my ranting and obsessive tracking of my hydro usage, so I’ll put that at the bottom.

First, I’d like to just mention that Netbug lent Snow Crash to me over the holidaze, and I quite enjoyed it. It has me thinking now, though: you know all that crazy spam that’s been avoiding the filters lately? The ones that mostly have crappy gifs with the random gibberish in the clear? I wonder sometimes if those patterns of lines and colours in those gifs aren’t there to tell you that this really is a legitimate stock tip that you must follow up on, but are attempts to fine-tune some sort of visually transmitted virus for our wetware. Or in a similar vein, try to find a combination of colours and lines and pixelated text that is absolutely hypnotic and is vastly more effective at getting the message across. Given how cheap and plentiful spam has been, it provides a brain researcher in this area an easy way to just go about experimenting by trial-and-error rather than trying to come up with any sort of governing theory… I also sometimes wonder if it’s some terrorist or otherwise secret organization attempting to send steganographic (encoded) messages to people who are unreachable other than by general broadcast…

Anyhow, on to power issues.

I flipped the main breakers today, and the wheel in the power meter did indeed stop spinning. That’s mostly good: good, because it means the meter isn’t completely, flabergastingly broken. Of course, it also means that the easiest solution to my problems is no longer a possibility. Rather than doing stuff and recording the power use in several-hour blocks (pretty much the minimum to get any kind of accuracy from a scale with 1 kWh as the smallest unit), I looked up the method of getting power use from the rate the wheel in the meter spins (thanks to Mr. Electricity). Before I shut off the main breaker, I had one computer and a 100 W light in my room running, plus some LED xmas lights on out front and a variety of leak power (TV, clocks, and the small blower fan for the hot water heater was on too). I was using 428 W, which coincidentally, is quite close to the average power use in the apartment. There’s still a bit of unknown power to account for (again, my computers and all that other stuff were in the apartment too, and except for the light, all that was generally on all the time, so my baseline should be lower so that occasional things like cooking and having the fridge cycle could bring the total up to that point), but it’s not huge. Maybe 100-200 W or so.

Then, after I switched the power off and on again, I went upstairs, turned off the light and turned on the other computer (I should have kept it constant, I know, but I was on my way out, and the difference between the two should be pretty small), then went outside to check again. The furnace clicked on (but I don’t know if the fridge did) and my power usage jumped to 1250 W! This is closer to the usage that would rack up the crazy bills we’ve been seeing, and sort of implies that the furnace fan, beyond all expectation, is somehow drawing 800 W (or possibly, the furnace and fridge together. The fridge was off when I walked out the door, but I didn’t go back inside to check that it didn’t click on before I made it to the meter). I’ll try to track this a bit better tonight when I get home.

Calculation: For the first usage, the wheel turned in 60.5 seconds. The power, in kW = ( 3.6 * 7.2 )/time in seconds. The 3.6 is a factor to go from seconds to hours and also from W to kW. The 7.2 is a factor printed on the meter. So, P = (3.6*7.2)/60.5 = 0.428 kW (or 428 W). The second time was 20.7 seconds if you want to do the calculation yourself.

Well, I called London Hydro today about where all my electricity was going, and to see if they would check that my meter was working right. They said that that usage was typical for this property (i.e., similar to what a family with two kids was using before we moved in), and said that when meters break they tend to underrecord (or slow down) so they wouldn’t check on it. Naturally, they have a disincentive to check it if it’s overrecording, but saying that wasn’t going to help me any.

She basically said that yes, we’re using more than 3 times the electricity as the old place, and our stuff is mostly the same, but that the stuff in the house may account for that: older stove or fridge (though they look to be about the same vintage), the fan in the furnace (I told her the furnace & water heater were gas). The thing is, we still used all that electricity when we were gone, which pretty much narrows it down to the furnace (though the thermostat was turned down and the fan only runs when the furnace does), the fridge (though it doesn’t sound sickly and it would have to use ten times the power it’s rated for on the energuide sticker), the security light, or the mysterious “sump pump” (there’s a switch on the circuit breaker for one, but I’ve never heard one running).

So, since they won’t check my meter (or see if there’s a grow-op leeching power nearby), pretty much the only thing I’ve got left to do is to just start throwing switches on the circuit breaker to see if I can isolate one circuit that’s drawing too much juice.

One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable/HDMI/DVI/VGA/S-video/and two different types of RCA-like connections (composite and this newfangled Y/Pr/Pb component stuff). Who knows what sort of format an alien signal may arrive in?

Anyhow, as you can probably tell we’re having some issues with our new HDTV over here. The whole thing really makes me think that the technology was released to the market prematurely; couldn’t take an extra few months to hammer out a standard? Or a few years to develop the technology enough to have a single resolution for “HD” rather than this crazy hodgepodge of incremental improvements?. Or get some better widescreen vs. not detection or broadcasting so I’m not staring at grey bars on the side of the TV to square it off to 4:3, then black bars within that because the TV station is broadcasting its “widescreen” format with the black bars as part of the content, leaving me watching a 27″ picture on a 42″ screen…

The first issue is a matter of a defective box: our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box has a wonky Pb out channel, which means that when we use the component input to the TV, every now and then the picture turns pink (since the only colour channel left is the red one). It can stay this way for a really long time… I wasn’t home when this happened, but my parents did call someone in to fix it. Their solution was to change to using the HDMI connection, which worked rather well… for a time. Then if the TV is turned off, the cable box will turn itself off (which loses the channel you were just on). Fortunately, there is a (rather deeply hidden) setting to get the box to remember which channel you were last on and restart to that one, but it’s still a bit of a pain. However, for some reason with that connector the cable box thinks that my parents’ brand new 1080i TV is only capable of standard definition (over an HDMI connection no less!). We can force it to go back into 1080i (i.e. HD) mode by going back to the initial setup menu, but the bloody thing forgets that setting every time it turns off — which is every time the TV turns off! It’s so frustrating. Even if I could figure a way to make the cable box stay on past the TV’s power-down, I noticed that it has an automatic sleep-mode “feature” so it would turn off an hour after I left it alone anyway.

I’m freaking loving analog cable back in London at the moment.

Anyhow, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and a Sunday to boot, so I don’t know if we can do much at the moment, but I think sometime next week we’ll be trading this puppy in for a replacement.

Update: Well, we called Rogers and they told me that the HDMI signals are buggy that way and that they don’t support them on many of their HD boxes. After power cycling the tuner/DVR a few times the component input went back to showing colours, and I’ll just have to call back later if it goes on the fritz again. For now though, it looks pretty good!

Update 2: The display went pink again. A hard power cycle seems to fix it for a short while, but nevertheless, we’ll be exchanging the HD tuner at a Rogers store in a few days.