Recent Reading List: The Gray Man

Ok. I admit it. I was wrong about this book.

When I started it, I thought this was going to be your typical 'big bad spy guy doing big bad spy guy things that only gun nuts would care about' type book. It sort of had that vibe to it a few pages in, but, since I was prepared to hate it when I started, I see now that my initial gut feeling was grossly out of place.

The Gray Man by Mark Greaney turned out to be a really fun and exciting read. The author provides the reader with enough detail to provide interest in the weaponry and tactics hero Court Gentry uses to accomplish his mission without trying to impress the reader with a smorgasbord of unnecessary factoids. The geography and city descriptions follow the same suit – enough to “put you there” without boring you to tears describing each and every cobble in a Paris alleyway, for instance.

The main character is not some god-like and completely unbelievable construct of innate superhuman abilities. As well trained and capable as he is in his craft, it quickly becomes obvious that he is neither flawless nor immortal (which is why I read it to the end instead of instantly dropping it).

That said, there is a little bit of a 'Deus ex Machina' feel to a end-of-the-book, umm, “conflict resolution”, but I do not want to post any more to prevent spoiling any of the action for those of you who might pick this up.

I am notoriously bad for being able to tell what would make a good movie from reading a book. For example, I remember thinking as I was enjoying the book Jurassic Park may years ago that “there is no way they could make a decent movie out of this”. But, for what it's worth, I would be very interested in seeing them turn this into a “Bourne-Identity-slash-Taken” screenplay as soon as possible.

DIY Chevy Keychain Fob Repair

The fob to my wife’s Chevy Malibu began acting oddly – refusing to operate or only performing specific tasks, like opening the trunk but not remote-starting the car, etc. The fob battery was replaced but still no improvement.

She took it to the dealership and they said that there was a bad transistor inside so the whole fob would need to be replaced at a cost of $180. When she told me the story I asked her a couple of times just to make sure that I heard the word “transistor” correctly (and not, say, “transmitter”, which would imply the whole thing was shot). She said yes, that’s what the guy told her.

Since I have some experience in the area of electronics, the “transistor” comment sounded to me like the sort of thing made up to sound exactly technical enough to prevent any follow-up questions except for ones that sound like “Sigh. Do you take VISA?”

So, since the thing is “permanently and completely broken”, there was no harm in me popping it open (after giving my wife my little-used fob as a replacement, of course) to see what I could see.

Close inspection of the solder joints that hold the battery clip in place revealed tiny cracks, and the clip itself was a little loose. Cool. A couple of touch-ups to the battery clip solder joints is all it took. No expert knowledge of electronics or super-specialized equipment was necessary.

Here’s how I fixed my problem and saved $180 in about 5 minutes (Your problem might be different than mine, of course):

You will need the following:

• Small, flat-bladed screwdriver
• Electronic (not plumbing) soldering iron with a pointy (versus rounded or flat) tip
• Electronic (not plumbing) solder
• Flux (I always use flux when soldering instead of relying on flux-core solder. Some people don’t.)
• Cotton swabs
• Rubbing alcohol
• New fob battery (CR2032 for mine – yours might be different)
• Beer or wine

Do the following:

• Carefully pop open the fob using a small flat-bladed screwdriver
• Remove the circuit board from the fob
• Remove the battery from the circuit board
• Using a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol clean the inside of the fob (not the circuit board). Believe it or not, loose junk can work its way inside after a couple of years, and this junk might interfere with the operation of the unit.
• Do the same with the squiggly traces on the back of the circuit board (this is where the buttons contact the circuit board).
• Apply a very small bit (or drop) of flux to the three solder joints indicated in the picture.
• Using a very small amount of solder, gently touch up the three indicated solder joints. The battery clip will act as a heat sink so you don’t have to be too afraid of “burning up” the board during this step (within reason).
• Using the alcohol and swabs, clean any residual flux from the board
• Re-insert the battery
• Re-insert the circuit board into the fob
• Close the fob
• Test your unit (lock/unlock your doors, remote start the car, pop the trunk, etc.)
• If it worked, pour yourself a celebratory glass of beer or wine and enjoy. No, wait. Turn off the soldering iron first, and then have the beer or wine. Safety First, you know.

This has happened on both the fobs for the car, so I thought I would post this in case this is a common failure mode for these things. If this did not work out for you, I hope that something else will – good luck!

House Repair Project

Woo Hoo! I got my new table saw yesterday! It is a 10” Hitachi C10FL, and it is much, much better than my old Craftsman. It weighs about 260 pounds, it is very solid, it has a large work surface, and it is extremely quiet. There were some assembly issues (extremely unclear documentation and poorly threaded bolt holes) but they were minor. No real problems (yet).

Of the five projects I had in my queue the House Repair one was the most important to complete as soon as possible. It turns out the house had old (say 10 years or so) termite damage that affected a small section of my garage. Although the critters had long since vacated the area, the weakened wood siding absorbed rainwater from the too-close wind-blown hedges that scraped up against the normally sealed wood surfaces. This helped to start the rot on its way.

Since this area was in a hidden part of the front of the house it went unnoticed for a while. It wasn't until we hired a crew to re-seal the entire place (we need to do this every 4 or 5 years or so) was the soft wood discovered.

At this point, I would love nothing more than to rail against the people that sealed our house, but I am going to save that for a really long, probably unhealthy, profanity saturated, and booze-fueled “manifesto-esque” post. It suffices to say that 1) I originally had no intention of doing this repair work myself 2) they did a terrible, overpriced job sealing the house and charged us an additional 20% for work they should have covered already and 3) my phone conversation with their salesman ended with me saying “Congratulations. The Golden Goose has finally run out of eggs. I am doing the remaining work myself.”

I called around to the various suppliers of the wood siding, stain, sealant, and chinking and found out how much supplies would cost with shipping. Since I knew that the people that did the house sealing job were one of the closest official vendors of the materials I needed it was worth my time to call them and order through them. Sigh.

I was less than shocked the hear them once again try to rip us off by claiming it costs $100 in gas to drive a Ford Ranger 125 miles to deliver the materials (the salesman said the delivery fee would be “just gas one way” from where they were). So, finally, my materials were delivered two Wednesdays ago (during the big storm). Well, they were stacked in my driveway in the pouring rain, a couple yards from the covered porch. Nice.

I brought the stuff into the garage and toweled everything off the best I could. I stacked the new wood siding so it would dry out for a couple of days without warping.

After the insect inspector came and pronounced the work site wood-eating-critter-free, the next day (Last Sunday) I started digging into the obvious spots of rotted wood. Initially, large chunks came out freely but it quickly became clear the rot was not as extensive as I had feared. All in all, four pieces of siding were affected. Three of them were damaged in areas about 13” wide but the bottom-most piece had a little less than four feet that needed to be replaced. Thousands of benign ants made their home in the bottom piece thanks to the vacated termite tunnels there. Spraying as I went, they died off quickly.

As darkness threatened, I needed to stop in the middle of the wood-removal process and cover the exposed areas in aluminum flashing. It wouldn't be insect-proof but at least it would keep most of the elements out of the exposed areas until I could get back to work this weekend.

A rotary saw and wood chisels were a great help in cleaning up the still-solid bits of wood left from the wood-removal process. I further smoothed out the damaged areas using a drum sander attachment on my cordless drill.

The new table saw cut the new siding like a dream. To be fair, the old Craftsman table saw also cut wood like a dream, but it was the kind of dream where you wake up in a cold sweat repeatedly counting your fingers and limbs to make sure they are all there. Also, you get out of bed to peek into the garage just to make sure the saw is exactly where you left it...

Anyway, I hammered the new pieces into place and chinked the gaps closed. Everything fit perfectly. Sweet. Time for staining.

I was assured by the aforementioned vendors that the stain and sealant were an exact match to the existing siding. Um. No. Not even close. Well, at least the unmarked 1-gallon can of stain they delivered is lighter than the old stuff, not darker, so I can work with it to gradually match the new stuff to the rest of the house. Maybe the stain gets darker as it soaks in. I'm not really worried about it - I am basically done. I spent $200 on materials (and delivery) and I can spend as much time on the job to get it as exactly perfect as I want.

I have never done anything like this job before but I am glad I did it myself. The scumbag contractors wanted $1,000 to repair the area. Even if you add in the cost of the table saw I am still ahead of the game. I didn't have to take time off work, I got to see the type of damage first-hand, I have a lot of left-over material, and I know what to look for in case I need to do this again.

To those of you out there facing similar challenges but are leery of jumping in yourself my advice is just give it a go. I mean, obviously, there are certain things that you might want to get an expert for (electrical stuff, plumbing stuff, and other dangerous or house-critical items) but embrace the opportunity to teach yourself a new skill. If you screw it up, you screw it up – it is not the end of the world.

And who knows? You might surprise yourself and do it exactly right, and that, my friends, is an awesome feeling.

Really Verb Ending in ING Sick

I was sick on Friday.  Spectacularly so, in fact. I was really impressed with myself.  I had no idea I had it in me.

Somach virus.  I wrote a whole big thing on it but it was too gross to post.  Since it was a shame to throw out the article, I will present it in "reverse Mad Libs" mode - that's where I just give you the filled-in blanks and I let your imagination fill in the rest of the story.  Enjoy!

• Working
• Suddenly
• Queasy
• Sprinted
• Technicolor
• Yawn
• Projectile
• Through the eye of a needle
• Explosive
• Driving
• Traffic Jam
• Church parking lot
• Four times
• Wendy's Combo #1
• Home
• Sixteen hours

Boy, I am glad that's over. 

Finally Finished!

I finally finished David Kahn’s 1,200-page work on cryptography and cryptanalysis: The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.


Overall, I liked it very much. Always enlightening, almost-always entertaining.

It is very thorough but this is both a large positive and a slight negative. Originally published in 1967, at times it gets bogged down with detailed descriptions of interpersonal relationships between now-little-known WWII-era personalities. It gets VERY bogged down with a (nearly) completely valueless chapter devoted mostly to the construction and staffing of various NSA buildings.

If you liked the detail, science, and writing style of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes you will definitely like this book.

There are a lot of math-light descriptions of many different types of historical codes and ciphers and how they were solved using absolutely flabbergasting strokes of genius or luck or both. I was hoping that something in the book would cause me to come up with new avenues for solving the Khan’s Cons puzzle on puzzlemonster.com, but, unfortunately, nothing really inspirational came out of it. It looks like it’s back to the drawing board for me, yet again.

I tend to jump from book to book, so I managed to knock out two others since I started this one. One is a Bill Amend’s latest FoxTrot compilation (Wrapped-Up FoxTrot) and the other is Terry Pratchett’s most recent Discworld book (Unseen Academicals). I liked the FoxTrot book but I could take or leave the Pratchett one (I am withholding detailed judgment until a couple of friends of mine finish reading their copies).

I have now started on The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. I may have gotten tricked into buying it because one of the reviews described it as “The Bourne Identity for the new millennium”. I saw a couple of the Bourne movies (but did not read the books) and thought they were pretty neat. I am fairly sure I am not going to like this book very much, though, since it seems to follow a pattern of one page of tough guy acting tough, 15 pages describing his gun/helicopter/whatever, rinse, repeat. Obviously I am exaggerating here but you get the point.

We'll see how it goes.

H1N1 News Update

At left is a graph I have been updating since a few weeks into the Swine Flu Pandemic. I was going to post it a few days ago but didn't get around to it (laziness, mainly). Recent headlines from MSNBC and other places have galvanized me into posting quick article.

Most of the information I have been getting has been through the European Center for Disease Control. I stopped getting my information from the CDC in the U.S. because I like the daily, more globally-concerned format of the data from the ECDC better.

The headline that caught my attention was “Swine Flu has sickened 22 million in the U.S.”. My numbers show that serious illnesses from this outbreak should be closer to 2 million, and that's world-wide. I thought, okay, this is a typical wild exaggeration by the media designed to capture my attention. After all, to avoid overworking emergency rooms, they stopped general testing for H1N1 months ago (at the recommendation of the CDC) when a patient showed up with flu-like symptoms, so how could they claim these numbers?

The sub-headline read “CDC: 4,000 in U.S. died, including 540 kids, between April and mid-October”.

4,000?! I “knew” that number was way off because my curve fitting shows roughly 1,000 in the U.S. should have died over the past six months, pretty close to today's ECDC published number of 1,004. But sicknesses can be misinterpreted – deaths cannot. So what is the deal?

Apparently the CDC has been under-reporting the numbers for a while. They knew they were wrong, but, in the absence of the correct numbers, they have been publishing gross underestimates for a while. I am looking forward to tomorrow's ECDC update and how they explain the discrepancy.

FWIW: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes people just make mistakes or do the best they can with the data they have – this is most likely what is going on here. It would have been nice to know that the error bars were so huge. Even knowing that the data were “plus or minus 100%” would have been a vast improvement.

As I wrote in my previous H1N1 posts, it looks like there are a lot of different data out there that can be used to “prove” anything regarding this outbreak. I am genuinely puzzled and concerned here. I plead genuine ignorance on my part – no passive-aggressive shenanigans or accusations of malfeasance are implied.

Any help to make sense of the situation would be appreciated.

Rain, Rain, Go Away. No, Seriously.

It has been raining for about 30 hours now and the November Nor'easter is not going to abate any time soon. Winds have tapered off a bit but they are fairly sustained at 20 mph with higher gusts. The storm is going to get worse before it gets better. I could not get a new table saw to my house in this weather so none of the projects could be pushed forward, which made me pretty furious. Just my luck, right? I mean, I have been waiting forever for a new one and now this.

The septic system is acting up and I am running around looking for leaks in the roof and making sure the garage is not flooding. Luckily they canceled work because, since daycare is closed due to lack of power, at least one of us needed to stay home and neither of us can afford the leave.

There are 10-foot branches dropping off into my neighbor's yard and several of his trees are swaying alarmingly. Many of them have dropped their leaves already so I am pretty sure their waterlogged root balls will stay anchored in the ground for the duration of the storm and not be torqued out of the earth by the hundreds like they were during Hurricane Isabel.

All of these “problems” are disgustingly minor, though, compared to the issue one of my 80-year-old neighbors had this morning.

He went out to get the morning paper (in the wind and the rain and the dark). As he was bending over to fetch it off the ground a gust of wind blew him over into the muddy water, half-in and half-out of his ditch out front. In his dark blue rain slicker and jeans he was not noticed for over an hour as he lay there yelling and trying to power through his joint problems to get enough traction to climb the slippery slope back to the gravel driveway. He says that several cars drove right by him probably on their way to work. They must have passed only feet away from where he was struggling.

After the sun had come up sufficiently to see, my wife looked out the window at the weather and noticed what looked like a figure slowly making their way on hands and knees up his driveway. We are a couple hundred feet from his house so we could not tell who it was or what they were doing (troubleshooting the septic system, digging a trench to guide floodwater away from the house, etc.). I donned my boots and jacket and grabbed my cell phone and went out and help whoever was out there do whatever they thought they were doing that was so damned important to do in this weather.

As I walked out into the street I saw another neighbor who had just gotten off night shift dash across the road to the old man's house. The younger neighbor started yelling “Help! Help!” and I ran over and helped the old man the last few feet into the garage and called 911.

He was more disoriented, embarrassed, and wet than genuinely injured, although he did have a small bump and cut on his forehead from the fall. The paramedic arrived within five minutes which is pretty impressive even when you don't have the extra problems of trees down in the roads and flooding all throughout the region. The old man's wife was awakened (she slept through this whole episode) and the other neighbor and I left so she and the paramedic could get him into some dry clothes.

He will be fine.

I walked back home and told my wife and son how much I love them.

By the way, I am no longer angry about not getting my table saw right away.

Five Projects

When it rains, it pours.


This week I will be going from zero projects to possibly five projects once I get my replacement table saw on Wednesday. I sold my Lego Mindstorms Kit and a dysfunctional Roomba to help subsidize the cost, but more on that later. I will have descriptions for all current projects in the sidebar of this blog and update their status as appropriate. For now here is a brief overview of them all:

1) Pallet Wood End Table – this project has been on hold since my Craftsman table saw died. I am looking forward to picking this project up again this week.

2) Desk Refinishing Project – jimmydunes (a reader and friend) has donated a large wooden desk to this site. He bought it at a used - and now closed - furniture shop in Lockport NY many years ago. He believes it originally came from a local school. There are no markings or metal plaques to identify it any more than that.

It is moderately dinged up but basically it is a nice heavy solid piece in need of some TLC. Personally, I like the way it looks now but I think it will bring in more money for the Puzzle for Charity if I sand and re-finish it.

Technically this project does not need a table saw, but I need to find a work area for it in the garage, and where it goes depends on where the saw ends up.

3) Antiqued End Table – adding a couple of coats of paint to an old oak end table gets it out of my way and into a guest bedroom or onto craigslist. I feel bad painting it (versus sanding and staining it) but it has a lot of curved surfaces which I do not want to deal with and it has been sitting in my garage generating negative value (collecting dust, cluttering up the joint, etc.) for over a year.

4) Siding Repair – repairing water (and maybe insect) damage to a small portion of my garage will require the table saw to ensure nice straight cuts are made to the replacement siding pieces. Parts, stain, and sealant get delivered Wednesday.

5) Play Table – We are in desperate need of more storage for my son’s toys and it would be great if he had a nice, safe play area to use them in (instead of the nightly ritual of turning the living room into an ankle twisting, trip-hazard mine field). Both of these problems would be solved by removing the no-longer-used rocking chair from his room and replacing it with a 3-foot by 3-foot table with ample storage. Although the need is great, this project is in the “maybe” pile because of the nature of the toys that need to be stored. Again, more on this later.

I hope to really push forward on all of these things starting soon but first I need to clean the garage. I have let it go for a while and I am pretty ashamed of the state of it right now. Blame it on Saints Row 2.

Wish me luck.

Single Point Failure (Part II)

Continued from Part I


When is the last time you did not have to go to a specialist for a seemingly mundane physical condition? When you call tech support, does a local rep answer the phone or is it someone half a globe away? When you send your coffee maker or cell phone or Xbox in for repairs (even if you had the skills, the warranty makes it impossible for you to investigate the problem yourself) , does it go to Tassimo or BlackBerry or Microsoft or does it go to some tiny third party repair shop somewhere? When someone does show up at your house to do something, do they have all the tools and skills they need to do the job, or do they need to come back with the right kind of pipe or drill bit or post-hole digger? Was the original job merely sub-contracted out, possibly multiple times?

We are held hostage by our dependence on people with specialist knowledge we need or want. But we all tolerate it because we all do it. This over-specialization frees us to focus only on the things we like to do or are good at, after all. The outsourcing of "menial" skills saves money and we also get the psychological and legal benefits of not needing to take responsibility for anything outside of our purview.

Everything is (with a nod to the late Douglas Adams) “Somebody Else’s Problem”.

But, ironically, as more and more tasks are seen as “menial” and “not my job” it becomes more and more critical that we all know how to do these supposedly unimportant things. It is the classic “For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost” scenario.

As has been already mentioned, lack of intellectual diversity – skill focus at the cost of personal growth – is rewarded. This is dangerous in itself but we have moved even beyond that into an area where we (as a society) appear to actually depend on the fact that nobody actually knows how to do anything.

How so?

If a person were to widen their skillset voluntarily they would reduce their individual dependence on others by a small amount. Not only would they be slightly more able to deal with day-to-day problems but doors open to solve related issues as well – sounds good, right?

Imagine a small town whose inhabitants for years have seen the engine compartment of a car as a giant hands-off mystery. Now one of them (because they are broke, tired of waiting at the very slow or rude auto shop, or whatever) becomes curious or desperate enough to try their hand at changing their own oil. They learn how and discover that it is easy to do, cheaper than paying someone to do it, and quicker than waiting in line. They are no longer tied to the business hours of the place down the road and are not forced spend a weekend morning trapped in a service station.

Maybe pride in accomplishment and the newfound courage to try things outside of their comfort zone allows them to try changing their own wiper blades, brake lights, air filter and replacing their old battery. All the mundane stuff that used to eat up so much time or money or both is now taken care of at home for a fraction of the cost. Great!

What happens to the local service station? Nothing. A little less business. A little less profit. The people that work there aren’t affected all that much. After all, it was just one person reversing their personal tendency to outsource the things they aren’t interested in to someone down the road. But what happens when more and more people start learning those skills that they have avoided picking up? Business starts to dip noticeably and eventually the shop workers can no longer be paid. The service station goes under, and the specialists whose livelihood was 100% dependent on the ignorance of the townsfolk are now out of a job.

Zoom the camera out from the hypothetical service station and really look at the situation where you work, where your friends work, and all across the country, and you might be surprised to see that we are sitting in a Learned Helplessness Bubble.

(To be continued…)

Great Job, Sport!

Congrats, Jesse, on your recent induction into the Neverwinter Nights Hall of Fame for your Bard's Tale module!

Not only have you managed to escape from "the crab bucket of New York State", but you have conclusively proven to naysayers that people from our home town can and do finish what they sta...

Hey, look, a squirrel!

Oh, We're Painting the Drywall White... (Updated)

I like to paint rooms. Actually I like doing any chore that involves making big, obvious changes to my environment. Mowing the lawn, staining a piece of furniture, or planting a garden are good examples of this. Unfortunately, a terrible example of this is the painting job I did this weekend.


Over the years the walls have gotten a bit dingy and I needed to repair a gouge in the drywall anyway so I spent some of Saturday painting the hallway and living room.

There is a lot of exposed wood in the place which makes the house look, well, homey, but this limits the shades that can be used. We went with darkish colors for the bedrooms and light blue for the kid’s room but these areas are isolated and therefore look cozy in those hues. An area the size and shape of the hallway/living room needs something a lot lighter or else you risk turning your whole house into a dark cave (it was like that when we first moved in).

The Valspar eggshell paint we chose was called, according to the card, Pale Ivory (114-2). A light color, but obviously not straight-up white which we felt would have been stark and cold. It looked great on the color card at Lowe’s and on the little paint dot on the can lid. In my opinion, however, Valspar’s fancy-pants name for the paint should be re-named “Dingy Drywall White” for all the effect it had on the place.

Other than a very slight wet look, I really had no visual cue on where I started and where I stopped painting. Oh, there were the occasional scuff marks and dirty areas that cleaned up nice with a fresh coat of paint but other than that I don’t see what the point of my 4-hour task was.

I only ended up putting on one coat. I mean, why would I do anything else? All I would be doing by slapping a second coat on is wasting a paint roller, slightly increasing the odds that I would screw something up (spill the paint, paint the trim, etc.) and greatly increasing the odds that I would be sore from stooping and stretching for several more hours. Plus I had no desire to hear myself do the “fat guy grunt” any more that day. You know what I’m talking about. I’m workin’ on it. Leave me alone.

To say I only put on one coat is probably not accurate. I am sure in some places I put between 2 and 5 coats because I had no idea if I had done that area yet. Maybe there are some ways of determining starting and stopping points but “using reflected light along with the gift of vision” is not one of them.

So I removed the 12.6 miles of painter’s tape from the all the fiddly bits of the doorways and exposed ceiling joists and upstairs railing and called it “done”.

There are some positives that have come out of this ho-hum project: 1) I have an extra gallon of the paint sitting in my garage that a friend of mine might be able to use in his new house 2) I was worried that the new paint / old paint border where the kitchen meets the living room would look weird. No worries there. 3) I got to try a tape-removal technique that a friend recommended (worked out great) and 4) My 15-month-old now knows the words “tape” and “sticky” and is familiar with the phrases “Yes, the tape is blue” and “Hey-hey-hey-stop-stop-don’t-pull-the-tape-awwww-dude-that’s-not-funny”.

SnowUrchin Note (11/03/09):  It has come to my attention that some people might think I am unhappy with the actual paint I chose for this project.  That is not true whatsoever.  I am, however, less than proud of my ability to recognize that a paint color card I pick up at Lowe's is the precise shade of the walls of a house I have lived in for the better part of a decade. :)