Now, That's MY Kind of Planetarium!

I don't know what goes on in there, but I want in...

My Google-Fu Has Failed Me

My brother sent me a text today asking if I could find contact information for a new Yahoo data center that was commissioned in Lockport NY last month and I said “npiaitcsiwlwighok” - no problem, I am in the car so I will look when I get home, ok?

I looked for about five minutes online (aka forever) with no luck. Agmorion and jimmydunes looked briefly, too, but all that seems to be out there are news articles saying that it will be or already is built, they are hiring between 45 and 125 locals with an average salary of $60k, and the place is allegedly green because it uses hydroelectricity for power.

I am sure I am just missing it, but can you find the mailing address, phone number, or any other way of proving it exists in the real world without needing to get there via Platform 9 ¾?

Good Thing He's a Cartoon...

Feeling guilty about eating that entire can of Pringles last night?  Well, Homer Simpson has made a lot of questionable dietary decisions over the years, too. Here's what some of his meals and snacks would look like in Nutritional Information form (all food info from WolframAlpha):

Episode 85: Rosebud

[Homer sits down in the middle of the night to eat cheese]
Homer: Mmmm. Sixty-four slices of American Cheese...
[begins eating]
Homer: ...sixty-four... sixty-three...
[morning comes, Homer is still eating]
Homer: Two... one...
[Marge walks in]
Marge: Have you been up all night eating cheese?
Homer: I think I'm blind.

Episode 184: Bart Star

Dr. Hibbert: Well, your cholesterol level is lethally high, Homer, but I'm more concerned about your gravy level.
Homer Simpson: Now, wait a second. You doctors have been telling us to drink eight glasses of gravy a day!
Dr. Hibbert: [laughs] Well, you're a little confused.
Homer Simpson: Oh, confused, would we?

Episode 220: Maximum Homerdrive

(While trying to finish a 16-pound steak as part of an eating contest)
Homer: Lungs filling... sinuses packed with meat...
Bart: C'mon, dad. Just 1.2 more pounds.
(Homer groans.)

Puzzle for Charity News

A charity for the Puzzle for Charity has been selected!

The Lake Country SPCA in Clarksville, Virginia, is a privately run organization with no state or federal funding – it is totally donation dependent. It is a no-kill shelter (cool) and they even take care of horses (wow).

All the cash in the Charity Pool (currently $50) will go to them when the puzzle gets solved, and all of the cash in the Prize Pool will go to whoever solves the most recent puzzle. I might throw in the puzzle itself at a later date, but for now, it will just be the cash.

For those of you who don't know, here are some answers to some questions you might have:

Where does the money come from, if it doesn't cost anything to participate? Donations, stuff I sell on craigslist, and out of my pocket. I used to ramp up the prize pools a certain amount per day, and I may do that again in the future, but, for now, I just will randomly chuck cash in the pot(s) when I can.

Why are you doing this? It's cool to help others, and this is a fun way for me to do it.

Check out the sidebar for updates to the Prize Pool, Charity Pool, hints, rules, FAQs, previous winners, previous puzzles and all sorts of other info.

What else... Oh, yeah... I have posted Hint #2 to the Anagram Puzzle. You can find all of the Unsolved Puzzles at the Secret Puzzle Page link in the sidebar on the right. Good Luck!

I Have Lost My Mojo

Maaannn....

My Mojo Jojo keychain fob is missing. The thing was 11 or 12 years old, the paint was all chipped and peeled from his turban, and one of the corners of the cape was broken, but it was mine and made the wife and my sets of keys easily distinguishable. Well, really, the fact that my wife has more keys on her keyring than an octogenarian janitor makes the keychains distinguishable, but that's not important right now. I think it might have been a gift from Agmorion and Siun-Kelan, but I may be misremembering some pencils FedEx'd to my place of employment way back when...

No biggie, but it looks like I have a potential project to do. Maybe I will make one out of some leftover tile from the kitchen project, but I may just end up buying one.

A friend of mine suggested some really inappropriate stuff from ThinkGeek. That Robot Chicken one calls to me a little and the wine opener calls to me a lot, but I want one that I can explain to my kid in 10,000 words or less without a lot of “Ummm...” and shuffling my feet when he says “What's that?” and “Why?”

Suggestions welcome.

New Puzzle Hint

Another hint for the New Desk Puzzle on the Secret Puzzle Page has been posted.  Here it is:

Hint 2 (Posted 11/17/10): Gur fbyhgvba unf gur jbeq "qrfx" va vg.

Remember, the hints are ROT-13 encoded to prevent spoiling the fun for those who don't want hints yet.  Just shift each letter by 13 spaces to decode the hint, of simply copy and paste it here.

You can find all of the puzzles using the Secret Puzzle Page link in the sidebar, and you can leave a comment if you think you have an answer to one or more of them.  Good luck!

Ooooh... How Exotic!

"Daddy, daddy, daddy!  Can I please go throw marmoset chunks to the Bengal tiger?"  "Sorry, son, we just missed the Feeding of the Interesting Animals... Maybe we can watch them feed the goldfish in a couple of hours..."

Funnus Quizzus

I was on the treadmill at the gym the other day and it struck me that I have a lot of old songs on my media player.

Well, not really old, I guess, but “Sympathy for the Devil” came out in 1968. Man... that would be like my dad rockin' out to Mairzy Doats or Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy or something. .

Why don't I just be done with it and fill my iPod with Gregorian chants, FCOL?

Say...

Just to prove to you once and for all that I have lost any ability to distinguish between what is entertaining and what is idiotic, I have decided to translate portions of some of the songs on my iPod into Latin. Well, I'm not really doing the heavy lifting, it's Google Translate – I am just massaging the words a little so the right meaning is conveyed, like when “blue” actually means “sad”, for instance.

Also, if a term simply did not exist “back in the day”, replacements were used... For example, “Spaceship” could be changed to “ship of the heavens” before chucking the phrase into the translation engine. Further massaging with my extremely limited knowledge of the language is done just to make the auto-translation back to English a little less silly, definitely with the downside of making the Latin unreadable to someone who is super into Latin.

Below are four chunks of songs translated in this way. Let's see if you can guess what songs they come from. There are three methods of attacking this: 1) Look at the words and try and deduce their meaning from roots in English words you know 2) Spend a couple of years learning Latin then translate or 3) copy and paste the phrases below back into Google Translate and work with what you get. The phrase “something is lost in the translation” definitely applies here... :)

If you think you know one or more of them, leave a comment giving the song name and band. Once this post scrolls off the bottom of this page in a week or two, I will post the solutions if they all are not guessed yet.. Have fun and Good Luck!

Song One:
Omnibus nota,
Plenus mundus stultis populi.
Occurre capella in media nocte,
Partem nos pecunia.

Song Two:
Coepi cogitare
Scitis bibendae coepi
Non memini omnis multo illa die
Pulsatus mihi ut aliquid iocosa
Quando omnem pecuniam peracto
Vbi es transivit annos XV

Song Three:
Eunt purgo sursum vestri vultus
Omnibus falsum ex libris
Ut te cive...

Song Four:
Est oculus de tigris
Est pugna Horruit
Stare nos contra aemulum

"Fixing" the Truck

I went to take the trash to the dump a while back and discovered my truck would not start. It was obvious from the sound that the (brand new) battery had drained away. A jump start got it going again and it started up okay the next day, so I just figured I was a bonehead and left a light on somewhere in the vehicle that slowly killed the battery in a non-obvious way.

After the truck had sat for about five days I needed to take it out again and, once again, the battery was too weak to turn over the motor. Obviously, I had an electrical problem.

Now, vehicles and computers are just tools to me. I get only minimal pleasure out of them when they are doing their job, and I just don't care how they work. Oh, don't get me wrong... I know quite a few programming languages and I once taught myself enough car stuff from scratch to have successfully single-handedly rebuilt an engine from a 1965 Corvair.

So you see, “I don't care” isn't sour-grapes code for “I don't like things that are hard to do or are outside of my elitist comfort zone”. I can and do learn. It's just that I simply and truly don't care.

When someone excitedly tells me about the features of the new 2011 Ford Whatsit or extols the virtues of their video card that can actually play Crysis without needing to be submerged in liquid nitrogen, it has the same meaning for me if they were passionately describing a crescent wrench or a pack of sandpaper for some reason. I am glad the topic gives them pleasure, but, to me, its just a tool.

But, like all tools, it is a hassle when they break when you need them and that's where my “I don't care” attitude stops being a reasonable thing to do. Time to go marching up the learning curve yet again.

So I fired up the Kindle and tried to find a Haynes Manual for my F-150. Shut up. I know dragging a fragile piece of techno-bling out into the cold, greasy, dirty, and possibly wet environment you are going to encounter while troubleshooting an auto problem is a bad idea – it was sitting there and I just wanted to see what the price of the book would be through Amazon.

No Haynes car manuals at all. Huh. Oh, wait, it's just showing the downloadable content, not the paper stuff. But, wait, what's this? A Haynes manual for the USS Enterprise. The starship, not the aircraft carrier. Interesting, but that doesn't help my truck issue, it only helps my “I haven't said 'oh you've gotta be freaking kidding me' in a while” issue.

I got the book ($20) at an auto parts store in town and headed home. If you have never opened one, here are a few observations about Haynes manuals:

1. They are wrapped in plastic. At least they are at the auto parts store. I guess this is to prevent people from coming in, looking up the answer to their minor car problem, and going home to fix it without shelling out twenty bucks. Personally, I think that sucks.
2. The writers of the book are heavily into coarse, semi-accurate generalizations that assume you were really paying attention when your father took you out into the driveway on your twelfth birthday where the two of you bonded in a Rite of Manhood by ritualistically dismantling and re-assembling the family car. What? He didn't? Well, then ya maht as well be wearin' a dress, then, Nancy-boy. Find the Generic Electronics Module yourself, cuz we ain't helpin'.
3. God help you if you have an electrical issue and you don't have a degree in Electrical Engineering or several decades of automotive or electrical experience. It is clear the price of ink must have gone through the roof just as Haynes was about to print out the electrical schematics, forcing them to render the description of the various wiring harnesses and everything they connect into a single haiku. Well, not really, but the minimalist drawings could be a hell of a lot more helpful.
4. The Index is for display only and lends a “finished” look to the book. It is not for looking things up.

I figured I would start by removing the passenger compartment fusebox cover since I had already performed the requisite “ten minutes of staring blankly into the engine compartment” before I went to get the book. I just happened to brush the back of my hand against one of the relays as I was doing this and it was very warm to the touch. Hmm. I let the truck sit for about 15 minutes and touched it again.

Still warm. Well, that shouldn't be. I knew from the amount of time it took to kill the battery and the fact that the alternator charged up the battery just fine that the electrical short was a minor one, maybe an amp or two. The ironically named Battery Saver Relay itself tested fine – there just always happened to be 12V across the coil, regardless if the glove box light, the hood light, or the map laps were on or off.

With the relay pulled, the battery drew about 60 milliamps, which, I guess, is the right amount of current to provide standby power to the onboard computer and to the little blinky “THEFT” light on the dashboard. With the relay in place but nothing on or open, I was drawing about fifteen times that much – the right amount to drain the battery in a couple of days. The same thing happened with the replacement relays I got when I went back to auto parts place, so the relays were not the problem.

Some more poking around narrowed the problem to an output line of something called the GEM (or maybe the Central Timer Module.. it's a little tough to figure out what the Haynes schematic means here... ).

The Internet speaks of the GEM (Generic Electronics Module) in hushed tones as is right for something that takes authorized Ford dealers upwards of $500 worth of pixie dust and unicorn tears to fix (labor not included). I expect there is a bit stuck low controlling the output of the line connecting the Battery Saver Relay to the GEM which is causing the battery to slowly drain to ground, or the line itself has frayed and is partially grounded.

Either way, that's like $300 worth of labor to have found and fixed. I would try it myself, but, since I would have to remove the fuse box to get to the problem (FWIW, I found the location of the GEM on forums out there, not in the differently-useful book). The Internet tells me it's a tricky thing to do and its not a task for the unqualified.

Fair enough. Here's what I am qualified to do, though: yank the relays and never put them in again. There, problem solved. If I ever have an extra $800 laying around that I simply can't think way to use then I might take the truck in. Otherwise, I am done.

My father-in-law, the king of the automotive jury-riggers, will be so proud!

Dentist, Schmentist!

Oddly enough, this bling-tastical mall kiosk is covered by my dental HMO.  I just hope that "Watch Battery" is an item you can buy there and not an activity you can engage in while you are waiting.