RasterWeb!As noted on Scripting News, all the cool kids have their birthdays today, Sheila, Andrea, Paul McCartney…
Today just happens to be my birthday as well, just in case, you know, you were wondering…
What’s that? You didn’t get to send a gift yet? Please send your credit card number to pete@rasterweb.net and I’ll pick out a nice gift for myself. Thanks…
Keep an eye on WordPress, it’s a descendant of b2, which I looked at a while back. WordPress is making good progress, it appears to be a nice clean system that focuses on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. It’s also a PHP/MySQL thing, and is released under the GPL. All good things indeed.
I know we’ve all been told at one time or another to RTFM, and I usually do, but due to the fact that we’ve lived in four different houses in the last six years, we’ve, um… misplaced a few manuals along the way. I’m sure you’ve done the same, unless you’re a real bureaucrat who enjoys filing everything in triplicate.
So, due to the fact that I’ve not always been able to find the fine manual needed, I’ve hit more that a few web sites looking for the manual, and let me tell you, a company that manufactures consumer products, and wants to improve the customer experience, would do well to provide easy to find PDF‘s of all of their manuals for download.
I’ve managed to get quite a few manuals for our major appliances, and it’s quite helpful to have them around, even if you still have the original dead-tree version. When the female asked me how to program the speed dial on our phone, I said “What’s the model number?” and had the answer, and the manual, within a few minutes. Hooray for companies that get it!
Remember those commercials with the Maytag Man, and how he was so lonely because he never had to do any service, because their machines were so reliable? Well that’s all changed…
Our Maytag washing machine started acting up, blowing the GFI circuit, leaking water everywhere, and not spinning properly, so we called for service. I knew I should have expected trouble when we got the machine, as it’s the ‘Performa’ model. (Long-time Mac users are chuckling right now…)
The Maytag Man managed to do a quick-fix with some electrical tape, and said he’d return again with a new part. What was the problem? Seems a hosr developed a leak, and was ‘peeing’ (his term) water onto the motor, causing havoc with the normal wash cycle. He said that the used to use a hard rubber hose, but switched to a corrugated plastic hose at some point, speculating that perhaps they found a different supplier. I think what he really meant was that Maytag wanted to save a few bucks by using a cheaper part. I could go one step further by saying they used chaper parts so that you’d have to call for service and be billed for that, but I won’t go that far. Yet. (Hmmm, looking through the owner’s manual I notice that they will replace parts at no cost, but you will be charged for labor, mileage, and transportation.)
The good news is that now I know how to repair a washing machine. Well, some washing machine problems. Add this to my garbage disposal autopsy a month ago (yes, it was successful, and that works fine now as well) and I’m racking up the home improvement points. Slowly, anyway…
The above map shows our journey on Saturday. We started at Fowler Park, and made a quick stop downtown to take care of some financial transactions (this worked well, since the car was in the shop, and the canoe provides reliable transporation) after which we headed down the river all the way to Riverside park. Along the way we saw ducks, swans, a fish or two, and lots of weeds…
All in all, the kids had a great time. We played at Riverside Park for a while and then headed back home. Maybe next time we’ll head farther down the river and see what else we can explore.
Lewis and Clark got nuthin’ on us!