Category: Whining
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Design for Serviceability
About an hour into a brief, twenty-four hour getaway, I received a not quite panicked call from my mom, letting me know that her microwave (a Panasonic NN-SN733W, bought in August 2015) wasn’t working. She uses the microwave all the time, for heating up water to make tea, and even making a good percentage of…
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We’re an American Pant!
As I started to write this, I searched for my previous post on the topic, and turns out I’ve not only written twice before but I already used a variant of the pun in the title. Sigh. Old habits… Anyway, what brought me back to the writing desk is that my two current pairs of…
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#BlizzBlog Day 1: The Plowing
It started snowing mid to late afternoon Monday, but the snow was pretty light until later in the evening. The governor declared a state of emergency, asking everyone to stay off the road except for emergencies. So why, oh why, do the plows go by so often on my little street? I can understand not…
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Catch-22
Bought a new printer today, to replace the Canon Pixma MP-500 that has been our main family printer for a few years. It started being all squeaky last week, and then it started completely missing horizontal bands. Tried all the head cleaning options, and finally tried removing the cartridges and the printhead and cleaning it…
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Unfortunately, this CharlieCard isn’t valid for usage with in the system
The MBTA has for years now had available a “stored value” type of card for subway, buses, commuter rail, etc. All very neat. You can go to a vending machine at subway stations and refill the card with cash or use a debit or credit card. It’s even possible to refill them on the bus,…
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Virtually Impossible
I received a new laptop at work, which is always a treat, but also always a pain trying to get the necessary programs and data migrated from the old one to the new one. My usual crutch is to create a “virtual” copy of the old laptop to run on the new one for the…
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Enough Already!
So apparently, this past month, we recorded the 3rd highest snowfall total for a January in Boston. Impressive. I am not generally a winter whiner — I put up with the cold, and the snow. I shovel, I snowblow; I sand and salt; I dress warmly. My 4-wheel drive pickup gets me through most conditions.…
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Shaving Hotel Costs
In two or three of the hotels we’ve visited, the pop-up drain plug has been missing. In two or three others, the sink wouldn’t hold water in spite of the presence of a plug. This makes shaving rather less efficient. I tried to fix one of the non-water-holding ones, but failed. Are the missing ones…
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Whapped WAP
As I mentioned earlier, my pictures were uploading to flickr very slowly last night, and when I woke up, I was not surprised to see that the upload had failed. I started it up again, and it failed on the second picture. After a couple more iterations, I decided to take another tack, and connect…
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It Looked Innocent Enough…
The ice cream cone sign, visible from the interstate, drew us in. There was also a fresh food market inside, with produce and everything. Very nice! Who would have dreamed that this placid exterior hid a fast food restaurant inside? Well, there we were, and it wasn’t McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Hardees, etc. It…