Shell Shock

One of the reasons I believe the car salesman's story about our Chevrolet Suburban (Newsletter #66) is that it came equipped with 3/4 of a tank of gasoline. I didn't fully realize what a big deal that was until it came time to buy gas. This thing, which we've named 'Moby Dick' or 'Big Mo' for short, seems to run forever on a tank of gas, and can in fact, go almost 1000 kilometers on a full tank. That ability can give the illusion of economy. A fillup quickly chases that illusion away, though. Capable of swallowing as much as 42 gallons, it can easily cost more to fill the tank than I've paid for several good running cars in the past. My first fillup cost $92.00. Fortunately, both of our gas-guzzlers (Suburban and Jeep Cherokee) run just fine on the local low octane fuel, so we save a bit on the price. Our 'economy' car (Chevy Vivant) demands the higher octane. Oh, the 'Shell Shock' reference? We buy most of our gas from Shell stations.

Speaking of gas, prices are once again down to ~$3.00/gallon for high octane, and I saw low octane for $2.63 today (Monday), which will save me about $15.00 the next time I fill up Big Mo.

War with Cable and Wireless - The Ceasefire

After 19 days of floundering around, we finally got our 1 Mbit ADSL connection back. I'll never know for sure what the problem was, but the last thing they did was replace my trusty Cisco modem with a Paradyne router, which I'm not too happy about. I recently bought a Linksys wireless router so I could use our laptop anywhere in the house, and I've not yet figured out how to make it work with the new router. I can get the routers to talk to themselves, and I can get the laptop to talk to the Linksys, but I can't get the laptop to talk to the Paradyne through the Linksys. I'm sure it's something in the configuration of one or the other of the two routers, but haven't had the time to thoroughly troubleshoot the problem. Normally, I'd just say to heck with it and set up a subnet off my Linux computer with the Linksys connected to that subnet and use the Linux box to connect the subnet to the outside world, but by a very strange coincidence, my computer's onboard network interface card died along with a lot of other stuff sometime during the 19 days we had our problems. My local LAN cabling developed a short, my NIC went bad, and the modem (according to C&W) went bad. I'm guessing mind you, and I'll never know for sure, but I think the C&W cable crew put a device called a 'megger' on my incoming telephone/ADSL line and fried some of my equipment. Which might be forgiveable if it hadn't taken them 19 days to fix it.

In the Country of the Blind, a one-eyed man is a freak.

Those of you who've been following my medical history know that this hasn't been the most fun year of my life. Briefly, for those who are new to the list, I had bypass surgery in March and eye surgery for a detached retina in June. My recovery from the heart surgery has been fast and successful, with very little trouble once I got past the first painful 6 weeks. The eye problem is another story altogether. I was making very good progress and was past the painful stage, and then about 5 weeks ago, my doctor gave me an injection directly into the eyeball. I lost most of the vision I had regained and three weeks later I was in pain and had developed a nasty inflammation. Two weeks ago I had surgery again, and the discomfort and pain have been sufficient to keep me from doing much except sleeping. Finally, this past weekend, I got the energy to go back to work a bit, and spent most of Sunday removing, repairing, and reinstalling the alternator on the Jeep. Today, I felt a lot better and my vision is once again improving, so hopefully, these newsletters will be more regular from now on.

The title above refers to a short story by H. G. Wells called 'In the Country of the Blind'. You can download it at  http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11870  It's a good read. As long as I'm on the subject, Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove of literary works, and I highly recommend it. There are thousands of books and stories available, all free.  http://www.gutenberg.org/

Service and Assistance for People Who Want to Live in Panama