The Threadless Nut

So what happened with the number 9? Did they get through creating the number 8 and were just so tired that they said “Screw it, just flip the 6 over, I’m going home!”

Ok, (yes I know most of my posts start with “Ok”, deal with it) Declan’s been enjoying watching some cartoons recently. His favorites include, rather unremarkably, Dora and Diego. I’ve been trying to get him hooked on Gatchaman and The Tick, but it just ain’t happening.

So Dora seems fine enough, she does all sorts of things that are fun and adventurous, uses her backpack and map a lot, and has to avoid swiper. Great, Declan loves it and is responsive to the educational content.

Then comes Diego, if you don’t know, Diego is Dora’s cousin. He lives in the rain forest and helps rescue various animals in trouble.

Diego is so much cooler than Dora.

Firstly, he takes a zipline everywhere he goes. So much cooler than walking or riding an ice cream truck.

Next he has this vest. He pulls a cord on the collar and the vest turns into whatever he needs. It’ll grow sleeves if it’s cold, or a hood if it’s raining, even turns into a life jacket when Diego needs to hit the rapids.

But this is the coolest part of all:

Dora has backpack, Diego has Rescue Pack. First off, Rescue Pack is a messenger bag. Ask any employee at Abercrombie and, if you can hear them over the blaring music in the store, they will tell you that a messenger bag is way cooler than a backpack. As if that’s not enough, where backpack can carry things, like a bananas or sticky tape, Rescue Pack turns into stuff. Not boring stuff, cool stuff, a snowboard, a mountain bike, a hang glider, climbing gear. I’ll take a kayak over a roll of tape any day. And just to rub it in, Rescue Pack gets this cool song and dance number every time he is deployed. It’s this salsa thing with spotlights and everything. I sing it all day.

So all this adds up to Diego being cool, in fact too cool for Nick Jr. I predict that soon Diego will have a new show. This show will be called Diego After Dark and will be set in Diego’s secret grotto deep in the rain forest. This will be a cool show, and it will be that kind of cool you don’t find anymore. Movie stars and playmates will hang out at the grotto with Diego. Diego will arrive, pull the cord on his vest and it will turn into an embroidered black silk shirt, casual, cool, and sexy. Rescue Pack will be there, wearing sunglasses, playing piano for Miss March and Miss October while sipping his martini. Diego will just walk around and chat with his friends, pouring Cristal as he wanders. Occasionally he’ll talk straight to the camera as if you are there with them all.

Yes, this is a blatant ripoff of Playboy After Dark from the 60s-70s. However, I think Diego can inject enough novelty into it to make it work again and who knows what Rescue Pack can do … after dark.

We shall see.

Ok, I understand that technology is helping us in all sorts of ways, but this is a case of engineers gone wild.

The Smart Pressure ™ tire gauge

Ok, this is a tire gauge, a digital tire gauge, so far I’m fine with that. Then we add the ability to enter in your target pressure. It will display your target pressure next to the actual pressure. So, this seems pretty unnecessary, but I suppose it’s still ok. You don’t have to remember what pressure you’re going for, and I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt that it remembers this setting between pressure setting sessions, so you don’t have to go look anything up.

Here’s where it gets out of hand. So we’ve got a pressure gauge that displays 2 numbers next to each other. You think that would be enough, you could look at the 2 numbers, determine if pressure needs to go up or down, and adjust accordingly. No, apparently that is not enough, this thing needs to change colors to tell you what to do. Of course, now you have to remember that green means add air, red means dump air, and blue means go have a coffee, but I suppose that’s easier than figuring out that 30 is less than 32.

Picked up and installed the new Voltage Regulator from Max BMW in Troy today. Voltage indicates all is well. Crisis averted.

Yesterday Erica is running a bit late to pick up Declan at my parent’s house, so I decide that I should ride over there and take him off their hands in case they have some plans. So, I hop on and start the bike up, it seems to crank a little slowly, but it fires up quickly and I just figure it’s been sitting a couple of days. (We’re about to see some evidence of how often I am completely wrong.)
I get almost all the over to the folks and the bike starts sputtering, I reach down and flick the reserve, even though the odometer doesn’t indicate I should be out for another 100 miles or so (no fuel gauge on this bike). No help from that and just as I’m cresting the hill it dies. Lights are dim and it won’t crank at all, indicating a flat battery. I try and pop start it, but it just sputters for a second and dies again.
Fortunately for me, it’s downhill all the way to the parent’s house, so I just coast down there. I put the charger on the battery and it’s really sucking the juice, so the battery is indeed dead. After charging for a while it starts up fine, but a meter on the battery indicates that it isn’t getting a charge. Uh Oh, Sad Beemer
Anyway tracked it down to the voltage regulator and will have to find a replacement part.