DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Biomorph recently bought back a truck-load of their “personal” ergonomic desks from a failed dot-com. The company is selling them (with a full warranty) for ~30% off. They’re still obscenely expensive at $895, and the only surface finish available at this price is the clearcoat, which is the least visually appealing in the catalog. But you’d still get the benefit of adjusting keyboard height and monitor height independently, and besides, the old door-across-two-file-cabinets look is so 1990s.

If you don’t like the clearcoat finish, you can still save $100 off the regular desk price by opting for a pre-owned frame. Also, I understand that some of Biomorph’s other, regular, inventory will be going on sale for the holidays.

Here’s how to justify home-office upgrades: you probably spend 50-60 hours a week there, so you ought to be comfortable. Most people think nothing of having a multi-hundred-dollar monthly car payment, even if the car sits idle in the garage 95% of the time. If it makes you feel better, you can haul your new desk out to the curb on weekends so your neighbors can admire it too.

A friend with an iBook just upgraded to Jaguar. Afterwards, at her request, I made a change to the network preferences to fix her wireless connection. Then I powered the machine down, because that’s what she usually does.

She phoned me the next day, because the laptop would not boot up. She reported that she’d pressed the power button repeatedly without any response. That’s always disconcerting.

First I thought the thing might be asleep, so I walked her through some wake-up rituals. I figured this would not help, because I was the last person to touch the machine, and I’d shut it down. But I had to suggest something, and I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, superstition is 90% of the hardware-repair game.

Needless to say, the iBook wasn’t sleeping, so we couldn’t wake it. But it wouldn’t turn on. The battery showed a full charge. And, the unit was plugged in.

I was beginning to worry. It’s hard to maintain one’s reputation as the neighborhood Mac expert after killing someone’s new iBook. I kept a confident tone in my voice — if superstition is 90% of the game, confidence is the other 10% — but the problem was that after having dealt with all varieties of weird hardware and software problems for most of my life, I’ve developed a sense for how serious a situation is, even if I’ve never seen the particular problem before. This one smelled wrong. I was afraid there would be a warranty claim in her immediate future.

Completely out of reasonable suggestions, I still had to say something, so I segued smoothly to an unreasonable suggestion. “Unplug the laptop,” I said, “remove the battery, and wait five minutes.” I could have added, and wave your arms in the air while dancing topless around the desk and making a sound like the horn on a 1947 Chrysler. Either process would be equally effective; I was making it up as I went along. “Then put in the battery and turn the machine on. Call me back if it doesn’t work.”

I knew the phone would ring in five minutes. But I didn’t expect to hear her say what she did: “It worked!” So, I don’t know, maybe I really am a computer expert. Anyway, the lesson here has nothing to do with being confident in the face of challenge, or having courage to proceed against difficult odds. The lesson, as far as I’m concerned, is never touch a friend’s computer.

Here’s my free advice for the day: befriend a gourmet.

We were invited to the City for a birthday celebration. The hosts have a serious talent in the kitchen, which we knew, so we’d prepared for this party by starving ourselves all day. Man oh man… what a spread. I ate everything in sight. I threw off the shackles of veganism, or really non-lacto-pescatarianism, with relish (and they probably put butter in the relish).

Their recipes come from a series of wondrous books. If you like to cook, or want to give a gift to someone who does (like me, for example), you can do no better than to check out the bound volumes of Cook’s Illustrated magazines. I don’t own any of these myself (but soon! but soon!) but my understanding is that the writers test countless variations of each recipe, publishing the one that works the best. And they explain why. If my friends’ results are any indication, these recipes are exceptional.

After upgrading to Jaguar, my TiBook refused to mount my workstation’s disks. The error message was a lot less than helpful: “Connecting to afp://… An error has occurred (error = -1028).”

I couldn’t mount the TiBook from the desktop machine, either, because I’d made the unwise decision to format the laptop’s filesystem as UFS rather than HFS+, and OS9 (the desktop’s OS) won’t read UFS disks. This means I had two computers that wouldn’t talk to one another. Basically I was suffering from the inverse of Metcalf’s Law: the value of my home network had decreased in proportion to the square of the number of nodes that were refusing to join. Or, assigning values, 1² = 1.

While on hold with Apple’s tech support group, I poked more at the laptop, assuming that the solution was something simple. And, I soon found, it was: within the network prefs, I’d disabled AppleTalk by mistake. Re-enabling it made my network happy once again.

Still: lousy error message, no?

We realized we’ve been enjoying good house karma lately. I’m writing about it now to thoroughly jinx myself, because I just can’t stand it when things go too well, and I really need to add some new stressors to my life. I fully expect part of the roof to cave in as soon as I publish this story.

A few weeks back we had our oven diagnosed because the thermostat was off by 75°. The repair estimate was ridiculously high at $860.

When we bought this house, we had the foresight to purchase a home warranty policy. A “home warranty” is basically an insurance policy that pays off if anything breaks during the first year of ownership. Some systems, like septic and wells, are exempt unless you purchase additional specialized coverage, but basic appliances and systems (heating, cooling) tend to be covered.

The policy we have may not be the best. It requires a $40 copay, which the insurance company uses to dissuade all casual inquiries — at $40 per claim, we’d want to be sure something was wrong.

With our oven situation, I was sure something was wrong. The insurance company arranged for a diagnostic visit and repair, and paid the whole tab minus my $40 fee. It all worked out surprisingly well.

(Confirming my suspicion that the original repair shop was trying to hold me up when they bid $860, the folks who actually did the work told me the wholesale price on the controller board: $250. Installation took about a half-hour. Had there been no insurance coverage, they’d have charged me $440, or roughly half what the original shop quoted. )

The $400 I saved pays for my entire home warranty, and then some. I am now a convert to the religion of home-warranty insurance. I just wish I was getting a commission.

Then we had a problem with our heater: all the vents in the main zone died. A phone call to the insurance company revealed that zoned heating systems are not covered by our policy… can’t win ‘em all I guess… and a second call, to the HVAC contractor who’d installed the zoned system originally, revealed that the part that had blown out was discontinued by the manufacturer.

All in all these were not looking like ingredients for a good-karma story, and I was on a deadline, so I had to juggle reality pretty quickly. Immediately, the HVAC guy said, “But you know, I think I have exactly one of those discontinued parts in the back of my warehouse. I’ll go dig it out and give it to you for free.” Seriously. In the end I paid him $90 for the installation and a grateful handshake for the part. He’s won a customer for life.

Finally, and there has to be a 3rd instance in any proof so here you go, we watched anxiously as the skies opened and drenched our new home for the first time this season. To understand how this feels, remember that in California it generally does not rain between April and November. And then it rains a lot and continues to do so for five months, causing enough flooding and drainage problems to keep repair crews busy for the dry summer to follow. The season’s first rain is like a warning shot at everyone who thinks they might need new gutters or a french drain.

For new homeowners, the frightening question is “where does the water go?” Chances are, it goes somewhere you’d rather it didn’t, like into the basement. Another good chance: your yard and/or driveway will end up about 10' further downhill than it was before the rain started. It kills my green soul to say this, but pavement is a good thing.

However… so far, so good.

We’d managed to clean out the gutters the weekend before, and I’m sure that helped prevent some problems. We hadn’t cut all the dead branches out of the trees yet, but last week’s windstorm took care of them, helpfully dumping two cubic yards’ worth into the driveway for easy pick-up. (We’ve since discovered that driving through them in the car two or three times helps break them up into manageable pieces.)