failure weblog

well, everyone will be happy to know that even though i was doing some legwork toward various things since i bought my ticket two weeks ago, i really didn’t start packing and/or pulling stuff together until yesterday. (i wouldn’t want act out of character all of the sudden — i have a reputation to uphold.) i did, however, plan my final meals.
thursday for lunch i ate at tacos-a-go-go. thursday evening i had chicken carbonara at corner market. friday for lunch i ate at goode company bbq with some co-workers (who had suggested i needed to eat some bbq before i left…something i had no problem agreeing with). friday evening i spent at coffee groundz for the geek gathering. (thanks for the shirt, loopylow!) there, kojo gave me a list of a few books he’d like for me to look for and buy while i’m in taiwan. and sue showed up and hung out. saturday i went to the saint arnold’s brewery tour. on an empty stomach. and i brought one of their glasses. i came home and slept about 5 hours. then i met the potts at chuy’s. i went over to their house and watched snl. today i ate lunch at the house of pies. i watched the super bowl. (yea, saints!) then i walked over to subway and picked up a chicken breast on flatbread. the only place i’d had on my list that i didn’t make it to was niko niko’s. oh well.
i appear to have managed to fit everything i want to take into what is traditionally a full-size carry-on bag — which i will be checking, and a combination laptop bag / backpack. i bought a full bag of cat food, made extra house keys for the potts, made copies of important documents, talked to my parents and grandmother, and so on and so forth. i went to the grocery store and picked up some stuff for ash, and bought some cashew packs, granola bars, and cracker packs. (half went in my carry-on, the other half in checked for the trip back). i’ve got about 5 or so days worth of clothes. i put an empty backpack in my checked bag just in case i need to come back with more than i took. i’ve got a point-and-shoot camera, an iphone, an unlocked razr, my macbook air, a micro mag lite flashlight, a fine-point sharpie and a cross pen, etc. i’ve emptied my pockets of my knife, my lighter, various keys, etc. i will be putting my wallet chain in my bag i’m checking. (although i did decide to wear my belt that is covered in metal studs. i’m guessing i’ll be taking that off at security.) i just checked the weather and it appears to be lows in upper 50’s to mid 60’s, highs in mid 60’s to mid 70’s. i was planning on taking a jacket of some kind anyway.
i have not made any lists at all. hopefully i’m not forgetting anything. yesterday was the first day i finally started getting a bit nervous about forgetting something, not knowing something and causing/creating issues for myself, etc. i’m completely out of my element, having never flown internationally before (and it’s not like i’ve flown domestically all that much either), so i have no experience and don’t feel completely at ease with this unknown-to-me process. but hopefully everything will go well.
it continues to be funny to me just how many friends, family, co-workers, etc. appear to be really, genuinely excited about my trip. a lot of them have gotten giddy when they found out, or continue to talk about it to me. but i’m still not excited. i finally (as mentioned above) got a little nervous. i’m overall just not all that excitable. it just doesn’t seem like a monumental thing to me. maybe it’s because i’ve known a lot of people who came from other countries, go on overseas trips, live in other places, etc. i know i don’t/haven’t, and i know a lot of people i know don’t/haven’t, but maybe that is what helps make it seem less like a huge deal. plus, like i said, i’m generally not known for how giddy and excited i get about…well, much of anything. i’m going overseas. lots of people do it. i hope it’s cool. i hope i have a good time. it’d be really nice if it did affect me in some meaningful and profound way. but i’m not counting on it.
the current plan is for jack to come around around 6am and go eat something at the house of pies, then he’ll take me up to iah. my flight is at 10:45am. i should be in the air for about 14 hours on a 777, flying into tokyo. then i’ll have 3 hours to switch to a jal flight from tokyo to taipei, which is supposed to clock in at around 4 hours. i’ll hopefully be using wifi a lot. doing stuff with google voice, skype, twitter, flickr, email, and maybe even this blog. if i can pull that off then it’ll be just like they say in the russian blog spam i get:
Мы путешествуем по всему миру и исследуем. Присоединяйтесь к нам и вам не придется скучать!
(you’ll have to copy that and paste it into babelfish or google translate if you don’t read russian. i’m not going to be around to hold your hand the next couple of weeks, you know.)

(no, that subject is not a back to the future reference. well, now it is i guess, but it wasn’t originally meant to be.)
let’s see…i called the taipei economic and cultural office (or something…”teco”) here in houston monday or yesterday to inquire about visas. i had to leave a message. i called a few hours later, to voicemail again (didn’t leave a message). i called again today and someone answered. they said if i had a u.s. passport valid for at least 6 more months and an itinerary showing a return flight within some number of days (30 or 60, i don’t recall) then i don’t need a visa. so hopefully they’re right, and that’s one less thing i have to deal with or worry about.
car update: edelbrock never called me after the new year. i gave them a week or two and called them. i eventually got in touch with someone. they said they would get info and call me back. they haven’t. so my expensive edelbrock crate engine still sounds like crap, ostensibly because of a lifter knock. i guess i’ll have to call them again. it’s annoying to have to push a company who i had thought would be professional and customer-focused.
another car update: a couple of weeks ago the windshield wipers, which had always worked, stopped working. the mechanic re-wired them because they were going straight to the battery. now they don’t work at all. (although i’m pretty sure they were working after i got the car back from him.) also, i recently realized that my gas tank is leaking gas. well, at least when the tank is full. i’m not sure where it’s leaking from. so i guess i’ll need to get a new tank here sometime. joy.
on monday i had my mom (who works at a bank) wire some money from an account at her bank to my local accounts here. one for my credit card, one for my atm card. i’m pretty sure i’d be okay financially, but since i’ve been pushing a lot of money toward the credit card with my engine/car work on it, and i hadn’t really planned to take this trip, my local reserves were low. so i’m borrowing money from myself to help make sure i’m good to go during the trip.
i upgraded my macbook air to snow leopard earlier this week. that went fine. what didn’t go fine though, was time machine. i use an external drive hooked up to an airport extreme base station as my time machine backup drive. this is possible, but not supported by apple. unfortunately, something with snow leopard borks time machine backups — especially when doing them over wireless. since it’s not a supported config, apple doesn’t have to offer help. but what happens is for some reason time machine ends up corrupting the sparse bundle that all of the backup info is stored in. so the only solution is to delete your sparse bundle and start over. or pull the drive local and use hdiutil to try and fsck fix the sparse bundle. joy. other than that annoyance, so far so good with snow leopard.
i had a scare yesterday after work. i got in my pickup and went to start it and the starter made scary ratcheting sounds. that in and of itself isn’t too scary, it does that now and then. but usually i turn the key off and back on and it works fine. but this time it never did anything but the scary sounds. i was annoyed about having to figure out how to get home, when to replace the starter in the parking lot, and what i was going to do about getting out of the parking lot. (you see, you pay for parking and then take the token to get out. but you have to get out within a time limit.) i eventually got out and knocked the starter around a bit with my mag-lite. after that it started right up. unfortunately, i had already paid my outrageously overpriced $12 for parking, and by the time i got to the gate after the starter fiasco the system decided i’d taken too long and charged me $2 more. i hate tmc parking. and i had to pay more than the maximum amount because of that.
back to my impending trip. i want to take my wallet chain, but i’m worried they’re going to have a problem with it because it’s sort of long and heavy. since i’m now planning on checking a bag, i can put it in there. but i’ve read about stuff like that going missing from checked baggage. so i don’t know if that’s any better than just having it on my person or in my carry-on baggage. i should probably just leave it, but i pretty much always wear it and i like having it. of course, i also always carry a lighter and a pocket knife, and i’m planning on leaving those behind. i guess i’ll figure it out in the next few days.
i’ve still not come up with any good way to get free (or even cheap) calls back into the u.s. via cell phones, or google voice. so i think i’m probably going to see about using skype for that. (if i need to make calls back to the u.s.) if i have a wifi connection, i can use my laptop or iphone (i have the skype app) to make calls to u.s. phones via skype for about $0.02/min (plus a $0.04 connection fee). not bad. (stupid at&t/apple and not unlocking u.s. iphones…otherwise i could have a local taiwanese sim in my iphone with a data plan and make cheap calls to the u.s. over 3g/edge as well.)

ever thought about being paranoid when using an atm? i mean, being really paranoid? perhaps you will after looking at these examples of modern skimmer designs. (skimmers are devices that swipe atm card info without you being aware of it.)
http://www.krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-the-fraud/
and a series of pics showing one being removed from a machine:
1. the machine when you walk up
2. the card slot
3. hhmmm…that was an added part
4. hello…what’s all this then?
5. and the reveal
(originally via a tweet from mikkohypponen)
gives you something to be even more paranoid about, right?
in sad news, evidently today i blew a seam in one of my metallic-blue-flame leather sha-sha shoes. it doesn’t appear to be fixable. i mean, it’s seriously ripped. oh well, they were cool shoes and lasted a few years. this may have been a premature blow-out since the rubber sole was coming loose on this shoe and i hadn’t glued it back together. but i treated them pretty roughly and wore them quite a bit.
pee-wee herman gets an ipad(via funnyordie). i used to love watching pee-wee’s shows. i haven’t seen any of that stuff in years. this made me kind of nostalgic, it did.
css is awesome coffee mug (for those of you familiar with css, you’ll enjoy it)
here’s a nice blog entry about how the way people view and use computers is changing.
want to be scared of mac fanboys? here’s a one-hour documentary on them you can watch on hulu: macheads
chevrolet is working on a new ad angle (link from chron.com), and one of them uses the front of a black ’55 chevy (i.e., looks like mine).
i started checking on luggage limits today. both continental and jal (japan airlines) have a carry-on size limit of 45 linear inches (height+length+width) (although it’s 115cm for jal). the bag i’m planning to take, from measuring with it empty, comes in at around 49, although the ends are loose pockets and the top height varies based on what i put into it. hopefully it’ll work out. the other thing is the weight limit for continental is 40 lbs, while the limit for jal is 10kg. that’s 22 lbs. that’s about half! i haven’t packed yet, so i have no idea what my carry-on will weigh, but i might have to check for the jal leg.
in addition to the carry-on, you can also bring one “personal item” which can consist of a briefcase, purse, laptop bag, planner, etc. other than purse or briefcase, the list is pretty small. i was hoping to also use a college-style backpack. even though it’s really not much bigger than a briefcase or some purses, i’m now concerned they may have an issue with it or something. i’ve also got a sort of day-bag/satchel kind of thing, i guess that might work. i don’t think it can hold as much as a briefcase though. 🙂
update: while i was attempting to not check luggage for simplicity’s sake, i was also under the mistaken impression checking luggage costs extra money. that changed for inside-the-u.s. flights over the last year or three, where now even the first checked bag costs (except southwest, at the least) — but evidently in trans-continental flights you still get free checked luggage (as long as it doesn’t go over the size/weight limits).

i’ve scanned, ripped, collated, etc. cds from several purchases over the last few months, but i forgot to note the cds i bought at the half price books on westheimer out past beltway 8 a few weeks ago. so i went through the stack and tried to separate what i’ve already mentioned from what i haven’t. here we go:

• aphex twin – richard d. james album (sire / warp / elektra / warner)
• assemblage23 – binary ep (metropolis)
• bjork – drawing restraint 9 – surrounded (one little indian / rhino / warner)
• david byrne – the forest (luaka bop / sire / warner)
• david byrne – live from austin Tx (new west)
• calexico – carried to dust (city slang / quarterstick)
• the chemical brothers – come with us (astralwerks / virgin)
• cute is what we aim for – the same old blood rush with a new touch (fueled by raman)
• dieselboy – project human (human imprint / system)
• dj dara – the antidote (breakbeat science)
• moby – i like to score – music from films vol 1 (elektra / warner)
• mortal – nu-en-jin (tooth & nail)
• the revolting cocks – cocked and loaded (13th planet / megaforce)
• she wants revenge – she wants revenge (flawless / geffen)
• sixpence none the richer – sixpence none the richer (squint)

i was stepping a bit outside of my normal purchases, picking up some stuff i’d thought about but never done, taking a few chances on some unknowns.
i think i also forgot to mention that a while back i picked up (on ebay, i think…or maybe it was on amazon) one of the last devo recordings i’ve been trying to get:

• devo – pioneers who got scalped: the anthology (rhino / warner)

in other news, i managed to borrow a t-mobile sim from someone at work today and used it to unlock my razr. it appears to have worked. i have also spent some time trying to figure out if there was any way i could use my google voice phone number to get cheap or free calls from taiwan back to the u.s. i couldn’t figure anything out.
this evening i watched my life, which i had rented for 99 cents from itunes. it has tom hanks and nicole kidman in it as husband and wife. nicole is pregnant and tom is going to die from cancer. he decides to make a recording for his child so the child will know who his father was, and in the process tom learns about himself and deals with stuff from his past. blahblahblah. it was okay. the movie didn’t seem to move very smoothly, particularly in the beginning — the story just felt sort of stilted and forced at times. it also got a little too into the (imo, shallow) fascination some americans have with eastern / mystical spiritualism and healing. but whatever, it had some good things to say and point out too. i took a chance on it, and it turned out to be fair.

i got up today and actually got out of the house and took care of some things, even though it was in the low to mid 30’s. i drove down to clear lake and went to my credit union there. i have been needing to close a second savings account i’ve had on my account. i created it the day after tamara told me she was having an affair. i was in shock that she would be doing that, and i was concerned if she could do that and was telling me, that she would then take money out of our accounts. because, hey, if she could commit adultery and was acting like a completely different person, why should i have any belief that she would have respect for my money? and i say mine because in our marriage what was hers was hers, and what was mine was ours. (which is how the divorce went too.) she had a bank account i had no access to, and never asked about. i had no idea how much or little money was in it. her checks for work were put in there. how she spent it was her own deal. my money, on the other hand, went into two joint accounts. anyway, all that to say, i was the primary breadwinner, and if she wanted to commit adultery and treat me like sh!t and leave me, then she had no right to expect access to the money that i provided to our relationship. so i had driven down to clear lake and taken her name off of all of the accounts, atm cards, visa cards, etc. i couldn’t take her name off the primary savings account though, and i didn’t really want to close it and have to get all new checks, new visa card, new atm card, etc. since all accounts were tied to it. so what i did was open a sub-savings account in only my name, then transfer all of the savings account money into it. (i had to keep the minimum in the primary savings for it to stay open, which was like $5 or $20 or something.) that said, a few years later, sometime after the divorce was finalized, i was able to get her name taken off the account completely. but later when i went to collapse the sub-savings back into the primary savings, it turned out i had to be there in person to do it. so i’d just never gotten around to driving down there to do it. so i did today. but i also went down there so i could tell them i am leaving the country for a couple of weeks and will likely be using my credit card.
driving down there is always kind of odd, since i have a lot of memories tied to the clear lake area. buildings that were there are razed, businesses changed, new large apartment complexes up, new overpasses and road changes. the diedrich’s on bay area is now a darque tan. in the credit union i ran into a guy that i worked with at lockheed martin (at least i think that’s where i remember him from). we made extended eye contact and i smiled, but he didn’t seem to show any signs of recognition at all. i didn’t talk to him. (that’s a good analogy for that part of my life in general as it relates to me now, actually.) i drove bay area, saturn (which goes near the apartment tamara lived in when i met her), and nasa road one. i ended up going by the bank of america, which reminded me when tamara and i were in there, desperately trying to figure out how to get access to the money for our house closing, which was in a couple of hours (the only time i was ever in that bank). i went by jsc. i saw rocket park. i thought about the buildings i worked in at jsc, the people i worked with. i drove up to the lockheed martin building on nasa road 1 i spent the first four years of my “professional” career in. i saw the convenience store we used to walk to for afternoon breaks. i saw the cheap two-story parking garage beside the building and remembered parking my car and pickup and motorcycle in/on it. i remembered the first time i ever drove down nasa road one, going to my friend tom’s apartment so i could “interview” with lockheed. (they were desperate for people and i already had an offer, i was just checking out the place and the people and such.) i remembered the time i spent at coffee oasis with ash, and other people, and meeting tamara for the first time. going to the waffle house. going to denny’s. and more recent things too, like when i was dating jennifer, or when i’ve had to go down there to do stuff at the credit union, or when the hrc and i went down there one time.
all this crap, stored away in my brain somewhere that i hardly ever think about. and i realized just how much i’ve completely forgotten, that i know must have happened but i can’t recall. i spent about 4 years living down there, and about 6.5 working down there. i drove those roads hundreds…thousands…of times. i ate out all the time. i did everything in that area. and most of it isn’t even memories anymore, it’s just ceased to be.

since i made the decision to go to taiwan, one of the things i’ve been trying to figure out is how to handle having/using a cell while there.
in the rest of the world, most people buy a pre-paid sim card when they get to a country, then use that sim card in their phone to make local calls while they are there. in the u.s., some phones don’t even use sim cards (phones using cdma…a protocol almost no one in the rest of the world uses), so they’re for the most part not usable outside the u.s. at&t and t-mobile use sim cards (gsm networks, which is what most of the rest of the world uses), so they have the possibility of being used in other countries. (there are difference even then, so you can’t always be sure.)
but (there’s always one of those, eh?) almost all u.s. phones are “locked” (even cdma ones) so they can only use sim cards for the cell provider they were sold to be used on. why? because u.s. cell companies offer you a phone at a discounted rate, which is locked to them so you can’t use it elsewhere. this gives them a good chance to be able to recoup the loss they took on selling you the phone cheap (or in some cases, giving it to you for free). that’s why the cell company locks you into a multi-year contract — they’re using your monthly rates to make up for the cell phone you got cheap from them. (more or less.) in most of the rest of the world, you pay full price for a phone, then you use a sim card for whatever provider you choose to use.
in the u.s., if certain conditions are met you can request your phone be unlocked. (like if you’re out of contract on the phone, or if you’re leaving the country.) i was hoping to be able to do that with my current phone, which is an iphone. (at&t has an exclusive contract on iphones in the u.s.) i’m not quite out of my 2-year contract, which is sometimes a reason for a carrier not to unlock your phone.
but from my googling, it appears at&t will never under any circumstances ever unlock an iphone. bought one unsubsidized for full price? doesn’t matter. met your contract obligation? doesn’t matter. unless you illegally unlock the iphone, you will never be able to use it on any other carrier (in the u.s. or not).
so yesterday after work i went over to the at&t store on us-59 near wilcrest. i talked with a guy there about options for the iphone, and said i wanted to get my razr unlocked. he claimed, in no uncertain terms, that at&t has never unlocked phones. i said i read it online, he said i must have misread/misinterpreted. he said he knew of one independent place in houston that could do it. (which is silly, as lots of places unlock phones, including online places remotely.) i told him i’d talked to people who said they’d gotten at&t to do it, he said i must have misunderstood them…because at&t does not and never has unlocked phones. i was kind of annoyed by him, but i didn’t have the facts in front of me so i lost some confidence in my position. so i got info about iphone options and left.
i went home and went on at&t’s website. from their faqs:

Question: What is the unlock code for my phone?
Answer: Note: If your phone is an iPhone, the following information does not apply. Please see the topic: What is the unlock code for my iPhone?
To control theft of devices and to protect customer security, AT&T only releases unlock codes to customers under certain instances. The unlock code is unique for each device as determined by the manufacturer. If you would like your phone to be unlocked, please contact AT&T at 1-800-331-0500.

Question: What is the unlock code for my iPhone?
Answer: iPhone cannot be unlocked, even if you are out of contract. If you are traveling internationally, iPhone is a quad-band phone and will work in many countries across the globe. Stay connected while traveling to over 215 countries, plus get discounted rates in over 80 of those countries when you sign up for AT&T World Traveler

regarding this iphone “answer” — as far as going to other countries — “world traveler” gets you discounted minute rates. it costs $6/mo, but the discounted rates aren’t all that impressive, really. (it varies from country to country.) and that doesn’t include data, of course. you can buy that in set mb bundles, which is not very cheap. (but cheaper than international data roaming.)
so i called the phone number and talked to a very nice at&t rep who immediately told me he could get the unlock code for me for my razr right then and there, no problem at all. he did. i also talked to him about the iphone. he said he had been told there was no way to unlock the u.s. iphone, other than hacks. i mentioned numerous other countries where people unlock their phones via itunes, so it appears to be possible. he said maybe it was a software difference, but he didn’t know.
now — regarding the iphone eternal lock — i’ve read that at&t will refer you to (blame) apple, and apple will refer you to (blame) at&t. i don’t know who did what. but the fact is, iphones in and of themselves have the ability to be legally unlocked. they are sold unlocked in some countries, and in numerous countries where they are sold they can be unlocked (by apple, through itunes) by request through the cell company either for free or for a charge, sometimes after a set period or your contract ends or other times at any time. but not at&t, not in the u.s.
this really kind of annoys me. especially since i had assumed once your obligations were done you could get the phone unlocked no matter what reason you did or didn’t have. to me, if you buy the phone outright, or if you meet the contract obligations, you should be able to have the phone legitimately unlocked. now, i can see why at&t would want to not allow that, since a phone locked to them means it can only be used on their network and thus more money for them, but it seems wrong since you the consumer have covered the cost of the device and it is yours to keep. if apple is the one who set it up this way, i’m guessing it must have been to try and control leakage of u.s. iphones to carriers in other countries. or something. whatever the reason might be, it seems pretty lame to me.
[note: please don’t harass me too badly if i didn’t get exactly all the terminology or statements right about cdma, gsm, sim cards, etc. in general, what i’ve written is accurate based on what i’ve read and discussed with others.]

i just bought a round-trip ticket. for taiwan. leaving in two weeks.
i hope when i tell work tomorrow that they’re cool with it.

i mentioned a while back on here that a few months ago my logitech harmony remote (model 676) fell off the back of my couch, and after that the glow function would never turn off. the glow button still worked (on and off), but the glow timer didn’t…when a button was pressed that made the glow come on, it would stay on forever. other than that, the remote still worked perfectly. it wasn’t horribly annoying to have to hit the glow button, except when i forgot a couple of times and the batteries ran down overnight. not cool. i did some google searches and could find people describing the problem, but no one had solutions other than going into the software and changing the glow timeout value, and/or reloading the software. i guess that worked for some people, but it didn’t for a lot of others. some people were saying this was a known issue and logitech would exchange them under the warranty. but mine wasn’t in the warranty period. i finally gave up and bought a newer harmony remote a couple of weeks ago (model 700). which is nice, although it can’t control as many devices (6) as my previous one (12 or 15 or something). oh well.
since i’d already gotten a new one, i decided to take the old one apart and see if i could see anything obvious. i took a couple of electrical engineering courses in college, and have dabbled a bit with electronics and soldering, but when i got it open my reaction was pretty much “yep, that’s a circuit board alright.” “there’s some resistors, and capacitors, and ir lights, etc.” but nothing looked burned or melted or something obvious. i was a bit disheartened, but not surprised by my lack of finding the cause.
but then i decided to do some more google searching, and i actually came across a thread where someone mentioned what the problem with their remote had been (describing my situation) and providing a solution. basically, the remote has a 32.768 khz crystal on it, and that is used as the timer for the glow function. in fact, that crystal is used a lot for clocks/timers, specifically in digital watches. if you’ve ever replaced the battery in a digital watch, you’ve likely seen one of these crystals. usually there is a bunch of white plastic, a spot for the watch battery, and you can see this crystal.
anyway, i took my remote apart and unsoldered (is that a word?) the crystal from the circuit board. (note it was also in some hot glue, but that wasn’t really stuck to anything very well…i think it was more just to keep it from jostling too much. in the pics below you can see hot glue on a couple of other components.) here’s what the one out of my logitech harmony remote looks like:

note it actually has “32.768J” printed on it. well, mine did. (in the picture the “3” is worn off, because of the way i was carrying it around with me when i was looking for a replacement.)
i didn’t feel like trying to scavenge one from a watch, so i headed off to the most convenient place: radio shack. man, have they fallen. they had two cabinets of about 8 or 10 drawers each with electronic compenents. no crystals that i saw at all. i did, however, buy some 0.032″ diameter solder while i was there since all i have is huge diameter and it would drop way too much at once for this job. the next convenient place for me (because my friends were going to that furniture store, the dump) was fry’s (because it is right by it). they have a long aisle of components, but no crystals that i saw. i even asked a couple of people who worked there. no luck. i was worried i was going to have to order one online. but yesterday i was working maintenance so i had the day free, so i used it to go to epo (electronic parts outlet). they had a bunch of crystals, including the one i was looking for. yea! it cost me about $5. (but if you need one, you can find them online too.)
i came back home, and – having already removed the old crystal a week or two ago so i could take it around with me – i clipped the wires so they were about the same length as the ones on the old crystal, did a dogleg bend on them so it would rest well on the board (and make it easier to solder since i was doing all of this completely freehand), and soldered the new crystal into place. i put the remote back together, put the batteries in, and…my glow timer works again! how awesome is that?
well, i thought it was pretty freakin’ cool.
anyway, i thought i’d provide some pics for other people who might be having the same issue and are interested in trying this fix. (note that i’m someone on the internet you are listening to, so obviously i take no responsibility if you fry your remote, or your cat, or your house, or yourself, or void your warrenty, or anything else.) even though i have a 676, i assume probably a lot of the remotes use the same crystal.
here are the location of the four small phillips screws you need to remove to get into the case (on a 676):

note that two of them are underneath where the aaa batteries sit. (which you should have known you were going to need to remove, right?) the other two actually hold the silver metal frame in place that goes around the screen on the front of the remote. once you’ve gotten the screws undone, there are about four or five tabs on each side of the remote holding the front and back together. you just sort of have to pry them apart, and hope you don’t break too many of them. (or at least that was my technique. hey, it’s screwed on anyway, right? who needs tabs?)
once you’ve gotten the back off, you should see something similar to this (depending on your model):

i had already removed the old crystal when i took this picture, but i put a red box around where it was located on my model. here’s a closer view:

(again with the red box.) and finally, here’s a picture of the new crystal in place:

don’t make too much fun of my kr4zy l33t soldering skilz. it works. i mentioned above that the original crystal was lovingly cradled to the board with hot glue, but i didn’t put any hot glue on my replacement. i guess i just like living life on the edge.
anyway, i hope maybe this will help someone else fix their logitech harmony remote, instead of having to live with a broken glow timer, or shelling out big money for a new remote.

i failed to mention earlier that when i was in brady my dad gave me a few books that he had doubles of:

• Texas wanderlust: the adventures of dutch wurzbach – douglas v. meed (Texas a&m university press)
• julius theodor splittgerber (1819-1897), volume one: his life and times – mary lewis turner (the watercress press)
• the history of the german settlements in Texas 1831-1861 – rudolph leopold biesele (eakin press)
• a sojourn in Texas, 1846-47: alwin h. sorgel’s Texas writings – w. m. von-maszewski (german-Texan heritage society)

i also failed to mention a while back that i got a new set of nanini googles (these are brown leather with mirrored aviator-style shaped lenses) and a black “novelty” helmet. that means it fits close to the head and isn’t dot approved as a safety device. i bought the helmet because i thought it’d help hold stuff on my head and keep me warm during colder weather. not sure if that’s true, but i like the helmet enough.
very late on the 28th i logged into the online bank account for my visa card — the one where i’d recently had to work to get my name of my ex’s old account — because i was going to initiate an additional payment. you see, i set up an automatic payment on the account so it pays above the minimum monthly payment, then i go in and pay more myself. well, i had set it up. when i logged in, no payment had been made and there were none scheduled. in fact, it was as if i’d never set it up at all. nor did it appear i could any longer set one up. unfortunately, the due date for the payment was the 28th, so by the time i figured it out i already had a late fee. i was paranoid me missing a minimum payment would allow them to up my “introductory” interest rate, so the next day i talked with them. they said they hadn’t yet and i would have to be notified, but it was only one day after the due date. hopefully it’ll be okay. i switched the payment method so another bank of mine initiated the payment (pushing it) instead of the visa bank (pulling it). i’m not sure why taking my name off the joint checking account canceled all scheduled payments i had set up, or why i wasn’t notified of this somehow — but it did, and i wasn’t. wouldn’t you know anything with me involving my ex would screw things up for me somehow?
for new year’s eve i once again headed to chris and mary’s for their formal party. since i’m an under-dresser, they’re happy just to get me in a suit jacket. in addition, i wore my grey fedora and my red 8-bit thinkgeek tie. so i still looked like a slob with no fashion sense, but a fake-formally-dressed one. i spent the first part of my night sitting by myself, then finally some people started talking to me and from then on i was involved in conversations. going to parties in general is usually somewhat difficult for me, partially because i’m fairly introverted, partially because i lack some self-confidence, and partially because it reminds me that i am single which makes me sad.
new year’s day i ate lunch at the house of pies, then ran some errands. i was trying to get a halogen floor lamp to replace the one in the house that stopped working, but evidently no one makes them anymore. these are the floor lamps that used to cost $20 and exist everywhere and everyone (especially 20’s or younger) owned one. a guy at home depot said they stopped making them because they were too hot and people started fires with them so the companies decided liability on being sued was too much. i did pick up a motion sensor that goes between a bulb and the socket. i put it in the garage where the washer and dryer are. that light bulb tends to get turned on and never turned off, so this way it automatically comes on due to motion and then turns off after 10 minutes. it should save some electricity. i was looking for one of those plastic containers to hold your wrapping paper — i missed getting one last year, and evidently i did this year too. the few left were all broken ones. i might have thought about it earlier if i had cared to buy and wrap xmas presents this year. i did manage to use some best buy rewards money and got a new harmony remote. the one i’ve had still works, but a few months ago it fell off the back of the couch and now when the glow comes on it never goes off unless i press the button. something might be loose in it that i could fix, but i went ahead and got a new one. i got the 700. i didn’t really want touch-screen. unfortunately, it appears the models now limit the number of devices they control. the 700 can do 6. my older one, a 6 series, didn’t have a limit that i recall (or it was higher, because i have 7 or 8 devices on it). anyway, i have yet to set it up. later in the day, i went over to the potts.
saturday i ate supper at sylvia’s with the potts clan. it’d been awhile since i’d eaten there. there for awhile i could always count on the hrc (julia) to join me in going at least probably once a month. since she bailed on me, i’ve not gone as often. (over the last couple of months she actually finally started replying to texts sometimes and sort of having some level of conversation with me, but she still acts pretty indifferent about my existence in general and won’t seem to acknowledge anything about feelings or emotions or the past between us. it’s all rather odd, and i don’t really know how to deal with it. i’ll talk about this more some other time.) i actually met the potts at the half-price books. i bought quite a few cds (like 15 or something). i’ll list them in some other entry.
today i ate an einstein bagels with the potts, then jack and the boys came back to the house with me and we loaded up my pickup with my old tv and entertainment center. we took it up to jamie’s (amateria) place. we unloaded it, then jamie and her kids and my group all went to best buy and helped her get some electronic equipment. we stopped and ate supper at double dave’s, then went back to her place and jack and i tried to get everything set up and working (tv, dvd, wii, surround sound, plug-in for iphone/ipod. we got everything going (i think) then we hopped in my pickup and i took the potts guys back to their house.

sunday morning my parents got me up and we got on our way to austin. i was feeling really crappy about life, the universe, and everything. (and when i say that, i’m not exaggerating.) when we got to austin, we were going to eat lunch at kerbey lane (on lamar), but the wait was 45 minutes so we gave up and went to a schlotzsky’s.
when i got to my car, i could see and smell that it was still leaking gas. i popped the hood and could see gas seeping out of the top of the fuel pump. i didn’t see gas leaking from anywhere else. i decided the fuel pump must be bad. (not that i knew much of anything about how it worked.) i was going to use a vise grip to pinch off the rubber fuel line from the gas tank, but no one had one so i ended up using a c-clamp to pinch it. it worked. i disconnected the gas lines from the fuel pump and pulled it off the engine. my dad helped me push the car some so we could get the hydraulic jack under the frame and take off the flat tire. we put the tire and fuel pump in my parent’s car and hit the road. i went to an advance auto parts and got a new fuel pump (~$19) and some new hose clamps. i was going to take the tire to discount tire, but they were all closed. but we found a firestone. the guy there was helpful — the tire was fine, but it was leaking at the rim, so they sanded the steel rim and re-sealed the tire. which cost me nothing. (yea!)
we went back to the car and put the tire on, then my dad used an air compressor he’d brought to get the other three tires to the right pressure while i worked on the new fuel pump. in the instructions it said chevy small blocks don’t lubricate fuel pumps well enough, so i should pack the rocker arm and spring cavity on the fuel pump with heavy grease. back to advance to get some heavy grease. i packed the pump cavity. sometime around here, a guy in a 4-door ’57 chevy stopped and started talking to us. he knew some about engines, so i told him i was having problems getting the rod pushed up so i could get the fuel pump rocker arm in the engine block. he helped and i got it figured out. unfortunately, it became difficult at this point. the rubber hose side was easy enough to attach, but the metal tube just wasn’t lining up well. i had to connect, loosen, and disconnect the fuel pump two or three times trying to get the metal tube in and tightened. it felt like it wasn’t screwing in properly. to really get the metal fuel line movable, i could see i would need to remove a bolt behind the alternator, which would mean re-tensioning the belt, etc. gah. eventually i got pretty frustrated, and i knew i only had maybe 30 to 45 minutes of daylight left, so i just started cranking on the metal line nut. at this point i knew i might be stripping the threads, but i didn’t know what else to do. i finished and it was time to crank the engine.
i got in and had to turn the engine for awhile before the pump would get gas through the line. then it car started. it was running. and there didn’t appear to be any fuel leaking! my dad got in with me and i drove it around the neighborhood for 5 or 10 minutes to see if it would fizzle out or blow up. it seemed to run okay, although i was paranoid about everything. i drove it back to the house.
my parents left, then i hung out some with my brother and heather and miles (who had indeed been sick, and was tired). they got some pizza and i helped them figure out some speaker wiring in their house, hooked some of it up, and helped configure one of their remotes. then i decided to see if my mechanic work would get me to houston.
the car ran fine. and my gas mileage back to houston was better than it’d been going to austin. the only thing of note during my return trip was that on i-10 between mason road and highway 6 i got pulled over by a dps officer. again. i’d just gotten a warning 3 days before. since my speedometer doesn’t work, i also had no idea how fast i was going…i just knew it was faster than pretty much all the traffic around me. the officer came up and said he’d pulled me over for my speed and took my license. after a few minutes he came back and said “alright mr. leifeste, this is a warning. now, you just a got a warning and you don’t want to get a ticket so you should watch your speed.” i thanked him and then said “so…uh…how fast was i going?” he said i was at around 78 to 80. (which meant i was 15 to 20 miles over the speed limit.) i told him my speedometer wasn’t working and i’d just put a new engine in, so i used to judge my speed by the rpms but i couldn’t do that yet on the new engine. i talked to him for a few minutes, then i made the short trip the rest of the way to my house.
so in the end, i was pretty excited i was able to fix my vehicle myself, and i was also pretty happy that it only cost me about $28 and a couple of hours of my time. it certainly helped make the holidays feel a little less utterly demoralizing. (although i found other ways to make sure i was emotionally tweaked for the holidays. i’ll save that for another post.)
oh yeah, also, sunday morning before we left my parents’ house i suddenly remembered i’d forgotten to set out extra food for my cat before i left. oops. when i got home, she was desperate for both food and attention. but she was okay.