imroot.com

While SSHing into the webserver that imroot.com is hosted on this evening I was struck with the irony that I’m NOT root. Not on that box anyway. Not sure how I feel about that!

Recently my wife purchased a used road bike. It came with a Mavic M Tech 9 Cycle computer, but no user guide. It needed to be calibrated for some reason. After googling about every combination I could think of I had come up dry. That is when I got lucky and stumbled into one of those things that makes me look like an awesome online researcher. In desperation I google for just a basic bike computer, hoping that the manual from another computer would clue me into the numbers it was looking for. I ended up on a forum and the second link I clicked on was for an Avocet Cyclometer 15 User Guide. It is the same computer basically, in a slightly different case. The only difference I have found so far, is that the Avocet designates the odometer as “D” while the Mavic M-Tech 9 does so with and ODO. Other than that, everthing seems to work just the same.

Last night after mountain biking I dropped my key fob in my trunk, then closed the trunk, the problem was the car was still locked. My car came with BMW Assist, so I gave them a call and asked them to remotely unlock my car. They ran through a series of security questions, then sent a signal to my car. A few minutes later, my drivers side door unlocked, and I could pop the trunk to get my key. That is an awesome feature.

I recently rescued a Mac Classic II from destruction, that had been sitting undisturbed for 6+ years. In the early days of my career I actually did tech support on these things. I remember one time I had one that was having problems booting, and the hard drive (80MB) was making this click-click-click sound. So I went to my supervisor and told him the hard drive was dead, and we were going to need to replace it. He said “No, here use this” and handed me a hammer. He went on to explain “Tap it a few times on the sides of the hard drive and try it again”. Well it fixed it! Thus began my weird and wacky relationship with the Mac Classic II.

Now, back to present day. When I rescued this Mac Classic II I decided to try and boot it. So I plugged it in and turned it on. All I got on the screen was a black and white checker board pattern. So I fired up Google to find an answer. I found one, but couldn’t hardly believe what I was reading. Wash the motherboard by hand, or stick it on the dish washer! You have got to be kidding.

However, I had nothing to loose, so I did. I opted for washing by hand. With a few drops of dish detergent in a sink full of water I swished the motherboard around for about 5 minutes, pulled it out, and rinsed it off really good. After letting it sit out to dry overnight, I put it back it, and fired it up. Almost immediately I was met with the familiar “bong” sound, and it booted right up!

The technical explanation I have found is that the capacitors leak fluid after sitting around for a while. This gets on the motherboard and creates short circuits. Washing it, removes these short circuits and allows it to boot again. Weird stuff.

So I need some input on what to make of this classic machine. We are collecting feedback on moreron.com

So yesterday Ron posted that the google streetview car was in Acworth. I went on Google tonight and Acworth is already online. You can see the entrance to my subdivision, and if you know the right out of focus blob to look at, you can see my house.

I think they might still be updating and adding streets and there are some notable missing areas such as the area where our office is, and they have been on smaller streets. Looks like they have already covered a decent amount of the metro area already.