Greg In The Desert

I certainly don’t want to turn Greg In The Desert into a political blog (I know there’s not enough of those). However my friend Steve usually has interesting things to say about current events and thought I would give him a chance to express his opinions here – Greg.

German and FRENCH (mon dieu!!!) banks have received US taxpayer money…. nice… No wonder our deadbeat ‘free market’, ’self-regulating’, ‘privatized profit – socialized risk’ banks won’t say where the funds went.

I think the ‘terrorists’ have succeeded in taking down more than a few buildings with box-cutters. Thanks to our incompetent response! Talk about taking the opportunity to get one’s agenda to sail through our society… fueled on fear and extravagant, expensive war theatrics (and precious blood)…. What’s the current threat level? Orange? Pink… yes, PINK is where we are told we are headed. We sure got our underwear all tied up in knots. And BinLaden is still free! But that is understandable… if you kill the bogey man, how ‘ya gonna scare the suckers? Worked for 7 years.

Meanwhile, all our retirement plans are pushed out another 5-10 years…(my optimistic assessment). I sure hope WallMart opens up a few more stores because we sure are going to need a lot of those ‘greeter’ positions for our ‘Golden Years’.

Excuse the rant, but I just looked at my retirement funds. Foolish me! On the bright side, I do not make over $250,000 so at least I can bask in the afterglow of my tax cuts of recent years instead of worrying about my taxes going up…. oh, wait, I did not make 250k in recent years either — so my tax cuts were not even noticeable, and I can’t remember which gas station took the proceeds of those economic stimulus checks….. I certainly do not notice them in the current balances in my retirement funds…. Gee… I never saw this coming! — as most of you know!

And now we are bailing out FRENCH and GERMAN ( and who knows what other foreign) banks with our children’s future taxes… WOW!!!! …. or more to the point, WTF!!!!!

Anyone else feeling outraged? Is anyone’s ‘conservative ideology’ getting shaken by our current reality? And why are all these ‘free-market capitalists’ going to the ’society’ (sure sounds like PINK socialism) to be bailed out? I do not want to hear anyone bitching when Wall Street has to submit to a crapload of regulations in the future. In order for vultures to thrive, we need a bunch of suckers. And we sure do not have a shortage there.

And now all we hear from the solution-deprived perpetrators/enablers of this mess is that the new administration wants to take us into a socialist society! Socialist like the fire department, the city and state police, the National Guard the city and state road department, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, air-traffic control, the Coast Guard, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the national highway system, the CIA, the NSA, the ATF, the school systems (K-University), the unemploymnet system (which too many of us may be relying on soon)…and if you combine ALL of these, they pale in comparison to what Wall Street (and foreign banks) are are getting from US taxpayers…. gee we sure are a bunch of PINKOS!!! Karl Marx must be smiling in his grave (and BinLaden from his cave) right about now! How did we get here? Who reigned while we blindly headed here? Just exactly WHAT got VETOED in the last 8 years (besides that one stem-cell research-containing bill).

And, by the way, Rush Limbaugh needs to go on a diet and should quit dressing like he is auditioning for the Sopranos because his mouth is obnoxious enough for our country. Also, after cheerleading us into this mess with his FAILED, EXTREMIST brand of ideology, he should temper his pie-hole and quit trying to lead the GOP into being the Goose-stepping Obstructionist Party…. which too often has placed party before country in recent years. We gave W 8 years, can we give Obama at least 4 before we try to sink him along with the country? We are headed down HARD… help or get out of the way, OK Rush?

Oh yeah… here is the article that set me off: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638394500958141.html

Let me start off with a rant. To those marketing monkeys setting around trying to find names for new products: For the love of God leave the “i” off the front of your product. Yeah yeah, it was cute to have Macintosh related products with an “i” on it when the iMac first came out. But even that got old fast. It might make sense if your product had something to do with the Internet but even then your pushing it.

• IBM has something called iDrive
• There’s idrive.com for back up
• Actually there’s a whole bunch of sites that do backups calling themselves iDrive.
• Hard drives
• And so on and so forth

My point being that iDrive isn’t really a unique name and it’s mostly associated to computer related things. Yet Wayne-Dalton choose this name for there garage door opener. Yes people I’m talking about a garage door opener here.

Despite the stupid name it’s a very innovative product. It’s about as high tech as you can get for a garage door opener. It mounts directly above the garage door and therefore has no chains or other devices to run along the celling of the garage. It’s self contained in a small one small unit.

In the box comes 1 iDrive motor unit, 2 key chain remotes, 1 wall mount remote, 1 outside keypad remote, a light fixture and assorted screws and hardware. What doesn’t come with it is a wired wall mount remote. That means it’s completely wireless.

The wall remote has a “interlock” button on it that prevents it from working when it’s not in the case. Basically the case pushes the button and it works. Or as far as I can figure that’s what it’s purpose is. Maybe it’s a reset button or something but I couldn’t tell. All I know is that this button had come off the circuit board and that the wall remote showed no sign of life. I already had the main unit mounted on the garage door and didn’t want to pull it down to take it back to the store or worse: call Wayne-Dalton tech support. I whipped out my 15-watt soldering iron and soldered this surface mount button back on. The remote worked.

That was just the start of my problems. For some reason this thing did not want to receive signals from the remotes, or so it seemed. I went through the wall remote programming instructions (which are the same for the key chains) about a hundred times before I could get it to operate the garage door properly. Even then it was hit or miss if it would operate the garage door. It was completely random if it would open or not when you pushed the button. What was really strange was it would work better with the front cover off and would work consistently in the morning but not in the afternoon. This points to some sort of overheat situation, a sensor or something that thinks 70 degrees is too hot. Since we use our garage for the main entry into our house getting this thing to operate reliably started to become a big issue. So I broke down and called tech support.

I hate calling tech support for anything, particularly for consumer devices. Mainly because I get some person on the phone who doesn’t understand that I’m more technically inclined then most and don’t need to get the instructions for pushing the button. In this case it took 4 separate calls to tech support to get this thing replaced. In all 3 cases the first thing they made me do was go through the process of programming the remotes.

First call to tech support was after they closed (there on eastern time, I’m on mountain. Yesh!). They called back a few days later (phone message said 24 hours). It was at work so not much I could do. Guy said the reason the cover was a problem was because it was interfering with the programming button. Said that I should “adjust that”.

OK, that wasn’t the case. Next call to tech support. Guy makes me go through the programming of all the remotes. Jump through a bunch of other hoops. Still no resolution. He gets his next level tech support on the phone. Makes me go through programming the remotes. Blah! It’s not a programming issue already. Guy makes me take the wall remote out of it’s housing to get closer to the main unit with it. But wait a minute this this has some interlock button that prevents it’s from operating when it’s out side of it’s case. I told that to the guy twice, but he just didn’t get it. (Why do I know more about this thing them him?) Ok clearly it doesn’t work for sure now. He thinks the fuse is bad. I really was hoping the fuse was bad but when I pop it out it doesn’t appear to be bad. He suggests that I replace the fuse anyway and if that doesn’t work to call them back and he will make sure I get a new motherboard for this thing. I agree. I should have got his name. Oh and the wall remote didn’t work at all after that.

“Look”, I said to the 4th tech support person, “I’ve already been through this with the last 3 people. Not only do I know how to program the remotes because it’s in your manual and I’ve done it a hundred times, not to mention that the last 2 tech support people walked me through it and it didn’t help.”

“Sir, to me it sounds like the wall station isn’t programmed correctly.”

GRRRRR!!!! I’m a pretty calm person, but this set me off. I nearly yelled at the girl that A) The 3rd tech support person I talked to said that if I had to call back that the main unit would get replaced (which he put in his computer file, he promised me he would put it in the my file) b) I already told her that I went through this procedure a gazillion times and I am not doing it again.

“Well, I will have to send this through engineering and the warranty department since I cannot replace it because I couldn’t verify the proper operation”.

Fine, whatever. Just get me a new part. (I should mention that she did send me a wall remote)

A week later I get a call from Wayne-Dalton. They basically were sending me everything, a new main unit, wall remote, key chain remote. Yahoo!!! Finally some good news from these people, I thought for sure that they were going to give me a hard time about this and the eventually result was going to be me returning it to Lowes. Frustrated even more that a great idea didn’t work out.

A few days later the parts arrive. I installed the main unit the next weekend. What a relief, it works just as expected at any time of the day. One noticeable difference is the light control. WIth the old unit I could turn the light on from the wall remote but I could never get it to turn off. But it’s still not totally without problems. There’s a “detent” setting that controls how the motor arm thingy drops down. Right now it’s set in such a way that the motor never drops down into it’s locked position. I’ve only been able to get it to go down before the garage closes or not at all. There’s som
e fine tuning to do with i
t but I never had to do that with the old one. I’m just happy the darned thing works.

Next step, getting the computer to control it.

I couldn’t agree more with Alton Brown when he says (June 10th, BTW).

“I?m just saying that people with authority should have to play by a set of rules…published rules. If as a nation we?re going to have to tolerate being probed, scanned, profiled and frisked before we can get on an airplane, so be it. But it seems to me that we deserve a little consistency. Otherwise we open ourselves up to a whole new brand of bully…bullies with badges…not to mention really nice omelet pans.”

(TSA = Transportation Security Administration)

In the year before September 11th, 2001 I was working away from home in California. I flew back and forth for 9 months and got quite familiar with the airport system. I was luck that my assignment was over just before those planes crashed into the towers. At the time I thought it a good idea to turn over security to the feds. I mean, they should be doing for the safety of the citizens instead of for the money (not that “for the money” is a bad thing). Having been through security since then I can think that it is nothing more than a joke. They have random searches of peoples shoes? Give me a break.