[Toshi]

Finally ordered, after having an electric car of some sort since August 2013. No more 1 kW Level 1 charging: 10 kW from here on out.

(This actually will help in moving: otherwise the many trips back between the houses would sap the RAV4 EV's battery and I'd have to use the Land Cruiser.)

It arrived, and I figured out that I'm an idiot and had the wrong outlet put in.

It needs a 6-50R, I had a 14-50R put in. Rather than mess with a $30+ adapter I ordered a mounting kit that in addition to a mounting/quick release plate also has the correct outlet included. I figure it'll be just a matter of shutting off the 50A breaker and figuring out how to secure huge-ass wire to the outlet's terminals.

In other news, I think this is my new favorite photo of Yuna. It captures her smiley nature just so:

It's been a long workweek (M-Th + today) and having this photo up on a side computer has been my solace.

 

[Toshi]

Outlet swap turned out to be a piece of cake as the wire was held in by screw-in terminals. Quick and definite. 10 kW charging >> 1 kW charging!

In other news I need to run this some time in my Land Cruiser:

That'd be Black Bear Pass overlooking Telluride. A bit pucker-inducing, that view!

 

[Toshi]

There's more room to park in the new garage despite the same garage door width as in the rental.

Of course, this was with me parking both cars and angling them such that they ended up further lateral than would have been possible had I backed in (or pulled in) straight. I don't think Jessica is going to do this every day consistently. (On the other hand, it is my fault in some sense that there's a problem, since I chose the very wide Land Cruiser...)

Some of that mess in the background of the half garage bay will be lessened, as I bought but haven't set up a second 72 x 24 x 18" shelf set, and am going to add overhead storage racks and hooks as well.

 

[Westy]

It arrived, and I figured out that I'm an idiot and had the wrong outlet put in.

It needs a 6-50R, I had a 14-50R put in. Rather than mess with a $30+ adapter I ordered a mounting kit that in addition to a mounting/quick release plate also has the correct outlet included. I figure it'll be just a matter of shutting off the 50A breaker and figuring out how to secure huge-ass wire to the outlet's terminals.

In other news, I think this is my new favorite photo of Yuna. It captures her smiley nature just so:

It's been a long workweek (M-Th + today) and having this photo up on a side computer has been my solace.

If you believe in reincarnation.

 

[Toshi]

Per the nomograms she's actually a normal baby! (albeit with a big ol' head and face from my Japanese side)

It's just startling given that Mariko was and is such a beanpole.

 

[Westy]

In my mind all babies look like Winston Churchill or Chris Farley. It usually depends on if they are smiling or not.

 

[StiHacka]

In my mind all babies look like Winston Churchill or Chris Farley. It usually depends on if they are smiling or not.

I know the names of some of the kids (ages below 14) in my street. I can recognize them most of the time when accompanied by their adults , but I have zero brain capacity for association of their faces to their names or families if met unattended.

Get off my lawn now?

 

[Toshi]

1) I didn't win at Powerball so will have to continue working for a few more years yet. I did match one number, but it was a white number (vs the red Powerball), which gets me bupkis.

2) I procured an extended warranty for the RAV4 EV today. 8 years (from in-service, which for this car was 2/20/13) duration, 75k miles, 0 deductible. Retail price was $1,700 but I got it for $734 by getting a semi-local dealer to price match one in Kansas. For that savings I was ready to trailer the RAV4 EV to Kansas–VIN and mileage must be verified in person, annoyingly–but I only had to drive ~26 miles each way instead.

This warranty is something I wouldn't buy for a normal vehicle, but there exist multiple expensive, proprietary Tesla bits on this mongrel machine that have shown a propensity for breaking, namely the heater ($4k per report), electric drive motor, and gateway ECU that translates between Toyota-speak and Tesla-speak.

Therefore, assuming we don't end up having a third kid, then my wife should still be rolling along in her RAV4 EV through at least 2020.

 

[Toshi]

Email exchange with the Amazon Home Services dude, in chronological order:

>>>>>>>>>>>

Richard,

I am not satisfied with how you showed up with insufficient manpower and no equipment for moving my appliances. I believe that the tip I gave you was more than enough compensation for the work that was done, and intend to file an A to Z claim to recover the Amazon $140 service fee. That fee was for you and your men to move the appliances, not for me to assist you with my own tools and potentially injure myself.

-Toshi

>>>>>>>>>>>

Hi Toshi,

I'm really confused! I showed up to your home, was very respectful to your family, patiently waited for you to get home, worked very hard to get your washer and dryer upstairs into your laundry room which you and Jessica can attest to, was back breaking work. You thanked me for the work that I did, you signed my proof of appointment form when the work was completed and even gave me a tip, stating you appreciated the work I did. So I'm not sure what has happened between that day and now.

I appreciate your business, and don't want to be disrespectful to you or your family, but to be realistic this job was a $300.00. I almost decided not do the work, but I did it because I wanted to honor my commitment to you and I also realized that you had just moved with 2 little babies, so I felt you needed to be able to do laundry.

Just to clarify the fee is for my services, which I provided to you.

Anyway, I enjoyed meeting you, your family, mother in-law and wish you guys the very best in your future endeavors~

Thank you~

Richard

>>>>>>>>>>>

Richard,

In the future then you should bid $300 and show up prepared. I agree it was backbreaking work for both you and me, but that's because you did not show up with appropriate assistance or equipment. I shouldn't have been a part of that equation.

I feel that the $40 I tipped you is appropriate compensation for what work you did, and will still seek the refund of the Home Services fee from Amazon as I am not satisfied that you personally provided the services that you promised to provide in the advertisement.

With regard to you waiting for me to arrive: again this is only an issue because you did not show up prepared to do the work on your own. I did not hire a day laborer to lend a hand for two hours. I hired a complete service to move appliances within my house with stairs, and that's what that $140 fee should have reflected. This latter service was not provided by you as you were not prepared.

I am thankful that you showed up in a timely manner and were respectful to my family. I have no complaints about that. You just didn't show up prepared to do the job that you advertised on Amazon--that is my complaint.

-Toshi

>>>>>>>>>>>

Toshi,

I appreciate your business and I'm sorry you feel the way you feel. I have done so many jobs and many times my customers work with me or alongside me when I'm moving their stuff for them. Unfortunately, you had a different expectation of how your technician would show up and that is okay.

It is definitely within your rights to file a complain.
My stand is still the same, I showed up, did the work with you and you paid me for my service and in appreciation of the work I did for you, you even gave me a $40.00 tip. Again, I'm very thankful for all these things.

With regards to equipment, I don't think there would have been any equipment other than you and I that would have made a difference in the work we did.

Thank you for everything~

Richard

>>>>>>>>>>>

[Toshi files Amazon A to Z claim to get money back at this point.]

 

[Toshi]

Amazon resolution: $40 gift card to me for my troubles via Happiness Guarantee. Still waiting on the A to Z claim, but I think I should be refunded it eventually.

This is but one of many items that I'm floating right now that eventually should make it back into my checking account or Amazon gift card balance, which is basically one and the same. Outstanding items that I can think of, which distress me as I love my spreadsheets, love my numbers, and do not love uncertainty of this magnitude:

- HSA reimbursement (from the cash balance so I'm not withdrawing investments from a down market): $590.46
- Professional organization annual dues reimbursement: $300
- Costco.com replacement blinds order, with blackout blinds to replace light filtering ones: $543.60 due back to me upon returning the original ones
- security deposit from rental house: $2,400
- potential rent due for February for rental house, as the landlord hasn't told me definitively whether he's lined up another tenant: $2,400
- Amazon A to Z guarantee refund: $140
- Amazon Happiness Guarantee "oops" gift: $40
- Amazon first time Home Services booking gift: $20
- Hawaii registration/hotel/flight/shuttle partial reimbursement up to my academic account's annual limit: $5,000.51

Yeah, I'm floating $11k+ in various things now. That plus the huge bills for the fridge, washer/dryer, blinds, sofa, etc. make for an uneasy psyche.

 

[Toshi]

My baby says "good day to you, sir!"

 

[Toshi]

My Hackintosh has been getting progressively less reliable the past year or so. It came to the point of not booting up several times. Earlier this week I had to resort to disconnecting all USB and SATA drives to get it to boot up at all, which is a strong indicator that something is awry with all those spinning platters. (Boot drive is an old SSD with the others physical HDDs.)

The upside is that I'd signed up for a year of unlimited storage Amazon Cloud Drive back on Black Friday. That's a $60 product, on sale for $5… with that $5 price including a $5 Amazon gift card thrown in. Not bad deal, eh? Today I'm finally starting to use this service by abusing my office's 100 Mbps Ethernet connection. I'm uploading every last file that I can recover from the Hackintosh's drives. Unlimited is unlimited, right?

Currently the desktop sync app says it's in the process of uploading 355,184 files (81.03 GB) with the tally keeping on going up every few seconds. I'm not sure how well it will cope.

End game will be to ditch all of the spinning platter drives. I have a Samsung 950 PRO 512 GB M.2 SSD and a Sandisk Ultra II 960 GB SATA III SSD sitting around at home. I was planning on popping both in the new gaming computer build, but since this Hackintosh will be very storage-short after I throw out the hard drives (240 GB SSD partitioned with Windows and OS X partitions! tiny!) I think I'll install the Sandisk here as well. I may not need more than 512 GB on the gaming computer anyway, what with a basic Windows 10 installation and just Fallout 4 to start with.


Update: 1,288,519 items (156.69 GB) and counting.

 

[StiHacka]

Update: 1,288,519 items (156.69 GB) and counting.

I am sure your ISP loves you.

 

[Toshi]

This is from my work computer. It is limited by the 100Base-T at the wall jack. (Reading rooms, where we go through hundreds if not thousands of images to read a single case, run 1000Base-T and even that's not enough!)

Very rough back of napkin math, possibly with order of magnitude errors in there and without accounting for protocol overhead or the latency in accessing over a million individual files:

170 GB / 12.5 MBps (aka 100 Mbps) == 13,600 seconds < 4 hours.

In reality it'll be much longer but should be done by the next time I'm in my office, which will be Monday afternoon. Then I start plugging in the failing HDDs 1 at a time and repeating this process.


Update 2: 1,780,011 items (173.63 GB). I don't think it's a good sign that it's run all day and the total has only increased.

 

[Toshi]

Operation Scratch Removal in progress.

Tonight I wiped the many scratches with a grease and wax remover, hit them with a sanding pen, then made them look more prominent with wet 1000 grit sandpaper.

Post sanding pen. That thing is aggressive!

Post elbow grease with 1000 grit wet sanding paper.

Tomorrow (due to late current hour, proximity of garage and master bedroom, and my noisy random orbital) I'll attack the areas with Meguiar's M105 and then polish and wax anew.

Right now things definitely look worse than when I started but the fingernail test shows the scratches are less deep… because I've sanded down the surrounding clear coat! I think some of these (many of these?) scratches will still be visible, but hopefully less ugly than before. They really stood out, as it was.

 

[Toshi]

Final results are disappointing.

Close up of bottom right of image:

I give up. This was after the sanding pen (which probably did more damage than good ultimately), wet sanding (ditto), Meguiar's M105 (not very effective), Ultimate Polish, and wax.

 

[StiHacka]

Dat shine though... those scratches seem to go too deep.

Now that you've given up on the resale value of your car, you can finally start enjoying it fully.

 

[Toshi]

I've already drove partly down a mountain trail on a rim (which still was usable!), trail pinstriped the sides, this debacle with the hood, and dented a running board midway through the Alpine Loop. I'll be keeping this thing forever barring an insurance payout for a not my fault accident...

 

[Toshi]

I moved forward with a lot of things the past few days:

- giant TV and associated detritus bought (but not the remaining significant bits to finish to computer build to drive Fallout 4 on said TV)
- yet another credit card application put in, for 50k more Southwest points. I'm shooting for a Companion Pass this and next year with this angling, and the miles will get me ~3 round trips to Seattle for the whole family (!)
- Global Entry applications in for wife and me, with kids pending arrival of their actual passports, so as to smooth out planned Japan travels in May
- three papers at work punted off to co-authors for final review in last week or so

It's quite unnerving to spend more than I bring in net in a month, with this month particularly bad since I'm floating all of the things mentioned in post 5811 in addition to the spending itself. (I've been saving and budgeting for this so it's not something rash I'm doing. Still a weird feeling to have a net influx of funds from investments rather than packing away each month. Not the best period of time to be drawing down investments but it's not like I'm raiding my tax-deferred accounts. This is just my taxable investment account, designed to be used for just this kind of thing.)

 

[Toshi]

The ending is worth the wait.

 

[Westy]

The ending is worth the wait.

Luckily he was wearing a hat.

 

[Toshi]

Yuna was 16 lbs 15 oz at her 9(.5) month well visit yesterday. She was just a shade under 7 lbs at birth, iirc. This means she'll be on track to be 20-21 lbs at a year. She's only 25th percentile weight but 49th percentile height and 25th percentile head circumference. This seems weird to me since she appears so plump and with such a big head and face. Go figure.

Meanwhile Mariko, at 3 years and 1 day of age, was 23 lbs 3 oz yesterday. That's 5th percentile weight to go along with her 10th percentile height. They might have mismeasured her as she was taller before.

Anyway, the moral of this short story is that my two girls probably will be the same size in about a year.

 

[Toshi]

Built in shelving is done. Not cheap, but it should last.

 

[Toshi]

Like a boss:

 

[Toshi]

Next commuting vehicle?

 

[Toshi]

I installed a Toto Washlet today. Why? Free from parents (from an additional house in Wyoming that they no longer have by virtue of retiring and not working there any more) and because it's fabulously Japanese.

Hot butt + bidet function FTW.

Installation was pretty simple, with the only difficulty in getting the metal nut on the adapter piece cinched down without crossthreading on or twisting the plastic tube upon which the float floats. I had an extra 120V outlet put in by the toilet expressly for the purpose of powering this thing.

 

[Toshi]

Washlet has a slow leak from one of those connections. I don't like working with water for this exact reason. Gah.

In other water-related news, we have an in-duct humidifier in this new house. Its installation was somewhat of a comedy of errors. First it wasn't there at all. Next it was there but without the requisite ductwork. Then it wasn't hooked up to the thermostat. Then it didn't have a water line run to it. Then said water line was on the cold side instead of hot per its installation instructions.

As of now it has water to it, power to its actuator that controls a little valve that manages how much water goes to its element, and it's open to the ductwork… yet it doesn't seem to do jack squat.

Humidity in the house without it is about 25% most days here in Denver. With it on humidity is exactly the same despite the thermostat supposedly aiming for a target of 40% and water clearly making it to the humidifier itself (as evidenced by runoff from the condensate tubing).

I have a complaint into the warranty department of my builder and they passed the buck to the owner of the HVAC company that did most of this work save for the plumbing. My suspicion is that they sold me a unit that is never going to work with a house of this volume of air/square footage. We shall see how they resolve this.

 

[Toshi]

Too bad I'm not in the market for a Prius in Japan. This paint job seems right up my alley:

http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/there-s-a-smart-reason-behind-this-hideous-prius-paint-job-1314893

In a move to help its hybrid car stay cool, Toyota unveiled a new Thermo-Tect Lime Green paint job for the Prius. The Japanese car company explained in a statement that its new color option improves the paint on a molecular level by removing the black carbon particles and replacing them with reflective flecks of titanium oxide.

Between the bright lime green color and swapped out particles, this new coating should significantly increase the vehicle's solar reflectivity. This in turns means the car will absorb less solar energy and get hot less often. Toyota claims, its Thermo-Tec paint is so effective that it outperformed a car donning a purely white paint.

 

[StiHacka]

Too bad I'm not in the market for a Prius in Japan. This paint job seems right up my alley:

http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/there-s-a-smart-reason-behind-this-hideous-prius-paint-job-1314893

Less prone to scratches?

 

[Toshi]

Heh. More an intended reference to my high-viz-all-the-things motorcycle riding gear + high-viz chevrons on the back of my top case.

 

[Toshi]

Baby Yuna is 10 months old as of today. Note fancy/annoyingly expensive built-in basement shelving in background.

 

[Toshi]

Finishing up my basement gaming PC build. It was started in pieces during the Black Friday sales (5930K, 950 PRO M.2, etc.) and now this should be enough to get it running Fallout 4 in 4k.

 

[StiHacka]

this should be enough to get it running Fallout 4 in 4k

Is that some important nerd's milestone?

 

[Toshi]

My giant TV is 4k. Therefore to run it native resolution would be to run it at 4k. It's a 60 Hz max set and the Fallout engine is limited by its physics to 60 fps capped, which works out nicely. Pushing 4k @ 60 Hz is actually pretty tough, which is why I'll be running two nice graphics cards in parallel/SLI.

 

[StiHacka]

My giant TV is 4k. Therefore to run it native resolution would be to run it at 4k. It's a 60 Hz max set and the Fallout engine is limited by its physics to 60 fps capped, which works out nicely. Pushing 4k @ 60 Hz is actually pretty tough, which is why I'll be running two nice graphics cards in parallel/SLI.

Short answer: yes.
Nice setup, I guess. I have not played any games for decades now, but I doubt anything beats the old good games like X-Wing anyway.

 

[Toshi]

Garage is shaping up. I installed the overhead storage today, with an extra set of hands thanks to my visiting father in law. It's 4 x 8' with about a 48" drop, iirc, so the long pieces definitely needed more than one person up on more than one ladder.

Specifics: $150 from costco.com including shipping but not tax. Usually $200 when not on sale, iirc? Each top corner is affixed a railing that in turn is screwed into two rafters with 3" screws. Rated for 600 lbs.

 

[Toshi]

Short answer: yes.
Nice setup, I guess. I have not played any games for decades now, but I doubt anything beats the old good games like X-Wing anyway.

'tis nice. That's a lot of money in video cards alone plus a super duper fast SSD (that Samsung M.2 bit, running over PCIe v3 x4 speed/lanes).

My gaming history is very irregular: Wolfenstein 3D, Marathon and Marathon 2 back in the original Bungie days (long before they were bought out by Microsoft and made Halo and the like), Quake 3, and then a huge gulf until Civilization 5, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and now Fallout 4. The Fallout games are all open world where it just sucks one in. Totally immersive.

 

[Nick]

games, shelves & hot water ass washers etc.

Dude, I seriously want you to come out and pedal a bike, without a battery, on some dirt.

 

[Toshi]

You'd fall asleep waiting for me to catch up on the climbs.

 

[Nick]

who cares.
fun > anything else