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Letters From Little Rock |
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a semi-regular column
Letters From Little Rock is my column on whatever topic strikes my fancy at the time. Check in as often as you like, but I make no promise as to when new columns will appear. I hope to add a column on a weekly basis, but honesty compels me to admit that I might not even maintain a monthly schedule. March 8, 2004 I've spent a long and marginally productive weekend grappling with the minutia of updating my web site from its previous no frills layout to its current less awkward yet still no frills layout. I've had ample time for this because I've been more or less stranded for three days since my car is out of action. Oh, it's not like I'm roughing it or anything. I've got all of the amenities and the weather was gorgeous. Saturday I grilled a nice steak and got mildly stuporific on a bottle of Wiederkehr Niagara wine. Despite the name it's actually bottled here in Arkansas. It's embarrassingly cheap and very sweet. Kind of like a cross between muscadine and white port. I like it. Aside from that, my weekend was spent at the computer trying to figure out why my links weren't working or why the part of the page that should have been yellow was suddenly a shockingly dark shade of black. Heretofore I had believed that there was really only one shade of black on these things and that my page was it. Apparently I was mistaken. It's all worked out now, I think. It looks like I'm through tinkering now and my templates are all set. So far I've had no major feedback on my new design. Of course it's early yet. And by feedback I really only mean that the one verified viewer this page has ever had hasn't emailed me that his screen suddenly turned black when he tried to open my page in his browser. I guess that could be just because he can't find the email link on a totally black screen. I don't know how many of you have ever used the Classmates.Com web site, but I used to like to make use of its message board from time to time. Then it went all corporate on us and decided that you had to have a gold membership to use the message board or email your classmates through their web site and I kind of lost interest. I checked in this weekend to see if there were any new people registered in my class and just for kicks browsed through the message board. The majority of the threads there have quite a few messages from about three years ago and a handful of more recent ones. It's pretty obvious to see when the site went to its paid membership policy. It seems hard to believe that it isn't more profitable to have more active members than to have a scant handful that are willing to plunk down the membership fee. I've seen several web sites do this and it always strikes me as being sort of like the web equivalent of bait and switch. For some reason it just rankles. On the plus side there was a message from one of my classmates filling everybody in on her whereabouts and such. Turns out she's moved to California and married a chiropractor. I think she must be doing well for herself; she sells real estate, which, in California, I understand is pretty much the same thing as printing money. But it has got me thinking. In some way it seems very hip and bohemian just picking up and leaving for California and marrying a chiropractor the way she did. It also seems out of character in a way, but who do we ever really know? By her own admission she was kind of shy in high school, hardly the sort to go gallivanting halfway across the country, and yet there she went. There have been several turning points in my life when I might have left home and chased my tail who knows where; one time when I was still sharing an apartment with my Mother I almost took a job working on cruise ships, once when my job at the warehouse had gone crazy and they were working people sixteen to twenty hours a day I almost took a job as a carnie, and just before I found the job I have now, I considered working on the railroad. But somehow or another I always found my way back home at the end of the day. I guess I've always been curious about that kind of life. Curious and maybe a little jealous. I'm pretty well tied down to a thirty year mortgage, and I guess I'm really too old to want to quit a job on a whim, but I'm not too old to see the attraction of doing something new. I think we all get a little touch of "what if" sometimes, a little touch of nostalgia for a time when we hadn't narrowed our storylines through missteps and choosing the lesser of two evil choices. I suppose that's why we daydream, we like to think all of our options are still open to us. March 8, 2004 Well, I got a phone call at 10:00 a.m. It was the garage that has my car and wonder of wonders it probably doesn't need a valve job after all. So the little bluebirds of doom that have been hovering around my shoulders have begun to flitter off. It may yet need a valve job but if it just holds out another six months I will probably replace it altogether. 12:45 p.m. As it turns out I picked it up and it still ran kind of odd when I got up to highway speed. If I'd thought about it earlier it would have dawned on me that the car hasn't been getting any feedback from the speedometer cable for at least two years. Well, when the computer doesn't get any velocity indication, it doesn't run off its sensors, it runs off a computer program. When I installed the new speedometer cable I awakened sensors that haven't been used in years and one of the little devils is the Throttle Position Sensor. When it goes out it usually begins by not letting you run at your normal driving speed, that's the part of the potentiometer that gets the most wear, so you can only go faster or slower than your usual highway speed. I'm almost certain that that's what caused the car to buck at about 65 mph. You probably think I plan on replacing the Throttle Position Sensor. Well, you're wrong; I disconnected my brand new speedometer cable and the car runs like a champ.
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