I switched from DirecTV to Dish Network so long ago that I couldn’t even blog about it (April 2002, though I found an excuse to blog about it in December 2003, after the blog had started). I bought the receiver which included a massive 40GB hard drive to record 40 hours of programming so that I could watch shows whenever I wanted. And best of all it included a 30-second skip button that I could use to zap commercials. I skipped so many commercials that I wore that button out on my remote.
Puppy in the House
On the Avondale bulletin board a woman was looking for a home for a stray black lab puppy she had picked up in December. She has taken great care of the dog, taking it to the vet, getting him fixed, microchipped, and boarding him because she can’t keep a dog in her apartment. I offered to foster care for him while she looks for a home because I know boarding isn’t cheap, and I just don’t like the idea of any dog being boarded for so long, especially that young.
She brought him over yesterday. He is incredibly skinny, but he has a ridiculous appetite so I know he will pick up weight. I can’t even feed my two dogs with him around because he just dives right into their food. They don’t know if they are allowed to put him in his place, so they just let him do it. He hops right up onto the sofa and stays right beside me, loves to fetch and likes to chew on a nylabone, or really chew on anything he can get to. One of the first things he did was stick his head in a waste basket with junk mail in it and had 3 or 4 pieces of unopened mail in his month, walking away like it was some kind of prize or like he should go deliver it. It was pretty funny.
Katie and Austin are tolerating him, but Austin is kind of freaked out and doesn’t even like staying in the same room with him. That’s terrible because Austin likes being next to me so much but this dog (his rescuer has named him Moses) just wedges in like other dogs aren’t even there.
I’ll post some pictures this weekend. He looks pretty much identical to Austin except smaller and skinnier.
I only worked 6 hours today, but that still meant I was away for over 8 hours and he didn’t have any accidents or destroy anything (well, one dog toy was disemboweled).
He is estimated to be eight months old and is smaller than Austin or Katie and much thinner than either one. He probably only weighs 30 pounds, if that.
Button Cells
When I bought my house, I bought a voltmeter (really a digital multimeter, or DMM) at Home Depot. It has served me pretty well except that it doesn’t measure current (amps), so I wound up buying a second one pretty cheaply at Amazon. The new one uses a 9V battery, but the one from Home Depot has two button cells in it. The LED display was getting pretty faint, and now it is almost impossible to read after I left it on all night recently. So I needed some batteries.
The size written on the cell is L1154. On Wikipedia, I learned that cells that start with C are lithium and cells that start with L are alkaline. Lithium cells are usually 3 volts while alkaline are 1.5 volts. There are also silver oxide cells that start with S. I looked online and found I should be able to get a pair of cells for less than $2. I visited Walgreen’s but they only had lithium and silver cells and none seemed to be the right size. Plus they were at least $4, sometimes just for one battery. I went to Walmart today and, while they had some L cells, they were still pretty expensive. I visited their outdoor section to look at flashlights and they had one that uses 3 357 size button cells (very similar looking to the batteries I needed) for $4.50, including the 3 batteries. Up front in the battery section, you could get a package of 3 357 cells for $5.50 and it didn’t even include a little flashlight. This just reinforced what I knew already, which is there is a huge markup on these batteries.
Next I went to Rite Aid where I was looking to use up a $4 store credit before it expires next week anyway. They had a selection of cells, but none of them were the right size either. And they were expensive.
When I got home I looked up Wikipedia’s article on battery sizes and discovered that the 357 size is the same as what I was looking for, the L1154. Wikipedia says the IEC name for this size is LR1154, where the L is for alkaline, the R is for round, the 11 is the diameter in mm, and 54 is the height in tenths of millimeters (so 5.4mm tall). So at least it is kind of sensible if that name is used, but other names can represent the same thing: SR44, AG13, SG13, LR44, LR154, A76, S76, 157, 303, 357, LR1154, SR1154, 1166A, 1107SO, and 1131SOP. Some of those are names for the same size in silver oxide. The silver oxide batteries are interchangeable with alkalines but last longer. They also cost more and that’s what you usually find at the drugstores.
I thought it would be good to have a note on my iPod with all the battery sizes, but then I realized I already have all of Wikipedia on there already. Actually I have all of Wikipedia but the pictures and tables and that information is in a table. But the latest version of Wikipedia Offline lets me pull the latest version of a page, including tables (which are rendered in Safari, and you have to bookmark the page for the new version to be saved permanently).
With this information, I went to Amazon to see if I could find some cheaper batteries. Pretty quickly I found a place selling 10 Maxell LR44 batteries for $2.26, including shipping! Done. I should have plenty now even though my electricity detector and my electronic calipers use the same size. If anybody wants any, let me know.
Knife Etiquette
Today a friend at work needed a small philips head screwdriver to change the batteries in a calculator. I got my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and opened up the Philips head screwdriver/bottle opener. When he returned it to me, he had it still open and asked me if I was superstitious. I knew something was up, but didn’t know what it was. He explained that there is a superstition that if someone gives you a knife open, you are supposed to return it open. If they give it to you closed, you are supposed to return it closed. I had never heard of that, but another person who saw what was going on confirmed he had been taught that too.
I tried to look this up and see if I could find the origins of it, but all I found was that it is apparently a southern thing. I also found another superstition that it is bad luck if someone gives you a knife because it will supposedly sever the relationship. But you can mitigate the bad luck by “paying” for the knife by giving them a quarter. I thought that was pretty funny.
iPod Keyboard
It is pretty clumsy trying to type on the iPod screen since there are no buttons and the little virtual key are pretty tiny. You can get bigger buttons by turning the iPod sideways. I downloaded a typing speed app and found I could get about 15 words per minute using one finger and the little keyboard. Turning it sideways and using my thumbs to type, I got about 17 wpm, but I made a lot of mistakes.