Some Blog Site

The prices in our local grocery store usually reasonable, like this:

Three dollars and 99 cents per package. Not too bad.

But sometimes they try to trick you into paying way too much, like this:

Four hundred and ninety nine dollars? Nice try.

I am happy to report though, that the sign printer and the pricing system were not in sync.

At a store this fall, the younger two boys and I were given free reign to wander while Some Wife did her shopping. We ended up finding some puzzles and the Delta engaged in his favorite pasttime of finding things that are AI-generated.

We decided this puzzle was the winner, in terms of most AI content. I suppose “loser” would be a better term than “winner”, given the goal in our lives is to avoid AI stuff.

It’s hard to see the details in that photo, so I’ve zoomed in for some of the best/worst parts of it.

Example 1: The Trapped Present
Good luck getting whatever is inside this present out. You’ll have to destroy the box, probably.

Example 2: New Species of Rabbit
They took the facial features of the deer and applied them to the rabbit. What species of rabbit has a long snout and black nose?

Plus the snowman has a hat that is both top hat and Santa hat together.

Example 3: Santa Smoking a Cookie
Really, who holds a cookie like that? Unless it’s a middle-schooler trying to be funny. And why is the glass of milk steaming?

Example 4: Earthworm Canes
Those things are supposed to be candy canes but they are shaped more like earthworms.

And a couple of those cookies are vaguely tree-shaped, so that’s good. But the others are random shapes with no relation to Christmas, or any other valid shape.

We did not buy that puzzle, but it gave us a lot of amusement looking at it.

For a trip earlier this year we ended up borrowing a vehicle. The vehicle and I got along in most things, but we did not get along in one particular area: the door kept attacking my leg.

After a week, I ended up with 3 gashes in my leg.

The reason was that the door had a bottom section that curved, so there was a sharp edge protruding. Anything that is right next to the door while it is moving will get sliced.

Here is the offending part of the Ford Expedition:

For contrast, here is what the doors look like on the vehicles I typically drive.

As you can see, the door does have a corner but the corner is in the same plane as the rest of the door edge, so it’s not going to catch your leg as you’re standing next to it. Maybe if you angle your leg under the door, but that’s not normal.

What happens is that the part of the door that deviates from the vertical ends up sticking out as the door moves, so anything right next to the door edge will be fine when the door edge goes by, but then it will be caught by the protrusion. Here’s a diagram that shows it.

No one else in my family – or in the family that owns the vehicle – got their leg scraped. I must be the most impatient one of the bunch, closing the door before I’ve moved far enough away from it. Ah well, I still say it’s a poor design, and if I actually owned the vehicle I would be modifying those corners somehow.

Either someone at Google reads this blog, or maybe their customer communication quality control department finally kicked in, but they fixed their incorrect description of what frequency is.

Here’s the older blog post, where Google described what a frequency is but with the opposite meaning of what frequency actually is.

And here’s a more recent email from them, where they give the right description.

There we go – low frequency is a higher time, and vice-versa. Good job Google.

One of my ways to enjoy a few minutes of idle time is to see what cheap cars are for sale on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. That or sudoku.

One ad that caught my eye a couple weeks ago wasn’t because it was a great deal necessarily, but because its wording was suspect.

I think they meant that the car would sell quickly and thus the deal would not last long, but I choose to believe they knew the car was about to suffer a major catastrophe and that’s why they’re selling the car. They just want you to think they were bad at writing ad copy, when they were instead disclosing what they knew about the car.

No, I did not go test drive it. Also, the ad is still up 22 days later, for what that’s worth.

This is not that interesting of a story, but I’m putting it on the internet in case someone else has a similar problem and can’t find the answer on the internet like I couldn’t. But now they can, because the answer is here.

Little backstory: the power went out in our barn. Said barn has its own electric meter. I checked all the circuit breakers, even the main, and went so far as to put a voltmeter on the main connection before the breaker box, so straight from the meter, and it showed no power.

So I was fairly sure the problem was from the power company. I looked at the meter and the meter was displaying things (a few things in rotation), but mostly zeroes and then this cryptic phrase: “con off”, or more correctly “COn OFF”

Not quite sure what that meant, I tried to look up the user manual for the meter, a type C2SOD smart power meter. I found some information but nothing that described the things it was displaying.

I went to the house to compare the barn meter to the house meter, since the house had power. The house meter was not displaying “con off”. So I concluded something is wrong with the barn meter (or power line).

I called the power company to report a problem. They are too fancy for their own good, and when I pressed the number to indicate I had a power outage, they matched my number to an address and said “thank you, your power outage has been reported for this address” and then the call was over.

I then got a text a few minutes later confirming my outage report. Then, more than a few minutes but less than a few hours later, I got a text saying they ran their diagnostics and my address has power so they have closed the ticket.

I was thinking “If you just let me talk to someone in the first place, it would save us both time”. Because then I had to click the link that said “I still have a problem” and then it let me enter a comment.

I took that opportunity to let them know I checked the voltage and that the meter was saying “con off”. Whoever got that note knew enough to check something else, maybe they ran the advanced diagnostics on the line not just the standard diagnostics, and a little while later I got a text that they agreed there was a problem.

And then shortly afterwards (still the same day) I got a text saying power was restored and the issue was “equipment failure”. I never saw anyone come to the barn. I wasn’t there the whole time either, but the meter didn’t look brand new after it was fixed so my guess is they just remotely reset the smart meter. Just like any other computer – turn it off and turn it on and it works again.

Anyway, if you have a power outage and your meter reads “COn OFF” then the problem is with your meter so go ahead and tell the electric company it’s their issue.

I happened to be reading the back of the cereal box during a recent breakfast, and it had some activities to try.

So I tried them, and I was particularly disappointed with the word challenge. Here is the challenge. You try it and see what you think.

Here are the base words: spoon, cloth, milk, light, break, wash, berry, table, straw, star, blue, cloth, man, fast.

And they want to know how many words you can crunch together to make a new word.

My answer: 14, but that uses each base word only once. My new word is lightmilkclothbreakwashberrytablestrawstarbluefastclothman. It sounds like a superhero of some sort. And it reminds me of some German words.

They did give a hint that some words may be used more than once. I think they didn’t notice they put cloth in there twice. And if I can repeat words, then the answer to how many words I can crunch together to make a new word is “infinite”.

But I think that’s not what they meant. They’re looking for compound words, with just two halves. So the question should have been “How many new compound words can you make by crunching together these words?”

In that case, my answer is 149. That’s with 13 total words (I removed the duplicate “cloth” because it wouldn’t make any unique combinations), so each word can make 12 compound words when combined with the 12 other words. Do that 13 times, and you get 156 total words.

Then I added one more because I can make “clothcloth” as a new compound word. So up to 157.

Then I have to remove existing words, because the question was how many new words I can make. So there were 8 existing words like strawberry and breakfast, that brings the 157 down to 149.

Let’s see what the cereal box says the answer is.

Nope, they say the answer is 8. That makes no sense. They said they wanted new words, and the answer is only old words.

Well I like my new words, such as washtable and fastlight and clothberry.