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Evaporative Cooler Thermostat Fail

I woke up early this morning mainly because the swamp cooler had been running an extra long time (it blows right on me). I knew something was wrong because it felt cold yet I knew I set the super fancy digital thermostat to 78 degrees before I went to bed. The house temp was 68 degrees and the darn thermostat wouldn’t turn off. Even setting it to “off” wouldn’t turn it off.

I sent a email off to Dial Manufacturing of Phoenix, Az but I suspect it’s going to be easier to just replace the darned thing. 

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Wrong Kind Of Cactus On New Mexico Poster

The 2004 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is due to start in October. There’s been a bit of hub-bub because of the poster.

The major problem to me is they hired a Texas artist to do the poster. There’s always been a kind of Texas/New Mexico rivalry between the two states but this isn’t my issue. See New Mexico is pretty well know for it’s fancy-smancy artists. Santa Fe and Taos both have quite a few of those types there. I suspect they are at least better known for their artists than Texas.

Second problem is the Texas Artist screwed it up. There’s Balloons and there’s a cowboy. Sounds good. There are also Saguaro cactuses. For those not familiar with the South West United States, these are native to the Sonoran Desert which, “has a quite limited geographical range, centred on southern Arizona and extending into western Sonora (Mexico)” which means they don’t even exists in New Mexico. I know, to the rest of the world these cactuses exist in the desert southwest and that includes New Mexico. But if you want to accurately show one of New Mexico’s few claims to fames then it’s probably a good idea to be accurate on such a little detail. Perhaps the cactuses could be replaced with power lines.

By the way, thanks to Metaquerque for the links. 

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Arizona Dust Storm Pictures

These photos were taken by my Cousin (forwarded by my Dad, thanks Dad!). This is one thing Arizona is famous for. The area between Phoenix and Tucson gets the type of dust storms that you saw in the Movie “Stargate”. The area she was in was just south of Phoenix. I didn’t ask her permission to post these so I hope she doesn’t mind!

These are pictures from the Dust Storm on Friday the 13th. I had to pull off the highway because visibility was at zero. As you can see in the first two photos I was approaching the dust storm. It was about 6:00 in the evening or so and I was leaving the Ahwatukee/Chandler heading towards Casa Grande. Just thought I would share.

 

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Legend City

Legend City was Arizona’s answer to Disneyland, a western version of Disneyland if you like. It was open from 1963 to 1983 and located near the Phoenix and Tempe border. Now in that same spot stands SRP’s headquarters (SRP is the Salt River Project, one of the Utility companies in AZ). They spent millions of dollars on the place but it apparently didn’t work out in the end. Was the place to small (58 acres) or did no one want to go to a theme park in the Arizona summer heat (110 degrees)?

I was less than 10 years old and don’t remember much of it. My main memory is of bumper cars. I recently found the Legend City website with all kinds of photos and it brings the memories back. The Lost Dutchman mine and the Legend City Rail Road all come to mind now.

Wallace & Ladmo performed at Legend City. A icon for kids growing up in the valley during their 36 year run, making them the longest running daily show in history. They aired on Channel 5, the first TV station in Phoenix. I watched them every morning before going to school and saw every singe Tom & Jerry cartoon they ran. Ladmo (Ladimir Kwiatkowski) died in 1995 thus ending the show. I might have even been on that show once, but can’t recall.

There’s been rumors for a long time that another theme park was going to open near Phoenix but nothing built yet. 

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LANL Getting Their Act Together, Hopefully (updated)

Los Alamos National Labs was where they invented the first nuke, then send it down south to test. LANL is located kind of between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, near the Jemez mountians. There’s a route from Albuquerque through the Jemez that take you to Los Alamos. Along the road you see abandon cement outposts with “Tech Sector” or something written on them. Back in the day there use to be armed patrols guarding this area in the mountains.

Back in the day they were more concerned about security. Now adays they are being critized for insuffiecnt security, with all this loosing hard drives and floppy disks with classified information and such. Now it looks like heads are going to roll. Last week, “I don’t care how many people I have to fire” in order to knock the security- and safety-challenged staff into line, Los Alamos chief G. Peter (“Pete”) Nanos declared in the Friday memorandum to his 12,000 employees.” and today, ” Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham today ordered a halt to all Department of Energy operations that use the same kind of computer disks reported missing last week at Los Alamos National Laboratory.” I think some people at the labs thing they “were to important to be fired” or “people focusing and making a big deal about stupid, meaningless things instead of doing their jobs: protecting information and national security.” Clearly they have forgot what’s important.

There as been talk before about reducing the number of national labs in this country. Los Alamos is a company town, and things like this will just make congress want to “make it go away”.

[Updated 07/26/04:] Check out this, “The owner of a Los Alamos business, where the FBI seized several items, says the items are an elaborate jest. The owner of the Black Hole Surplus Store and Museum, Ed Grothus, says the items included a small computer hard drive, a cassette tape and some tape labels. He says he had word ?secret? printed on the labels and he placed the labels on the cassette tape and the hard drive.” 

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Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta UFO Identified As Balloon

I happened across this site where they took a picture of a UFO (UFO means unidentified, not a ailen spaceship). The photo is from the 1991 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

They have a great explantion of what they saw

One might be led to believe that I actually saw a UFO that is an extra-terrestrial vehicle that was large but far away. The fact is that I saw it at a crowded sitr and in a crowded sky. The photo was taken during a hot air balloon mass ascension and a balloon flew behind this curious object after I had taken the photo. Thus I was able to determine the object was no more than a few feet in diameter. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that it was some sort of mylar balloon reflecting the sunlight and caught in the wind, even though it appeared to be stationary and rotating from my vantage point. Or who knows….Maybe they are just really small aliens attending the balloon fiesta like I was!</blockquote

It’s good to see an actual explanation and not instantly assuming it’s a spaceship. As much as I would like to believe, the truth is really out there. I’m almost sure it’s always man made. 

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Rio Rancho & Lots Of WiFI

Rio Rancho, New Mexico is just butted up against Albuquerque to the north. Thanks to Intel (the largest employer in Rio Rancho and one of the largest in the state) they will have the worlds largest WiFi hot spot. It will cover 103 square miles including residential homes. Funny since you can barley get DSL and no internet via cable.

I lived in Rio Rancho (often called Rio Rathole) when I first moved here. At the time it was mostly a overgrown truck stop with no roads. The road have improved some and the whole city has grown up a lot, it’s good to see some high tech anything moving in.

[Update:] Check out the submission I made to slashdot. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember my password otherwise I would have tons of traffic coming to this site 🙂 

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The Wayne-Dalton iDrive

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.

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”.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=gregssite-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000KKVHVG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrOK, 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.

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New Mexico's Space Port

The Southwest Regional Spaceport located in New Mexico has been chosen as the location of the X Prize competition. The X Prize competition is a contest to get a civilian spacecraft into space and back to earth. The winner gets $10 million US dollars.

I believe the Spaceport is located south of Roswell. On the way back from Carlsbad Caverns last year I recall seeing a sign saying “Future Location of the Southwest Reginal Spaceport” with a big field behind it. I thought it was some crackpot scheme related to the UFO landing near Roswell. Guess not.