Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

Here’s a small collection of tips fellow residents of Olympia might find useful:

1) Trouble with the KitchenAid dishwasher - the other day the dishwasher stopped mid-cycle and the blue “clean” LED was blinking. No button press had any effect, nor did unplugging the unit. The LED flashed 7 times repeatedly. I discovered by searching the internet that this means there was an error with the water heating cycle. I reset the machine and now it seems to work correctly. To reset the dishwasher, press Heated Dry, Normal, Heated Dry, Normal without delay between each press and it will go into diagnostic mode. All lights will light up simultaneously. Close the door and it should reset and work normally again.

2) Central Vac supplies -It’s easy to forget that the central vac needs some simple maintenance such as changing the bag and cleaning the filter. I found the best place to buy the bags (Nutone #391 for most of us) is on eBay. Several vendors have them for a few dollars each. A local vendor also sells them, but they cost about twice as much. It’s also convenient to get additional parts such as hoses and vacuum heads. These cost quite a bit, but again I found them on ebay for a reasonable price. I purchased an additional hose (without electricity) and tile floor head for less than half the list price and it’s great for using in the garage.

3) Lighting - The light bulbs supplied by the builder are low quality and waste lots of energy. I’ve found that the typical lifetime of the 65-Watt flood lights is 9 to 12 months. This is compounded by the fact that many of us have high ceilings. A good place I found for replacements is Lowes Costco. They sell 15-Watt compact fluorescent flood lights for $14 a pair $13 a pack of 4.  These lights are brighter than the originals, use about 1/4 the energy, throw off very little heat and last 5-7 years. I also replaced the 50-Watt smaller flood lights with 11-Watt bulbs from Lowes. The only downside to the CFL bulbs is that they take 30-60 seconds to reach full brightness. An alternative is the 50-Watt Halogen lights from Sylvania. They are slightly brighter than the 65-Watt original bulbs and also last 5-7 years.

4) Night Lights - I’ve found it very convenient to have small night lights distributed throughout the hallways. The standard 7-Watt night lights require frequent changing and waste lots of energy. A good product I’ve found is a 1W LED night light with a light sensor from “MaxLite”. The bulbs last 10,000 hours, they’re bright and total energy cost is about 4 cents per month (versus 32 cents for a standard bulb). These are a bit pricey to buy retail (Amazon Link), but I’ve found there are some good suppliers on eBay which average $2.50 or less for each one.

5) Internet - We have 3 choices for internet service within Olympia: dial-up, BellSouth DSL, or Comcast Cable. I work at home and need a fast connection, so Cable is the only real choice for me. The service costs $42.95 per month (taxes included) and gives you 8-16Mbs download and 500-2000Kbs upload speeds. A cable modem costs $25-50 and should definitely be purchased instead of rented ($10 per month). If you are a former AOL dial-up customer and are also paying for DSL or Cable, you can now cancel your AOL payments and retain your email address. Please see my other article about this: AOL is Free.

The internet is incredibly deep and wide when it comes to all types of information. Need to find some software or some computer info? No problem. Need to find competitive prices on a product - easy. Famous people, history, dictionaries, maps, city guides, movie schedules, it’s all there. The only real gap in this huge collection of information is the basic question and answer.

There are tons of discussion forums covering all types of topics. People debate politics, parenting, product reviews, and technical subjects. What is all too common is that someone asks a question; it’s read by plenty of people who could answer it, but it sits unanswered. What incentive do ‘experts’ have to take their precious time to answer ‘newbie’ questions? None! There seem to be two types of people who do answer these questions - those who are kind and try to help their fellow man and those who want to show off their knowledge of a particular subject.

Amazon has tried to correct this situation by creating a system of incentives so that questions get answered. They created a site called AskVille . This site creates a complicated system of levels of expertise and rewards for answering questions. It’s a reasonable attempt, but for me it fails because you earn points which have no clear value. If Amazon would define precisely what you can do with the points (e.g. buy their products) it would go a long way towards making the system viable.

A system of monetary rewards makes much more sense for a software company such as Microsoft. They have a group of employees which “evangelize” new products and operating systems. When things are newly hatched, they give away free tools and offer all sorts of help to get you “hooked” on their new stuff. Once the product has matured, the free tools vanish and it suddenly becomes quite expensive to work with. They maintain several discussion groups to help developers, but the same basic problem remains of answering simple questions. Microsoft is in a good position to use their software products as incentive. MS Office, Vista, Visual Studio all cost hundreds of dollars, but really cost nearly nothing to Microsoft. A reasonable system of incentives to reward experts with free software would probably work well. This could also be used by other software companies such as Nokia to get more developers to flock to their system.

Thoughts?