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fire alarm community
Friday, November 9 2018
There was a very fat dead skunk on Hurley Mountain Road on my drive to work this morning. I've seen a number of skunks up close (wild ones surprisingly tame and are unlikely to spray you) and they've always been thin, like squirrels. This one was more like a spayed housecat. The white stripe down its back looked to be at least four inches wide. He was just trying to cross the road, confident his striped warning and chemical weapons would protect him from every danger. That spot on the road still stank of skunk on my way home from work at the end of the day, though his body was no longer in evidence.
The workday was weird today. The other developers and I were called in to help with an interview of a prospective hire, an older gentleman with a grey pony tail. He seemed knowledgeable, if a bit of a talker. I didn't really have any questions for him except for about the Raspberry Pi he'd mentioned. And then, just as the interview was wrapping up, things were cut short by a firealarm. This causes us to all assemble out in front, where we had nothing to do but chit-chat. This was a wonderful thing, because it gave me an opportunity to learn things about my normally-silent colleagues. For example, Victoria claimed to be into mining Bitcoin with a special rig she set up, though she admitted that the return on investment made the whole operation pointless; all the easy Bitcoin was extracted by the Chinese before the Bitcoin bubble began to build.
Evidently our "fire" wasn't the only one in the village, and so it took awhile for the fire department to respond. Apparently a more pressing issue was a battery fire resulting from a car crash. What with all these hybrids and battery-powered cars, the risk of dangerous battery fires has increased. Still, I pointed out, that's nothing like a good old fashion Volkswagen Beetle engine block fire. Those things were machined out of solid magnesium. After the fire department arrived with their hook & ladder and oxygen backpacks just to turn off the alarm, we returned to work, though that only lasted for an hour at the most before another alarm sounded. Evidently someone was fucking up in one of the other spaces rented in our building. This time my immediate boss noticed (for the first time) my "Portland Fucking Oregon" mug, and this got us to talking about Portland and my love of the place. My colleagues seem more buttoned-down and conservative than me (both politically and socially), but they nevertheless seemed to get the joy that comes from dragging a pool table out to the sidewalk (which is always my go-to example of the sort of thing one can expect to see in Portland, a city that hopes to "stay weird").
I snuck out of work extra-early, partly because I'd been there since before 8:20am. I drove through the cold pouring rain and arrived home before Gretchen had left to teach her creative writing class at Shawangunk Correctional Facility. Since the windshield wipers are so bad on the Prius, I convinced her to drive there in the Subaru instead.
I should mention that, after much successive approximation, I've got the Subaru oxygen sensor hack nearly dialed-in. The values now are as specified in this diagram, with a 2 microfarad capacitor between the oxygen sensor signal wire and ground, a 330 kilohm resistor between that signal and the car's computer, and a 100 microfarad capacitor between the input to the computer and ground.
That 2 microfarad capacitor is the only one whose values I've been changing in response to error codes. When I've gotten a P0139, I've lowered the capacitance. When I've gotten a P0420, I've raised it. Today on the way to work, after over a hundred miles of no errors, I got a P0420 error. Since I know I get a P0139 error when that capacitor is at 4.7 microfarads, I won't be raising it to that value. I'll be trying something like 3 microfarads and see how that works.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181109 feedback
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