Tomasz Korwel

Don’t get close to me today

tomasz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:21:34 +0000

Last Saturday my Range lost it’s water pump on the interstate while doing 70mph. Looks like three of the fan blades disintegrated and the imbalance caused by this destroyed water pump’s bearing (this is my diagnose after looking at it for 5 minutes). Being in the middle of the trip and already 200 miles from home I’ve just towed it to the shop suggested by the tow truck owner, rented something on moved on.

I was thinking - OK, towing Range back home will run me about $300. Then I will have to spend time replacing the water pump anyway. So maybe it’s wort to just let the shop fix it and I’ll pick it up fixed on my way back?

Today I’ve got the call. The shop confirmed my diagnose. The estimate for: water pump, fan blades, serpentine belt and labor - $1100. It took me about 5 minutes to regain my calmness and not call the mechanic names. Eleven f**** hundred f***** dollars for water pump replacement!

As I really didn’t feel like to replace it myself so I’ve started a conversations along the line:
ME: how about I order the parts and you just quote me the labor
mechanic: no, we do not accept parts as we are making our living by marking up the prices on parts (can you believe he actually said that?)
ME: OK, I understand that, so how about I give you the address which is roverparts.com, you go there and get the parts yourself, mark them up whatever percentage you need to and quote me again?
mechanic: no we won’t do that - we buy parts only in our sources so we can provide warranty on them.
ME: But those will be OEM parts from Rover itself
mechanic: doesn’t matter, no is no.

At this point I calmly asked how much do I own for diagnose and storing the car for few days and thanked the guy nicely.

$1100 for water pump replacement. Unbelievable. The needed parts at roverparts.com will total to about $200. That leaves $900 for labor. Shop manual quotes 1.8h shop time for water pump replacement which gives us $500/h! Unbelievable.

I don’t mind paying $100 per shop hour, that is reasonable. I don’t mind paying up to 25% markup on parts - that is reasonable too - they have to spent time and invest money ordering them too.

But nothing pisses me off than people who thinks they can steal from me because it says ‘Range Rover’ on my hood.

Apple Airport Extreme USB disks problem finaly solved

tomasz — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:00:58 +0000

Living in WiFi crowded environment (more than 10 stations in 2.4GHZ band) forced us to move to 5GHz band. For many months now we have an Apple Extreme base station installed at home. It performed almost flawlessly with one exception - the airport failed to recognize more than one hard drive connected to it’s USB port. After almost giving up on it I have finally found a solution. Connecting the drive directly to my mac and running on it Repair Disk function from Disk Utility solved the problem. Now our airport sees both disks and I’m a happy camper again :-)

Cleaning up Apple’s wireless Mighty Mouse - take two

tomasz — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:24:30 +0000

Many of you probably saw my previous post about cleaning up Mighty Mouse here

After using my mouse for another 2 years I have found out that using this method may in fact become less and less effective (meaning I have to do it much more often that I used to). So I had to come up with something to solve this problem too. Now I’m using a modified method which is much more material involved :-)

I bought small bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol and I put one or two drops on the ball when mouse is still in upright position. then I use ‘Apple method’ of pushing down on the ball and turning it around to loosen up the dirt.

Then I continue with the above method using either white sheet of paper as before, or even better - clean microfiber cloth I got with my new pair of glasses recently. All that helps greatly to get the dirt off of the sensors.

After such treatment my mouse is working flawlessly for over a month now.

Snowboarding

tomasz — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:58:49 +0000

[See post to watch Flash video]

music by U2 - Beautiful Day from U218 Singles

Winter biking

tomasz — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:24:49 +0000

If somebody asked me a year ago what do I think about riding bike in the snow I’d say you have to be stupid to do so. Today… I did it myself and boy did I have a fun!

Bike handled surprisingly nice. Probably in greatest part because I have nice Panaracer Rampage tires. The only tricky part is when you try to turn and there is a patch of ice below the snow. Oh and rolling resistance is like you were driving on loose sand.

Can’t wait to get some more.

Weather in Iowa

tomasz — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:20:19 +0000

Here’s what I saw today when I went out to check the weather:

For those of you imperial challenged:

And of course zero clouds and clear sky. Time to look for some additional blankets…

Balanced zone controller

tomasz — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 03:05:35 +0000

One of the nicest features of our new HVAC zone system is module called balanced controller. Basically it’s an algorithm calculating heat demand in every zone and opening and closing registers accordingly.

Here you can see that one of the zones (middle one) was fully open while remaining two were just barely moved, Then when this zone was satisfied in it’s heat demand it was closed and the first one was fully open to direct all hot heat into this zone to shorten furnace running time to the minimum.

I don’t have any statistic data to prove my theory yet but it seems to me that such behavior shortens greatly overall running time and simply saves us money.

Greenhouse

tomasz — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:24:08 +0000

Looking at the graph (and trying to keep my fingers from freezing):

I noticed interesting thing - the temperatures in my office tend to go down a bit every day (look at those last four green peaks). Keep in mind that my thermostat is set to the same temperature as it was before, yet those temps really go down. Looking for explanation I tried to remember what changes in weather did we observed during those last 4 days. Did it become colder outside? Not really. Maybe hotter? Naa… Rained? Snowed? Was it windy? And then it strike me - we got more and more sun each day. So apparently upper level of our house acts as greenhouse absorbing energy from sun. And because the thermostat is in fact mounted there, lover level rooms, not exposed to radiation heat became colder and colder.

One additional reason why giving those rooms more decision power as when to turn the furnace on is not that bad idea.

DZ at work

tomasz — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:24:18 +0000

I installed 2 motorized registers and set the system to run in passive mode.

Here you can see:

how it nicely flattened the temp curve by closing the registers when temperature reached setpoint.

Time to finish the rest of the house.

HVAC zoning resurrected

tomasz — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:54:30 +0000

A comment posted under one of my older posts reminded me that it can be a good idea to resurrect and finish my HVAC zoning project I shelved some time ago. Main cause I did so was that I couldn’t get dz compiled. I didn’t have time to mess with it any longer then, but I decided to give it a try this time. It turned out that over last two years Ubuntu project went forward so much that this time dz compiled successfully the very first time I tried. So right now I have a spider web construction on my desk consisting of two 1-wire temp sensors and two servos run by phidget boards. And they work. Servos are opening and closing according to changes in the temperature of my office. They have no influence as they aren’t running registers yet, but they proved to work. Now it’s time to run wires around the house and motorize registers.

Stay tuned.