Banal Leakage » repair

I’ll Be Missing You

martymankins — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:15:26 +0000

My MacBook Pro 15-inch unibody that I got in September 2009 is off to get fixed. Not much wrong with it. Just an ethernet port that stopped working. So it’s getting an entire logic board replacement. The Genius bar employee told me to allow up to seven days, but told me that the average lately has been three days.

I hope so, because it’s only been two hours since I dropped it off and I miss it already. Not that I’m without a Mac to use. My original MacBook Pro 15-inch that I gave to my wife when I got my new MacBook Pro is what I’ll be using in the meantime. It only has a fraction of my data on it as I cleaned most of it off before handing it over to my wife.

I did a backup of my data to an external hard drive, so I do have it available to me, but it’s still not the same.

Amazing how reliable I have become on my laptop for just about every part of my computing needs.

I’ll still find time to blog and do my personal work. But I will be missing my Mac, even if it’s not gone for that long.

Water Leakage

martymankins — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:44:23 +0000

The fun of living in an older house [sorry Beth... another complaint] comes with all sorts of regular challenges. For example, plumbing issues.

We woke up Monday morning to this:

Out In The Street

The main water line for our house is out in the street. Not in the middle of the road, but cars drive over it on a regular basis. So that constant pounding over layers of asphalt and dirt takes a toll on 50 year old pipes in the ground.

This happened to us two years ago as well. So we discussed the options with our city water department. Here’s what’s on the table, er.. in the pipeline:

Option 1) Move the water meter to a place closer to our house and away from the road.
Option 2) Fix the current leak and then revisit the moving of the meter to next year.

Option 1 is very costly right up front. The city will pay for the cost to move the meter, but we have to change the location of where the water line is coming into our house. That’s our expense. Currently, it’s about $5,000 to move that, just to meet where the city relocates their line.

Option 2 still requires us to move the line, but it buys us some time to come up with the money or figure out another option [digging the trench ourselves, only needing a plumber to come out and do all of the pipe connecting work.]

We chose Option 2, which the city was also happy about [I'm sure their annual budget is getting pretty tight by this time of the year]. This is what the road and the area near the water main looks like after the repair:

the orange cones help keep the cars off the newly-repaired leak

Yep, that’s my scooter in the background to the left

A closeup view of the road dug up and repaired

Until Next Year

So we are good to go for now, only being water-challenged for a couple of days. Guess I need to start getting prepared to dig a 60 foot trench next year. All in the name of saving a few thousand dollars. Yay me!

Scooter Sunday #14

martymankins — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:20:50 +0000

It’s back.

Returned, but….

Two weeks to the day, I got my scooter back from being repaired. If you remember from two weeks ago, I talked about how the service department at Honda World Salt Lake screwed up my scooter. They repaired it and covered the costs, but it took them almost two weeks to order ONE part. ONE FUCKING PART! How did they ship that… Pony Express? Obviously I was low on the list of priority. During that time, I spent an extra $110 in gas for my car that I was hoping to have saved due to the nice weather that welcomed a daily scooter ride to work.

On top of all this, I had asked them to clean the burnt brake dust and residue that was formed on my front rim from the damage. So getting the scooter back on Thursday, I immediately checked it out, seeing that nothing was done or touched in the two weeks my scooter sat. So I inquired, “The front rim still has the brake residue on it. I thought that was going to get cleaned off.” Their response was, “We didn’t have enough time to get to that.”

Same picture because nothing was changed

Didn’t have enough time? WTF? The scooter sat for 12 days before someone touched it. One of the techs couldn’t have taken 15 minutes with some cleaner and at least make an attempt to try to please a pissed off customer? EPIC FAIL. I am now a former customer that is looking for another service department that will treat a customer with both respect and urgency.

Throughout this whole ordeal, I have learned a few things:

Don’t trust the official Honda service department to fix things as they should.

Asking for something simple in today’s world means “We really don’t plan on doing anything extra for you, the paying customer.”

Inspect everything before leaving the shop to make sure nothing got fucked up in the process

I really missed my scooter

But the scooter is now home and is getting ridden for every possible trip I take around town.

The Police

For anyone that is a fan of 80′s music, you will remember the band The Police. After an almost 25 year absence to the state of Utah, they made their return to the state for a concert on Saturday night as part of their reunion tour, which started in May 2007.

My daughter and I saw them in Denver last June, during one of the first few performances. It was an incredible show and we enjoyed their over 2 hour set. So we obviously wanted to go see them again (for this show, she went with her mother – I took my wife and step daughter).

Photo taken by Keith Johnson, Deseret News

And while they sounded really good and their performance was top notch, their set list was cut short by a few songs… actually, about 30 minutes worth of classic tunes — “Spirits in the Material World” “Canary in a Coal Mine” “Bring on the Night” “Synchronicity II” — all songs they performed during the first leg of the tour last year.

I guess in the winding down of this tour and the conclusion of them performing together [their final show is August 7th at Madison Square Garden in NYC], they are using the boilerplate option to get through these last 13 shows. Even with this, I still enjoyed seeing them live again [This was my 3rd time seeing them live - the first being in September 1983] and will be glad that my family got to see them live, too.

Next Time on BL

So that’s all for now. My next post will be my review of The Dark Knight, which we will be going to see on Monday night. Until then, thanks for stopping by.

Scooter Sunday #12

martymankins — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:15:48 +0000

There’s something different about this week’s Scooter Sunday. Can you spot what’s missing from the photo below?

Yep. No scooter. And it’s not in it’s shed, either. Let me tell you a sad tale. No, it’s ~~stolen~~ not that sad. But if you know how much I love my scooter, you may need a tissue.

Time for a Check Up

So last week, I took my scooter in for it’s 1200 mile check up. I did the 600 mile check up last year and want to keep this as properly maintained as I can. With the 4th of July weekend backlog the service department had on ATVs and motorcycles, it took almost two days for them to complete the work on my scooter.

Time for regular maintenance

Thursday, I got a call around noon that my scooter was ready. I left work, drove to Honda World in Sandy, parked my car, paid my bill, hop on my scooter and ride.

Not Quite Right

As I’m driving down the road, something seems different. I notice the brakes are a bit tightened up, but that’s always the adjustments they do. I get within half a mile from home, and the scooter slows down to under 10 mph. I can’t go any faster. I stop the scooter, get off and notice smoke coming from the front wheel.

That dark brown icky stuff is not normal

I get back on, start it up and finish riding the block to my house. As I was pulling into my driveway, I saw that the speedometer was not working. I’m fucking pissed. I spent two days without my scooter, and now there’s something seriously wrong. I call up the service department and they tell me to drive it back down to them.

I try to push the scooter and can’t. The front wheel is locked tight and won’t move. I go into the house and get a wrench and loosen up the front brake. It moves! It then occurs to me what happened: they tightened the front brakes way more than they should have. And the heat from the brakes must have melted the speedometer part inside the front wheel. Grease is now dripping down on the ground. Getting more pissed off by the minute. I grab some towels to clean up the grease and make sure the scooter is operational and drive it back down to the service guys.

They take it in the shop and make the exact same assessment that I did 15 minutes earlier. They apologize and tell me it’s a week to order a new speedometer cable and related parts. They are covering all of it because they fucked up and should have road tested it. But at this point, I just want to make sure it’s fixed right so I can enjoy my rides again. With the weather nice and gas at $4.20 a gallon, I am missing my scooter a lot right now.

4th of July

With the sadness surrounding my scooter, there’s only two things that can help take my mind off of this: fireworks and alcohol. Now I know what you are thinking: you should not mix those two as dangerous things can happen when drunk people are running around yelling “Woo Hoo!” while holding a BBQ lighter and a brick of firecrackers. But there were no fireworks allowed at Bear Lake. So it was just alcohol.

80% sober at the time this photo was taken

Seriously though, we had lots of fun. Our good friends Kris & Karen and Jaime & Ryan invited us. There were a few boats, which we went out on the lake the next day. For the almost 30 hours we were there, it did wonders for taking my mind off my scooter.

So hopefully, by next week’s Scooter Sunday, I’ll have my scooter back and can be back on the road having fun and saving gas.