Daily Archives: December 4, 2020
Naked At Hooters, Again . . .
On the way home today, I stopped off at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts to pick up a new gas cap for our Jeep. I’ve been getting an occasional (every 4 or 5 days, or so) Check Engine Light and when I checked the code with my phone I got a P0442 error code. This translates to a small leak in the Evaporator Emission Control System.
And the most obvious fault is a loose or faulty gas cap. So after I retightened the cap several times and the error came back, so I got a new cap this afternoon and then cleared the code, again with my phone.
And now we wait.
As to how I read and clear engine codes using my phone, I use this OBDII Bluetooth adapter,
OBD2 Bluetooth Diagnostic Scan Tool, Mini OBDII Scanner-Check Engine Light Code Reader
And even better the adapter is only about $12. Much cheaper and more versatile than a standard code reader.
It plugs into the OBDII Diagnostic Port under your dash. Then you just use the free Torque Android app to interrogate your engine computer and display a lot of details with screens like this.
And for only $4.95 you can upgrade to the Torque Pro version which gives you a lot more options, including CO2 emissions and Horsepower/Torque readings.
Check it out!
December 4, 2010
Linden Trees and Light Shows . . .
This morning got off to an early start when Jan and I left the lake house about 9:15 to drive back down to Fischer to pick up our friend Gina so she could meet up with everyone in Fredericksburg for lunch and get in some Landon time.
We got to Gina’s about 10:30, and then turned right around and headed for Fredericksburg, a little over an hour away.
When we got to Der Lindenbaum, our favorite German restaurant, the rest of the family was waiting at a table for us. We had a great meal of Weinerschnitzel, Jaeger Schnitzel, Bratwurst, German potato salad, sauerkraut, and their fantastic red cabbage.
It seems like we sat around talking all afternoon, but by 1:30 we were back on the road after a great meal. After dropping Gina off, I got back to the lake house about 4:30 just in time for a nap with my head on Jan’s lap. Just heavenly.
We thought we were going to see the Christmas Boat Parade on the lake along with some fireworks, but no lights, no boat, no fireworks. Apparently we were told the wrong date.
About 6 pm we headed out for dinner at Highlander Inn, a really good local buffet restaurant. Then after the meal, we walked next door to see Burnet’s Christmas Lights along Hamilton Creek. And this time Landon stayed awake and was fascinated by all the lights.
We got back to the house about 7:30 and settled in for the night.
Once again Chris and Piper played HALO on the Xbox for a while and then we watched our favorite Christmas movie “A Christmas Story”.
“Ralphie, you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing”
Tomorrow will end our short vacation here in the Texas Hill Country, and we’ll head back to Houston about 10 am or so, probably stopping off for lunch at Rudy’s Country BBQ in Austin on the way.
So more tomorrow from Dickinson Bayou.
Thought for the Day:’
Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.
December 4, 2012
Naked at Hooters . . .
For the first time since we got back to Houston, I did pretty much nothing today. No clients, no errands, no nothing. Just goofing off all day.
We did get a lot of rain off and on during the day which, along with the overcast skies, kept the temperature down which was nice.
Finally about 4:30 we headed up to the Hooters in Seabrook for supper. And luckily for me, it was Sexy Santa Tuesday, so the scenery was even better than normal. Gives a whole new meaning to who’s naughty or nice.
I always order my Hooters’ wings “naked”, which means there is no breading on the wings. Not only do I like the resulting crispy skin better, it saves a lot on calories. In this case, 10 “naked” wings have 660 calories, while regular wings have 1750 calories. A big difference!
I also order “all drums” instead of a mixture of drums and flappers. I just like them better.
Whenever we eat at Hooters I always remember my first visit to one. Somewhere around 2003, while I was working in Tech Support at the University of Houston – Clear Lake, we were eating at Floyd’s Cajun Seafood one night with Chris, Linda, and Piper. Piper, who was about 10 at the time, was eating onion rings, and holding one up, said, “These are good, but not as good as the ones at Hooters.”
Well, that brought the conversation to a grinding halt. What was our 10 year old granddaughter doing at Hooters? Turns out that she and her father sometimes had lunch there. She also said they had really good chicken wings.
Now we had never been there, so about a week later we all met at Hooters for dinner. I was surprised to see how many other families were there with kids too. In fact they had a whole line of high chairs stacked in the corner.
We’d been there about 15 minutes when from across the dining room I hear “Greg!”, and then a few seconds later I was getting a big hug and a big kiss on the top of my bald head from a Hooters girl. Of course Jan was very interested in this, and I could feel the cold wind coming my way from her direction.
But before I could really react, the girl said, “Cindy, come here! It’s Greg”. And soon I was getting another hug and kiss. By now it was getting down right frigid.
So I figured my marriage was probably over. But then I finally figured out who the two young ladies were.
It was Jennifer, and of course, Cindy, both students at the university where I worked. Jennifer was finishing up her Masters Degree in Business, and a few weeks before she had come to me one night (I normally worked the night shift there) with a defective ZIP disk.
With tears in her eyes she told me it held the only final copy of her masters thesis that had to be handed in a couple of days from now. From her description, I told her it sounded like her disk was suffering from the infamous “Click of Death”, and said that I had a ZIP drive that I had modified that might be able to read her disk. I told her that I would have to take it home, and that she should check back with me the next night.
Luckily, I was able to recover the data and transfer it to a CD for more permanent storage. That got me a big hug and a tearful thank you from her the next night.
Cindy, on the other hand, was getting ready to take her CPA exam, and the hard drive in her Toshiba laptop had died, taking all of her study materials with it. And when her friend Jennifer heard about Cindy’s problem, she sent her to me.
I asked her the name of the folders she needed recovered and took the laptop home with me. I was able to recover the data from her dead drive by using the old “freezer” trick. This is where you place the bad drive in the freezer for about an hour and then plug it into the computer as a slave drive, and then power up.
If you’re lucky you will be able to get data off the drive until it warms up. After that, it’s rinse and repeat, until you’ve got everything you need. And luckily for Cindy, it worked this time too.
As the girts explained this to Jan, I could detect a distinct warming in the atmosphere.
Luckily for me.
So remember the next time you’re at Hooters, your “dumb blonde” waitress may be better educated than you.
But Jan still got some revenge. After we left Hooters, we stopped off at Kroger’s for a few things. As we were walking around the store, I noticed people looking at me and smiling.
Figuring it probably wasn’t my good looks and sparkling personality, I checked my zipper. By then I noticed that Jan had a sly smile too. Finally she told me to go to the restroom and check the mirror.
And there on the top of my gleaming, bald head was the reminder of my Hooters’ hello – two large, bright-red lipstick prints.
Thought for the Day:
“Every nation has the government that it deserves.” – Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)
December 4, 2017
It’s Probably Eyetalian . . .
Work today was pretty slow with nothing much going on, so I just took care of a few loose ends, and printed up some new ‘FRAGILE’ labels for our shipments.
Or you may pronounce it ‘FRA JIL E’. It’s probably Eyetalian.
I did discover a problem this weekend that could have been catastrophic under the right (or wrong) circumstances. We were set up to use iDrive’s Linux Server Backup Service on our webserver Or at least I thought we were.
When I finally got a replacement password from iDrive this weekend, I logged in and found that our service had lapsed 3 weeks ago, due to non-payment. The credit card on file with them had expired and they had been sending notices to the previous IT guy’s email account, which I still don’t have access to. (or ‘to which I still don’t have access’, in case you’re one of those dangling prep people)
So I went ahead and paid the bill, $374.62, for 2.5TB of backup storage to get things going again. Glad I caught it before things went south.
Jan and I finally got through all the slides, ending up with about 180 slides to possibly have digitized. We’ll make another pass to look at them again before we make a final decision.
Some of the slides are from a family vacation we took out west the summer of 1964 when I was 15. One thing that was hard to believe were photos of us driving on four lane freeways in LA with only 3 cars ahead of us.
Another that was amazing was the fact that the adult General Admission to Disneyland was $1.60. No, that’s no a typo. Or for $4.95 you could get a 15 ride ticket book, that included your General Admission. Oh, and parking was a quarter.
The other thing is the fact that we visited places I don’t remember visiting, Virginia City, NV for one. We were going through the slides and suddenly a slide showing this building popped up.
I thought I remembered it from Virginia City when Jan and I visited there in 2013. And I was right. It’s the Fourth Ward School. Then a little later we came across a ‘Welcome to Virginia City‘ sign. So I guess we were there and I just forgot it.
Finally, presaging last weeks, The Big Bank Theory, a guy in Wales threw away an old laptop HD in 2013, forgetting that it contained 7,500 Bitcoins, worth about $4 million at that time. He had mined them in 2009, saving the HD when he trashed the laptop, figuring the Bitcoin price would rise. But then over the years he forgot about it and the HD got trashed as well.
Now it’s worth $108 million. Ouch
The Headline of the Day: Drunk monkey crashes boat party, downs bottle of vodka and makes underwater scuba escape.
Thought for the Day:
“You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out!”
