Some Blog Site

This is not that interesting of a story, but I’m putting it on the internet in case someone else has a similar problem and can’t find the answer on the internet like I couldn’t. But now they can, because the answer is here.

Little backstory: the power went out in our barn. Said barn has its own electric meter. I checked all the circuit breakers, even the main, and went so far as to put a voltmeter on the main connection before the breaker box, so straight from the meter, and it showed no power.

So I was fairly sure the problem was from the power company. I looked at the meter and the meter was displaying things (a few things in rotation), but mostly zeroes and then this cryptic phrase: “con off”, or more correctly “COn OFF”

Not quite sure what that meant, I tried to look up the user manual for the meter, a type C2SOD smart power meter. I found some information but nothing that described the things it was displaying.

I went to the house to compare the barn meter to the house meter, since the house had power. The house meter was not displaying “con off”. So I concluded something is wrong with the barn meter (or power line).

I called the power company to report a problem. They are too fancy for their own good, and when I pressed the number to indicate I had a power outage, they matched my number to an address and said “thank you, your power outage has been reported for this address” and then the call was over.

I then got a text a few minutes later confirming my outage report. Then, more than a few minutes but less than a few hours later, I got a text saying they ran their diagnostics and my address has power so they have closed the ticket.

I was thinking “If you just let me talk to someone in the first place, it would save us both time”. Because then I had to click the link that said “I still have a problem” and then it let me enter a comment.

I took that opportunity to let them know I checked the voltage and that the meter was saying “con off”. Whoever got that note knew enough to check something else, maybe they ran the advanced diagnostics on the line not just the standard diagnostics, and a little while later I got a text that they agreed there was a problem.

And then shortly afterwards (still the same day) I got a text saying power was restored and the issue was “equipment failure”. I never saw anyone come to the barn. I wasn’t there the whole time either, but the meter didn’t look brand new after it was fixed so my guess is they just remotely reset the smart meter. Just like any other computer – turn it off and turn it on and it works again.

Anyway, if you have a power outage and your meter reads “COn OFF” then the problem is with your meter so go ahead and tell the electric company it’s their issue.

I happened to be reading the back of the cereal box during a recent breakfast, and it had some activities to try.

So I tried them, and I was particularly disappointed with the word challenge. Here is the challenge. You try it and see what you think.

Here are the base words: spoon, cloth, milk, light, break, wash, berry, table, straw, star, blue, cloth, man, fast.

And they want to know how many words you can crunch together to make a new word.

My answer: 14, but that uses each base word only once. My new word is lightmilkclothbreakwashberrytablestrawstarbluefastclothman. It sounds like a superhero of some sort. And it reminds me of some German words.

They did give a hint that some words may be used more than once. I think they didn’t notice they put cloth in there twice. And if I can repeat words, then the answer to how many words I can crunch together to make a new word is “infinite”.

But I think that’s not what they meant. They’re looking for compound words, with just two halves. So the question should have been “How many new compound words can you make by crunching together these words?”

In that case, my answer is 149. That’s with 13 total words (I removed the duplicate “cloth” because it wouldn’t make any unique combinations), so each word can make 12 compound words when combined with the 12 other words. Do that 13 times, and you get 156 total words.

Then I added one more because I can make “clothcloth” as a new compound word. So up to 157.

Then I have to remove existing words, because the question was how many new words I can make. So there were 8 existing words like strawberry and breakfast, that brings the 157 down to 149.

Let’s see what the cereal box says the answer is.

Nope, they say the answer is 8. That makes no sense. They said they wanted new words, and the answer is only old words.

Well I like my new words, such as washtable and fastlight and clothberry.

I happened to be reading the back of the cereal box during a recent breakfast, and it had some activities to try.

So I tried them, and I was particularly disappointed with the math challenge. Here is the challenge. You try it and see what you think.

It starts off easy enough: raspberry plus raspberry equals 4, so 4/2 = raspberry, thus raspberry = 2.

Then I skipped ahead to raspberry plus spoon equals 12, so 2+spoon = 12, thus spoon = 10

Similar logic with the last clue gave me strawberry = 3

Then we have two of the three variables for the second clue, so we can solve for blueberry = 6

So that gives us all the items we need for the final equation, to find the answer they want.

The first cluster of 3 fruits is a mystery, but we can solve the rest and come back to that. So strawberry plus spoon plus blueberry equals 19. Now all we need to do is add that to the fruit cluster.

The fruit cluster is a blueberry and raspberry and spoon clumped together, with no math operation involved. What is the math operation in this case?

Usually, if you put numbers together with no operator, that means multiply, like (10)(6)(2). So that would give the clump the value of 120, so the answer would be 120+19 = 139

But putting them together could also just be concatenating the numbers, so 6102, which would make the answer 6121.

Let’s check if the answer is either 139 or 6121.

Nope, they say the answer is 37. That makes no sense. Let’s see if we can work backwards and figure out what math operation the fruit cluster is.

The clump must be 37-19 = 18.

Oh, if they want you to add the numbers together, they put a plus sign between the symbols. Or they just lump them together with no operators. That was not intuitive, because they already established the plus sign means add. Switching away from that, but then keeping it too, with no instructions or clues for what that means, makes it frustrating.

For all the talk I’ve heard over the years about how Google hires the brightest and best talent, that apparently doesn’t mean for all aspects of the business. Or maybe they’ve grown too big and have lowered their standards.

I got this email from them, a standard form email, so I’m sure thousands of people got the same email. Which also means it should have been reviewed by someone other than just the one person who typed it up. At least I assume that’s standard practice for most places – an official communication to customers shouldn’t be thought up and sent out by one person.

In reality, it’s not a big deal. I think whoever gets the email will understand what Google meant. But it’s not like it’s an ambiguous term – “frequency” has a specific meaning, especially to electrical engineers, but even non-engineers know that a higher frequency means something happens more often.

It’s not like “turn up the air conditioning” which can get a response of “wait, do you want it warmer or colder?” because “up” can apply to the temperature setting or the fan speed or they actually want the temperature to do down. But I don’t know how you could take the term “frequency” as anything but frequency.

Their problem is that they mixed units. The numbers are in time but their description is in frequency, which is inverse time. So when they say “lowest frequency” it’s actually the highest frequency, but lowest time. And vice-versa.

Why they felt the need to use “frequency” instead of “time”, I’m not sure. They must have had guidance from the product team that told them to use “frequency”.

Note: see the bottom of this post for the lesson.

The battery in Some Wife’s iPhone was getting old, and it no longer could get her through the day without needing to be recharged. The battery health-o-meter indicated it was not so healthy anymore, confirming with numbers what we already knew.

So, having replaced batteries in iPhones of generation 4, 5, 6, and 7, I figured I could handle an iPhone 10. Excuse me, iPhone X.

I looked at the repair instructions, and they looked about the same as before, so I ordered a new battery.

The instructions say to take apart the iPhone in the usual way – take the screws out, soften the glue, and carefully pry the screen away from the housing.

The instructions emphasize to be extra careful not to pry the screen from its frame, but make sure to pry the screen and frame together away from the housing.

I wondered how to know if I’m prying the screen only (bad) or screen and frame. I found out the hard way.

I thought the screen came away a little too easily, and after I had separated about 3/4 of it, that’s when part of the frame came away from the housing and I saw the difference.

It turns out I had been doing the bad thing and separating the screen from itself.

Argh.

I quickly pried the frame out from the housing and tried to keep the screen and frame together as much as possible. I did end up getting the screen and frame back together, and both off the rest of the phone, but I wondered what effects that might have had.

The rest of the battery replacement procedure went okay, not perfect but it got done.

In the course of previous battery replacements, I have learned to turn the phone on after everything is connected but before I screw it back together. One of my earlier attempts I had mis-connected something, so I had to take it back apart and re-fix it. It saves time and effort to test it slightly earlier in the process, rather than waiting until the very end.

So that’s what I did with this phone. After I had all the electrical connections back together, but the screen not in place, I turned on the phone.

In previous repairs, I saw the Apple logo appear on the screen and I knew everything was fine, so then I’d turn the phone back off, screw everything down, and then turn it on and then I could be done.

But with this phone, when I turned it on, the screen was blank. No change. But the phone made noises that told me it was on, which lead me to conclude that I broke the screen during the repair process.

Now the problem was that this was Some Wife’s phone, and both she and I were expecting the repair to be done that evening. That was not a fun thing to do – come back into the room and break the news to her that she no longer has a functioning phone.

But she took it in stride, and we came up with a backup plan to borrow Alpha’s backup phone (an iPhone 7) that he no longer used but still had around. One sim card swap later, and she had a phone. But it had none of her apps and none of her contacts, so it was a challenge over the next couple of days when a text would come in with just a number listed, to see if she could figure out who it was without responding back “who are you?”

Anyway, the day after I broke her phone, I told her “good news, you get to get a new phone”. Or at least new to her. Actual new phones are ridiculously expensive, so we upgraded her to an iPhone 12, which was still more money that I had planned for a simple battery repair, but much better than a phone that costs as much as my car did.

In the meantime, before we settled on which exact phone, I ordered a replacement screen for the iPhone X. She wanted to be able to get a bunch of info off the old phone, and it was cheaper than a used iPhone X, so we’d still come out ahead by having an iPhone X with a new battery.

I thought I had turned off the broken phone, but I found out it was on when one of her alarms went off. The touch part of the screen was working fine, but I couldn’t see where to turn off the alarm, so I tapped a couple of times where the Stop button should have been and got it to turn off.

The replacement screen came in about the same time as her newer phone, so while she was setting up the phone, I was trying to get the screen working on the old one.

The repair went smoothly, except when everything was connected, I turned on the phone, and it didn’t work. I disconnected the cables and put them together again. Still nothing.

I thought I must have damaged a connector or something in the process. With nothing else left to try, I decided to just put everything back together and wait until tomorrow to figure out what to do.

After I put the screen fully in place and screwed it down, it worked.

At first I was excited and relieved. But then it got me thinking, and I bet there was nothing wrong with the old screen. I could have tested it by taking the new screen off and putting the old one back on, but at that point I didn’t want to mess with anything. But I’m about 80% confident it would have worked.

Lesson for iPhone Battery Replacements
From what I can tell, the new style (and I don’t know when it changed, but somewhere between iPhone 7 and X) is to have grounding pads for the screen be separate contacts at the bottom of the screen, not in the cable connector. So the screen isn’t fully electrically connected until it is fully physically installed. So you cannot test the repairs with the screen slightly off the phone, even just a little bit.

We live in a rural setting, rural enough that we don’t get good cell phone reception. After a while of dropping calls or just not being able to make calls, Some Wife discovered that AT&T will give you a cell phone signal thingy.

It’s not a booster, it’s your very own mini cell tower, in the comfort of your own home. And if their records show you drop enough calls at your house, they’ll send it to you for free.

I called, and explained the situation, and I also explained that we don’t have home internet. At that time, our home internet was just using our cell phones as mobile hotspots. (It’s slightly better now, we have a dedicated mobile hotspot.)

The customer service rep either didn’t understand what the microcell does, or they didn’t care about that part. Either way, AT&T shipped us a free microcell, to help us with our cell phone service.

For those of you not familiar with the microcell, it connects to your home internet and gives you cell service through that. Our problem was that our home internet was from the cell service. It would have been an infinite loop of the cell signal going through the microcell that was going through the cell signal.

I never even tried to set it up. But their customer service was friendly.

Based on recent events involving power tools in the barn not working because critters chewed on the cords, today I am listing for you the worst animals to have on your property.

These are listed in order, with the first animal being the worst (most annoying).

• Woodchuck : They seem to have a knack for knowing which items near them are the most important to humans and then damaging them. Such as ignoring the cheaper 25′ extension cord and chewing through only the 100′ extension cord. And digging under the concrete slab floor. And digging behind the car tire so the car gets stuck when I try to move it and I have to get another vehicle to pull it out of the very small ditch. And so on.
• Deer : Deer are very damaging, but only to plants. Especially fruit trees. They are high on this list because their physical range requires so much work to defend against. You can’t just put up any old fence, it has to be high and sturdy.
• Chipmunk : These little guys like to dig. Whether it’s under my brick walkway or through the flowers I just planted, they get just about everywhere. I expect about a 10% loss of any flowers planted because chipmunks can’t help but go through new dirt (they seem attracted to freshly-dug dirt) and they don’t put back any roots they may unearth in the process.
• Raccoon : These are not as annoying as chipmunks – although it was a close call – because they are easier to get. Chipmunks are too small and fast. Raccoons do damage property, but there are fewer of them and they are large and slow. If I kept animals, such as chickens, I would put raccoons above chipmunks, since I know they go after small farmyard animals.
• Canada Goose : Noisy and messy and mean. They don’t specifically damage property like the critters I’ve listed so far, but they could damage you if you let them get settled and they start feeling territorial.
• Mouse : Messy, and they chew holes in things. Not a big deal, except we have a corn stove. I have to keep a tight lid on the corn storage, otherwise we end up finding little stores of corn in weird places, like in someone’s hockey skate that apparently looked inviting to a mouse to use as his pantry.

Note that this list is tailored to the Midwest. I’m sure there are worse things to have milling about the grounds in other places, such as mountain lions or chimpanzees.

Also note that I do not mind having skunks around at all. They avoid people and stay away from my stuff. I’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve run into skunks 3 times in my life, and each time the skunk had skedaddled out of sight by the time I realized it was a skunk and not a large cat.