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Sunday, October 1, 2023

The Fake Heroes Meme Strikes Again

Having some minor but annoying technical difficulties here today; the UPS for these computers has intermittently given off some sort of warning buzzer.  The display appears to show an "X" through what looks to be a battery.  Battery dead?  Not charging?  Gone to find itself with a tribe of nymphomaniac leprechauns?  Don't know.  An additional puzzle is that it seemed to coincide with an oddity we've had with our dishwasher for a few weeks, where it changes the "normal" 1 hr 52 minute cycle to last closer to 2 hrs 50 minutes, but the dishwasher thing has happened many times and only this one time did it coincide with UPS yelling at us. 

The computer issue makes me want to do a repost of something that's just so pathetic it's a cliche': last night's "eleventh hour" signing of a way to avoid shutting down the government. It just comes across as brinkmanship - delaying the resolution of a short term fix to the last minute to look like heroes.  

The very last line in this cartoon from VirtualShackles.com (which I've used multiple times) sums it up perfectly.  Paraphrasing to fit the situation  "Just sit on the agreement a bit longer so we look like heroes."  (VirtualShackles.com appears to be gone.  I tried to go there years ago and tonight; all I get is a notice that the domain name is for sale.  Well, the cartoon is dated 2011, after all.)

Let's be honest about this.  The other way of saying "government shutdown" is "paid vacation" for the lucky Fed.gov 's nonessential workers.  The longest government shutdown ever was 35 days between December of '18 and January of '19, under President Trump.  True, the essential workers had to work without pay until the deal was made before their pay could be issued and that could have been tough.  The nonessential workers were free to get a replacement job to get some additional income but had to wait for the shutdown to be over to get their back pay, too.

The thing they passed apparently has money for Ukraine and just keeps all the crap flowing.  I just see this cartoon mentally whenever I hear about avoiding a government shutdown, debt ceiling or such stories.  



9 comments:

  1. Your UPS is telling you it's internal battery is on the verge of failure. They don't last forever. Plan accordingly.

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    1. That's what I thought was going on. It has been temporarily pulled from service, after the alarm went off at midnight last night. This will be the third or fourth battery in this one, so it may be time to replace the whole thing. Modern, lead-free solders don't last forever, either.

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    2. "Modern, lead-free solders don't last forever, either"

      Nor electrolytic capacitors!

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  2. As to the other issue, check out your outlets and switches on the outside of the house. One of them going bad can make your whole house act weird. Been there, done that.

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  3. Don't know if you'd find this of interest, but one guy had his UPS battery going bad and he replaced it with a lawn tractor battery.

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    1. I use car deep-cycle batteries for the "booster pack", on an external trickle charger. LOTS more run time.

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  4. As for the dishwasher, check the heating element in the bottom of the machine. If it can't heat the water, it takes longer to clean. Mine had a white area on it that I think indicated a break in the element.

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  5. Most Computer grade UPS use sealed lead acid cells. I seem to replace the cells in my Cyberpower 1500 units every 6 years or so. Thats 2 each 9 AH VRLA types. Some of my UPS units are pushing 15 yrs, so I expect to either re-cap them or junk them when they fail, depending on my work load. I have 5 UPS units in service powering PC’s and network eqpt in my home. They are needed in Florida Flash and Flicker fed South Florida. I say that in jest as FPL has made great strides to eliminate outages by tree trimming and other reliability improvements. But summer lightning cant be eliminated, and does create issues for all our electronics.

    And theres the lightning rod I use to mount my HF Yagi. But thats for another day.

    Full disclosure I did work for FPL and retired after a long illness.

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    1. I did some looking for papers around here that might say how old that UPS is, and found APC stopped making this model in 2012. I have a record of having bought this battery pack in 2020, so since that's 8 years after they stopped making them, I guessing it's not the first replacement battery pack but the second replacement that has been in it. Maybe the UPS itself is from '10. After pondering and discussing we decided to replace the whole thing rather than put another battery in it.

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