Angryman, All dead, Holy roller, Loud, Interruptus, Matthew

So I left work early to meet the Comcast repair guy at home.  Once again to their credit, by utilizing the Comcast account app I was able to get an arrival window that was within 15 minutes of being accurate.  The Haitian repair tech didn’t seem to be in a great mood from the start.  When I opened the attic crawl space he wasn’t happy it was so hot.  When he saw the way the original installers handled the wiring he was really unhappy.  He was complaining nearly non-stop about how lazy they were and how they don’t do things as they are supposed to.

Eventually he settled down.  He determined that what I suspected was the case, the powered splitter in the attic was defective.  In addition to replacing the splitter he also changed the wiring around to whatever the proper configuration is supposed to be.  In total he was there for less than an hour.  It was nice to have cable tv up and running although we could have survived with streaming content indefinitely.

So I did some more investigation of my AV equipment after the guy left.  As I feared, EVERYTHING that was connected to the tv via HDMI was f’d up.  That list includes the blu-ray player, the satellite receiver, the Xbox 360, an HDMI hub, the X1 DVR and the tv itself.  I was able to get a free replacement DirecTV satellite receiver without even picking up the phone, able to complete the transaction via online chat session.  The satellite box was actually unplugged from power at the time of the incident but got smoked anyway via the HDMI cable.  The blu-ray will come out of my pocket.  The Phillips unit that I had hooked up was sort of shitty anyway so it doesn’t break my heart to replace it.  The 360 has not been used this year so I just ripped it all out with no plans to replace it.  My days of console gaming are pretty far behind me at this point.

Cindy had to grab some groceries.  She came up with a good idea where I would go with her out to the Ave Maria Publix where I could ride my Ninebot while she shopped.  I had a good time putting more than four and a half miles on the wheel around the town/campus.  I explored areas I had never seen before.  As usual I got a large amount of head turns and confused looks from bystanders that never saw a person riding an electric unicycle before.

On the ride home from the grocery store Cindy commented on the unusual amount of road noise coming from what appeared to be the front passenger side of the car.  I had noticed the noise for the last few days.  I had actually taken a look at that tire to see if it was abnormally worn or if it had something stuck in it that could possibly make the noise.  The tire looked fine.  My next idea was the wheel bearing was going bad, something that would make sense considering the Prius is rapidly closing in on 200,000 miles.

When I got home I looked online and saw front wheel bearings going bad on a Prius are not an unusual thing.  I also watched a video of a home mechanic outlining the replacement procedure.  It is in my wheel house of capability except that the bearing/hub assembly needs to be pressed on/off in some cases which would require a garage anyway.  I would feel better having an actual mechanic doing the work.  I called the garage I have used for some other repairs.  They said I could buy the part and they would do the work for about $200 which isn’t bad.  I did a somewhat risky move, buying the part online this morning, gambling that my diagnosis is correct.

Cindy and I watched some of the VP debate last night.  There was a lot of interrupting of each other, not only by the two candidates but also by the attractive female moderator who was trying very hard to keep the candidates in line and on topic.  Despite her attempts, most of what I saw was the two men stepping all over each other.  Of course I thought Tim Kaine came off better with Mike Pence repeatedly not directly answering most questions presented to him and trying to redirect away from any questions asking him to defend various Trump statements and actions.  I doubt the VP debate ever makes up a voter’s mind on their ultimate decision but I guess it’s a necessary evil.

So the east coast of Florida is now moving into full fledged panic mode with the prospect of Hurricane Matthew swinging right by the coastline.  You would think that staying just off the coast would be a good thing but that allows the eye of the storm to stay over it’s power source, warm water which is not a good thing.  Our area is right outside the edge of the danger zone although we certainly will see considerable effects from the storm.  Even a slight shift to the west could make the impact to Florida much, much worse.  I am not the panicking type so I will be monitoring the storm but not obsessing over it.  I do have some east cost friends that I of course hope come out of the storm with minimal impact.