fine whine

Today I thought I stumbled across a brilliant idea. While killing some time this afternoon (more on this later) I sifted through the shelf-full of gadgets in the front of our house, idly picking up Jessica's step-counter with belt clip. At that moment I thought of another belt-clipped gadget, the Ericsson LX588 cell phone I've taken to carrying at least until SBC beats CoreComm up and installs our phone service. Why not, I wondered, combine the two devices and for once actually cram a new feature into cell phones to replace a gadget that people already have on their belts?

Well aware of the lack of original ideas these days, I did a quick Google search for "cell phone pedometer" and in fact turned up this this posting on whynot.net. Oh well. It's still a good idea, I just was beaten to it by at least four months.

So as I mentioned, I was killing time. Sometime between last evening and the night whilst the temperature was dropping some twenty-odd degrees a transformer in our furnace decided to shuffle its coils off their, er, mortal coils and burn out silently, leaving us, as it did, with no heat on the coldest night in May. My feeble, half awake attempts to flip all switches and trip all breakers was to no avail, and I had to break down and call up the HomeGard folks who have our home warranty. We called out All-Knight Heating, and after two hours of banging around in the basement and garage the repairman had replaced the dead transformer, installed a fuse inline, and took down my credit card information to pay the $100 deductible that I'd forgotten about. Not only had I forgotten the deductible, but I also failed to ask the guy where in the circuit the transformer had been, namely so I could figure out why none of the four breakers involved tripped instead of the transformer being fried. You know, since I had all those otherwise-wasted hours of circuit analysis in college... as if I were going to bust out some calculus on his ass. Now that's cold.