More laser discovery

As I stood in my little workshop, waiting for glue to set on the fake Crocs from which the puppy removed significant portions, I noticed the laser portion of my printer dissection. I assumed it would need to be broken open, but now picked it up and saw it had four little plastic tabs – piece of cake!

And very cool! The laser is at the arrow on the right. The hexagonal disk has mirrored edges, and is attached to a motor. The bizarrely-shaped plastic lens is obviously very carefully designed to very precisely deliver incredibly tiny dots at incredibly high speed. The arrow on the left points to a tiny mirror whose purpose remains a mystery to me. Amazing technology.

The plastic bits on the right represent a slightly less amazing technology. I was unable to plug in a Schuko plug to an adaptor (maybe the very one labelled C in this post from 2012). I thought I’d take it apart, which it turns out involved breaking it, but the stuck safety gate shown here dropped out. So I glued the broken parts back together, and voilà – another silly little project done.

Catching up

It’s been over a week since I last posted, about dissecting a dead laser printer and discovering that it yielded several pounds of recyclable plastic. Today I was cleaning out files and found a photo taken a month ago.

Some low-functioning individual decided a more appropriate way to dispose of a broken printer would be to take it 180 meters from the nearest dwellings, and dump it in a field.

Meanwhile, doing a bit of spring cleaning – it’s amazing how much grows around the edges of those concrete plumbing junction box lids – I found that ants had been using this unused one as a dumping ground for sand as they made their nest under the patio. All the sand in the wheelbarrow came from that box, which means it probably came from below the wheelbarrow. Great!

After removing all the sand I could, I flushed the rest with the 3/4″ hose attached to our well. (Unfortunately not potable water.) “Someone” who saw the hose “come to life” decided it needed to be taught who’s in charge here. He managed to wrap it around this little orange tree three times, tightly.

Meanwhile “there’s something happening here” in the little park near the intendencia in Atlántida. And, as is to be expected, what it is ain’t exactly clear. Huge eucalyptus and pine trees cut down, all the tile torn up, and – nothing. The eucalyptus stump will send up new shoots; the pine in the foreground won’t.

The real question: will whatever they’re doing be complete in three months, when the summer season starts?

Stay tuned….

Laser printer dissection

You may have read my account about dissecting the dead kitchen scale, and maybe thought well, that’s a silly thing to do. And maybe you’re right.

I had pulled my wife’s desk back so I could work on a window, and a certain dog who is not allowed upstairs apparently got upstairs while we were out, went to look out the window, got tangled in wires, and pulled a computer and laser printer from the desk. I immediately ran diagnostics on the computer (a Mac Mini) and it seemed to be fine. The 9 year old printer, on the other hand, wasn’t working right at all.

The local computer place techie looked at it, identified one part was cracked and basically not replaceable. So I had two challenges: 1) find another printer, and 2) take this one completely apart without breaking anything.

68 screws, 17 springs, and 12 gears later, it was done! The heating element (black and red rollers to the left) was the single most difficult challenge. Amazing the ingenuity that goes into putting pieces together – little tabs, rotate this, pry back that….

The number of springs surprised me. I did break a couple of small pieces of plastic, but on purpose to save time, not because I couldn’t figure out their assembly.

In addition to admiring the design and engineering wizardry, I can hardly imagine how they created the incredibly intricate molded plastic parts.

As with the kitchen scale, there’s nothing particularly useful for other projects, though I’ll save some of the bits of wire and springs, and chuck the rest.

But wait! I see at the large plastic pieces are identified as ABS for recycling (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, but you knew that). So in addition to having a fun hour or so, disassembling the printer allows for recycling at least some of it (bits of aluminum as well) that otherwise would have gone to a landfill.

And oh by the way, I found no evidence of a crack or break in the part the techie indicated. But it doesn’t matter: the printer no longer worked, and wasn’t about to get fixed.

The numbers

This is what I saw on our refrigerator yesterday morning. 66-44-77-66. Struck me as rather unusual, but then it’s been happening a lot lately: glancing at the clock at 11:11 or 15:15. I even glanced at the electronic odometer in the new car a few weeks ago to find it was the same as the time on the clock.

Anyway, I never imagined I’d live in a place where I would consider 60% relative humidity “dry,” but Uruguay is that place. As you might surmise from my note on the AcuWRONG device in the photo, the accurate humidity reading is actually 12% more.

Today is again completely overcast and windy. I’ve got the wood stove cranked up, even though for economic reasons (lower electrical rates during the day) it makes more sense to use the electric “split” (heat/AC) unit. The more dry heat we can get today, the better!

And I think back to wood stoves up north with cast iron kettles boiling water on top for humidity – nooooooo!

Later that day: get in car after walking dog, glance at clock….

Santa Rosa 2018

Apparently the Santa Rosa storms have arrived. It’s dreary, and windy, and rainy. So perhaps appropriate to post photos I took a few days ago, on a beach walk, when I thought the weather was just awful, and rightly predicted that virtually no one else would be on the beach. (Hint: no blue sky today!)

dune walkway, Uruguay

This is the access board walkway I have shown many times in the past. Because of a “valley” walkway through the dunes to the beach, “they” built a board walkway. But “they” didn’t realize that, free of erosion, the dune would naturally build back to its original height, maybe 1.5 meters higher than the highest point of the walkway, making it the second choice for crossing the dunes. But it gets “better:” to the left (from this perspective), the new “valley” has now become so massive that it’s actually stripped away dunes from where they grew over the walkway. Great work by whoever “they” are (who BTW also budgeted zero for maintenance).

lifeguard shack, Uruguay

In the next town over (five blocks away), I am heartened to see that I am not the only one disgusted with the fishermen who leave behind their trash.

Using the formal (su instead of tu), graffiti implores one to take [away] your trash. And then, Mister Fish[erman] (a little confusing to me, since it seems to say pescada, whereas “fish” in this sense (literally caught) is pescado, care for the river. I have explained – but with over 1,000 posts, don’t easily find – that the Uruguayans consider this thing that others might reasonably call an ocean, having no flow nor other side, a river. In fact, an estuary. Whatever.

Anyway, I find the formal and polite nature of this message amusing. Perhaps explains why I found some of my stickers apparently scratched off trash containers, as if they were too norteamericano blunt.

But hey, they got the job done – sort of. More on that later.

Finally, success with Mercado Libre!

You may recall I have not had great success with Mercado Libre, the Craigslist of Latin America. But, learning about training dogs on Doggy Dan’s site, and watching Mocha run in front of cars, completely ignoring me, before I could get him on leash after our most recent beach walk, I decided I needed to train with a dog whistle. So I went to three vet shops in town, only to find none had one (interestingly, after being corrected by the first I asked for a chifle instead of silbato; I now learn that chifle really means a child’s plastic whistle, so silbato was the correct term after all?).

Anyway, nice day, riding around town on my bike, so what next? What about Mercado Libre?

Sure enough I found one for about USD 6- with free delivery. OK, why not? I ordered it (after inquiring if they actually had it). That was Monday. This morning, Wednesday, a moto pulled up in front of our house, beeping his horn for me to sign and take delivery.

¡Increible! The training involves developing a neural pattern where your dog is insanely happy to hear the whistle, because it means he’s getting a lovely morsel of hot dog or something equally scrumptious, and comes running like crazy. Which is exactly what Mocha did today when I again walked with Syd and dogs. Well, at least once.

A bit complicated, but after putting down Benji – who had attacked Jordan, Syd’s only male dog, twice, despite our efforts to ameliorate, after our absence because of Mocha’s broken leg — Mocha and I rejoined them further along the walk route, since Mocha needed more walk training, and the off-leash point from Syd and Gundy’s house usually involves a half dozen or more dogs, most loose. Ten minutes later Gundy found Jordan in their driveway, trembling. Apparently encountering Mocha in the place he last encountered and got beat up by Benji was all it took to create a flight response.

So today we started together from the house, and all went well. Until Jordy – who spends most of the walk prospecting for rabbits – didn’t make a cameo appearance halfway through. Syd was convinced he’d again bailed, but a few minutes later he appeared. I decided this deserved a reward, so called “Come, Jordy,” from ten meters. He did! I gave him a little pancho (hot dog) treat. Well, that was it for his sister Kiya (KEE-shah). She walked behind me, licking one hand, then the other. I finally found an excuse to reward her with a treat, but it was so interesting — neither the two sister dogs Sophia and Lorena nor the “sharp knife” Leah took any interest. Only Kiya: you’re giving my brother a treat — I don’t care WTF he’s done — and not me?

Ah, dogs. Ah, kids.

Windows

Earlier this week, a woman went door to door in our neighborhood, talking about a proposed project that sounded like it would make the large (1/3 of a block) round plaza near us much more attractive and interesting.

pamphlet for public improvements, Uruguay

There was a short window of time to vote for it, so we went today, curious about why there would be a vote for a single project. Yes or no? Turns out there were four different projects, and residents of Atlántida could vote for one. We got there with our IDs, waited for several people before us, then learned we needed a utility bill to prove our residence – last two lines of the blue part of the handout above, which I had simply spaced out. Simple: walk next door to ANTEL and ask for a free duplicado of our most recent phone bill.

I’ve only cast a vote once before in Uruguay, required because of country land ownership. That election was for the head of BPS, the social security system, if I recall. It involved going to the local high school, handwritten various this-and-that, taking an envelope into a room where I could privately chose and insert the “voting paper” for the candidate of my choice. Turns out there was exactly one candidate. I probably could have put it in torn in half, maybe negating my vote (fascinating subject BTW; I will have to return to it at some point), but eh: it was done.

Today was similar. The friendly lady behind the desk took my cédula (ID card), handed me a little slip of paper with four projects: our “Plaza Alondra” (which turns out means “lark,” as in the bird; I’d never heard it had a name before), a school sports facility, and two others I could neither figure out or particularly care about.

Then take a brown envelope out of the box in front of me, put my voting slip in it, tear off the end for her to register. The one I chose was fallado because it had no preprinted number. So I chose another, and all was good. After my other details, she entered the envelope number, then asked my age (why? Because for this election, you have to be over 14 to vote!), and handed me a blue envelope, into which to put the brown envelope. The blue envelope said something about “observed vote.” That then had to be folded in half to fit into the slot in the cardboard box, almost bulging full.

The process took several minutes per person, really laughably inefficient. But then I thought about voting in the Untied Snakes: here, a verified count and real recount is possible. There, it’s all as fictional as Disney World (to get a fascinating glimpse into the mechanism of electronic vote rigging in the Untied Snakes, check out this video: Fraction Magic).

So, several minutes of standing there waiting, watching a nearby unused computer display a generic screen saver for…

Windows XP in use at Uruguay government office, 2018

… Windows XP. Hang on here — didn’t support for Windows XP absolutely end a couple years ago? If networked, isn’t this computer susceptible to all kinds of hacking?

I didn’t think to angle the camera down, where, on the other side of the counter in front of us, were bound handwritten ledgers three inches thick. We both commented on how old they seemed. Who knows what’s in them, but chances are they won’t be hacked.

I wrote 5+ years ago about the Uruguayan education system and computers. I expect in 5-10 years you won’t see handwritten ledgers. I hope you also won’t see antiquated operating systems as well.

But I also expect then that, the amusement at the idea of handwritten ledgers will be accompanied by a nostalgia for a time when information was at least a little difficult to retrieve.

Mocha, then and now

Mocha today, running in the country.

Below are the x-rays of Mocha’s right thigh bone on May 1, less than four months ago.

Amazingly, the surgeon first cut into the thigh to align the bones, then inserted a pin the length of the femur, from the hip. We had our work cut out for us, keeping Mocha from playing with Benji. The pin had to stay in at least five weeks. After two weeks, the vet explained that Mocha hurt after being active from the pin rubbing the skin from beneath. He also told us that if the pin broke the surface, he would have to remove it, ready or not (oh shit!). Happily, Mocha made it to five weeks, and gradually started putting weight on the leg.

The cost of the surgery, including boarding a couple nights and all followups? 12,000 pesos, or about USD 415. No complaints!

What happened: on our way to walk with Syd and dogs, Mocha jumped or fell out the window. We had just gotten off the highway, thankfully, and I wasn’t going very fast. Just a sudden terrified shrieking, and there’s Mocha in the grass on the side of the road behind us. A friend who returned to the States for a while had generously loaned us his car for two months (I did spend USD 800 on repairs, but still cheaper than renting!) until we could find something to replace the Meriva. Unlike the Meriva, which had a child-safety switch well protected from casual switching, the borrowed car (also a Chevy) had a button near the window controls that was easily deactivated accidentally. The dogs stood up on the window switch in back to stick their noses out the open top, the window went down, and one way or another Mocha went out. I had only been manually checking the rear window controls every other day or so.

But what happened next was quite amazing. Our friend Isabel, who grew up in Uruguay but spent 45 years in the U.S., had introduced us to a wonderful vet who works out of a rather primitive space in her home in nearby Marindia. She speaks no English, and generally we have no trouble communicating, but obviously in this case a translator would be helpful. As I pulled into the block where Gabriela lives, what did I see but Isabel 30 seconds ahead of me, parking! I carried her dog in for her, as well as Mocha. After a brief examination, Gabriela said we’d need x-rays. Maybe she could get a mobile x-ray service there, or I could take him somewhere, or get the mobile x-ray to our house. This was all sounding complicated. For some reason, Isabel called a local vet, chatted a minute or two, hung up and said, “The mobile x-ray service will be at SAV in Atlántida in ten minutes. Take him there. There are four dogs ahead of you.”

Isabel arranged an appointment with the vet surgeon, and went with me every time (25 minutes toward Montevideo, in Shangrilá, near where we helped out the dog lady). Turns out not only did we know the vet from taking our dog Karma for x-rays years ago when he was nearer, but he was also a teacher of our neighbor, veterinarian Mariana, in the campo. And considered one of the three best veterinary surgeons in Uruguay.

I’m in no position to evaluate that. But seeing Mocha scampering around today, less than four months later, he obviously did a good job!

Taking down a tree

This is time of year, the sound of chain saws is quite common. But a couple days ago, I hadn’t figured out that something more interesting might be going on until my wife spotted a guy with a chainsaw high in a tree. Only once have I topped a tree as part of felling it, but it was a pine, nowhere near this size, and swayed like crazy after the top fell. And I did it with a bow saw – no way was I climbing up a tree with a chain saw!

So here’s this guy up a 15-meter (I presume) ladder. All rather impressive. Listen for the guy on the ground yelling ahora! (now!).

I hired tree people a couple times when we lived in North Carolina. We had a lovely old spreading oak that needed thinning. The tree people – who worked at the Augusta National Golf Club – said they never use ladders, but only free climb, and also don’t wear spiked shoes, in order not to damage the trees. Quite spectacular to watch!

No worry about damaging the tree in this case. Also, being eucalyptus, it will regrow. And regrow.

Unlike the last time, this does not affect the sunshine we receive in our yard.

Well, duh.

Not long ago, we noticed our water bill beginning to skyrocket. We had plumbers here to install whole-house water filters outside. Checking their work, they pointed out a little spinning disk that I had never noticed in the middle of the water meter. It was going spin-spin stop-stop. We had a leak. After a bit of checking, it was clearly not their doing.

After digging a dozen holes along the length of the pipe going to the casita (little house behind), and finding no moisture, I called Enrique, a nice, mellow plumber from Peru. We determined there was a leak underneath the casita (i.e., impossible to fix), so he installed a cutoff valve. At length we discussed how to re-plumb outside, tap into the cold line on the exterior bathroom wall, all without breaking tile inside – we had a plan!

Alas, perhaps Enrique has been in Uruguay too long. I said I’d get back to him when the weather got a little more pleasant for outside work. This has been a mild winter, but it’s still winter. So, sun appears! And no response from Enrique to text messages; phone calls terminated before a chance to leave a message.

Well, we have other issues with the main house, so I sought the advice of Daniel, the guy who will be solving many of them. I had bought bricks, and was preparing to create a subterranean box around the valve.

This is how you do it, with mortar, and when you’ve built up to ground level there’s a nifty little concrete frame and cover that fir perfectly. But, I thought, if they need to re-route the tubes, maybe I shouldn’t do this first. I explained to Daniel the plan Enrique and I had come up with. He agreed with the overall plumbing plan, but hadn’t answered my question.

So I asked again. Well, he said, if we’re putting a new cutoff valve on the outside bathroom wall, we will simply remove this one.

(See title.)

Anyone need a few crappy Uruguayan bricks and a kilo of Portland cement?