Oil Spill Recovery

Unloading the car in Cedar Rapids for ACRF I had the unpleasant discovery of an oil spill in the trunk. A spare bottle of oil leaked and the oil seeped into the trunk liner, stained a suitcase, a wooden folding chair and generally got things unpleasantly slick. The good part was that the one suitcase did its job and protected everything inside it and that the other suitcase was on top of the wooden folding chair and thus not affected. Also good is that the trunk liner did its job and nothing under it was coated with oil.

Since then I've been cleaning things up. The suitcase is still stained, but I have to really look for the discoloration. The chair seems to be no worse off than before. And the trunk liner is now de-oiled, though if it gets soaking wet it might lather up as I probably used an excess of detergent and the rinsing never seemed to quite finish.

I also now have a couple covered plastic tubs in the trunk to hold various things. Now any spill should be confined to one tub and finding things should be just a bit easier with less of a need to dig through everything. There's a bit more to do, but the major work has been done. I expect to have everything taken care of before I pack for Nodaway.

You Can't Get There From Here

Well, I can get there from here, but I have to go somewhere else first. But which somewhere else works out best?

I've been looking at how to get from Fairmont, MN to Red Oak, IA (which is near Nodaway and is big enough to have a motel) and I've gotten some interesting results. Yahoo Maps suggests I take highway 71 down through Iowa, but that's not a good for two reasons. First, it's a two lane road that goes through many towns that slow things down and second the bit at the end of my trip is closed. Even if it were open, that would take an estimated six and a half hours. That estimate also assumes I never stop for food or gas or such, which will not be the case.

An obvious alternative is to go to Des Moines and take I-80 to highway 148 and then take that down to US 34. This would still take a bit over six hours.

Another choice would be to go to Sioux Falls and take I-29 south and make my way to US 34. This has less backtracking east and west (or west and east) than the Des Moines route as well as more (and higher) Interstate speed. The result is an estimated four and a half hours of travel.

I hadn't planned on going to Sioux Falls, Sioux City, and Omaha (well, Council Bluffs) but that seems to be the best route. Besides the time savings, it means that I'll be driving east to Red Oak in the afternoon or evening and have the sun behind me.

"It works, but we're sending you a new one."

"It works, but we're sending you a new one." is about what the message on the answering machine amounted to. I sent in the USB hub & card reader that wouldn't read the camera's CompactFlash card as it was still within the warranty period. The message was from someone who claimed to have tested the thing with a few CF cards and had it read all of them. He said that a new unit would be shipped, but went on to suggest that large size cards don't show up right away (256 MB is hardly large these days and the 512 MB flash drives show up without any significant delay) and that the format makes a difference. I'm not sure what filesystem Canon uses, but that I could see it at all indicates that that should not be the issue.

Having done some troubleshooting and dealing with similar though not identical issues, I don't doubt that every test he did showed a(n apparently) properly working device. But that doesn't change that the device didn't work me or for jmaynard. I am a bit suspicious of the offered explanations. Hopefully the replacement hub & card reader will work for me and not just the test bench.

YAQ: Chess Piece

( Chess Piece Face? )