From the “not so much about gizmos as about where we get them” department:

High-profile North American electronics retailer Circuit City, a chain nearly as ubiquitous in the US as Best Buy, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This comes a week after the company announced that it was closing 155 stores as part of an effort to improve its cash position going into the holiday retail season. This, in turn, was presumably spurred at least in part by the New York Stock Exchange’s notification to Circuit City on Oct. 30 that its stock no longer meets the NYSE’s requirements for listing.

The holiday season’s expected to be brutal for, especially for retailers in Circuit City’s line, which is no real surprise. They’re basically toy stores for grown-ups, and people don’t buy many toys when they’re either out of work or worried that they soon will be (in short, when the sound of the US economy collapsing is audible in Buenos Aires).

Here’s a list of the stores to be closed. On the plus side for those of you who do have some cash to spend on gizmos this Christmas, chances are they’ll be offering some interesting liquidation deals at those stores, especially given that they’ll be liquidating during the run-up to Black Friday.

Okay, I just finished mowing the biggest of the three lawns, and I was right: Setting the Neuton to a saner cut height (2) fixed the “clippings foul wheels” problem. It still doesn’t seem to be terribly effective at mulching - I end up with rows of cut grass, much like if I’d been using the side ejector, but they’re in slightly different places - but that’s all right with me.

The battery was just starting to run out of steam and the mower to bog down as I was finishing up, and that included a number of switches back and forth to the Clever Attachment to knock down the grass around the trailers, the woodpile, the parked snowmobile, etc. that the Big House people like to leave scattered around the lawn. (In practice, the Clever Attachment turned out to be just as handy as I expected it to be.) According to the documentation, the battery won’t reach its full power until it’s been drained and recharged five or six times.

It’s definitely easier to jockey around the obstacles - and drag back to the garage afterward, which involves going pretty much all the way around the compound - than the gas mower.

I’m still sold. I hate mowing lawns, but it’s a hell of a tool. Someone who liked mowing lawns would probably be in hog heaven with this gizmo.

I just talked to one of their technical support folks (they’re apparently a division of DR, the company that makes the giant field mowers and stuff one sees advertised on TV, which I find slightly amusing). They’re sending a replacement for the key socket assembly, no charge. The guy said he didn’t think it’d be a problem, given that I was able to correct the misalignment with the key itself, but we might as well replace it anyway.

Replacing this bit apparently does require the use of one tool - a screwdriver. You’ve got to love modular technology.

Anyway, since it’s working correctly, there’s no need to wait for the new part to get here - it’s just a contingency measure - so I may as well go and do the back 40 now. More in the gripping saga of the electric mower later.

I have various little jobs here on the Ireland estate in beautiful, cosmopolitan Millinocket. One of them is groundskeeper. In this capacity, I’ve been grumbling mightily for the better part of this year that our old 4.5-horsepower gasoline-powered lawn mower is getting a bit worn out. I was hoping that this campaign would eventually culminate in the acquisition of a new riding mower, to replace the one my mother gave to her father a couple of years ago. That would have made the Giant Rear Lawn so much less… daunting.

Instead, the head office acquired this little gem: a Neuton CE 6.2 electric lawn mower.
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It should come as no surprise to anyone that there’s a fair number of toys available relating to Disney-Pixar’s current feature film, WALL-E. After all, there’s a fair number of toys available relating to any Disney theatrical release of any significance, and in the case of WALL-E, almost all of the main characters are robots - the perfect subjects for licensed toys.
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Over the years, I’ve owned a couple of different cars with mechanisms for opening up the top and catching a little fresh air, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite things you can get a car to do. I’ve had a Saab convertible for years, and I don’t even care that where I live, I can only open it about ten days a year. I gladly accept the reduced forward visibility (because of the heavy frame around the windshield) and the nearly nonexistent rearward visibility (because the back window is about the size of a comic book), the increased road noise, and having to do that little windows-open-a-bit-and-shut-again thing to make them fully seal against the weather strips just for that magical first day in late spring when the time has come to undo the latches and wind back the lid. There are even some facets of the top-up experience I actually like - the sound of a heavy rain, for instance. And, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t cold in winter or drafty anytime. The Swedes know how to build for foul weather.

When I was younger, I had a T-top Camaro. This was a whole different animal. The tops were heavy, taking them off and putting them on was a pain in the ass, they took up the whole damn trunk (not that a Camaro has much of one, admittedly) when stowed, they started leaking about half an hour after we took delivery, it was drafty and cold, and there was the ever-present terror that you’d manage to very expensively break one while putting them on or taking them off (though, fortunately, I never did). To add insult to injury, it didn’t really feel much different with them off. Oh, sure, you had the open space where the bit you’d normally hit your head on getting into the car should’ve been, and that was nice, but on the road it was just noisier. With the same view through the rearview mirror either way, there just wasn’t any particular feeling of… liberation.

Put simply, the convertible is worth it; the T-top wasn’t.
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The discussion resulting from the last Technosophy item got me to thinking about a couple of things. One of them was the whole gas/electric hybrid car concept. I really do think this is a technological dead end, the kind of thing that future generations will look back on and say, “They seriously thought that was worth bothering with?” I honestly believe that, if all the money that’s been wasted developing hybrid drive systems had been spent instead on improving the efficiency of the normal ones, everyone would be getting better mileage now, not just the tiny, smug, self-important Prius minority - resulting in a much larger net gain in fuel economy worldwide with much less silly faffing around.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that piston engines have reached the limit of what can be wrung out of them. That what’s really needed now is a whole new concept in automotive powerplant technology, something that will make cars with piston engines seem as antiquated and quaint as fighter planes with propellers.

Well, funnily enough, I think that something already exists. In fact, I think it’s the same something that left propeller-driven fighter planes behind at the end of World War II… and it’s a something that engineers first seriously took a crack at putting in automobiles in the early 1960s.
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I was born just a few months before the first major petroleum crisis to hit the United States, in those last few days before the American car-buying public got its first hint that maybe - just maybe - the gravy train wouldn’t run forever. In response to the Arab oil-producing nations putting the screws on the world economy in October of 1973, my father - a shadetree mechanic since high school, which at that point was only three years ago for him, admittedly - decided, very reluctantly, to bite the bullet and buy a small car.
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If you have a Hewlett-Packard desktop computer with an AMD processor and are running the factory install of Windows XP, you may wish to know that, as configured from the factory, your computer will stop working, in a way that will do no irreparable harm but may startle you considerably, if you install XP Service Pack 3.

Oddly, this is not Microsoft’s fault, it’s HP’s; they were lazy and didn’t remove an Intel processor driver, intelppm.sys, from the disk image used to create the AMD systems. This is normally not a problem, but when restarting after the application of XPSP3, it becomes one, to the tune of rebooting forever and ever until you stick your foot in the door and boot into safe mode. I ran into this interesting state of affairs this morning.

The fix that worked for me is relatively simple - get into the recovery console and tell it “disable intelppm”, and Bob’s your uncle. There are a few other ways of getting it done, including one for regedit studs. More information is here.

There are also a couple of other things that can cause SP3 to have reboot problems, but that seems to be the most prevalent and it’s the one I have personal experience with, so I figured I’d do a little signal repeating. More info on the other failure states can be found here (and if you follow the links far enough, you’ll end up at the first page I linked about).

Not ready for prime time…

Anybody who’s been here a while knows I’m a bi