You see, my wireless router resides in the furnace room in the basement. The furnace room is also kinda like the server room, because all the cabling for phone, cable TV, and wired LAN converge there in a junction box. My wireless router also has four wired LAN ports, so it makes sense for it to be located in the furnace room, too. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the most ideal location for getting a wireless signal to all other parts of the house–especially considering that my house has three floors.

There are other factors that come into play, too.  How many other wireless networks are in range? What channels do they use? What happens if I change the locations of my wireless adapters, or I reorient the antennas on my router? The default Windows XP wireless network manager will tell me if it sees other wireless networks and will give me a rough indicator of signal strength, but it doesn’t tell me what channels they use. This turns out to be important information.

Thankfully, I stumbled upon the Practically Networked web site. It’s full of great information aimed at helping home users set up, maintain, and troubleshoot their home networks. And, in their article “The Free Windows Networking Toolkit: 10 Must-Have Apps,” they referred to a cool app called inSSIDer. This little baby tells you pretty-much everything you need to know as you’re trying to troubleshoot or optimize your wireless network.

I have it running as I type this, and it’s currently detecting eleven wireless networks (including mine). I can tell which wireless networks are using channels that overlap with mine, so I can know to move to a different channel to reduce possible interference. I can make changes to location and antenna orientation and immediately see what impact that has on the signal strength. How cool is that?

I’ve always had issues with wireless connectivity on my main floor, and after seeing inSSIDer’s display, it became clear to me that many of my neighbors were using the same wireless channel as me. Moving to a different channel appears to have improved that connectivity, as well as making a few adjustments to the orientation of the wireless router antennas.

Unfortunately, I still get knocked offline momentarily when the phone rings. It’s a 2.4-GHz cordless phone. I’m going to replace it with one of the new DECT 6.0 phones that’s supposed to not interfere with wireless networks. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I recently came across an exception, though, when I decided to pay BatteryRefill.com to re-cell my two notebook computer batteries. It seemed like a decent deal–I could get both batteries re-celled with brand-new Li ion batteries for about a hundred bucks. That’s much less than a couple of replacement batteries would have cost. And they promised a turnaround of seven to ten business days, not including shipping times.

First things first: I did, finally, receive my re-celled batteries back from them, and they appear to work as advertised.

The problem that I had with BatteryRefill.com was two-fold. First, instead of a turnaround time of seven to ten business days,  over seven weeks elapsed from the time they acknowledged receiving my batteries to the time they notified me that they were shipping them back to me. Second, their communications with me were absolutely terrible.

I didn’t worry too much until three weeks had passed since they received my batteries. At that point, I emailed their customer support to inquire about the status of my order, and after hearing no response after a few days, I dialed their customer service phone number. Eventually, their automated phone attendant routed me to their voice mail, telling me that all their representatives were helping other customers. So, I left a message and hoped for a callback, but it never came. I repeated this process several times over the next several days without any satisfaction. It was impossible to communicate with anyone at BatteryRefill.com.

Then I did something I should have done before I placed the order–I did a web search and found many reports of unhappy BatteryRefill.com customers who told stories of waiting several months for their batteries (and some were still waiting). At that point I decided to escalate things a little bit. Since I’d used Paypal to pay for the service, I opened a dispute with Paypal over the transaction.

Miraculously, that seemed to get the attention of BatteryRefill.com, because the day after I did so, I received a response to my email inquiry telling me that my batteries would be ready to ship the following week. Ironically, I was able to actually speak with someone there on the phone the same day, and they told me that they’d ship the following day. I smelled a rat, but I decided I’d wait and see what happened.

What happened was that both shipping estimates came and went, and I had still not received my batteries. Since my Paypal dispute was about to expire, my only option was to escalate it to a claim (which means Paypal investigates and then attempts to get my money back). The day after I did so, Paypal forwarded to me the USPS Priority Mail tracking information they received from BatteryRefill.com, indicating my order was going to ship. I checked the USPS web site every day for a week, but the shipping status never showed the package actually in transit. Finally, a week later, I received an automated email from BatteryRefill.com telling me that my order had shipped. Lo and behold, I received my order the following Monday. Curiously, the tracking number on the package I received was not the same as the tracking number that BatteryRefill.com gave to Paypal.

So, to sum it up:

1. BatteryRefill.com’s turnaround time of seven to ten business days was exceeded by a factor of about five.
2. BatteryRefill.com was practically impossible to communicate with regarding the status of my order.
3. When I was able to get information from BatteryRefill.com, it was inconsistent, contradictory, and just plain wrong.
4. Their communications were nothing more than stall tactics, apparently meant to intentionally mislead me about the imminence of shipping my order.

As I said before, I did receive my batteries, and they appear to work as promised, but I would not order from this company again, for the reasons I outlined above.

This was a good thing, since I’m the one who ended up driving it. The boy has yet to master the stick shift, so he’s driving my car (a newer, nicer car) while I’m driving the stick around town. Something’s wrong with this picture, but that’s a post for another day.

The Sunfire came with an aftermarket CD player installed–a Sony CDX-M630. I thought this was going to be a good thing, too–until I actually tried to use it.

One of the things that astounds me is how incomprehensible the front panel is on most aftermarket car stereos these days–and this Sony was no exception. So at first, I chalked up my inability to make it do something to the fact that I was too old and feeble-minded to understand how to work the damn thing. And, of course, it didn’t come with a manual.

But I’m nothing if I’m not persistent, especially when it comes to electronics. I’m a geek, after all–an old and feeble-minded one, but a geek nonetheless. So my stabbing at the dizzying array of buttons on this thing finally paid off, and I brought it to life.

Well, kinda. I quickly discovered that the Sony seemed… well, possessed. Sometimes buttons worked, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they even did the job of other buttons. Sometimes I could change the volume, and other times those buttons would change the radio station, or turn the whole thing off. And then I had to poke around to see which button would decide to turn the thing back on. Even the display was hosed. It wouldn’t show me what station I was listening to, or even the time, but occasionally it would light up a few of its pixels.

Clearly, its brains were scrambled. Nothing that a good pressing of the reset button won’t fix, I thought. The reset button was easy to find and press, so I was just moments away from stereo sanity. Or so I thought.

I thought that my stereo’s brains had simply suffered an electronic concussion of some sort. Turns out that there was permanent brain damage. Repeated resetting of the Sony didn’t improve the situation, although it did change which buttons would decide to perform its various functions.

Being the cheapskate that I am, rather than buying a new one and replacing the thing, I just continued jabbing the buttons until I managed to cajole it into playing the radio station I wanted at an acceptable volume. I determined that I could generally get the volume to go up and down as desired, as long as I was willing to take the risk of the volume buttons suddenly deciding to do something else, like changing the station or initiating autodestruct sequence.

I actually drove the car around for several weeks under those conditions. I wasn’t ecstatic about it, but I wasn’t suffering painfully, either–that is, until my regular radio station decided it was time to change its format to “All Christmas Songs All the Time.” Arrrggghhh!!!!! It was time for the Sony to go–I’d need a radio that I could reliably station-hop with, because, frankly, all the remaining stations play mostly crap.

So, I pried the credit card out of my wallet, went online, and ordered a new Pioneer unit from Crutchfield, and it arrived last night. I spent part of the evening examining the new unit and all the various installation parts that were included, and I scrutinized the installation of the Sony unit, and I eventually convinced myself that I knew how to proceed. The stereo transplant surgery will take place sometime tomorrow.

In the mean time, the Sony would have to provide me service for one more day. This morning, as I was driving to work, I noticed that its display was lit, and it was actually displaying the frequency of the station I was listening to. I guess it wasn’t suffering from irreparable brain damage so much as from an electronic Alzheimer’s disease, and it was having a rare lucid moment, as if to implore me to spare it from the fate I had planned for it. Meanwhile, the new stereo sits on my desk, shiny and new and ready for installation, knowing that it will soon be my faithful and trustworthy servant every morning and evening.

Okay, he’s a high school teacher, so fortune might be a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, he’s earning his own paycheck, paying his own bills, and putting his own food on the table. One of his parting gifts from me was the title to my 1994 Ford Escort. He’d been driving it around at college for the past four years anyway, so I certainly wasn’t going to miss it, and it had been a good car.

Of course, one of the first things to eat out of his initial paychecks was–you guessed it–car repairs. His front brakes needed to be done, and he needed new tires.

He’s teaching in a little town in western Kansas, about four hours’ drive from me, so he’s been a frequent weekend visitor, and one weekend he decided he’d get the brakes, tires, and an oil change done at the shop I’ve been using for years here in Colorado Springs. A few hours and about $475 later, we went to pick up the car at the shop. The guy at the front desk was kind enough to point out that the clutch was in need of replacement (my son confirmed that) and gave us a $711 estimate for that work.

Well, I got to thinking about the clutch, and whether it made sense for him to drive a car with a bad clutch back to Kansas. Finally I offered to let him take my ’97 Pontiac Sunfire for the week and I’d get the car back into the shop for a clutch replacement. So that’s what we did. I drove his car back to the shop on my way to work Monday morning (and learned that his clutch was indeed in bad shape), rode my bike the rest of the way to work, and then picked up the car again on my way home that evening.

The good news was that the clutch replacement was successful.

The bad news was that the speedometer no longer worked, and the “check engine” warning light was now on.

I dropped it back off at the shop on Wednesday morning for them to fix the speedometer. I figured they’d forgotten to hook up a sensor or something, and that would be why the “check engine” light was lit, too. They called me later that morning to tell me that the speedometer cable was broken.

“Since the car’s got 120,000 miles on it, the cable might have broken on its own,” the guy told me. “But my mechanic might have broken it during the clutch replacement, so we’ll go ahead and take care of it for you. The problem is that we can’t get a new cable until Friday, and since the dash is completely disassembled right now, we’d like to just keep the car until then.”

I gave them the okay for that. Being short a car would require a little car juggling for everyone in the family to get where they needed to be, but I could manage that.

When Friday came, the shop called to tell me that the car was ready. I picked it up after work and drove it home.

The good news was that the speedometer worked again.

The bad news was that the “check engine” light was still on. Rats!

Out of curiosity, while the car was in the shop I’d been rummaging around on the web to see if the speedometer not working could be the reason for the “check engine” light being on. I didn’t find anything definitive. What I did find was that it was easy to read the trouble codes from the computer on this particular car. The only equipment needed was a jumper wire and an eyeball. Being an older car, it uses OBD-I codes, and by connecting two test terminals with a jumper, I could read the codes as they were flashed on the “check engine” light. Cool–especially since I knew the shop would charge me at least fifty bucks to read the codes for me.

I wanted to wait until my son returned before trying to read the codes, so on Saturday morning I decided to give the engine a once-over to see if there were any obvious reasons why the idiot light was still on. One thing I noticed immediately was that the oil was about a quart low, and it was also dirty. Knowing that my son had paid for an oil change the previous weekend, it was pretty clear to me that he hadn’t gotten one. When he arrived, we took the car back over to the shop and pointed out their error. They were suitably embarrassed and took care of the oil change for us.

So, let’s recap:

1) Shop is paid for tires, brakes, and oil change.

2) Car returns to shop for clutch replacement.

3) Shop breaks speedometer cable while replacing clutch.

4) “Check engine” light is on after clutch replacement.

5) Shop fixes speedometer. “Check engine” light is still on.

6) Shop does the oil change they failed to do the first time.

Now, to their credit, the shop never gave us any flack about fixing the speedometer cable or doing the oil change. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve taken my cars there for so many years–they’ve been honest and taken care of mistakes when they’ve happened. But my patience was wearing thin, and we still had the “check engine” issue.

While we were waiting for the oil change to be done for real this time, my son and I went over to the auto parts store and picked up a Haynes manual for his car. The information on the web about reading codes and what they meant was a little sketchy, and the manual was much more complete. When we got his car back, we gave it a whirl and tried reading the codes. It took a couple of tries before we really understood what we were seeing, but eventually we got a single code:

172: Lack of Heated Oxygen Sensor (HO2S-1) switches, indicates lean (Bank # 1)

Unfortunately, the manual didn’t really give us much of an idea about what to do about this particular condition. Neither did a web search, although I did find some information on the web that suggested replacing the PCV valve and inspecting the hose that feeds it. We ended up replacing the valve and those (for less than $10), but that didn’t take care of the problem.

The weekend was over before we figured out how to fix this problem, but the car was running fine so my son drove it back to Kansas. I continued to search for useful information on the web, and I gradually came to the conclusion that it would probably make sense to replace the O2 sensor. My son was coming back in a couple of weeks and he told me he’d like to get it fixed, so when he arrived we went out and bought a new sensor ($45!) and prepared to install it.

Job one was to figure out exactly where this sensor was. The Haynes manual wasn’t clear on this, but we’d gone to the library to pick up a Chilton manual for the car, too, and it showed that the sensor was located on the front of the engine. So, I prepared to remove the sensor (it wasn’t going to be easy because there wasn’t a lot of room for a wrench). First, I needed to disconnect the cable from the sensor.

You know what happened next.

I found that the sensor was already disconnected. Doh! and Yessss!!!

That was obviously the reason why the “check engine” light had been coming on. And it meant that we wouldn’t need to replace the sensor. My son returned it the next day, and the guys at the parts store laughed when he told them the story.

After a few minutes of searching, we figured out how to reconnect the sensor, and that was the end of the “check engine” light being illuminated.

I’m at a loss to explain why the sensor was disconnected. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would need to be done during a clutch replacement, but I could be wrong. Or, maybe the mechanic did it on purpose so that I’d have to bring the car back in for more work. I just don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that I had fun working on my son’s car. I had long ago stopped doing my own car repairs when I got rid of my old ’70 Ford Torino. Cars had just gotten too complicated, I thought, and I wasn’t really saving any money by doing my own oil changes. But I discovered that I missed puttering around with cars, and I also discovered that with the right information, even modern cars are accessible to the weekend mechanic. And now it’s easy to recycle things like used motor oil because many of the auto parts stores will do it for free.

Finding a reputable auto shop and getting repairs done right seems to be a real crap shoot these days. I’m pretty sure that my relationship with this particular shop is over, and since I have a nice big garage and plenty of tools, I think I’ll be doing more of my own car work from now on.