Stuff I Learned Yesterday

Are you ready for a lesson on auto repair troubleshooting? Good. There are 3 things required to make an engine operate: air, fuel, and spark. These three things not only have to be present, but they have to be combined in just the right way at just the right time. If you have just 2 of them, you get to call a cab, hop on a bike, or take off walking.

Last Saturday the kids and I hopped into my car to go grab some PVC pipe from the hardware store, but my car wouldn’t start. It had given me some trouble the week before, but after a couple of attempts at starting it, it fired up. However, on Saturday, it was a different story.

While I knew the car was not out of fuel, my first thought was that fuel was not getting into the combustion chamber. The likely candidates would be the fuel filter, or the fuel pump. Since the fuel pump is located inside the gas tank on my car, replacing it would require removing the gas tank and mess of other things that are beyond my ability to do myself. So I decided to start with replacing the fuel filter. However, before I headed off to the auto parts store, I decided to give it one more chance to start. It didn’t start up, but I noticed something new.

Now as I tried to start it, I could smell fuel. This meant that I was wrong. Fuel was making it to the combustion chamber, so one of the other two ingredients must have been missing. It seemed very unlikely that it was an issue of getting air into the motor or that the motor was losing compression. It was more likely an issue of not getting spark.

Now it was about this time that my son had decided that he wanted to watch me work on the car. As is the case with most 9 year olds, he’s very inquisitive. He wanted to know what was wrong and how I was able to figure it out. I told him all the stuff I just told you. Since he was just in time to help me troubleshoot the electrical system, I let him help me out. Read More...

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I just published episode 48 of We Have To Go Back Podcast which is the LOST podcast I do with my wife. We love LOST. We love LOST so much that when we found out last fall that a get together was being planned in Honolulu for the 10th anniversary of the LOST premiere, we immediately started making plans to attend the event.

This is a big deal for us for several reasons. We’ve never traveled anywhere together for a fan gathering before. Yes, I’ve gone to several comic-cons, but Kari has never had any interest in those. Kari doesn’t really like to travel. We’re taking the kids along with us on the trip. This is a big deal because we’ve never taken a family vacation before. We never took a family vacation when I was a kid, so this will be my first family vacation ever.

We’ll also be extending our stay so that we can take our time and really enjoy the island and time together. We’ve reserved a condo that’s on the 35th floor and has an unobstructed view of Diamondhead and beautiful views of the ocean. As you can imagine, there are cheaper vacations that we could take, but none of them will include the LOST experience.

I’ve said it before, although not on this podcast, that LOST change my life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it did. In fact, it’s safe to say that without LOST, you would not be listening to this podcast today. Despite what you may think, I really don’t watch a lot of TV. At any given time there are 2, maybe 3 shows that I watch per week. If I’m podcasting about it, of course, I’m watching it. Right now I’m watching LOST via Bluray, Alias via Netflix, and Falling Skies live each week on TNT.

That’s the way it’s always been for us. We may talk about TV a lot, but that does not mean that we watch a lot of it. Before LOST came along, TV was not really important. We watched it, of course, but casually. I can’t even tell you a single show we watched before it with any regularity. And then we saw the previews for LOST. It looked really good. I mean, really, really good. So we made it a point to make sure we were in front of the TV, tuned to ABC at 7pm central on Wednesday, September 22, 2004. Except for the day our son was born, October 13, 2004, we never missed watching an episode live. Read More...

The post 76- Discovering a LOST Adventure appeared first on Golden Spiral Media- Entertainment Podcasts, Technology Podcasts & More.

Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I once got kicked out of a fast food restaurant for starting a food fight, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I’m pleased to bring you another installment of the Friday Forum.

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Friday Forum

The post 75- Friday Forum appeared first on Golden Spiral Media- Entertainment Podcasts, Technology Podcasts & More.

About 10 years or so ago I was working at the bookstore and I had just been promoted and given the responsibility of organizing the e-commerce operations for the company. Our company had its own distribution warehouse and it was designed to send one massive order to each store every week. It was not at all designed to send several small orders to customers all over the country every day.

We knew that it would take a lot of work to scope out the features of the website, build the databases, design the front end, design and connect all of the APIs and hooks into our inventory management system, and many other things that would be necessary before we could start selling online. We decided that while that stuff was being done, we could go ahead and generate some income and learn some operational procedures by selling on third party marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

Amazon had a third party sellers conference each year and we thought it would be good for us to attend. Since I’d only been at my current position for about 3 months and I was working closely with the president of the company, we decided that both of us would attend the conference.

I had never been to Seattle before, or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest for that matter. I was really looking forward to the trip. I had mixed feelings about traveling with the company president. On one hand, he and I got along really well and had a good rapport, on the other hand, I was apprehensive about it. I didn’t know if he ever took the tie off and relaxed, or if he would be working the entire time we were there. I wanted to see a few things while we were there, but I knew that business duties had to come first. Read More...

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When it comes to making choices in my life I sometimes feel like I am in the drivers seat and fully in control of everything that is happening. Other times I feel totally out of control, like I’m in the back seat watching the car that is my life run off the road and into a ditch.

There are days when it all goes my way and days that I would rather forget ever happened. I struggle to makes sense of my own free will and the hand that life has dealt me. I’ve got my own control issues, but that’s a topic for another day.

Today I’d like to tell you two stories. Two stories that illustrate what The Sailor and The Famer have in common with each other. We’ll see if we can’t shed some light on the battle between free will and being tossed around in a river of predetermined circumstances.

Imagine with me the first person that attached sails or sheets or whatever he used to a boat. Everyone must have thought he was crazy.

“You can’t control the wind, how do you know you will be able to make it back to the shore! You are wasting your time, what if there is a storm or no wind at all?” The people must have said.

Surly the first person to try to sail a boat had doubts of his own. In the back of his mind he must have thought there was a chance he would be blown off the end of the Earth.

Now imagine with me the first farmer. Read More...

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