A brief perusal of the service manual revealed that this was the Mazda version of the “Check Engine” light.

I hate check engine lights.  I should more properly phrase that as I FEAR check engine lights, as they almost universally mean “something is wrong, we’re not telling you what, and you’re at the mercy of the mechanic to tell you what you desperately need done RIGHT NOW or else your car will probably explode.”

Basically they’re a license for unscrupulous mechanics to print money, and I’m in a city where I don’t have a mechanic that I trust yet.

Anyway, I was staring at this light as I was driving to work the next morning, and I had a crazy realization – I could buy a code scanner, plug it in, and get advance warning for how much my upcoming trip to the mechanic was about to hurt.

The last time I looked at code scanners, they were in the $80-$100 range, which was a bit expensive but I figured that I could justify it for peace of mind.

It turns out that they’re a little cheaper now.  I got this little red beauty for $20.58:

Thanks to Amazon’s never-ending efforts to lose money on shipping, I even got it the very next day.

I plugged it in under the dash of our Mazda3 and it whirred and clicked a bit and spat out a punch card with “P2404″ printed on it.

Well, ok, it did none of that.  But it would have been awesome if it had.

I looked up P2404, and it turns out to be a problem with my “EVAP leak detection pump sense circuit malfunction”

That sounded expensive, but at least I knew what I was in for.  I was about to close the browser on my phone and go in to the house to relay the bad news and consider making a service appointment, when I decided to check one more web site.

A gentleman on that web site had been in my position and had asked for help.  One of the responses he’d gotten was, and I quote: “did you forget to tighten your gas cap?”

I thought about this a moment.  I’m in Oregon, where we don’t pump our own gas, so I didn’t actually know the answer to this question.

I got out of the car and walked around to the tank side, opened the little door, tightened the cap, got back into the car, and turned it on.

Every indicator on the dash lit up, as normal, and then most of them turned off.

Including the check engine light.

Life is good.

We went out of our way to, for instance, see a covered bridge.  It wasn’t a very big bridge, but by god it was covered.

Anyway, we were driving to go see the covered bridge when we drove past this Dairy Queen.  Afterwards, I had to go back so I could get a picture of the sign.

After taking the photo, I asked my wife, “So, would you like a chicken salad?”

And she hit me.

So, I judge this a marketing failure.

I’m in a bit of an MMO lull right now and have a ton of projects going on right now that I’m quite enthused about, so I’m going to try to get a little more content up here before the inevitable backslide.  :)

Thanks for stopping by and reading.  Unless you’re a spambot, of course, in which case thanks for stopping by and letting me know about good places to get male enhancement products and knockoff Coach bags.

Pointing at her computer monitor, she asked me “Can you read German?”

I looked at the screen, and it was plainly in German, but beyond that basic conclusion it was pretty incomprehensible.

So I said, “I’m sorry, high school German was a long time ago.”

and this didn’t seem enough, for some reason, so after a pause I added “in high school”.

this I thought was a little bit ridiculous, so after another pause I added “which was a good time to take high school classes I suppose.”

I don’t think I helped my case at any point.

One of the things about being a bit of a geek from an early age is that you’re exposed to the notion that other countries have things that are cooler than you can get at home.  When I was a teenager, I used to hunt down British editions of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books in used bookstores, I bought Japanese versions of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games, and of course I imported the very occasional laserdisc.

As long as I stuck to Japan and other NTSC countries, I was pretty comfortable importing media.  The video game console manufacturers paid a sort of lip service to the idea that they didn’t want you playing games from other regions, but it was never difficult to circumvent; you could always get an adapter or fit a mod chip or some such.  Of late, of course, I’ve taken to simply buying consoles from other regions, which neatly sidesteps the whole issue.

Europe, however, has always presented a bit of a problem, mostly because of PAL.

The first time I imported anything in PAL, it was because the powers-that-be had decided to delay broadcast of the last four episodes of season 2 of Babylon 5 for several months in the US, while airing them on schedule in the UK.  I managed to find a chap on the net who wouldn’t mind taping them for me in exchange for a favor on my side and wound up with a tape that I couldn’t play but that represented me raising a middle finger to regional broadcast decisions.

Another friend tracked down a VCR that could play PAL tapes on an NTSC TV and we had a bit of a viewing night.

The quality was, simply put, dreadful.  The technology to do on-the-fly conversions simply wasn’t quite there.  Nonetheless, it was watchable.

Technology has advanced somewhat since the mid 1990s.  Region locking is more omnipresent than ever, but technology for freeing your media from region locks has kept up.

Even more promisingly, the PS3 was released completely region-free and blu-rays are frequently (but not always) likewise released without the studios bothering to region code them.

Most importantly, the advent of high-def resolutions has freed us from worrying about PAL or NTSC or what have you.

Or so I thought.

When we were in Britain, we bought a batch of media, knowing full well that it would come with some hitches when we got home.  For the most part, these hitches turned out not to be.  The DVDs, well, they play just fine; we have a DVD player that was made region-free with a simple remote control code and our TV is smart enough to understand an incoming PAL signal and display it.

Likewise, the PS3 games I brought back – “Siren: Blood Curse” and “Arcana Heart 3″ work without issue.

It’s this one Top Gear blu ray I brought back that gave me fits.

I was worried about region coding.  I needn’t have been, it went right into the PS3 and spun up, played the studio logo, and then nothing.  A simple black screen taunting me.

It turns out that, yes, 720P and 1080P and such are universal; they cross borders. 1080i at 50Hz, however, that is a different story and that happens to be how this disc was encoded.

I had never had occasion to rip a blu ray before, so I needed to get my toolbox up to date.  Fortunately I ran across a lifehacker article  that recommended a product called HD Decrypter, and it turned out to do just what it said on the tin.  30 minutes to rip, three hours to encode, and I was once again sneering at the thought that I could be thwarted by mere national boundaries.

It strikes me that a good 99% of the world probably goes through their day without worrying about stuff like this.

Some days, I kind of envy them.  :)

I’m going to rank this somewhere between “faith in humanity failing” and “well, civilization has had a nice run, don’t forget to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave”

Westminster Bridge spans the Thames in London, with Big Ben and Parliment at one end and a whole mess of touristy stuff at the other.  I like to imagine that the railings were designed by a very serious man, who took great pride in his work and was thoroughly satisfied to see the bridge completed.

Then I like to imagine him walking across the bridge at just the right time of day, looking down, and then smacking himself on the forehead.

It’s a wonder that she hasn’t strangled me in my sleep yet.

I also had a birthday recently, and received some excellent gifts to commemorate the occasion.  One in particular stands out because it was given to me by a grown woman who was, I think, attempting to determine whether I was capable of shame.  Note that the following, which is a small zippered pouch, was given to me with about 8 witnesses in the room:

I will honor her gift by proudly using it to store my new dice in and will display it without shame at all gaming events.

Normally I’d say something like “in my defense, I was incredibly busy with school” or the like, but I was actually just playing a lot of EQ2 and studying the bare minimum needed to keep my final school GPA above 4.0.

So uh oops.

Anyway, no self-congratulatory stats post for this year because I have no idea how many visits were in the last 14 months as opposed to the year between Mar ’10 and Mar ’11.

Simply a “thanks for reading” to people who come here and get something out of my unfocused and frequently incoherent ramblings.