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I must report a bit of sad news: despite my jury-rigging brilliance, the Hearn family’s venerable Playstation 2 appears to have met its sad but inevitable end.

It had been slowly dying for some time. A year or so ago I had to take most of it apart to clean the disc-reading laser and blow out 9 years of accumulated cat dander and other detritus. Earlier this year, the cooling fan built into it had gotten so noisy that I decided it was time to replace it, so I ordered a new one, popped the case open and put it in. Finally, last week, I noticed that it would occasionally turn itself off. I usually left it running all the time (I subscribe to a relatively-common theory among nerds that electrical devices prefer to actually have electricity flowing through them at all times, and that frequent power-off and -on shortens the life of the device) and I’d come into the room and notice that instead of the blue and green lights indicating the P2, as it was affectionately known, were off, and the red light was on, indicating that the power switch on the back was on, but the OS wasn’t running.

Then I noticed that when playing a game, the cooling fan wasn’t turning on. The poor thing was overheating and powering itself down to keep from melting. So, I took it to the kitchen table, popped it open, and started testing things. A long story short, I determined that the fan itself was fine, but that the system board wasn’t signalling it to turn on for some reason. I should probably have put the poor console out of its misery at that point, but instead I went online and ordered a cheap USB fan to stick to the front.

Then, I read a nerdy article about a fellow who took a similar fan, connected it to a USB cable, and used it to cool his enormous, sweaty forehead during extend sessions of Diablo 3. I realized that the P2 has USB ports on the front, and I have plenty of old USB cables lying about. So, I took the fan out, spliced it and a spare cable together, and plugged it in. Whirrrrrrr! Yay! I reinstalled the fan into the P2, with the fan wires going out and around to the USB connection on the front. Brilliant! Sure, the “boot OS” button didn’t work anymore. But you could simply turn the box off on the back and then press the CD load button to get things to come to life. Sadly, all I had done was delay the inevitable.

Just as I was planning another self-congratulatory post about my ability to hack anything and get it functioning again, I sat down for a few minutes of MLB: The Show last night. Powered the P2 up, inserted the disc, waited for David Wright to appear on my screen so that I could remind him that the Mets suck, and…nothing. Back to the red light. Hm. I ejected and reinserted the disc tray, which booted the OS, but again: down she went. O noes!

P2 came into our lives in January 2003, a highly-appreciated birthday present from Sarah to myself. Our first game together was Tiger Woods 2002. Over many years, we have spent many hours together playing many games of football, baseball, basketball; hundreds of rounds of golf; and slaughtered countless numbers of terrorists, Germans, rival gang members, and prostitutes. P2, we mourn you, and along with you all of the valuable saved games and customized athletes to which you gave life. Requiescat in pace.

Playstation 2, 2003-2012

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I am a genius. I am like Stephen Hawking and Yogi Berra rolled into one very strange tall gentleman with full use of his various limbs but very bad at sports. So maybe that was a poor simile. Or maybe it was just so smart it broke your brain. Who’s to know? Other than me, of course.

My brilliance was confirmed over the weekend when I attempted to mow my lawn. I have a fairly sizeable patch of property, so a few years ago a got a used riding mower that has taken every ounce of my considerable mechanical skills to keep running. I’ve replaced blades, batteries, and bearings; adjusted pulleys, decks, and brakes; and even managed to keep a tire inflated with that weird green tire patching goo they sell that’s pretty much useless in any automotive application.

I topped off the gas tank, fired the mower up, and pulled it out into the yard, at which point I remembered that a small bungee cord that holds on part of the mulcher had broken and a cover had been lost, such that the mower would throw “mow muffins” all over the place instead of turning them into a fine grass dust. I decided to simply replace the bungee with a piece of clothesline, and since I was going to be fiddling around only inches from the blades, I thought it best to turn the mower off rather than trust the little clutch that disengages the blades. I got the cover tied back on, sat down atop my trusty steed, and turned the key.

Nothing. Not a click. Not a whirr. Not the telltale grinding that indicates a bad starter, not the constant cycling of an engine that’s spinning but just won’t fire up, nothing. Usually when this happens it’s because I’m doing something stupid, like trying to start it in gear with the clutch up, or trying to start it with the blades engaged; Sears is smart AND lawsuit-conscious, so there are a million safety switches to keep you from starting the dang thing in top gear and flying off out of control at a breakneck 5.5mph. But I was satisfying all of them. Brake on, neutral gear, butt firmly weighting down the seat switch, and nothing. There’s a small ammeter on the dashboard that indicated that juice was being delivered somewhere, but where?

I suspected the battery might’ve been shot; I don’t start the thing between October and April, so the batteries tend to lose voltage as they wear out over the winter, but this one was only about 2 months old. After a few minutes of fruitless searching I was unable to locate my electronic multimeter (my genius does not extend to organization; my garage looks like a Katamari exploded in it) so I said to hell with it and decided to just bypass the battery and jump start the mower with my van.

I connected all the cables, turned the key: nothing. I heard a faint “click” when switching to the “running” position, which indicated to me that the mower could draw power if I could just get it going, but turning the key to “start” did nothing. I disconnected the jumper cables from the van and gently touched them together, getting sparks galore, so the battery seemed to be okay. I then had to spend a solid half an hour digging through my horrendously filthy garage to find the multimeter, which I finally located under various bicycle parts and something that smelled suspiciously like a raccoon turd. I stuck it on the battery, which reported 12.35 volts, about what one would expect. The plot, as they say, thickened.

I decided it was time to go inside and do a little research. I have the owner’s manual on my lappy, which includes a helpful schematic that looks like this (click to enlarge):

That looks crazy complicated, but it’s not too bad, particularly if you’re aware that only part of it pertains to actually starting the engine:

Basically what it says is that current flows from the battery, through a fuse and an ammeter, and then reaches the ignition switch, which when turned to “start” forwards that current through the clutch/brake sensor (to make sure the clutch is disengaged, and the brake on), then through the “attachment” clutch sensor (to make sure the blades are disengaged), and then to the solenoid, which is a special kind of switch then when fed a small amount of current, allows a much larger amount of current to flow through another circuit and activate the starter. In short, either one of the switches or sensors is broken, or the solenoid is broken. All of which are fairly cheap to replace, except that

1. They would take 5-6 days to arrive, and


2. We were having a barbecue on Sunday for which I’d prefer the grass be ankle-high instead of mid-shin.

Faced with the prospect of mowing 2/3 of an acre with a 30″ push mower (which would take 3-4 hours), I had the lightning bolt of genius that characterizes so much of my life: all the solenoid does is let those various switches and sensors tell it what to do, which is supply current to the starter. Theoretically I could just supply the current to the starter by pressing one end of a wire to the positive terminal on the battery, and the other end to the input connection on the starter. So I got some gloves and goggles, and did exactly that. VROOOOOM! It fired right up, and I finished mowing, being careful not to turn the sucker off no matter what.

The dilemma I’m faced with now is, do I order a whole bunch of new switches and sensors and a solenoid ($45), or do I simply get a nice heavy gauge wire and a cool-looking starter button to bypass all that stuff and just get this awesome switch and a thick wire. I think we know the answer.

I’ve been talking a while about my fitness and diet regimen (not that I used the word “regimen;” if you have been using the word “regiment” to describe anything but a military unit, you are a stupid-ass), and figured it was time to share a little results in the form of imagery:

The new hotness, right? And I’m still about 20 pounds away from my goal.

Quick update on what I’ve been up to vis-a-vis diet: I tried a “Protein Sparing Modified Fast,” which is basically eating nothing but pure protein and green vegetables, leading to a rather dramatic caloric deficit. I was taking in 1400-1500 calories a day, which is well over 1000 calories under what my body needs to just stay alive for 24 hours, and I lost something like 8 pounds in 10 days. Then my body said “Hey, enough of this crap,” and I spent most of this past weekend fighting what amounted to a 2 day migraine. Horrible headache, stomach issues, occasional diarrhea, and an odd sensitivity to heat on a weekend when the daily high was near 90F. Bad times. The only thing that made me feel better was, unsurprisingly, eating, so by Sunday I was having a sandwich or bowl of cereal every few hours just to keep me feeling hale. I gained every ounce of that weight back as my body soaked up water like a sponge. Now I’m back to the infinitely more reasonable LeanGains cut, and plan to stay on it solidly into the fall, at which point I hope to have rockin’ abs and a minor role in a CBS soap opera.

I’ve decided it’s time for me to create a “meme.” If you aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s basically an idea that floats around with a given culture, although in practice it often means “hilarious internet thing that gets modified and copied ad nauseum.” For example, check out the “Y U NO guy“:

I’ve decided, given the plague of horrible, horrible drivers throughout the world, to create “Bad Driver Deb,” to demonstrate the hypocrisy inherent in most drivers’ behavior. For example:

Another one:

Whaddaya think? I’m not sure if the idea really has legs, since bad drivers only seem to be worried about how fast others are driving or whether they’re being tailgated, so I’d end up reusing those over and over every time I wanted to moan about them holding up traffic, rolling through stop signs, talking on their phones, cutting me off, etc. There’s a strong chance I’ve created the most pointless meme in existence. Oh, well.

Speaking of automotive concerns: I finally got around to fixing the brakes on Sarah’s car last weekend. You may recall from my review last month that the car would shimmy and shake like Elvis’s hips during hard braking, and my amateur diagnosis was that the rotors needed to be replaced. So I swung by my local NAPA and picked up rotors, pads, grease, and a new jack, because my old one is too small to jack up taller cars.

I quickly discovered that the new jack wasn’t going to work either. At full height, it lifted the car about an inch, but the suspension just kept the tire on the ground. I ended up having to jack up the car with the horrible scissor jack from the trunk, and then using the new bottle jack to lift the suspension a bit and get the wheel off the ground. The lug nuts came off fairly easily, thank Jebus, and the wheel as well. I had to hammer at the ratchet handle a bit to get the caliper loose, but got that off as well.

The rotors were another matter. They were held in place by two small screws, which are entirely unnecessary since the wheel itself is more than capable of holding the rotor in place once the nuts are tightened down. The little screws were too tight (probably glued in place) to get with a regular screwdriver, so I dug out my impact screwdriver and got to work. After snapping the heads off of three impact bits and completely stripping the head of the screw, I cursed eloquently and drilled the feckers out (snapping off a good drill bit and blunting half a dozen others).

I was pleased to discover that the caliper actually has two pistons in it, but it did mean double the compressing. It also took some doing to get everything back in please, requiring even more fluent cursing, but I ended up getting everything replaced in about 2 hours.

Once that was done, I crawled under to change the oil, and discovered that finally engine designers have wised up. The oil sump screw came out easily (although I put my bucket in the wrong place and spilled a quart of oil on the driveway), and even better, the oil filter is right at the bottom of the engine and I was able to unscrew it with just my hand. I wish the oil hadn’t inexplicably been pressurized, though, because as the filter came off oil exploded out of it and got all over me, the car, the ground, just about everywhere but the oil bucket.

5.5 quarts of new oil went in easily, followed by gently firing up the engine and taking the car for a spin. The brakes worked fantastically, and I discovered that even the minor shimmy that had been happening at 80+ mph had gone away as well. For scientific purposes, I took that big beast up to, um, a rather high rate of speed on 495 and it just purred.

In short, it turns out that if you spend the bucks on the premium parts, the car works better, even if you do the actual labor yourself. Who knew?