5 things NOT to do with your garage door

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1. Don’t make any changes, adjustments, manipulate any settings at all on the opener without recording their current values and being able to put them back to the original settings.  In delicate manipulation and adjustment, it is often useful to be able to undo.  Keep the ability to undo by noting the original settings for everything.  Take photos if necessary.  Make 1 adjustment, and test the result.  If you do not get the expected result, reset the adjustment.

2. Don’t re-engineer the door if part of it is broken.  Fix the broken part.  If you think you need to re-engineer the door, stop and consider the various parts of the system again.  If the door WAS working, but now it is NOT working, something changed.  The door does not need to be re-imagined.  It needs a small adjustment.

3.  Don’t call a Garage Door place at random off google or the yellow pages without being prepared to kindly and politely decline to buy a new door, new opener, new house.  The opener you have is not an antique (unless it is of course).  The door you have can be opened (it worked yesterday).  If they can’t look at it, determine what is wrong, and adjust it so that it works, thank them for coming and call the next random place.

4. Don’t ignore the garage door until it STOPS working. While it is working properly, keep the tracks clean, oil the hinges, keep dust and dirt out of the mechanism.  A clean and well oiled mechanism does not have to work as hard.  This leads to longer periods between stoppages.

5. Don’t work on the door at all until you have re-read the manual, and reached a sense of the zen of the whole garage door system.  Garage doors are very simple, and hideously complex.  If you assume that the door is easy to fix and jump right in to fixing without understanding what has gone wrong and is out of tune, you will become lost on the path to proper Garage Door operation.

Blogging about Blog About

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For the recent Canadian Thanksgiving, John Chow challenged readers for his blog to donate money to the Vancouver Union Gospel Mission to help feed the hungry.   John offered to match any donations.    I was happy to be able to donate 10 meals and have John match them.  The total donation with all intake and John’s match raised over $6K for the Union Gospel Mission, so yay.

John Chow’s blog is a very popular blog on how to be an internet entrepreneur.   Besides matching the donations, John also offered to link to all of the donors in the blog.    I have been clicking through these and have found a variety of useful and interesting reading.  My initial thought was just to click through them all and note that I had done so.  But what I found by and large is that this self-selected subset of blogs has a lot of treasure inside, and has taken a bit of time to read, study, and save off as bookmarks for later review.

Today’s find — a quick thank you to Creative Pride News for the link to Writing the Greatest About Me Page Ever on Steven-Sanders.com.  After reading this I revised the About page here. Thanks to Steven for the actual advice of course.

Just another lesson in the obvious — but people who are generous in giving usually are interesting to talk to or read as well.

Clarkson on the 2009 Cadillac CTS-V: buy it and blast through the recession

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Someone at the Times of London has written a meandering but fundmentally positive review of the new Cadillac CTS-V and then signed Jeremy Clarkson’s name to it.  Jeremy Clarkson is an English Broadcaster, and one of three presenters of the British television show Top Gear.  Apparently he also writes for the Times.

Someone is in trouble.  Top Gear is a fun watch, and has a lot of character built up in the show.  They have great traditions on how they test cars and how they discuss them, so that the audience knows more or less what to expect at each step.  One of the things we have come to expect is that American cars will be pilloried by the program.

I liken it to a story I once heard of two brothers.  The older brother was a good sort.  The younger brother however was a natural athlete, quite good looking, someone who seemed to lead a bit of a charmed life.   The older brother missed no chance to suggest that the younger was perhaps a bit simpleminded, or stupid.  It was not true, but he was left with no other areas he COULD compete, you see.  The US and UK are great friends and allies, and especially these days we’re all in this together.  But I think someone with a heady sense of history and wistful for another time when Britain ‘ruled the world’ has little other way to compete than to suggest that Americans are somehow less cultured or more boorish.

Anyway, back on topic!  Here are some key descriptions of the CTS-V from the article by vehicle area:
The interior is a nice place to be.
The exterior is a good looking car.
It sounds more refined than an AMG.

So make no mistake: financially, the Cadillac smashes the M5, completely and utterly.
And here’s the next part. Round the Nürburgring, it smashes it again

First the markets go upside down, now Clarkson LIKES an AMERICAN car? I am losing my grip on how things are supposed to be.  I am not complaining, I am just stunned.  The entire Cadillac CTS-V release is very much that way though — this car is just BETTER than I expected.

The Clarksometer You’d be mad to buy anything else

[Speechless]