The Camry has been looking a little lackluster lately – it’s been exactly the same since the day it left the dealership over three years ago. For a while I toyed with the idea of getting something new. I tried to sell the Katie on the idea of letting me buy an old Lexus (10 years old or so), then when that failed I tried to convince her that I need a 1995 Buick LeSabre Limited – a $2000 car . No. 1979 Ford F100? Niente.
I realized I was just going to have to spice up the Camry a bit, the only way I know how – with technology. So, I started looking around for something to trick my brain into thinking the camry was new and special – and ended up finding a Pioneer AVH-3200BT.
With the 3200BT, I could add Bluetooth hands-free phone functionality, DVD capability, a 5.8” touch screen, and the ability to interface directly with my iPhone. I also bought a box from PAC (the PAC SWI-PS) that would allow me to hook up my steering wheel controls to the new receiver. Apart from the hardware, I bought a wiring harness for the camry, and a dash kit made by Scosche to replace the area that was used by the factory radio earlier.
So, with the equipment in hand, the wife properly sedated, and enough bravery to rip into my dash for the first time, I started the project. The following steps aren’t meant to be a step-by-step guide for people to install, but it might help guide some other hapless 2007+ Camry owner through the basics of the process of installing an aftermarket stereo.
Step 1 – Wire up the wiring harness to the new stereo’s wiring harness.
I used heat shrinkable butt-splice connectors (yes, that’s what they’re called) in order to avoid soldering. You put one of of the two wires you want to connect into each end, crimp down the metal connector and then heat the connector so that it shrinks to provide a snug fit for the two wires.
For any other Camry owners, especially 2007+ owners, the Blue wire in the wiring harness is the Power Antenna power cable as labeled. Connect this wire – even though you don’t have a power antenna that rises and lowers – this wire powers an antenna amplifier which is necessary since your antenna is embedded in the back window. I didn’t do this at first, and couldn’t tune any AM stations, or weaker FM stations in my area.
Step 2 - Disconnect negative battery terminal.
Step 3 – Remove dash and car stereo.
Removing the dash isn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be (like in the ‘95 LeSabre, ‘99 Ranger, or ‘97 Accord) – especially with the instructions from crutchfield.com (free with purchase of harness and scosche kit). Most pieces of the center console just snap-out with a little force, the gear shifter knob unscrews – all in all I think there were four 10mm bolts and two screws, with a few harnesses to disconnect along the way.
Step 3 – Screw the new stereo to the factory mounting brackets, fit the Scosche dash kit to the stereo and the top of the A/C controls.
Step 4 – Connect the remaining wires from the stereo to the factory jack, including the ground wire, and the parking wire (safety precaution to prevent you from watching DVD’s while not parked). They instruct you to connect the parking wire to the parking brake light’s wire, then toggle the parking brake on and off to start playing a DVD – riiiight. So, instead, you can follow the instructions on the following youtube video and hook that wire up to a relay, which will simulate pressing the parking brake and releasing it immediately after starting your car every time. Just buy an automotive relay and some wire from radio shack… it wasn’t difficult.
I hooked up the antenna and the bluetooth mic, then hooked the battery back up to verify that I’d wired everything correctly. I tested each speaker set by changing the balance/fade, then tested a DVD (the relay hack worked), and tested the bluetooth and iphone capabilities.
Step 5 – Wire up the PAC SWI-PS
I used more butt-splice connectors (BTW, I was laughed at in Radio Shack when I asked for these) to hook up the wires on the PAC SWI-PS – actually bought a soldering iron, and ruined it within 5 minutes. The instructions on the PAC unit were a little confusing… and my resistor hook-up could be completely jacked-up, but in the end my controls worked.
You basically hook this little box up to your steering wheel controls (a 20-pin factory harness right next to the stereo harnesses), and tell it what type of vehicle you’re in by entering a program #, then go through and teach the box what signal represents what steering wheel function by pressing buttons in the order it expects. So, after it’s hooked up, it will intercept a signal from you steering wheel and send the appropriate command (i.e. volume+, volume-) to the pioneer via the remote wire. It’s pretty amazing.
Step 6 – Place the bluetooth mic somewhere convenient
I placed the bluetooth mic on top of my steering column. You can run the wire out the steering wheel side of the dash, and under the flap where your steering column meets the instrument panel. There’s a gap there to allow you to move the steering wheel up and down. I used double sided 3M type tape to secure the mic there.
Step 7 – Reconnect everything.
Throughout this process (stretched over two Saturdays), I added and removed the stereo 4-5 times, bent back my toenail on the parking brake, lost the ratchet extension picture above and a 10mm socket in my dash, and wired and re-wired several different connections as I realized my mistakes (power antenna cable needed to be hooked up, the relay hack needed multiple wires used already in the harness, and hooking up the wiring harness without hooking up the PAC SWI-PS at the same time was a mistake).
Apart from those problems, I had a good time. I hope the information here helps someone else in a similar situation.
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Pluto, our labrador retreiver, recently got mixed up with some super fleas. Regardless of what we did, we couldn't get rid of them. We tried Frontline, Advantage, a couple of different flea bath products, and even bought a yard spray thinking our back yard was the source of the problem. However, none of these gave him more than a few days worth of relief.
Pluto's relief came in the form of a two-part solution:
1) Set off bug bombs in the house
2) Give pluto a pill (Comfortis) that will help kill the fleas for a full month - got the pill from our vet @ Towne South Animal Hospital in Shreveport
Those two remedies did the trick, and Pluto was flea free. So, last week when the Comfortis was ready to be administered again, I went to 1800PetMeds.com to check on the price there. It would've saved us a few bucks, and I wouldn't have had to make a trip to the vet just to pick up meds. 1800PetMeds sent a few notifications to our vet, which were ignored, and I had to call to check on it after several days to find out why they weren't responding.
So, I called yesterday and found that the vet's office (surprise!) doesn't recommend using online sources for prescription drugs. Towne South says that the sources of the drugs can't be verified, and that the drugs could harm my pet. However, they'd be glad to write the prescription, provided I sign a waiver saying that if the drug harms Pluto, they won't be held responsible.
I went after work today to pick up that script and sign the waiver, and was asked "Did they person you spoke to tell you about the $22 prescription fee?". Uh... no. I tend to remember when people try to screw me (didn't say that :-)). I just said "No." and asked what the fee was for, and whether the fee is charged when prescriptions are dispensed from Towne South. She explained that the fee isn't charged when they dispense their own drugs because they don't have to write a prescription out. So, they're charging $22 for having to put pen to paper, essentially.
The fee is bogus, the explanation for the fee is bogus, and the whole thing stinks. If the people at Towne South didn't feed a line of garbage about the fee, and were able to prove that PetMeds is questionable, I would be more understanding. 1800PetMeds says they're FDA approved, and have a certification from NABP. So, I'm taking their word for it until I have reason to doubt them, other than anectodal evidence from years old message boards.
We've spent $300+ dollars at Towne South Animal Hospital in the last two months alone, and to be nickled and dimed over wanting to save a few bucks and save a trip to the vets office seems wrong to me. So, we're looking around for other vets when it comes time to get Pluto's next checkup or set of shots.
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Katie and I are busy patting ourselves on the back over here. While it may look odd to anyone who's looking in our windows, it feels good. In the past year we've been able to save just under $900, and save hours of useless surfing.
Two main things have kept us from heading back into the deep, dark pockets of the cable industry:
1) Hulu.com - they offer most network shows we watch, anytime we want. Our home theater PC allows us to watch Hulu on our HDTV with limited commercials.
2) Over the Air (OTA) HD channels - we also bought an outdoor HD antenna for watching our major local channels. We get ABC, NBC, CBS, 3 LPB stations, FOX and a few other stations for free (and did I mention in HD?).
As you can see, we still watch TV, we just do it more intelligently (at least that's the way I think of it). We have what the cable industry has yet to provide - a la carte programming. We pick and choose what we want to watch, and get to watch it when we want. It's a logical approach. I don't want to watch '1000 ways to die' on the Spike channel, or any of the 23 other hours of the garbage there, so why should I be paying for that channel? Now, I'm not. Someone else is going to have to subsidize Spike, MTV and We.
Anywho, good luck to anyone else wanting to drop cable and save some money, it's been good for Katie and Me We've made it a year longer than I thought we would without cable.
I stumbled into trouble today – a looming deadline as well as a complicated problem with no win-win solution that I can see.
In this case, I need the ability to allow the end-user of our software (a web-based document scanning app) to define certain aspects of how this software will operate. This means letting them set up their own list of Document Types (Invoices, Checks, Bills, W-4’s, etc.), Document Statuses on each of those Document Types so they could recreate their office’s workflow. We also decided (late in the design process) to allow the user to add as many indexes as they want for each Document Type… and this turned out to be the tricky bit.
This means that a user can define an index called Invoice Number on the Invoice document type, and when they scan an Invoice, they type in an Invoice Number. This way, when they want to find this document later they can look it up by Invoice Number. They can create as many indexes on each Document Type as they want. They could also create indexes to allow them to look up that Invoice by the person who received it, the account number, the date it was received,etc.
So, being the smarty pants I am, I whipped up a couple of additional tables to account for this scenario -described, albeit not exactly, as follows:
Simple, right? Well, it turns out that it’s simple to create and to insert data into, but pretty rough on the person who’s trying to get data back out (unless my brain is just friend and there’s a simple solution). When the user searches for a Document, they can add as many indexes as they want. So, I have to dynamically create a query that will match any number of name and value pairs, in addition to any other search criteria a user might select (Date Scanned, Document Type, etc.).
That’s where I’m at today… trying to figure out a good way to find the documents in our database based on one or more Name/Value pairs. In looking around on the internet, it looks like I designed myself a sort of EAV (Entity Attribute Value) model… though a slanted a bit to better fit the relational database model.
Just about every article I read on the internet trashes the idea of storing an EAV model in a relational database (which is what I’ve done here), trashes dynamic SQL (what I’m considering using… though, not because it’s the most prudent choice) and basically dirties the name of anyone who considers it. Consider me dirty.
I’m looking at a bunch of solutions, none of which look promising and staring a deadline in the face that I’m unlikely to meet now. It’s an ugly day… but I’ll make it.
Cover - Black Crowes - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Original - The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Since we've moved from North Bossier down to Shreveport in South Highlands, I've learned quite a few things about home ownership. The least of the lessons learned involve lawn care. They are as follows:
A year ago, I finally learned the value of #3 -paying someone else to do a job I hate. Shortly after, I learned #4 - being selective about who you pay for those jobs. I hired someone who had done work for our neighbor in the past, and needed work. He did a good job at first, but slowly started to miss spots or not weedeat from week to week. So, we parted ways.
This spring, I started back to mowing again but kept noticing my neighbor's lawn across the street, which was now being cut by a lawn service. It always seemed to be cut and trimmed well.
I talked to my neighbors and found that they've been using Baber Lawn Service. Soon after, I contacted them and have been happy with the results. No missed spots, no nonsense. I come home from work, the grass is mowed. That's an awesome feeling.
So, anywho... the point of the post was really just to offer that advice for anyone else who shares a hatred of yard work. Hire someone else if you're able... and if you're in Shreveport, call Daniel at Baber Lawn Service (Contact info below).
Phone: (318) 424-1728
Cell: (318) 588-0805
Cell: (318) 754-1487
Why is there no Grocery Delivery service in Shreveport? Surely there are other people like myself here in town that have come to despise going to Walmart or Target. Surely those people also have disposable income ($10 per delivery to spare). It's a small price to pay for not having to get out in the 107 degree heat and fight the crowds for hot pockets and toilet paper (must buy in pairs).
I tried to do the math on making a successful go at starting a delivery business in my off-hours. I ran into a couple of problems.
1) I don't have enough energy. It may be that I don't sleep well at night or have sleep apnea... I'm not sure. Either way, when I get home from work I don't want to do a dern thing that resembles work.
2) See #1
The thing is, I think it could work here. It could work like this:
1) Create a website that listed a large selection of available items, with their prices and pictures. (Companies exist that will provide a database of food items with prices and pictures).
2) Allow users to register and purchase groceries at your prices (hopefully priced between walmart and brookshires prices). If the order is placed before 3PM, it will be delivered the next day. Add $10 for orders under $100, 10% above $100.
3) Have the website print a master list of groceries ordered by 3PM, combining all orders into one big list. Shop Sam's and Walmart, etc. for all items.
4) Bring groceries home, split into individual orders.
5) Refrigerate necessary groceries.
6) Deliver groceries the following day.
The main thing someone would want to do would be limit the delivery areas initially. I imagine that targeting an area like South Highlands (small, upper middle class area) would be a good way to fine tune the business.
If I were a college student with the ability to create this website, I'd be all over it... but I'm not. I have a full time job, bills to pay and little energy. It doesn't seem like it would take much... a website that can accept credit cards, a decent size car, grocery skills, a few ice chests, and a heavy heap of time and patience.
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