this day writhes with what?

Korean children advise us all—in song, no less—that we should watch our manners online.

Kutiman is an Israeli musician who has edited a series of unrelated YouTube video snippets into new musical compositions.

You’ll find more Kutiman here.

Three days ago, our washing machine conked out. I did some digging around online, and discovered that a fairly common problem afflicts front-loading Maytags in the Neptune line—common enough, in fact, that it sparked a class-action lawsuit a few years ago, which led to a settlement on the part of the company.

A guy named Jeff Hartman had even set up a Blogspot blog called Maytag Neptune Washer, mostly to explain the problem and sell inexpensive repair kits (you can buy the kits here and read his how-to here). The kits include a so-called wax motor (a sort of slow-motion solenoid that locks the washer door when the tub is full) along with a component called a triac (Q6) and a resistor (R11) for the main control circuit. It seems that the original wax motors were defective (hence the lawsuit) in that they would draw too much voltage through the triac, which would short out—and that, in turn, would fry the resistor.

The kits cost about $50, but entail snipping the bad components off the computer board and soldering on the replacements. Though I’d done a fair amount of soldering and circuit assembly as a kid, I was a little apprehensive, and kept browsing.

Yesterday, I called the service company Maytag suggested in the area (apparently, such referrals are what the Maytag means by the Priority One Service touted as one of the benefits of Neptune ownership). A service call would be $90 (plus tax), which seemed a reasonable fee for the peace of mind, and besides, they had someone in the area who could be here in 30 minutes. The guy showed up, asked me what the problem was, and then told me exactly what I had read online: The machine would probably need a new wax motor and control board. “Oh, so it’s the R11/Q6 problem,” I said. He looked at me, answered, “What?” paused, and then added, “Well, you may also need a new water valve, since the tub isn’t filling, and a motor and motor-control board. The motor will be under warranty, but you’ll have to pay for labor.” He wrote this up on a service form, took my money, and said the shop would call with an estimate.

I went back online and found that sometimes other components on the control board get fried, which may have been why the tub wasn’t filling. In any case, I found a source for a new wax motor and control board: RepairClinic.com, which you can call at 800-269-2609, though it was very easy to find what I needed with the on-site search. For a total of about $200, I had the parts overnighted to our apartment.

Yesterday morning, the appliance-repair shop called to tell me it would cost $550 (plus tax) to replace the wax motor and control board. If that didn’t solve the problem, it would be another $250 (plus tax) to put in a new water valve and/or motor. This is on top of the $100 I’d already paid for the diagnostic visit. So all in, somewhere north of $900. I told him I’d have to think about it.

Two hours later, FedEx delivered the parts. It took a little over an hour to open the machine, swap in the new parts, and put everything back together. The washing machine is operating perfectly again.

My only regret in all of this is that I didn’t try repairing the control board first.

If you have a broken front-loading standalone Maytag, check the links above before you call a repairman. For a walk-through of the process for a stacked washer-dryer, go to the jump.

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Philosecurity recently published an extremely interesting interview with a guy who used to write adware. He lays out in very clear terms what anyone venturing out online—especially from a Windows box—is up against:

Matt Knox: So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. Now, those threads can communicate with one another, they would check to make sure that the BHO was there and up, and that the whatever other software we had was also up.

…

Sherri Davidoff: How private is people’s information today?

M: Not at all.

S: Do you think that in our society we delude ourselves into thinking we have more privacy than we really do?

M: Oh, absolutely. If you think about it, when I use a credit card, the security model is the same as that of handing you my wallet and saying, “Take out whatever money you think you want, and then give it back.”

Chilling to hear the details, but sadly not so surprising.

In the Boston Globe, an interesting piece about “How the City Hurts Your Brain“:

“The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

John Leonard, a trenchant, learned, and generous critic of books and television and a clear-eyed observer of the culture at large, has died at 69 from complications of lung cancer. If you’ve never read his work, you owe it to yourself to grapple with his dazzling sentences—verbal pyrotechnics always in service of a point rather than just egotistical showoffery.

“The books we love, love us back,” he said as he accepted the National Book Critics Circle’s 2006 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. “In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them—not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.”

New York magazine has links to a rich selection of the columns he wrote for that publication, and there are appeciations at WashingtonPost.com, The New York Observer, Salon, HuffPo, and, of course, The New York Times, where he served in the early ’70s as editor of the Book Review.

[Photo: CBS News]

“And I will remember your name and face
On the day you are judged by the funhouse cast,
And I will rejoice in your fall from grace
With a cane to the sky like ‘none shall pass.’

“‘Aah, let me in!’
‘None shall pass.’
‘Aah, let me in!
‘None shall pass.’”

The rest of the lyrics here. More Aesop Rock videos here.

And the champion is…

More meta here. <via>

“When the fall came, I saw it as a moral failing on my part.”