Power issues

JPS is messing with me. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that food came out of my microwave and it was still cold, my fridge guard was chipping out and the fuses started to blow in my speaker set. I found all this strange until one day I came home to my hot apartment to turn on the fan and it was barely spinning. I ran for my multimeter and it gave me 80 to 90v and it all started to make sense.

Since I am all about going green the term brown out has mostly lost its meaning since the florescent lights are either on or off and they don't get brown under a low voltage supply like I had been receiving. It still left the mystery as to why the 3amp fuses in my speakers where blowing but one day last weekend I plugged in my multimeter and caught jps giving me power at 150v sustained.

As far as I am concerned my supply voltage should be 115v +/-5v and anything else is unacceptable. 80 to 150v a deviation of 35v is enough to destroy anything worth having and that's what JPS has started to do. When the voltage got too low my DSL modem would drop out and I would lose internet service. On the flip side when the power was at 150v the 15v, 1amp, linear power supply primary coil burnt out.

Pretty much anything with an unfused coil facing jps faced certain doom as a second set of speakers in my bedroom died as well. That was the last straw, I took it apart as pictured to the left and cut off the dead transformer and fed the amplifier circuit with a rectified power supply I built 13 years ago(I'm so proud). This one has a significantly larger primary coil so it should withstand any further surges until I can find a suitably rated switched mode power supply for it as I have already done for my DSL modem. FYI if anybody actually read this far I majored in electronics for my undergrad degree.

Tastes like chicken?

What the hell is wrong with these lizards? I have no real problem living with them but they have crossed the line.

Saturday night I stepped into my kitchen and heard no end of commotion somewhere in the room. After some investigation I realized the lizard that normally lives under my fridge was in the garbage bag I placed on the ground pending the arrival of the garbage truck. It was eating my left overs so I quickly identified where it was in the bag and just stepped on it through the bag *splat*.

I thought that was the last of those buggers in my kitchen for now but some night later on this week I stepped into my kitchen to do the dishes and saw a single lone chicken bone in the middle of the counter, someone tried to help themself to a snack before I could clean up. Needless to say the lizard pictured above soon came into view as he tried to make his escape. Look at it, he is still licking his lips. I went for my camera and bug spray and now he is no more. Lizards be warned.

back! but barely here

I think I promised my Mobay friend a picture from the last post.. so here it is! where does the time go? I have some many things to blog about but no time to update it, things have become so bad that I don't even have the time to go through the other blogs I normally read or to reply to my messages and friend requests on facebook.

What have I been up to then? Lets digress, the last time I was on a AA flight their in flight entertainment got me hooked on the big bang theory theory. I sat in the hotel that Monday and watched CBS' entire prime time comedy lineup and found the greatest thing next to sliced bread so when I came back to Jamaica I continued to follow their series. After missing a few episodes I did some googling and found I could download them via public torrents and the rest is history. I now have the full seasons of all the shows I liked but never had the time to watch downloaded. Is this illegal because I could have just watched them on my cable.. which is what is not happening now. Instead of watching the crappy quality How I Met Your Mother on my cable, I just download the episode the next day and watch it commercial free in wide screen format.

Now that I have hours of shows to watch on my computer I still don't have much time to watch them. I still probably just spend 30 minutes per day to watch an episode. So what else have I been doing with my time? I find that if I leave at 7:30am I can beat most of the traffic and reach work before 8 so I have been waking up and leaving early. I have also fought the urge of leaving at 4:30pm and started to stay at work until 6:30pm at which point there is pretty much no traffic on the road to go home. At the same time I come off as being a good employee and so much more work is getting done! What I need to start doing is waking up earlier and energized so I can go walking.. but one step at a time.

Enough chatter for now, I'll leave y'all with an interesting photo from that trip to Montego Bay. This photo was taken on the way back to town as I was passing through Ocho Rios. I am just going to assume that this is not really meant for the pedestrian crossing but for the dolphin park that should be somewhere near by. Yet again as per usual walking through the town all the locals thought I was a tourist and harrased me to no end. How does one look like a Jamaican? It shouldn't be that hard for me.. I born and grow here.

postings from the couch

It is Thursday night and after 200+ km and a twisty turny trip though Sligoville I am now sitting on the couch not the guest bedroom as promised. What am I doing in Montego bay in the middle of the week? vaca, I needed it badly as Ruthie may have noticed. Being over here wasn't 'plan A' but the stars lined up right and I had to jump on it, the stars don't often line up for me.

Anyway for those who follow this blog you may have noticed last month my sister moved shop to Mobay and her parents followed her up here to help her get settled in. When they came back to Kingston and said they loved the townhouse complex that my sister moved to so much that they were going to buy one. Fast forwarding to this week they made the final payment and have now taken ownership of a unit. Will I ever be that cashy? I guess I will just stick to my window shopping for houses while I save my pennies.

So they decided to take a road trip to see their newly acquired property and coincidentally I was on leave this week so I could get to go(yes this is what I get when the stars line up). Of course my parents won't be moving to Montego Bay anytime soon so they just planned to rent it and use it as income since they are retired. This is a good plan but had a major flaw, they decided they will rent it to their daughter(for now) at less than 1/2 the going market rate. WTF! yup when the stars are lined up for my sister and actual ruler is used and I guess I get a best effort eyeballed 'straight' line scribbled by a kindergartener.

Pushing bad mind to the back burner these row houses are pretty sweet, they are up in the hills and have a view of the city and Mobay harbor. Crown molding, granite counters, double paned windows, these people know how to please. I hope the sun comes out tomorrow so I can go to the pool and bake myself to a cripsy brown lol. Maybe the stars will line up a cute girl for me by the poolside? lol wishful thinking.

Gusty Gustav

So many people including myself got tricked by tropical storm Gustav. At some point in time it shifted from passing north of Jamaica to passing over the dead center of our island. I knew about it but it seemed fairly disorganized for me to be that concerned about it so I went to work Thursday morning as usual. There wasn't much to do there so I was back home by 1pm and started to prepare for the storm.. yes, shame on me for waiting until then to prepare. I had enough tin food from last year so the only thing left was for me to collect some water and cover my stuff with plastic.

As the storm penetrated our little island I watched the news coverage on TV as people called in and reported fires on the power transmission poles, downed power lines and strong gusts of winds. I looked around and noticed I possibly subconsciously arranged what I now dub my 'MacGyver' survival kit on the edge of my pool table. These are items that have probably been all over my apartment for months but now a swiss army knife, 2 lighters, a paper clip, a serrated pocket knife and a $1 coin found them self together. I didn't have a flashlight but I had hundreds of little tea candles that would have provided me with continuous light for weeks if power went away. Was I really prepared?

One thing for sure work had me prepared (supposedly). Before I left work yesterday my boss gave me a so I can work from home if my dsl went or the dialup server died.. how thoughtful. When I reached home I pulled out my laptop and saw a flaw in their plan, my pcmia slot was broken(thats how I received my laptop from them). How could I have forgotten about that? anyway power never went away and I was glad. Everybody who called me told me they didn't have power or water. Up until I went to bed at 2am I had power, water, cable and internet service. I also noticed that there was about 2 feet of water on the main road that was now a river. That was very disturbing but I was high and mostly dry in the ghetto penthouse.

The real parade

This float here was titled the Olympic dream and it was probably the most appropriate float in the parade given Jamaica's performance in the 100m sprints thus far, 2 golds, 2 silvers and lots of records broken/created. I don't need to get much further into this matter as I see pretty much every other Jamaican in the blog sphere has covered it already. We have nothing on China or Phelps winnings but as a small nation we have done pretty well for our self.

Enough olympics chit chat, it was now 2pm on Independence day and I was heading down to Halfway tree to see if I could catch the parade with real people in there.

This was quite the opposite of what I saw earlier in the morning, I thought the promoters where fluffing the numbers when they said 2000+ people would participate in the parade and they did not fail to deliver. It was baking out in the midday heat and yet still there were thousands of people lining the side of the road watching the parade.

They also mentioned a classic and sport car section of the parade. I am not quite sure what this has to do with Jamaica's independence but the people love them some classic cars. Can someone please explain how so many VW bugs made it to the parade? They may be classic but not classy enough to be parade worthy. There was also an unmodified 3000GT in the line up, really now.. maybe I could have entered my civic Vi-RS into the parade as well since they taking every Tom Dick and Harry. At the end of the parade there was also around 30+ bikers on sports bikes just revving their engines. I was at a lost as to their significance in this parade. I guess the promoters where trying to ensure they captured every ones attention. Bikers always seem like a trip to the ER waiting to happen to me.

I think the people in costume depicting various aspects of Jamaican history was the best part of the parade. Those man/donkey people took the cake. Do you see the guy with the Hasselblad camera roaming the streets? maybe not, the picture is too small, but he is the camera guy right behind the red gold and green flag man, if you took a peep over at their website their low budget camera starts at $18,000.. lets just leave it at that.

Then there was the passa passa float that you might have seen from my last post and in true passa passa road side pool party style they had the blow up pool and girls in it. Passa passa seems to have really taken off internationally, to di werl' in true Jamaican style, so I guess it does have some place in the parade. Thanks TG.

The parade had passed, I was sweaty, my memory card was full so I was just following the crowd trying to make my way back to where I parked when I saw a bunch of people looking up and taking pictures. It was Bruce(PM) and his team perched up in a building across from the clock tower. Nice parade Bruce and Olivia, I would have toned it down a bit and spent the countries money on infrastructure improvement though. *clicks tongue*

Independence day '08

This was a few weeks ago on August 6th, so yah I know I'm a bit late but as usual I have been bogged down with other things. Tropical storm Fay passed by Jamaica this weekend leaving me in my house with lots of time to edit photos so you can thank her for this post.

Anyway for Independence day I heard there was supposed to be a few street parades. The first one started at 10am just down the road from me so I saddled up and went down to TGIF to see a handful of people also waiting for the "parade" to start. First of all, as expected, they started in Jamaican time which means for us punctual people we had to wait an hour before the first float started to move, we all sat there wondering if we came late and missed the parade. The next issue was the missing music and the missing people. When the floats started to move they were empty and there was no music. I'll let the photos show how lame the first parade was.

After I had seen enough and was about to leave a guy stopped me and gave me his story. He just came back to Jamaica, was waiting on the barber to open, didn't know anything of a parade hence left his camera at home and would like me to email him the pictures. I found it odd for him to give me such a detailed story but as you can tell from my previous posts I think it's pretty much a given for people to stop me about some photography issue whenever I venture out into public with my camera these days. So guy, I apologize for the delay but here is the first set of the photos.

One thing to note. If you look carefully at the make a joyful noise float you can clearly see that it is church themed. What blows my mind is the back section with the ghost looking wacky waiving inflatable arm flailing tube man that is surrounded by white rum bottles pouring into the float. Bad sponsorship.. float faux paux.

Stay tuned I already have the pictures ready from the real parade later on that day for my next post that should be ready shortly.