That is all, really. Turned over 3500kms on the not a big Ford truck this week. It’s surprisingly liberating to ride. I had no idea that the biggest benefit would be being far more calm in traffic. You would think I would be nervous with all of the cages around me, but instead, I feel safer. I can get away from them. I can avoid the worst traffic. I can filter. I’m still not ready to split, but I’m sure that will come, probably with a Ninjette or something else a little smaller. This truly has been a game-changer for me, and the game is now on.
After being told that my packages were undeliverable, I did what scientists due: I researched it. I called the USPS station that delivers to my house in Michigan and asked them if the address was good. It took me a while to get there, at least three phone calls, but Jeremy answered the phone and asked me right off the bat, was I getting any mail there. Yeah, I get baskets of junk mail. Then, dude, the address is good. We deliver if the address is good. Your address is fine, ma’am. You have a good carrier and that route is a nice one. Thank you for confirming, Jeremy.
I called Aetna back. This time, I asked for a supervisor, who swore up and down she would call back in 40 minutes. After about two hours, I called again, and as usual, the third time was the charm. I somehow to get connected to the actual pharmacy service (instead of “customer” service), and spoke to a guy who not only could see the entire file, but started from scratch with the data, checking and double-checking the address information. We got as far as the ZIP code when he asked me if my town was near Akron, MI.
Any modern piece of software that ends up printing a shipping label has a neat feature called ZIP code cross-check. This automatically populates the city field based on the ZIP code entered. Pharmacy guy found the error with minimal effort – the city that was typed into the manual entry field was different than the city from the ZIP code, because the ZIP code had not been transcribed properly. One digit was off.
I’ve reconfirmed that address with at least five Aetna reps over the last two months. Not one of them noticed the ZIP code error. This kind of issue is what software is supposed to fix for us – to reduce the impact of human error. In this case, the software worked fine. But apparently it required its user to understand the importance of what it was doing. This is just more proof that there is still no cure for stupid.
I live in Germany (duh). My generous employer contracts with Aetna International to manage my health care benefits. This has produced some rather funny phone calls that have left me with a serious case of indigestion. Most focus around the pharmacy benefit – Aetna’s international plan strongly recommends that participants use the Aetna mail-order pharmacy to save costs. Sounds good, right? Until you discover that they don’ t ship out of the country.
My first go-around with these people centered around two reps at the pharmacy call center who were sure that Aetna shiped to Germany “all the time”. I repeatedly told both of them that NO, I DO NOT LIVE ON AN AIRBASE. I HAVE A GERMAN POST CODE. Both swore up and down that this was no problem. Four weeks later, I was sitting in the office of a German doctor, begging in broken German for a maintenance medication that is so rarely prescribed over here that she had to call a pharmacy to see if it was even available! It turned out to cost four times what the US generic price is due to being unusual.
Once I had some meds, I returned to the phone. Since not only does the US Government prohibit US pharmacies from shipping out of the country (APOs and FPOs are technically US addresses, so don’t count), Aetna refuses to allow its reps to make international calls, severely limiting the contact options for those customers living overseas. Once I determined (I had about 6 hours into phone calls at this point) that I was on my own, I figured out that I could get the meds shipped to my job and the kind staff in shipping would forward them to me.
This worked fine, until the USPS decided that I no longer lived at my house.
I rode out to Kalkar Mill on Saturday afternoon to check out the stones. Kalkarermühle is an operating windmill in Kalkar, NRW, Germany, and home to a diverse bunch of people who have decided to keep the windmilling trade alive as volunteer millers. One of the millers is a friend and fellow rider, and introduced me to this neat old technology last fall.
The key to the mill is the stone set. The lower stone, shown here, is fixed and does not move. The upper stone is supported on a pintle that is driven by the familiar sails that catch the wind and power the operation. The entire rig runs at around 120rpm, which is quite speedy, considering that the stones are about 1.6m in diameter. That comes to an edge speed of 24m/s! When the season for milling is low (winter), the millers open the stones for cleaning, resurfacing, and rhynd repairs. On this stone, the darker areas are the wear surfaces, and the grooves are the feeders that feed the grain in.
Fixed stone from Kalkarermühle
Nordic skiing has a lot more to do with Alpine skiing than skateboarding does with snowboarding.
I traveled to Willingen, a town in the Sauerland area of Germany, to further my skiing abilities, and for the first time, skied fully in parallel, executing pretty stem turns and schussing down a moderately steep piste. Four hours of lessons produced a recognizable and functional technique that could get me safely down the slope with good control. By the end of the weekend, I could ski comfortably, avoiding oncoming traffic and the hundreds of Dutch children covering the bunny hill. I even ventured up the Seilbahn (gondola lift) to take on the big hill. I fell once, sliding due to a bit of fear (my survival reaction is to lean backwards, a quick way to lose control), but no harm done. I seemed to have learned how to properly fall in the process, too.
The instructors both made a good point: I was not a beginner skier. Unlike instructors in the US, who pooh-poohed my hundreds (if not at least a thousand) kilometers of Nordic experience, the Germans were quick to describe each Alpine technique in Nordic terms. This was a confidence boost and made it easier to adopt the new technique of pushing the tails wide (stemming).
I expect I’ll be skiing through the summer, over at the Skihalle in nearby Neuss. Yes, it’s a bunny hill, but I see no reason not to own it, too.
From my Autoholics feed: There is, indeed, a McDonalds in the BMW dealership in Düsseldorf.
You want fries with that 7er?
One of the few real contributions I have been able to make to the MkI VW community, who have helped me with countless problems, is a manual for repair and replacement of MkI convertible tops. Co-Authored with Brian O’Connell of the152, it will save your bottom end when leaks invariably wander in.
It’s one of my favorite literary lines ever, from Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain. The scientist in question is pondering whether successful treatment of the symptoms displayed by his patient means that the disease causing them is actually cured.
So it goes with electronic diagnoses involving logic boards. Stray voltage at one pin results in a strange signal at another one. The voltage can have three sources, but which one is it?
For example, a artificially high (500rpm) tach reading on an F650GS that remains after shut off for several seconds. Coupled with poor running/starting. Symptoms occur only when bike is started wet after cold rain. Brought up to running temp and restarted, the problem is gone. Signal path is a single star circuit of the ECU, the #1 coil, and the tach signal feed. Diagnosis starts with check air and fuel to rule them out for the poor running aspect. Both are fine. Second step – pull plugs. As expected the #1 plug is funny looking, not bad, but a bit pink on the insulator. The primary resistance on the coil is a hair high when the coil body is wet.
Is this a symptom, or is it the disease? I’ll find out when I pull the tach apart. I hope.
All my life, I’ve been pretty good about patents and trademarks. So I’m a bit confused as to why BMW isn’t. The “Motronic” in my bike is actually a Hella product called BMS, as I just learned from the FAQs over at f650.com. This explains a great deal about why it bears so little resemblance to a modern Bosch engine management system, even as it bears resemblances to pieces of so many others.
Did I say anything about wanting to learn a new EFI control codec? No, I did not.
edit – when I wrote this post, I was under the impression that Motronic meant Motronic. Not to BMW, who call any engine control unit Motronic, regardless of whether they are violating Bosch’s trademark rights or not… See above.
I am a card-carrying K-Jetronic girl. When I first discovered K-Jet-E in my 1982 VW Rabbit Convertible, I leaned back in awe and remarked to myself that this is how I would do fuel injection if I had to: I would take apart a carburettor and distribute its parts liberally around the engine bay, making sure that each had its place and did not interfere with the others, all being individually adjustable and controllable (einstellbar und kontrollierbar, auf Deutsch). Just like K-Jet. I regard K-Jet as one of the peaks of elegant engineering design, and certainly one of the coolest systems to ever leave the halls of Robert Bosch Gmbh. It is also simple and easy to work with, provided you understand the basics of air/fuel ratios and a few other odds and ends about ICEs, of course.
I can’t say the same for Motronic, Bosch’s “modern” EFI control system. I’ve been watching a weird problem on my bike lately, and I’ve tracked it down to what looks like a bad hack job over in the Motronic design group. Not content with just supplying a modern, 2004 version of Motronic, it appears that Bosch decided to crib together the lousy parts of Motronic (signals taken from only half of the system), an interesting part of K-Jet (running the whole thing off the coil sense), and who knows what from Digifant.
The problem manifests itself as a flat 500rpm lift in the tach signal when it rains. Being Motronic, the tach signal is fed from the coil sense, but only from one of the two coils. The Rotax engine is known for some assorted issues (other than being a bullet-proof, workhorse, dinosaur of a fuel-efficient and otherwise great motor), one of which is pretty serious surging. Well…. imagine that. When your injector circuit is being driven by a feedback loop from half of the coil circuit, and voltage is building up due to phantom capacitance somewhere, yeah, the poor thing is going to surge like crazy.
So, I’ll be spending my weekend working on the bike with the only tool you need on a Motronic machine: my DVM. This is not what “working on the (insert ICE-equipped vehicle)” is supposed to mean, Mr Bosch…..