There are 521 posts filed in Follow-Up (this is page 19 of 53).
I did a search of the CPSC website, SaferProducts.gov, to see if my Bosch dishwasher report had been posted yet. What I found was a shocking number of similar reports, many of them of full-fledged fires that started in Bosch’s defective control board. Many of these reports are for the recalled models, but not all of them! It seems my problem is not unique.
Over just the past 12 months there have been 26 reports filed on Bosch dishwashers.
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A Bosch dishwasher control board that caught fire. From CPSC website.
So as I posted earlier I discovered that Bosch had a voluntary recall on its dishwashers to fix the defective control board. I felt so sure this was my issue that I told all my neighbors. The homes in our neighborhood were all built by the same builder so our dishwashers are likely to all be Boschs.
Then I got home, punched in my model’s serial number and was surprised to see it wasn’t included in the recall. How could this be? My dishwasher’s control board clearly malfunctioned, with the heater relay melting itself off the board, yet it wasn’t recalled?
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Remember last year when I wondered when someone would start building roads made of solar panels that generated electricity? I found out today that someone actually is doing this. Pretty cool!
Years ago, when the phrase “Global Warming” began gaining popularity, we started batting around the idea of replacing asphalt and concrete surfaces with solar panels that could be driven upon. We thought of the “black box” on airplanes: We didn’t know what material that black box was made of, but it seemed to be able to protect sensitive electronics from the worst of airline crashes.
Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to “paint” the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.
Over the weekend our Bosch dishwasher began to run in an “infinite loop,” with the countdown timer always showing 1 minute left. This went on for hours. We looked up info on the problem, discovered how to fix it, and successfully repaired our dishwasher. However, I learned this morning that our dishwasher was subject to a recall for this very reason.
From the Consumer Product Safety Commission:
Hazard: An electrical component in certain model dishwashers can overheat, posing a fire hazard to consumers.
Incidents/Injuries: BSH Home Appliances has received 51 reports of incidents, including 30 reports of fires resulting in property damage. No injuries have been reported.
A component on the dishwasher’s control board arced and melted, growing hot enough to potentially cause a fire. Because the dishwasher is quiet, we often run it as we are going to bed. I shudder to think what might have happened if it had caught fire while we were asleep, separating us from our children’s bedrooms!
If you have a Bossh dishwasher whose model number appears on the recall list, STOP USING IT IMMEDIATELY and CALL BOSCH! They will come out and correct the fire hazard for free.
We were very lucky ours wasn’t more serious than it was. Take action before it happens to you!
See these links for more details:
http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Recalls/2009/Bosch-and-Siemens-Model-Dishwashers-Recalled-by-BSH-Home-Appliances-Corporation-Due-to-Fire-Hazard/
http://www.bosch-home.com/us/support/safety-notices/dishwasher-recall.html
Speaking of working from home, we have an arrangement here at work that is a pretty interesting use of telepresence tools. One of our developers works remotely but needs to attend occasional meetings. Rather than fly him in and out, we’ve set him up with a Wifi-enabled camera which he can use to pan, tilt, and zoom around the room. All that’s missing is some way for him to drive the camera from room to room and he could be virtually here. The camera isn’t cheap but it easily paid for itself the very first time it kept our developer from traveling.
I was thinking of bringing in my now-unused Roomba vacuum and using that to move the camera around. I could slap a small UPS battery on top to power the camera and interface it with the camera software to let it be controlled remotely.
Another thing that would be useful to telepresence tools would be an additional fisheye-lens camera. This should show the whole room in a separate window while the main camera is pointed somewhere else. When the viewer needs to focus on something or someone in the room, the viewer will know where the main camera needs to be pointed. Better yet, the viewer could simply click on a point on the room image and the main camera would point there. That might make it painless enough that attending a meeting virtually wouldn’t be so much about fiddling with the tools but being able to focus on the meeting itself.
Interesting stuff. I’ll have to see what I can put together to make this work.
Here’s a look at another way of dealing with death on your own terms: the home funeral.
Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child’s paling lips, and covered up Caroline’s toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.
Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline’s death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.
via Home Funerals Grow As Americans Skip The Mortician For Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care.
Perhaps the N&O’s sports section isn’t the only one that could use some editing attention. A friend alerted me to the misspelled name of Capitol Broadcasting CEO Jim Goodmon, which appeared in a caption on page A1, above the fold, in Saturday’s paper.
Misspelling Goodmon’s name is akin to misspelling the governor’s name, at least here in the Triangle.
This editorial cartoon from Bruce Beattie of the Daytona Beach News Journal sums up my thoughts exactly.
ReadWrite says its fake Facebook Likes story really struck a nerve. The magazine is asking others for their stories:
Meanwhile we’re looking for more examples of fake likes. Our writer, Bernard Meisler, put his story together by asking people he knew on Facebook to look out for fake likes and send him examples. Now we’d like to find even more.
Apparently this is happening a lot, and nobody seems to know why.
Facebook told us it must be people accidentally pressing a “like” button on their mobile app. But can there really be that many people pressing the wrong button, all the time?
If you have a theory, we’re all ears.
via ReadWrite – Have You Or Someone You Know Ever Fake-Liked Something On Facebook?.
I had thought that there would be no more news on the Mitt Romney Facebook hacking phenomena. Turns out I was wrong. ReadWrite’s Bernard Meisler shows ths fake likes are still happening on Facebook:
Last month, while wasting a few moments on Facebook, my pal Brendan O’Malley was surprised to see that his old friend Alex Gomez had “liked” Discover. This was surprising not only because Alex hated mega-corporations but even more so because Alex had passed away six months earlier.
The Facebook “like” is dated Nov. 1, which is strange since Alex “passed [away] around March 26 or March 27,” O’Malley told me. Worse, O’Malley says the like was “quite offensive” since his friend “hated corporate bullshit.”
via ReadWrite – Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff On Facebook?.
