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Day: March 5, 2011

Inconvenienced by Safety

A few weeks back I ordered this turkey fryer setup from Cabela’s to replace the burner/regulator that I had problems with a few weeks back. Today when setting it up for use I found that there is an electronic interlock on the gas line which will cut off the gas flow after the last time it was manually reset.

I attempted to remove this, but as can be seen here there is a laquer-like thread locker on the fitting between the regulator and the interlock. While this likely won’t be a huge issue, I’d really prefer to simply concentrate on brewing beer and not pressing a button to keep things running.

UPDATE: In practice this wasn’t that much of a hinderance. The large red button which starts the gas flowing and resets the electronic timer serves as a quick turn-on, and the black button is a good emergency-off in case of a boil-over. A green light illuminates when the gas is flowing and it starts blinking before the gas shuts off, giving one ample time to press the red button and keep gas flowing. While it would be nice to not have this safety in place, it’s not as difficult to deal with as I’d expected.

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Corporate Fanboyism

Driving home on I-75 in Detroit yesterday I saw this vehicle (black Saturn VUE, Michigan BWB 0564), driven by a 50-ish man with grey hair, grey beard, gold-rimmed glasses, and a flannel shirt bearing some rather interesting hand-written slogans on the windows. The ones shown here are:

TRY PAYING
BILLS & TAXES
WITH FOREIGN
$
BUY AMERICAN OR GOOD BYE!

and

FOREIGN CAR
DRIVERS NEED
2-B HOMELESS
+
JOBLESS

The rear window had something about cell phones similar to the Shut Up, Hang Up, and Drive bumper stickers.

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