Fun with electronics

When we stopped off at the Cambridge house on the way to motss.con, I found that my keyless remote car-door controller didn't work. (We pretty much never lock the car in Gloucester, so I hadn't used it in a while.) We presumed that the battery was dead, which while slightly surprising wasn't a disaster. So, having a bit of spare time on Friday, we wandered into Providence Place mall (immediately adjacent to the hotel) to find a Radio Shack -- who proved to be out of that particular battery, so we tried the camera place, and they didn't have it, so in desperation we tried CVS and -- score! In replacing the battery, we noticed a surprising amount of corrosion on and around the old one, but cleaned it up as best we could and put in the new one. Went to the car to reinitialize the remote and make sure it worked. All OK.

Except that the next time we needed to use the car, the remote was once again non-functional. Talking about this later with other attendees, I was puzzled about how the thing would fail after only about four years: "It's not like I dipped it in water or anything... oh, wait."

I had completely forgotten that on our (so far this season only) visit to Good Harbor Beach a couple of days previously, I had forgotten to do what I customarily do, which is to place my keys in one of my sandals, instead leaving them in the pocket of my bathing suit. I now remembered my relief at discovering, as we were leaving, that they had remained in my pocket as I played in the surf, rather than ending up somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. It hadn't occurred to me to speculate about the interaction of electronics and salt water.

Once we got home, we tried cleaning it more thoroughly, but to no avail. As it happened, jwg had an appointment to have the car serviced on Friday, so while we were at the dealer I bought a new one (for $65, but I had feared it would be far worse).

And at least we have a nearly-new spare battery, which we will probably never need (or will have no idea where it is if we ever do need it).

Light switch lottery

I was reminded by a passing remark in ruralrob's journal of a curious characteristic of the various lodges we stayed at in Tanzania: they had a remarkable array of light switches, some of which controlled the various lights, and some of which controlled whether certain other switches did anything at all. These were mostly either unlabelled or labelled ambiguously. In general, we never did actually figure the system out (it was, of course, different at each lodge), and controlled our lights by trial and error.

It has perhaps not occurred to the people who design these systems that the guest is unlikely to have stayed there before, and isn't going to be there long enough to learn each room's particular obscure system.