Humor

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The Cub Report – Riding a Dragon is Cool. Who knew?

Did you play World of Warcraft during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion?

Did you run Northrend heroic instances at the appropriate level?

Did you… were you one of the few, those few, that band of misfits that would stay in the instance when The Oculus appeared on LFD?

Do you remember those halcyon days of our LFD youth, when any instance was fair game except the Oculus, and you knew that you had a nice wait in store for you as people zoned in, saw which one it was, let loose with a psychic shriek of horror and dropped group like a Fire Salamander was dropped down their shorts?

I remember those days.

I remember when Blizzard did what was then almost unheard of, and added extra super special bribes in the form of extra Emblems for those who stuck out that hellish dragon-infested flailfest.

Can I admit to enjoying tanking it? Has enough time passed yet to say I liked it, and only dreaded the random groups of, well, idiots? Idiots that expected to brute force their way through instead of performing surgical dragonstrikes on the right target at the correct time?

Glory of the Hero has brought us back to The Oculus, in search of achievements.

The first time Alex got his hands on the reins of a Red Drake, I thought he was going to plotz with excitement.

Let me break something down for you.

Insanely high item levels of gear + drakes from old instances that scale with gear = let’s get it on dragonriders of the purple sage style.

The three of us were able to gun down Eregos using all Red Drakes easy as… easy as a thing that is almost as easy as breaking a yolk when you drop an egg. Almost.

The next day, flush with our success, we mounted all Bronze Drakes and stormed the heights, only to find that Eregos may hate being hit by bronze Drakes and their damage multipliers and stop times, but his whelps are most unimpressed.

Interestingly enough, plotz also adequately describes the sound our bodies made as they suddenly stopped plummeting from the skies after being swarmed, SWARMED by little blue freaking whelps.

Red Drakes do splash damage. I plumb forgot there WERE whelps on that fight. The first day with Red Drakes, they didn’t live long enough to show up.

Getting a “no Red Drake” achieve took the three of us using two Bronze and me on an Emerald. Which, frankly, was a lot of fun. I healed someone else! Whee!

Driving tanks and shooting cannons in Ulduar is great fun, but allow me to pass on a bit of feedback from Alex;

Riding Dragons is awesome when you feel as if you’re actually RIDING A POWERFUL DRAGON AND KILLING ALL THE THINGS WHEE!

Your dragon mount should not feel squishier than a Holy Priest in a Death Knight Mosh Pit during the half-price sale on spiked leather, Wednesdays only at Mosh Mart.

Having overpowered drakes means your dragonfighting experience against all the Blue Dragons in the middle feels… well, fun.

Flame breath all the things!

Gonna get back in there, gonna have me some fun. Gonna have me some fun.

Flame some!

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A Little Too Much Powa!

This last week, I’ve been running frequent random Twilight heroic instances in search of a weapon upgrade for a certain Death Knight Cub.

Alas, the drops have not been forthcoming in terms of weapons, but Valor and Justice are always welcome. Alex turned to me yesterday and announced he bought a Wooly Mammoth!

Yep, tooling around Dalaran, he spotted the Exotic Mounts vendor and checked out the wares on sale. Imagine his astonishment when he found you could buy a Wooly Mammoth to ride as a mount, and instead of costing gold, they cost Justice Points! He happened to have over 3000 Justice Points at the time, so one impulse buy later, he’s huge and hairy riding something huge and hairy.

Speaking of bears on camels, oh wait, that was my run with Precious and Soft. That’s for a different story.

So really speaking of huge and hairy, as I was saying, I’ve been tanking up the heroics for the insta-queue thing.

I thought I’d seen it all, but last night actually gobsmacked me, left me flabbergasted, boggled my brain and blew my cool.

It was wild, man.

We gathered up an all-guild run for a random Twilight Heroic, with Alex on his Death Knight, Cassie whacking all the things on her Shaman, BB throwing the red fire on his Mage and Ursi healing on his Priest from the Hellscream server.

I, of course, was bringing the butt.

The instance we got was Hour of Twilight, which elicited a groan from me. No weapon drops coming from THAT son of a bandersnatch!

Ah, well. Maybe next time.

As I bounced from place to place in true poohtigger style (you can call it Bearcatting all you’d like, I know who I draw my inspiration from), the comment was made that bears bouncing all the time must be a guild thing, since so many of our guild Bears do it.

I made some throwaway smartass remark about having done it for years and years now, as it’s the only way to exercise those rear haunches. Big butts are all well and good, but those legs have got to be strong to launch me into the fray. A wimpy Feral Charge would be a terrible thing, just terrible.

Apparently, my remark taunted the Priest. Sigh.

We blasted through in good time to the final boss, and gathered around while we waited for Archbishop Benedictus to shut up and give us go time.

Was I bouncing as I waited?

NO.

No, I couldn’t bounce as per Standing Order: Bear #1369, though, because that bastard Ursi abused the Priestly powers granted to him for no other reason than to prevent our bouncing.

When I ran into the chamber under Dragonshrine, Ursi cast Levitate on me, and then on every other member of the party including himself.

No bouncing! There was no bouncing! I wanted to turn around and say to Thrall, “There’s no bouncing with Benedictus! Thrall, there’s no bouncing! Make it stop!”

He did this with enough time to waste that we were able to comment on how I looked freaking cool bear paddling through the air. Cassie transformed into Ghost Wolf and we noted it looked like her wolf was standing on a flat plane of air rather than doggie paddling. There was plenty of time to pass for the posturing pontiff to propose the primacy of powa, the pontificating prick.

Being in this cooldown period, and having nothing at all to cause damage to pop the Levitate off me, I let it go and shifted to caster form. As soon as we got to about 12 seconds before the boss activates, I popped Bear (Furor +10 rage) and then Enrage (+20 rage +10 over time and prevents Rage decay) so I’d be all up and ready to throw down the bigbuttbeatdown.

What followed was instant epic karma.

The WoW gods are clearly Bears, for never before have I seen such sinister, swift justice to a misguided miscreant.

It all started with a Levitate, and went straight down to hell.

We’re all floating around Archbishop Benedictus, I’ve shifted out and in and have Enrage ticking and I’ve got my Rage bar full enough to get it going.

Boss goes active, I start with a Mangle to set the Bleed, Feral Faerie Fire, Lacerate stack going. My Tidy Plates/Threat Plates addon is solidly in the green. All is right in the Bear tanking world. My rage bar is filling nicely from all the damage I’m doing.

Except the boss isn’t facing ME, he’s facing Cassie and his back is to me! 

I’m trying to move him to the side in preparation for the waves and he ain’t going, but my bars are all green, so I should have solid threat, and he doesn’t have one of those “ignore the tank” mechanics, and WTF is going on? Cassie is a badass doing 28k – 30k DPS, but who the wha the how the fuh fuh fuh fuh

I use Growl to taunt, nothing, I’m doing the “Well DPS harder, damnit” thing,s no dice, I’m still green Threat Plates across the board but Cassie is on vent saying she has aggro, get it off me naow, what kind of fail tank are you, Ursi is healing Cass for all he’s worth, BB and Alex both die from lack of heals when the wave comes through, and it’s just freaking chaos, and I’M STILL FLOATING.

I was still floating.

I was still floating as the party died around me, Growl and Challenging Roar did nothing. My attacks all caused damage exactly as normal, but they seemed to have no Threat component at all. Nothing. But Threat Plates clearly thought I was generating Threat just fine. KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!

All I could do was float there, watch folks scramble, and search frantically among 20 little buff icons under my portrait for the Levitate one to click the damn thing off.

By the time I clicked it off, there was just Cassie and me left standing. Wimps.

We killed the boss, of course, I mean, Bear and Enhancement Shaman, c’mon. Chomp chomp.

That was the single freakiest thing I have ever seen on live. I’ve tanked that powa-ful idiot many, many times and I’ve never seen that happen.

In fact, I’ve done it so many times I’ll admit I was complacent and horsing around. I wasn’t taking him seriously. It was a point of pride in my skillz that of course I’d be full of Rage and ready to pop a claw in his skull the second he came off rant, but that was just because it’s that thang I do. It wasn’t out of fear of losing aggro or anything.

Woke my ass right up.

So of course, the only thing to do was get on my Priest, queue for an Hour of Twilight immediately, take a full PUG group in (Death Knight tank) and Levitate everyone at the same point on the Archbishop just to see what would happen.

It wasn’t to be mean, it was FOR SCIENCE!

Sigh. Nothing out of the ordinary. We won, no excitement, no screams or panic-filled chases. Bummer dude.

I don’t know whether there was some weird confluence of Talents and Abilities that just happened to create the conditions for a perfect bug, but I think I know what the real cause was.

The Bear Gods really did frown on Ursi preventing me from bouncing. And they took swift and powaful justice on the offender.

Let this be a lesson to you all.

Does a Bear bounce in a PUG?

YES

And don’t you even THINK of trying interfere. You’ve been warned.

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The Annals of Awesome

Welcome to an entry in what I am going to call The Annals of Awesome™.

I came home tonight and asked Cassie what she might have been thinking for dinner. Her reply was, “I was thinking quesadillas and soup. We still have half a pound of bacon, so I thought we could fry up the bacon and add that in for…. bacon and cheese quesadillas.”

Crunchy bacon and delicious melted cheese in a grilled flour tortilla?

Oh yeah. 

“Dear”, I said afterwards, “These quesadillas are five star. At least.”

She just looked at me with a serious expression, and replied, “You can’t rate food five star when bacon is involved. It skews the results. I could take ice cream, sprinkle bacon on top and drizzle with strawberry sauce and caramel and you’d call it five star.”

To which my jaw dropped, and I made dot noises like this, “…..”

Ice cream with bacon, strawberry sauce and caramel?

GENIUS!

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Mug of Coffee Pleasure +5

I have an announcement to make!

I have attained another level in my ‘adult’ base class by becoming a strong adopter of hot morning beverages.

In other words, I now drink coffee more than anything else, all morning long. Just like my parents, and my grandparents, and so forth.

Now, my beverage of choice is coffee, but I’m not going to be elitist about this. While I myself haven’t gone for one of the prestige classes built around Latte or Chai Tea, and I haven’t taken the disadvantage “Expensive Name Brand Vendor Only” in order to qualify for a higher social standing prestige class, I can appreciate what a delightfully diverse culture the hot morning beverage crowd has become.

Still. For me, it’s all about the coffee.

Coffee like you get in the generic can, with the color dot that says “not too strong, not too light, straight down the middle like a wuss afraid to fight”.

I’m interested in branching out, I keep an open mind. I’m not prejudiced, I like experimenting with the occasional Celestial Seasonings blend, a Mocha or a Latte, just for a taste of something different.

Seasonal coffees like Pumpkin Spice on a cold winter morning, mmmmm, yummy.

I found the Cinnamon-flavored coffee was amazing. It won my heart, yes it did.

I went back to get cases to stock up, only to find it gone without a trace. No location code, no shelf space, and the store has never carried it again.

It has become the Coffee That Must Not Be Named. Truly, it’s flavor was good, but now that I cannot have it, it has become that most exquisite of tastes, exotic and mysterious, never to be equalled.

I think, in fact, that the reason it was pulled was because it was too seductive.

It posed a threat to our modern American way of life. Homeland Security labeled cinnamon coffee a terrorist threat, and took it away, never to be seen again. If you listen close, you can hear the rubber hoses beat the beans and smell the grounds burn under the glare of the high-intensity lights.

Coffee that good? Too dangerous for mere mortals to comprehend or consume without terrifying effects.

I don’t like to think on the horrors that poor coffee may be suffering in a cell in Gitmo.

Instead, I like to think that the cinnamon coffee I sampled and now desire above all other blends was destined for the hallowed halls of Asgard, and it was a simple UPS sorting error that sent it to lowly Aldi’s Store #78545 instead.

A terrible fate may have been averted in the nick of time. Who could say what wonders or terrors my typing fingers may have bashed out under it’s divine influence?

The world will never know. The world was not MEANT to know!

Whew! Crisis averted.

Wait.

Oh, right. Coffee.

I be drinking coffee, and by coffee I mean a hot brew. I do not drink chilled coffee. To me, chilled coffee is what happens when you’re writing a long blog post, bring the cup up to take a sip, and make a face. Blech! Cold coffee. Shudder.

Nothing for it then but to prove geek cred by applying microwave radiation directly on tepid liquid, infusing pure, raw power into my beverage, power born of SCIENCE!

This post is not meant to be a passionate statement about coffee. That’s a bonus.

No, this is meant to be a message for all those like me who delight in the drinking of a nice, hot drink now and then.

While my hero Jack Reacher has his own thoughts on the perfect vessel to drink coffee from, what I like is a heavy ceramic mug, thick walled and oversized.

When we visited Walt Disney World, I saw the perfect mug, and carefully carted it back intact to our home on the other side of the country.

I have now been testing this mug. I’m not gonna endorse a mug until I’ve put it through it’s paces.

Well, I’m here to tell you, this mug is the cats meow.

I happily present to you, the Tigger Coffee Mug.

Now, I understand your concern when you see the words “oversized”.

Yeah right, heard that one before. What, it can hold a whole extra teaspoon? I need the ounces to be weighty, I have typing to do!

Allow me to reassure you. It is, indeed, oversized.

Here is my mug next to my other beverage of choice for the purposes of comparison.

There. That sucker will EAT the mountain dew can. Step off, dew, You’ve been warned.

So there you have it, my friends. When you’ve got a payload as powerful as coffee, shouldn’t you have a delivery system that shows the world you are SERIOUS about what you do?

Of course you should. 🙂

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It Was Just A Blown Fuse

BEARWALL that has nothing to do with gaming.

Has anyone ever told you this before?

“Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”

Just so you know, that saying is a test.

A lot of things in life are tests, and it can be hard to recognize it when one comes around.

This post is in the way of a public service message for those of you that aren’t all too sure what “a blown fuse” means, and don’t want to look stupid or ignorant when someone tells you this in the future.

From now on, instead of nodding your head and walking away feeling vaguely worried, I’m going to arm you with science so you know what they’re saying… and what pointed questions to ask.

A Firm Grounding

Here’s the deal. If you’re reading this, you’re plenty smart enough and educated enough to understand what a fuse is, and what it means. You might just need a frame of reference.

Don’t panic. This won’t get technical.

You know your electronics runs on a power source we call electricity.

There are lots of technical terms used when discussing electricity, how it’s measured, how to calculate volts and amps, etc.

You don’t need to know any of that to live your life.

What you need to know is, how does it make that iPod spin out music, and can my iPod electrocute me if I drop it in water?

Quick answer: No.

We can functionally describe electricity as being similar to water. Water that is unaffected by gravity… but that loves finding a path to the deep, dark underworld.

What do I mean?

Let’s look at how water functions.

Water, when flowing, pushes things in front of it. The force of water pushing on things in it’s path can be used to get work done. The stronger the flow (or current), the more it can push, the more it can do.

Electricity works much the same way.

Picture a flowing stream or babbling brook. If there is a building on the riverbank, and that building has a waterwheel dipping into the river’s current, the force of the flowing water pushes on the paddles that are at the bottom, moving them forward, turning the wheel so that the next paddle dips into the current, and the rotation of the wheel continues, forever and ever, amen, ’til the river rises and the cows come home.

That waterwheel rotates on a shaft, and the shaft goes into the building, and what you get is a turning shaft inside a big building, powered by the flow of water. You can then attach stuff like gears and things, linkages and doodads, and get working machinery… powered purely by water. Triphammers, mill wheels, saws and drills and all sorts of stuff can be powered in this way.

Well, electricity is the same exact thing.

Except… instead of electricity flowing as water does, pulled down by gravity following the lowest surface it can find, electricity is special water that flows wherever it can find a conductive surface to carry it into the ground.

Electricity always heads for the easiest, simplest, fastest connection to the deep earth it can find. It follows the path of least resistance.

What is a conductive surface? Well, it depends on how strong the current of the electricity is, really.

Things like metal and water can be great conductors. Electricity touching metal will go straight to wherever the metal is touching the ground at the best point.

Rubber and the air can both be very good insulators, blocking the flow of electricity dead in it’s tracks. Plastic is pretty good at that, too.

But the more power, the more force, the more oomph in the electricity, the more resistance (or insulation) the electricity can overcome.

At high enough levels, the electricity can even jump through the air, conducting through the air itself to get to the ground. We call that an arc, and that’s some serious high power fry your ass mojo.

Why, if there is enough current in the electricity, YOU can be a conductor! You are a lot more conductive than the air, by the way. A LOT more conductive than the air.

Safety First

Let’s have a brief experiment to illustrate this point.

Say you take a metal knife, and you stick it in a wall outlet… the electricity will instantly see that if it flows through the metal knife, and then through your body, it can reach the ground through your knees where you’re touching it, and off it goes.

At this point, you will either get blasted away from the outlet because the electricity flowing through your body from your hand to your knees caused your muscles to spasm, OR you will get locked rigidly to that knife, taking the juice constantly, because your muscles all just convulsed and locked up.

This can be a fun experiment, because if your friend or loved one sees you there unmoving or unresponsive, they might run over to grab you and pull you away… and IF they are suddenly a better conductor (say they are in bare feet while you’re wearing jeans) than you are, now the electricity sees a BETTER conductive path of least resistance through them, and BOOM, they get zapped too.

Quick fun fact: In the Marines, when you’re going to work with electricity, we used to make safety devices. What these were, were long wooden sticks covered in rubber, with a metal hook screwed into one end and also covered with rubber. They were for when a Marine grabbed a live wire, convulsed, and you had to get them free without electricuting yourself. You could grab the 8′ long rubber-coated hook off the wall, and either hook them and drag them away or just whack them good with the rubber stick.

Oh no? Oh, hell yes.

Are you paying attention now?

Just to ease your worried mind, you should know that there are two kinds of electricity… direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The kind of electricity in your wall outlets and in your home is all AC, or alternating current. Think of it as special electricity that pulses instead of just staying strong and steady. It pulses so fast you wouldn’t notice it without special gear, but your muscles will know the difference, because if you get zapped by AC, the first pulse may lock your muscles up and cause them to contract but the next pulse will convulse you and blast you free.

Direct Current, now… that shit will lock you up, holmes.

Where do you mostly find DC (Direct Current)? Why you find it INSIDE a lot of pwoerful electronics like TVs, stereos, microwave ovens, motors, air conditioners, all that kind of stuff. AFTER where the AC power cord comes into the gizmo, goes through a transformer and some other stuffs, and gets distributed throughout the thingie as nice, smooth DC voltage.

THIS IS WHY YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO SCREW AROUND INSIDE ELECTRONICS WITHOUT TRAINING. 

So.

Electricity is like water, it pushes stuff in front of it. It is supposed to start at, say, a wall outlet or breaker box. Then it flows through a conductive material, like metal wire, that is covered in a insulating material like rubber to keep it IN the wire, goes into a gizmo, pushes stuff around inside the gizmo to make it move and get work done… and then, believe it or not, goes right back out a second insulated metal wire and back into the wall outlet, return to sender.

It makes a complete circuit.

This is why, if you look at an AC power cord, it is two wires, each wrapped in rubber to isolate them from each other. One is the supply of juice TO teh gizxmo, the other is the return pipe FROM teh gizmo. They are commonly called the ‘Hot” and the “Neutral”, respectively. The hot is usually coated with black rubber, and the neutral is coated with white, when found in American wiring diagrams or inside a junction box.

You often also find a third wire. It is colored green inside gizmos, and it is called the ground wire.

Why? Because the ground wire does NOT carry any juice at all. None. It is dead as a doornail… and it is there to save your life.

The ground wire is attached to the deepest, darkest pit of black underground wetness there is anywhere near your house. It is THE favorite path for current to flow.

The ground wire is plugged into your gear, fixed to metal parts like the case… and is supposed to be a safety. If the hot or the neutral gets cut or shorted, instead of you getting killed by touching the metal case of your stereo, the power goes through the case, to the ground wire, and down to that inky it of blackness where all electricity finds it’s home instead.

It also provides a wonderful way of making sure you don’t get outside sources of electricity, like static electricity, interfering within your delicate electronics like your Xbox 360. If you zap the case, the ground wire bleeds the electricity off to ground so it never zaps the guts of the machine.

But what about fuses, you idiot!

It is normal to put a fuse in the wire at different points.

Breakers in your electrical panel in your house are, essentially, fuses too.

What a fuse is, is a wire designed to melt at a certain temperature, enclosed in a VERY insulative holder. It’s just the same as wire, but if it gets too hot, it melts. 

Fuses melt when they get too hot, and when that happens, no more path for the current to flow. Electricity stops flowing, because the wire just got cut. The gizmo stops working… because the electricity HAS to flow for it to push or otherwise make the gizmo do stuff.

So, if a fuse is designed to melt when it gets too hot, what causes it to heat up?

Electricity does.

More specifically, the amperage in the electricity.

What is amperage? 

You don’t need to know exactly what it is, but it can help to think of it like this.

Now, this is completely and totally wrong, and yet it may help. Professionals, if you think I’ve taken liberties before this, hold onto your hats. It’s all in a good cause.

When you see a sign saying # of volts, # of amps, think of it like this.

The amount of volts is the size of pipe the electricity is traveling in. The more volts, the bigger the flow of electricity can be, the more work it COULD do.

The amount of amps is the actual POWER, the push, the big honking wave that is flowing through the pipe, doing the actual work.

To complete this horrible analogy, the stuff that the electricity is pushing in whatever gizmo you’ve got? That is the resistance. The more it resists the amps trying to push it, the more amps you need to provide to get it to go.

Here is why you should care.

You could have 480 volts on the line, a huge pipe. But if there are only .2 milliamps in the circuit, an itty bitty amount of current, you can grab the bare wire in your hand and only feel a tickle.

If you lick a 9 volt battery, getting your tongue on both prongs at once and feel the electricity flow across your taste buds from one pole to another, it won’t blow your ass up because the amps are very low.

But if you grabbed that same 480 volt wire, and there were 20 or more amps on there… if those 20 amps of force decided to flow through YOU as the fastest way to get to the ground, if YOU became the “path of current flow”, then you can die, cooked from the inside out, with your feet blown off and still steaming in your boots.

I’m not kidding around here.

What makes a fuse melt?

Amps of force performing work, pushing through things that offer resistance, generate heat.

If there is too little wire to handle all the amps flowing through it, that wire will, literally, melt.

The reason you have circuit breakers in your house is to prevent you plugging in too many things on one circuit or loop of wire, drawing a SHOTLOAD of amps through the wires in the walls of your house to power all that crap, melting the wires buried in your walls and setting your house on fire.

The circuit breaker is a fuse, designed to trip out or ‘break’ when it gets too hot… and capable of being reset. It trips when there are more amps flowing through it than the wires attached to it are capable of handling.

Circuit breakers are designed to be reset, on the assumption you know enough to unplug stuff from the appropriate outlet when one pops. Old school power panels had actual fuses that you had to replace… and many skilled and brilliant electricians would replace them, all right. With copper pennies. Sigh.

So, pop quiz because you know the answer now. What does a blown fuse mean?

It means that something got so hot it melted a piece of wire. It melted a piece of wire that was designed to melt for a reason; to protect something else from getting damaged from too much force/amps/electricity/power.

So now we come to the main event.

If a fuse blew, it didn’t do it out of spite, or vindictiveness.

That fuse blew because something somewhere else went wrong, and the fuse melted to protect your valuable shit, or even your life.

Why your life?

Because the most common place to stick a fuse is right where the wire comes into your gizmo from the power cord plugged into the wall. If that fuse melted, something somewhere in your gizmo suddenly decided to suck so much juice out of the wall it melted a wire… melted that wire before it melted something else. Or tripped a breaker in your power panel.

Or shorted right through you, blowing off your feet.

So if someone says to you, “Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”, the very next question you need to ask is, “What caused the fuse to blow?”

That is the test.

To know that a blown fuse is not the problem, a blown fuse PROTECTED you from the problem.

What caused the fuse to blow? Because if all you did was replace the fuse, what the hell is stopping whatever it was from causing it to blow again?

What if the reason the fuse blew, was that there is water somewhere inside the gizmo. Electricity likes to find the easiest path to ground, right? And water makes for a good conductor. the electricity doesn’t want to do work, it doesn’t want to flow through any resistance, it’s always looking for the easiest way out.

So there is water, and sometimes the gizmo moves, the water flows, touches somewhere that has electricity, and the electricity says “Ah HAH! I can bypass almost all this other shit, flow right through the water, take a shortcut, and go through this here control knob, through that person’s hand, down their arm, and ground myself on the metal arm of the chair. YAHOO! FREEDOM AT LAST!”

Kaboom.

Or maybe, and god this is common, maybe you’ve got a motor that is powered by electricity in your gizmo. Like your car. Or your air conditioner. The motor is physically moving, spinning round, from the force of electricity pushing it.

It takes a lot of amps to physically move a motor. Lots more than your iPod needs. Rule of thumb, if the electricity has to get a motor physically moving, it’s got a LOT of juice running through it. Moving parts take power.

The motor has all this power running through it, some insulation starts wearing away, or the bearing that lets the shaft turn nice and smooth starts binding up making the motor use a LOT more power to get that shaft to turn, and the heat from the increased amp draw builds up.

The fuse blows. It gets hot and melts, protecting your motor from turning into slag.

If this is caught right away, the motor can usually be fixed. Maybe by something as simple and easy as putting a bit of grease or oil on the bearing that the shaft turns on, reducing how hard the motor has to work.

But what do I see all the damn time?

“Fuse blew, I replaced it and got the device back in service.”

“What caused it to blow?”

“I dunno, probably just a power spike.”

“Nothing else went down, and the lights didn’t flicker. Go check it out, find out why it blew.”

“Okay.” *very grumpy*

A week passes.

The motor ‘burns out’, from too much heat because instead of greasing the motor bearings, the jackass replaced the fuses and didn’t ‘waste his time ‘troubleshooting the core problem.

I look inside at the fuses, wondering why the $20 fuses did not pop, protecting the $3000 motor from melting by blowing first, like they were designed to.

I see that the fuses, which are supposed to blow if the electrical current flow exceeds 20 amps, have been replaced by 30 amp fuses.

It takes a lot more heat to blow a 30 amp rated fuse than a 20 amp rated fuse. If the amps never rise above 30 amps, the wire inside will never heat up enough to melt.

But that motor sure did love the extra amps that drove it far harder than it was ever designed to, at a temperature it’s wires weren’t designed to handle. Wires melted, or maybe even the motor windings.

Meltdown. $3000 motor burnt to shit. Repairs and rewinding will probably cost about $1200.

Oh wow, but at least those $20 fuses are still in great shape, and the tech that decided to swap 20 amp fuses for 30 amp fuses so he wouldn’t have to keep replacing them when they blew over and over?

Well, at least he had some piece and quiet for that week.

Wrapping this up

Now you know what a blown fuse really means. It means more juice, more power, more amps, more OOMPH just went through the thing than it was designed to safely handle, and the fuse blew before something SERIOUS happened. Read: expensive or dangerous.

If you simply replace the fuse, you are giving whatever it was a chance to do it again, shocking the system and risking damage from the fuse melting too SLOWLY to stop the big jolt of power from going through and doing it’s damage to the sensitive guts of your gear first.

If you replace the fuse with a BIGGER fuse, what you’re doing is saying, “I don’t like to live safely, or to save money. Fuck it, let the motor burn, just as long as it stops bugging me by popping all the time.”

Yes, a spike of power from the source can cause a fuse to blow or breaker to pop. A lightning strike on the main supply coming into your house, etc.

But if it did… you should have seen lights flicker, or had some other indication than just one thing popping a fuse.

At the very least, I hope that now you will feel confident whenever you are talking to someone about your car, or stereo, or air conditioner, or circuit breaker, to call them on the carpet if they feed you that old “It was just a fuse” line.

Today, it was just a fuse. Tomorrow, it’s the water pump, or the fan motor, or the overhead crane drive, or whatever it may be.

Or something compound in your car. I don’t care what it is, if it’s compound, it’s money.

This may not have helped you, but by God I’m glad to get that off my chest. Freaking idiot techs, I swear I’m going to start using the Big Safety Stick™ to give them a current test they won’t soon forget..

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Oh Big Bear Butt NO!

You know, it’s not often that just the thought of what I’m about to do to YOU, my readers, brings such a smile to my face as I’m sportin’ right now.

The best bit? I know some of you are going to buy this. I know it. I know you, oh yes I do. I’m not even sure Ursiheil is going to wait for the page to finish loading.

This is just fantastic.

Damnit, I’m shivering, this is so good.

Can I have your attention, please.

I am proud to announce to you, my fellow bacon loving bears, that you can now get down and dirty with your bacon, and it’s perfectly all right.

In fact, it’s what it’s for!

How many times have you said you loved bacon?

Well now you can! No, really, you really can love bacon. In fact, that’s what it’s DESIGNED for!

Now you, yes YOU, can get BACONLUBE.

Oh yeah, that’s right, this ain’t no April Fools, this is BACONLUBE for reals!

 To quote J & Ds Foods webstore;

You’ve always been a lover of bacon. Well, now you can be a bacon lover with baconlube, the world’s first bacon-flavored massage oil and personal lubricant.

Just… just think about all the things YOU could do with bacon-flavored massage oil AND PERSONAL LUBRICANT. And it’s safe for vegans!

It’s brought to you by the makers of bacon salt, so you know it’s got to be good. And well thought out. ALL the ramifications. Well thought out. Hours spent just thinking about it. A million and one uses.

It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for bear-kind.

Have you thought about what you could do with bacon-flavored massage oil AND LUBRICANT?

It’s thinking about what you’re thinking that is making me laugh my tits off, to paraphrase Lewis Black.

This is real, this is now. The future of bacon is TODAY! So get yours now.

Go! What about this idea could possibly give you reason for concern?

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Oh Garrosh Hellscream No!

Some of you who have been with me for the very longest time know that what to think if I were to say “Oh John Ringo No.”

I don’t have to say any more, now do I?

Oh, and if you haven’t read Princess of Wands, seriously, what’s stopping you? Go read it, it’s an awesome standalone book. I’m not in it so it’s missing 100% in awesome bears, but other than that, it’s brilliant. As I’ve said before.

Today, I read my Warchief’s Command Board, and through the tears and the pain and the howling cries, all I could think was, “Oh Garrosh Hellscream NO!”

I would hereby like to nominate Garrosh Hellscream as writer of my favorite humor post of the year 2012. If someone else thinks they can top that, good luck and pack a lunch, you’re gonna have to camp that shit all day.

Well done. Just flat out well done.

I laughed, I cried, I fell down. It changed my life. The end.