I just learned something interesting about Facebook.

I got an invitation to join from a friend of mine I knew from Boston. He now lives on the west coast.

At the bottom of the email it had a section of ‘Other people you may know on Facebook.’

And it listed two people I know from my church, one person who is another dog walker I see at the park, a friend of the family who is recently graduated from college, a woman who was on the volleyball team with me at my college a million years ago, and one of my dog walking clients.

So I started poking around online because it’s astounding how FB figured out that I know these people.

All the people have two things in common:

• They have all sent me an email at the same address my friend sent the invite to AND
• They all have web-based emails (hotmail, gmail, aol, etc.)

So here’s what I deduced:

1. When my friend sent me the invite, he made my email address known to Facebook.
2. Since those people have web-based email accounts, their address books are also web-based.
3. Somehow Facebook was able to access their address books and match my email address on it.

Interesting…and a little scary.

Here’s a related thread:
Facebook Friend Suggestion: How Does it Know???

My husband and I recently went through hoops to try to figure out why our Whitfield pellet stove stopped feeding pellets. One of the things I did was take the cover off the gear box and remove all the cogs. When I did this I could see that one of the gears had worn teeth, so we’ve ordered a new gear box and motor.

I’ve read on a webpage that some people take apart their gear box without making a note of how everything fits together. Then they can’t get it back together and are forced to get a new one.

Since I took such careful notes, I thought I’d post here how to reassemble it in the hopes that it would be helpful for someone in the future.

By the way, you probably know this already, but the gearbox screws use a star screwdriver, not an allen wrench.

So here it is.

If you look at the gear pieces, each one has a big cog and also a little cog attached to it (except for the gigantor cog which is just one). I’m going to call the big cog the ‘maincog’ and the little cog the ’subcog.’

First of all, take the gears and label them (just put them down on a piece of paper and write a number next to them) according to the following:

Gigantor cog.

Two gears with small flat subcogs. The one with the bigger maincog label as piece 3. The one with the smaller maincog label as piece 4.

A gear with a shaft as well as a big flat subcog. Label this piece 2.

Two gears with tall subcogs. Label the one with the bigger maincog piece 1. Label the one with the smaller maincog piece 5.

Here’s a picture that shows a birds eye view of the gears:




It’s hard to see the size of the subcogs in the above picture, so here’s an image at more of an angle. Note that the size of the maincogs is distorted below so that the larger maincogs look smaller:


Once you have the gears labeled, take a look at the gearbox. There’s a hole which I’m calling E and four shafts which I’ve labeled A - D in the picture below:




Now just put the pieces back in the following order. Use a light synthetic grease if you need more than what was already there and make sure you push the gears down snugly:

1. Put gigantor cog in the hole with the shaft up.
2. Put Piece 5 on shaft D, subcog up.
3. Put Piece 4 on Shaft C, maincog up.
4. Put Piece 3 also on Shaft C, subcog up.
5. Put Piece 2 on Shaft B, maincog up.
6. Put Piece 1 on Shaft A, maingcog up.

That’s it.

My husband and I are huge Harry Potter fans.

Recently we drove down to New York to visit my two nephews (reading The Goblet of Fire aloud in the car, I might add).

At their house, my husband showed me a library book that was laying around. It was called "The Book of Hob Stories" by a British author named William Mayne.

The thing that caught his eye (and mine) was the title of a chapter, “Hob and the Hinky Punk.”

At first I thought that maybe a hinky punk is a fictional character British children know about and J.K. Rowling used this in her books. But then I read this short children’s book from start to finish.

And I found some amazing similarities between this book and the Harry Potter characters.

• In another chapter, Hob encounters a creature called a boggart.


• Hob himself is a type of a spirit that lives in the cupboard under the stairs.


• Hob maintains the house by night (ridding it of such creatures as hinky punks, boggarts, and baby black holes). He is hardly ever seen. But if someone gives him the gift of clothes of any kind, he must leave.

There are too many similarities to be coincidence. So it’s obvious to me that J.K. Rowling is a fan of Mr. Mayne’s Hob and is giving him a little tribute in her books.

Kind of cool!