Miele G638+ Dishwasher Drying Heat

I have a Miele G638 plus dishwasher. A few years ago I thought I might reduce my CO₂ footprint a tiny bit by turning off the drying heat. Unfortunately, when I followed the instructions in the user manual, nothing changed. At the time I could’t consider the possibility of paying for a service call-out for such a trivial thing, so I left it as it was.

Recently, however, I bought a food processor for which it was claimed that the parts were dishwasher safe. To my not inconsiderable irritation—having chosen the particular machine of all others because of the dishwashability—when I opened the packaging I found a disc of paper that said that to avoid damaging the bowl, I should take it out of the dishwasher before the drying cycle. Since I run the dishwasher at night (on off-peak electricity rates), this would mean setting an alarm to make me get up in the middle of the night, go downstairs, extract the bowl and start the machine again. So I thought I’d make another attempt at turning off drying heat on the dishwasher. I followed the instructions to the letter, then repeated the whole thing while my partner read out the instructions and checked that I was following them, again to no useful effect.

This time, I decided it would be worth exploring a bit further. I phoned the supplier, who couldn’t solve the problem but who gave me the phone number (01235 554 455) of UK Miele technical support. On phoning them I got through to a helpful chap who couldn't immediately help and put me on hold. Generally I don't like hold music, but Miele’s was Prayer by Hayley Westenra, which makes surprisingly soothing hold music when filtered through the limited bandwidth of a phone. Anyway, he came back with a manual for the machine in his hand and started to check with me that I'd followed the procedure correctly. I had, but at the point (on p37) where my instruction booklet says “turn the programme selector to the 9 O’clock position”, his said “turn the programme selector to the 10 O’clock position”. My machine was among the first batch, and it seems there was a typo in the instruction manual. The helpful chap at Miele was quite taken aback that there should have been a misprint, but as it’s seven years since I bought the machine, I don’t think he should be expected to remember that far back.

Anyhow, if you have one of the first batch of Miele G638+ dishwashers and are having problems turning the drying heat off, with any luck you’ll find this web page and see the answer without having to phone Miele.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I recently finished reading The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Eco. I’m not entirely sure what I think of it. I certainly enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. The latter particularly since having recently read Dava Sobell’s book on Longitude, the descriptions of early attempts to determine longitude were especially salient. What made “Queen Loana” poignant is that it’s not terribly long since my father died of a cerebral infarction after suffering two strokes (spaced sufficiently far apart that we felt that he was pretty much recovered from the first when the second struck), so Yambo’s ‘incident’ had a relevance to me that it may lack for other readers.

The general structure of the novel is of three parts (or two and a coda); in the first Yambo wakes up after his ‘incident’ to find that his personal narrative memory is completely unavailable to him. (In my father’s case it was — as is perhaps more common — speech that was affected, a loss that was especially hard for a man so talkative). Yambo returns to Solara, his childhood home to attempt to recover his past, and here the book is somewhat amorphous, almost tedious in it’s ploughing-over of Italian comic books of the 1940’s, but you need to read it to give context for what follows. At the end of this section Yambo makes a discovery that throws him into a new state in which he can remember almost everything, and the book attains a new momentum with affecting descriptions of life Italy during the second world war.

The ending comes as a surprise, perhaps a disappointment, but then, in life there are no happy endings; the best one can hope for is a happy middle, so Eco — who is getting on a bit by now and must inevitably be aware of his own approaching end — is entitled to write about death without giving it a romantic gloss.

There are two things that make me uncertain about this book. I'm not convinced that the last part doesn’t to some extent give that romantic gloss to dying; is it there but weighted with Catholic guilt so that it must end that way while leaving open the possibility that had Yambo behaved differently (leaving aside the excesses during his visit to Solara) the end would have been different? I'm also not convinced about the "Illustrated Novel" aspect; there are so many illustrations that they are often distracting. Some of them do convey a specific image relevant to the plot, but I do rather wonder whether most of them are there simply because Eco likes them (the images are credited at the end and many of them are "from the collection of the author").

Do I recommend it (to my own non-existent readership)? A qualified yes. Eco does whatever he does very well, and this is no exception, even if I cannot say that it was fun.

(Added much later) According to the latest Amazon terms and conditions, I have to say that I am “a participant in the Amazon Europe S.à r.l. Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk/Javari.co.uk/Amazon.de/Amazon.fr/Javari.fr/Amazon.it”

Giving in, eventually?

Up until today, I’ve resisted the temptation to start a blog on the grounds that I wasn’t sure a blog really fitted what I want to do, that I wasn’t sure I had anything interesting to say, and that I wasn’t sure anyone would take any notice anyway.

What prompted me to start? I suppose the amount of unexpressed dissatisfaction in my head reached critical mass when reading New Scientist for 26 July 2008, which has a collection of opinion pieces on Reason that go over some of the ground that never seems to be gone over without stumbling.

Did that convince me that a blog fits what I want to do? No. A blog still seems like a half-arsed way of connecting articles and comments upon them. I reckon that there’s something not-quite-right about getting someone else to host my posts (I have webspace elsewhere that’s more nearly under my control), but I don’t want to host other peoples comments. I had a plan to design something that hosted posts on my server and allowed people to post comments that they hosted on their own server. Too much work.

Did it convince me that I have something interesting to say? No. It just convinced me that highly respected people often say things that are only about as interesting as what I have to say.

Did it convince me that anyone would take any notice of what I have to say? No, but it did suggest to me that saying it somewhere would probably be good for my stress levels, whether or not anyone took any notice. So at present I have no plan to tell anyone about this blog, but if people stumble upon it, that’s their lookout.